He arrived in 1934 – the worst period in living memory to look for work. To make matters worse, his gifts were intellectual. Even so, he’d failed to complete his degree, meaning that the only work open to him was as an unskilled labourer, yet he lacked the physical strength to compete within the vast and desperate labour pool. Frm the window of his run-down room, shared with five other men, he’d watch the Unemployed Union marching through the streets, slow-moving lines of jobless workers that filed south on Broadway. He’d scratched together a meagre, desperate existence for a couple of years, living hand to mouth, before chancing across Communist activists trying to tap into the disenchantment of the unemployed. His survival instincts had taken over and sensing an opportunity he approached them, explaining his history. Since he was Jewish and fluent in Russian, they presumed he had an predisposition to Communism. He’d lied about the reasons he’d left the Soviet Union, explaining that he’d come to the USA in the depths of the Great Depression certain that the capitalist society was in crisis and wishing to ferment a revolution. Familiar with the jargon, the slogans, aphorisms and theory, he’d dazzled his audience. Though the Communist Party of the USA didn’t know it, they were at the apogee of their success. The Communist presidential candidate William Foster and his Negro running mate James Ford had received over a hundred thousand votes in the 1932 election – claiming to be at the forefront of change: progressive socially and offering a radical alternative to the broken capitalist system that had driven workers to jump from office windows and families to live in shanty towns in Central Park. Almost everyone involved with the CPUSA hoped the Depression was the beginning of the end for capitalism, everyone, that is, except for their newest recruit, Osip.

Osip was starving, sick and unemployed. He didn’t care about the party. He cared that they had money. They could pay him – the CPUSA received substantial illegal subsidies from the Soviet Union, transferred via a system of mail drops. They could feed and clothe him. For the first time since arriving in New York he ate well, without counting the cost of each mouthful. His strength returned. After several months of leafleting and performing rudimentary services for the party, it was decided he would set up a legitimate business called the Global Travel Company, selling tourist packages for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Under this cover, Osip was tasked with importing potential spies from the Soviet Union, academics and scientists who could infiltrate key military and scientific operations in the United States. The American authorities would accept the applicants because they would be too brilliant to pass over. He’d run this tourist agency, which lost thousands of dollars, ever since.