Joseph Katz

Who is Joseph Katz?

Joseph Katz allegedly worked for Soviet intelligence from the 1930s to the late 1940s as one of its most active liaison agents. Katz was assigned management of the “First Line,” that part of the NKGB mission aimed at recruiting selected members of the Communist Party USA. He was an agent/group leader and co-owner of a Soviet front company that manufactured gloves.

The Venona project suggests he may have been implicated, along with Amadeo Sabatini, in the murder of Walter Krivitsky in 1941. After the death of Jacob Golos in November 1943, spotting and recruitment was taken over by Katz by mid–1944, while Elizabeth Bentley continued as manager and courier. Katz was extremely active at this time. Katz was known to Elizabeth Bentley as “Jack.”

In 1944 Katz was put in charge of handling agent recruitments from the New York City TASS office headed by Vladimir Pravdin, former rezident of the NKGB in New York. And in September 1944 Katz was freed of other liaisons and was assigned to work directly under Washington D.C. Rezident Anatoli Gromov. Gromov came to the United States to implement a new security program of isolating agents from each other by a complicated arrangement of cutouts.