Brian Goold-Verschoyle
Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Anglo-Irish politician was a member of the Communist Party of Ireland and was one of the three Irish people killed during the Great Purge ordered by Joseph Stalin. Early life. Brian Goold-Verschoyle was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal into the Anglo-Irish gentry. After schooling at Portora Royal and Marlborough public schools, he began work in England as an engineering technician. However, after visiting his brother in Moscow, he was recruited into Soviet espionage. His childhood and later life is explored – along with that  of his oldest brother, the communist Neil Goold-Verschoyle, and his sister, Sheila Fitzgerald – in the 2005 novel, "The Family on Paradise Pier" by Dermot Bolger. The collection of short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich contains a short story entitled "The Sow That Eats Her Farrow" that is based on the life of Goold-Verschoyle. In 1929 he moved to England at the age of 19 and took part in an apprenticeship in English Electric Works in Stafford. In 1931 he applied to join the Communist Party of Great Britain which prompted the MI5 to open a file on  him. Eventually he became the party's leader in Stafford. Spy. Goold-Verschoyle became a Soviet spy after visiting his brother Neil in Moscow. He was said by MI5 to be a "naïve supporter" of the Soviet Union; unaware that he was being used to courier messages for the NKVD while he lived in London. He was controlled by Henri Pieck. Goold-Verschoyle couriered UK agent's reports, mainly from John Herbert King, a Foreign Office clerk and gave them to Theodore Maly whom he was the principle courier for. He was also a courier for Dmitri Bystrolyotov In 1936  he traveled under an assumed name to Moscow to undergo wireless training. Previously he had worked as a technician. He fell in love with a German Jewish refugee, Lotte Moos, and took her to Moscow against orders, falling foul of his Soviet masters. He was then sent to the Spanish Civil War (Barcelona) on the condition that he broke off all contact with Lotte. However he disobeyed this order. He is mentioned in Walter Krivitsky's memoir 'I Was Stalin's Spy and Karlo Stajner's memoir 7000 days in Siberia. Arrest. During his stationing in Spain he got in  trouble over his personal views. He disliked what he perceived as the Soviet Army taking control of Spanish areas without consulting the Spanish and the surveillance and punishment of ideological deviance by the Soviets. His letters to his family in Ireland reveal a growing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In April 1937, he was asked to report to Barcelona harbour to repair a ship's radio. When he embarked he was escorted to the radio cabin and the door was locked behind him and he was left in there with two Komsomol members. who  were also kidnapped. He had in effect been kidnapped and when the ship arrived in USSR he was immediately transferred to the Lubyanka (KGB) prison in Moscow. He was eventually sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. He died in an Orenburg gulag on 5 January 1942.