Juliet Stuart Poyntz (originally 'Points') (25 November 1886 – c. 1937) was an American suffragist, trade unionist and communist spy. As a student and university teacher, Poyntz espoused many radical causes and went on to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Later she began working as an intelligence agent for the Soviet Union, travelling secretly to Moscow just as some of her comrades were being executed in Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, after which she resigned from the party. This is widely assumed to have led to her unexplained disappearance in New York City in June 1937 as the likely victim of an assassination squad, possibly because she had been associating with Trotskyists.

Early life and education

Juliet Poyntz was born on November 25, 1886, in Omaha, Nebraska. Her family moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, not long before she entered Barnard College. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

Poyntz moved to New York City as a young adult, where she earned degrees at Barnard College in 1907. In 1918, she left the ILGWU.

She later quit her outside work in favor of intelligence activities for the Soviet OGPU during the "Third Period".

According to a book by Benjamin Gitlow, a founding member of the CPUSA, Poyntz was a delegate to several consecutive American Communist Party conventions, and was a member of the Party's Central Executive Committee, besides being on New York's District Executive Committee. She had gone to China on a Comintern (Communist International) mission, and had dropped out of the CPUSA in 1934 in order to work for the OGPU (Soviet military secret police) in gathering scientific information for the Soviet Union. In 1936, Poyntz secretly travelled to Moscow to receive further instructions from Soviet authorities, and was seen there in the company of George Mink (alias Minkoff), an American later implicated in the disappearance of several Trotkskyists during the Spanish Civil War. While there, Poyntz witnessed the Great Purge instigated by Stalin, in which people she had known and worked with were killed. She returned to the U.S. disillusioned and unwilling to continue spying for the OGPU (later the NKVD). Poyntz disappeared after leaving the American Woman's Association Clubhouse at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City. A police investigation turned up no clues to her fate. Her belongings, all of her clothing, and hand luggage in her room appeared to be untouched, which suggested that she had not intended to leave the building for very long.

In early 1938, Carlo Tresca, a leading Italian-American anarchist, publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Poyntz in order to prevent her defection. He said that before she disappeared, she had come to him to talk over her disgust at what she had seen in Moscow in 1936 in the early stages of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Chambers later stated that he heard Poyntz had been killed for attempted desertion, and this rumor contributed to his caution when he defected in 1938. Elizabeth Bentley stated she was told by Jacob Golos in the late 1930s, and later by KGB officer Anatoli Gromov in 1945, that Poyntz had been a traitor and was now dead. Both Chambers' and Bentley's defections were probably in part motivated by fear of the example set in the Poyntz case.

Author Benjamin Gitlow wrote that Poyntz was disillusioned by Stalin's purges and was unwilling to continue as an espionage agent for the USSR. Gitlow relates that the OGPU/NKVD used Poyntz's former lover, a man named Shakne Epshtein (Shachno Epstein (1881–1945)), the associate editor of the Communist Yiddish daily Morgen Freiheit (and an OGPU/NKVD agent himself), to lure Poyntz out for a walk in Central Park. "They met at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk through Central Park ... Shachno took her by the arm and led her up a side path, where a large black limousine hugged the edge of the walk ... Two men jumped out, grabbed Miss Poyntz, shoved her into the car and sped away." Gitlow relates that the assassins took Poyntz to the woods near the Roosevelt estate in Dutchess County, and killed and buried her there. "The body was covered with lime and dirt. On top were placed dead leaves and branches which the three killers trampled down with their feet."

Personal life

In 1913, Poyntz married Dr. Friedrich Franz Ludwig Glaser, a communist and attache at the German consulate in New York. She kept her maiden name, although she changed the spelling from "Points" to "Poyntz".