# Brian Goold-Verschoyle

Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier between its moles and their handlers in London. After being sent as a radio technician to Republican Spain, in 1937 he revealed his disaffection with the Moscow party line. Lured aboard a Soviet freighter, he was abducted to the USSR and died as a prisoner in the Gulag in 1942. He is one of only three Irish people who can be formally identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.

## Early life

Brian Goold-Verschoyle was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal into a family from the Anglo-Irish gentry. His father, Hamilton Frederick Stuart Goold Verschoyle, a barrister, was a pacifist who supported Home Rule.
After a childhood spent during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War and schooling at Portora Royal and Marlborough public schools he moved in 1929 to England at the age of 19. He took part in an apprenticeship in the English Electric Works in Stafford.
In 1931 he applied to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) which prompted the MI5 to open a file on him. Eventually he became the party's leader in Stafford.

## Soviet courier

Goold-Verschoyle became a Soviet spy after visiting his older brother Neil Goold (Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle) and his Russian wife in Leningrad. The British domestic counterintelligence service, MI5, thought he was simply a "naïve supporter" of the Soviet Union. They remained unaware of the full truth until they learned years later from defecting Soviet GRU spymasters Gen. Walter Krivitsky and Henri Pieck, that Brian Good-Verschoyle had routinely couriered messages to the OGPU/NKVD and that he travelled in 1933, 1934 and 1935 to the USSR.$^{:242–245}$
Brian Goold-Verschoyle also couriered classified papers from moles working within the British Government, particularly from John Herbert King, a British Foreign Office clerk. Goold-Verschoyle delivered the documents to former Roman Catholic priest and NKVD spymaster Theodore Maly, for whom he was the principle courier. He also worked as a courier for Dmitri Bystrolyotov.
In 1936 Goold-Verschoyle, who had formerly worked as a technician, returned under an assumed name to Moscow to undergo wireless training. He was in love at the time with a German Jewish refugee named Lotte Moos and, to the dismay of his NKVD superiors, she accompanied him. Associated in the German Communist Party with the so-called Right Opposition,$^{:180}$ she was regarded as politically suspect. When Goold-Verschoyle completed his wireless training, he was assigned as a military advisor to the Second Spanish Republic, with express orders to break off all contact with Moos. (Moos succeeded in returning to Britain where she was arrested and interrogated as a suspected spy).

## Disaffection and arrest

In Spain, Goold-Verschoyle was alarmed by what he perceived as the subversion of the Second Spanish Republic by both Soviet intelligence agents and the local Communists they directed. He particularly objected to the Red Terror: the surveillance and persecution of both real and suspected members of the anti-Stalinist Left as alleged fifth columnists by the Soviet NKVD and the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the Republic's Communist-controlled political police. Concluding that Moscow had no interest in any socialist revolution it did not control completely, Goold-Verschoyle's letters to Lotte Moos and to his family in Ireland revealed a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, with whose militia George Orwell served and which inspired his memoir Homage to Catalonia).$^{:261}$
By April 1937, while working as a technician for the radio service of the Republican Army in Barcelona, Goold-Verschoyle had become sufficiently disillusioned that he asked to be released from active service. His commanding officer told him that he would have to wait until a replacement could be found. Several days later, Goold-Verschoyle was assigned to repair radio equipment aboard a Soviet freighter. Once aboard he was arrested and, with two members of the Communist Youth League, he was shipped as a prisoner to the Soviet port of Sevastopol. There the Irishman and the two Komsomol members were handed over to the NKVD and transferred to the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.

## Death

Goold-Vershoyle was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. He died as a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag in Orenburg Oblast on 5 January 1942,$^{:295}$ one of only three Irish people who can be formally identified as victims of Stalin's Great Purge.$^{:117}$ Official Soviet sources had reported him killed in 1941 on a railway journey as a result of German bombing.

## Surviving family

Brian Goold-Vershoyle was survived by his brother, Neil Goold. Having lived in Moscow during the purge that claimed his brother, Goold returned to Ireland where, during the Second World War, he was interned with members of a now banned IRA. In the 1950s, he was active in the Connolly Association in London where, vocal in his defense of Stalin's legacy, he supported those in the CPGB opposed to the reformism of Khrushchev. In 1959 he re-established contact with his wife and son, and returned to Moscow, where he worked as a translator, notably of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, and died in 1987.
Brian Goold-Vershoyle was survived by three additional siblings, including Sheila Fitzgerald. Her notebooks and sketchbooks from their common childhood years in Donegal, was published in 1985 as A Donegal Summer.

## In popular culture

* Brian Goold-Verschoyle is mentioned in GRU defector Walter Krivitsky's memoir I Was Stalin's Spy and in Gulag survivor Karlo Stajner's memoir 7000 Days in Siberia.
* Informed by the recollections of his sister Sheila, Goold-Verschoyle's childhood is fictionalised in the 2005 historical novel, The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger. (In 2018 Bolger published An Ark of Light a "stand-alone novel telling Sheila’s later story").
* Danilo Kiš's collection of short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich contains a short story entitled The Sow That Eats Her Farrow that is inspired by the life of Brian Goold-Verschoyle.