A Strand in the Web

During the war years when Russians had things free and easy in Washington, the FBI began to note with interest the comings and goings of an especially free and easy Russian named Vassily Zubilin. Zubilin's official post as a minor functionary in the Soviet embassy was, they discovered, only a cover. Under the aliases Peter and Cooper, he traveled about the U.S. getting in touch with Communist Party members and suspected Red agents. Years after he was recalled to Russia, a Soviet defector identified him as a secret-police general and an overseer of Soviet espionage.

For more than twelve years the FBI has been tracing strands of the web of subversion and espionage that stretched out from Vassily Zubilin. At 7 a.m. one day last week, reaching the end of one important strand, FBI agents in Manhattan arrested two men and a woman on charges of serving as Soviet spies: Jack Soble, 53, and Jacob Albam, 64, both natives of Lithuania, and Soble's Russian-born wife Myra, 52. Handcuffed, the prisoners were escorted to Manhattan's federal courthouse, where a U.S. commissioner set bail at $100,000 apiece.*

Multilingual Jack Soble, who entered the U.S. from Japan in 1941 and became a U.S. citizen in 1947, was ostensibly a respectable businessman, dealing in animal hair and bristles. Under cover, according to U.S. Attorney Paul M. Williams, he was a Soviet superspy who "replaced" Vassily Zubilin as "a dominant figure in the espionage ring." In advance of presenting the case to the grand jury, the Justice Department declined to specify where and how the Sobles or Albam had spied. But at week's end the FBI whisked Albam away from his colleagues in the federal prison, and the rumor spread that he was telling all.

*By coincidence a paddy-wagon mate on the ride to Federal Detention Headquarters was Ukrainian-born Irving Potash, 55, one of the eleven top Reds convicted under the Smith Act in 1949 of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the Government. Deported by his own choice last year after serving 41 months of a five-year sentence, Potash mysteriously re-entered the U.S. (he refused to say how). Arrested in January, he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for illegal entry.

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