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Valentin Markin (aka "Arthur Walter") (1903 – 1934) was the chief illegal rezident and director of the espionage operations of the Soviet Union in the United States from 1933 to 1934. Markin headed the activities of both Soviet military intelligence and that of the NKVD during this period.
In 1920, Markin joined the Komsomol, the youth section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and he worked on Komsomol activities for the next two years in the Caucuses.
In the United States, Markin lived under the pseudonym "Arthur Walter." He also is known to have used the aliases Oskar, Hermann, and Davis.
The novice GRU agent Whittaker Chambers met with Markin, posing as Hermann, in New York City in 1933. He was, Chambers wrote, "a short, sturdy figure confined in a tight-fitting, rumpled suit and elevated on high-heeled German shoes." His brushlike mop of hair looked like it had been cut with a sickle. "I felt," Chambers continued, " that I had met what is much more unusual in life than a thoroughly good man-a thoroughly bad one."
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) provided the authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev an unprecedented peek into their archives for the preparation of The Haunted Wood (1999). One of the startling revelations in the text was that Valentin Markin had a source inside the U.S. State Department, codenamed "Willi," who had access to "numerous ambassadorial, consular, and military attache reports from Europe and the Far East," and could "filch transcripts of recorded conversations Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his assistants had with foreign ambassadors."
The Soviets paid "Willi" the extraordinary sum of $15,000 per year for the documents, which he passed to Markin through an intermediary codenamed "Leo," subsequently identified as New York Post journalist Ludwig Lore.Svetlana Chervonnaya, "Ludwig Lore (1875-1942)," DocumentsTalk website. Retrieved August 18, 2010.
Markin was replaced as chief illegal rezident by Boris Bazarov.
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