Difference between revisions 301503213 and 301503772 on enwiki

{{improve}}
{{unreferenced}}

'''Ilya'''Ilya Elliott Wolston''' was an American citizen who enlisttered the [[U.S. Army]] in [[World War II]] due to his pride in having become an American citizen. He was never an officer and acted as an interpreter in both Alaska and Berlin due to his knowledge of several languages, including Russian. 

While there are/were sources that libeled Wolston, claiming he was a Soviet spy, these allegations were never proven, nor were any such charges filed. In fact, Wolston sued Readers Digest for libel in the 1970s and his case went through to the US Supreme Court [Wolston vs. Readers Digest], where he won. He never received any monetary compensation for the libel suit as he died before the actual case could be completed.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolston, Ilya}}
[[Category:Year of birth missing]]
[[Category:Year of death missing]]
[[Category:American military personnel]]
[[Category:People of World War IIand became a [[military intelligence]] officer. Allegedly, Wolston began reporting to [[NKVD|Soviet intelligence]]. Wolston allegedly provided the Soviets with information about the organization, curriculum, and personnel at the Army's intelligence school at [[Fort Ritchie, Maryland]].

After the war, Wolston worked for the [[KGB]] network run by his uncle, [[Jack Soble]], which included Soble's brother and Wolston's uncle [[Robert Soblen]].  [[Boris Morros]] wrote in his autobiography that Soble told him that Ilya, whose cover name Morros remembered as Slava, had done work for the Russians in [[Alaska]].

There is a Slava in a 1945 message (Venona 325 KGB [[Moscow]] to [[New York City|New York]], [[5 April]] [[1945]]); it clearly is not Wolston but someone connected to the [[Julius and Ethel Rosenberg|Rosenberg]] spy ring. This also suggests that by that time Wolston had a different cover name.

===Venona===
Wolston  is referenced in the following Venona project decrypts:

*777–781 KGB New York to Moscow, [[26 May]] [[1943]]
*893 KGB New York to Moscow, [[10 June]] [[1943]]
*325 Moscow to New York, [[5 April]] [[1945]]. (It is not clear that the Glory in the 1945 message is "Glory"/Wolston as in 1943).

===References===
*Boris Morros, ''My Ten Years as a Counter-Spy'', London: Werner Laurie (1959).
*[[John Earl Haynes]] and [[Harvey Klehr]], ''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America'', New Haven: [[Yale University Press]] (1999), pgs. 275–276. ISBN 0300077718

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolston, Ilya}}
[[Category:Year of birth missing]]
[[Category:Year of death missing]]
[[Category:American military personnel of World War II]]
[[Category:United States Army officers]]
[[Category:American spies for the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Americans in the Venona papers]]