Jack Soble
Lithuanian spy for the Soviet Union
Jack Soble (May 15, 1903 – 1967) was a Lithuanian who, together with his brother Robert Soblen, penetrated Leon Trotsky's entourage for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s. Later, in the United States, he was jailed, with his wife Myra, on espionage charges. He was born in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania as Abromas Sobolevicius and sometimes used the name Abraham Sobolevicius or Adolph Senin.
Biography
Early life
Soble was born in 1903 as Abromas Sobolevicius in, then-Russian controlled, Lithuania to a wealthy Jewish family. Soble travelled to Leipzig in 1921, to attend college, while there he joined the German Communist Party. In 1927 he travelled to the Soviet Union marrying before returning to Germany. Soble studied briefly at the University of Berlin where he became a Trotskyist which led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and the university.
Spying career
Soble would claim decades later that he was coerced by Soviet agents to become a spy in 1931 after his wife returned to the USSR to visit her sick mother and threats to her safety were made if he did not cooperate. These claims are considered suspect as there is evidence that Soble had earlier contact with Stalin's agents.
Soble, who now adopted the name Abraham Senin, became publicly known as a prominent member of the German Trotskyist circle, visiting Leon Trotsky himself on at least two occasions.
“Jack Soble” enters the record as lithuanian spy for the Soviet Union. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jack, Soble and Lithuanian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jack Soble” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.