Ignacy Witczak

Ignacy Witczak was a GRU Illegal officer in the United States during World War II.

Witczak's code name with the GRU and as deciphered by the Venona project and other counterintelligence investigations was "R".

Evidence of espionage

Ignacy Witczak is referenced in the following Venona decryptions and FBI reports:

• 3, 4, 5 KGB San Francisco to Moscow, 2 January 1946;
• 25 KGB San Francisco to Moscow, 26 January 1946;
• FBI report, “Soviet Espionage Activities, 19 October 1945,” attached to Hoover to Vaughan, 19 October 1945, President's Secretary's Files, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo.;
• FBI report, “Soviet Activities in the United States,” 25 July 1946, Clark M. Clifford papers, Truman Library.

References

• William Stevenson, Intrepid’s Last Case (New York: Villard Books, 1983).
• New York FBI report, 5 April 1946, Comintern Apparatus file, serial 5236; FBI report, “Soviet Espionage Activities,” 19 October 1945,” attached to Hoover to Vaughan, 19 October 1945, President's Secretary's Files, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo.;
• FBI report, “Soviet Activities in the United States,” 25 July 1946, Clark M. Clifford papers, Truman Library; *David Dallin, Soviet Espionage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pg. 286.
• Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (New York: Random House, 1995), 34–36.
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999), pgs. 183–185, 418-419, 370, 467. The authors thank retired FBI agent John Walsh, who in 1946 tried to spot Bunia Witczak and her son on the deck of the Sakhalin when it docked in a South American port, for noting the likelihood that R. was Witczak.
• Transparence et secret aux États-Unis (in French)