Isaac Don Levine
Isaac Don Levine (January 19, 1892 – February 15, 1981) was a 20th-century Russian-born American journalist and anticommunist writer, who is known as a specialist on the Soviet Union. 

He worked with Soviet ex-spy Walter Krivitsky in a 1939 expose of Stalin's purges and other terrorism in the Soviet Union. Later he worked with Whittaker Chambers, a defector from the American Communist Party, to reveal agents in the United States government.

Background

Levine was born in 1892 in Mazyr (then "Mozyr"), Belarus, into a Zionist Jewish family. He immigrated to the United States in 1911, where he learned English. He finished high school in Missouri.

Career

Levine found work with The Kansas City Star and later The New York Tribune, for which he covered the revolution of 1917. He would return to Russia in the early 1920s to cover the Civil War for The Chicago Daily News.

He was in Boston to cover the Sacco and Vanzetti trials in the early 1920s, during which he formed the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti. "His experience there was one of the factors that eventually turned him against the [Communist] Party and toward a career exposing the KGB's espionage activities in America and Europe."

Levine worked as a columnist through the late 1920s and 1930s for the Hearst papers.

In the spring of 1939, Levine collaborated with Walter Krivitsky, a defector from the Soviet intelligence agency KGB, for a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post. Together they exposed the horrors of Stalin's regime, including the mass purges and murders of tens of thousands, and the deportation of suspected opponents to internal exile and Siberian camps. In November of the same year, the series was collected and published as a book, In Stalin's Secret Service, attributed to Krivitsky alone. (Levine's role in the writing was not revealed at the time.) 

In the meantime, Levine arranged a meeting in September 1939 between American Communist Party defector Whittaker Chambers and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's security chief, Adolf Berle. There Chambers revealed, with Levine present, a massive spying operation reaching even into the White House. He identified, among others, Alger Hiss in the State Department and, according to Levine, Harry Dexter White, the author of the Morganthau Plan, in the Treasury Department.

From 1946 to 1950, Levine edited the anticommunist magazine Plain Talk.

On December 9, 1948, Levine provided testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the Alger Hiss case, regarding Communist espionage in the US government.

He declined to join The Freeman magazine. He did work for a time with Radio Free Europe in West Germany instead.  There, he co-founded the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, based in Munich.

Personal life and death

Levine married and had a son with his first wife, Robert Don Levine (November 15, 1924 – July 21, 2013). He later married again, to a woman named Ruth. His son became a public affairs specialist.

Levine died on February 15, 1981, at age 89, in his home in Venice, Florida.

Representation in other media

Levine appeared as himself, in a cameo as one of the witnesses to the John Reed era, in the movie Reds (1981).

Levine is featured briefly in Walter Isaacson’s documentary Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007). He and Albert Einstein were friends, but they eventually fell out over their political differences.

Works

Russian Revolution (1917)
Botchkareva, Maria. Yashka: My Life as Peasant, Exile, and Soldier. As set down by Isaac Don Levine (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1919)
The Kaiser's Letters to the Tsar (1920) Editor
Man Lenin (1924)
Stalin (1931)
Stalin's Great Secret (1956) Coward-McCann, NY NY USA
The Mind of an Assassin (1960) Signet book, New York
I Rediscover Russia (1964)
Intervention  (1969)
Eyewitness to History (1973)

Levine also wrote the screenplay for the biographical movie Jack London (1943).