Joseph Katz (Soviet agent)

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Joseph Katz (Hebrew: יוסף כץ; 1912–2004) was a Soviet intelligence officer and one of its most active liaison agents from the 1930s to the late 1940s. He led the “First Line,” the NKGB mission aimed at recruiting members of the Communist Party USA, and he was a group leader who co-owned a front company that made gloves.

The Venona project suggests he may have been involved, along with Amadeo Sabatini, in the 1941 murder of Walter Krivitsky. After Jacob Golos died in 1943, Katz took over recruitment duties by mid-1944, while Elizabeth Bentley continued as manager and courier. Bentley knew him as “Jack.”

In 1944 Katz ran agent recruitments from the New York City TASS office led by Vladimir Pravdin. In September 1944 he was reassigned to work directly under Washington, D.C. Rezident Anatoli Gromov. Gromov’s security program used cutouts to isolate agents, and Katz and Bentley’s operations in New York and Washington were extensive. Bentley would later name more than 80 people who were feeding information to Soviet intelligence.

Katz told Bentley at their first meeting in October 1944 that Gromov had been sent to the United States to tighten security and that Bentley should turn over all agents not yet surrendered to NKGB officers.

After Bentley’s defection, Katz was tasked with killing her. There were discussions about how to do this, but the plan was not carried out. In August 1947, Katz met NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria in Paris to discuss eliminating Bentley, but the plan was abandoned.

Katz then moved to Western Europe to set up a company for covering the illegal courier line between Europe and the United States. He lived in France from 1948 to 1951, then moved to Israel. In the Venona decrypts his code names were “X” and “Informer.”