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Henry Samuel Magdoff (born 21 August 1913) and married to Beatrice. He studied mathematics and physics from 1930 to 1933 at the City College of New York where he was active in the Social Problems Club with many school mates who later joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a Comintern organization that fought in the Spanish Civil War. Magdoff attended New York University after 1933 studying economics and statistics and recieved a B.S. in Economics in 1935. An FBI investigation later revealed that Magdoff made many false statements regarding his employment after graduation in order to obtain employment with the federal government.

By 1940 Magdoff was working for the New Deal Works Progress Administration as its Principal Statistician. He recieved several letters of recommendations from Soviet spy David Weintraub, who also worked in the WPA. During World War II Magdoff worked in the National Defense and Advisory Board.

According to United States Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX) Official History, Magdoff was a member of the Perlo group of Soviet spies (See pg. 31). Magdoff was identified by Arlington Hall cryptographers in the Venona project and FBI counterintelligence investigators as a Soviet source under the cover name "Kant" in 1944. Code name "Tan", which appears in the 1948 Gorsky Memo, and appears once in deciphered 1945 Venona traffic, according to researcher John Earl Haynes, is consistent with Magdoff. Code name "Tan", as the evidence suggests, replaced "Kant" as Magdoff’s cryptonym in 1945.

Following the war he was an economic advisor to former Vice-President and then unsuccessful Presidential candidate Henry Wallace. Unable to be reemployed in government because of security concerns, he found a career in academia. One of his most famous books, The Age of Imperialism, his first and arguably most influential book, came out in 1969. The book sold over 100,000 copies and was translated into fifteen languages. Two years later after the death of Leo Huberman, Magdoff began co-editing Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy, and has continued to edit the magazine into his 90th year. Magdoff and Sweezy together produced five books, as well as many years of Monthly Review. Magdoff's most recent book is Imperialism without Colonies, published when he was 89. Monthly Review is one of the pre-eminent socialist journals in the world, a journal characterized by both its independent, nonsectarian approach, and its adherance to the centrality of economic forces as a determinant of human society.

Magdoff's complicity in espionage was corroborated by a message exhumed from the NKVD archives in Moscow in the 1990s. A message from the head of KGB foreign intelligence operations, Lt. General Pavel M. Fitin, to Secretary General of the Comintern Georgi Dimitrov dated 29 September 1944 requested information on Magdoff related to his recruitment into the espionage service of the Soviet Union.

Source

• A Counterintelligence Reader, vol. 3 chap. 1, pg. 31, Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, Official History
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999)
• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
• Alexander Vassiliev, Untitled Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on the Failed American Networks (2003)
• Feklisov, Alexandre, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs: Memoirs of the KGB Spymaster Who Also Controlled Klaus Fuchs and Helped Resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York: Enigma, 2001
• FBI Silvermaster group file, pgs. 182-188
• Vladimir Pozniakov, NKVD/NKGB Report to Stalin: A Glimpse into Soviet Intelligence in the United States in the 1940's

• Soviet spies
• 1913 births