My Father the Spy

"I know less about my father in many respects than you know about your fifth-grade teacher," says Robin Oggins in a recent New York Times article. He is not speaking in poetically angsty or Freudian terms. Robin's father, Isaiah "Cy" Oggins (pictured), was a Soviet spy whose missions took him from Paris, to Berlin and Manchuria to Moscow. Ultimately, his loyalty to Communism was betrayed; he was sentenced to 8 years in an arctic gulag and murdered in 1947.

Cy's story is now the subject of The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service by Andrew Meier, who worked with Robin Oggins to uncover the long-hidden truth about what really happened. Robin was ambivalent at first "When you've got what other people might regard as a secret you kind of evaluate: do you want to find out the truth at the expense of having the secret out there, or do you want to put the lid back on it as it has been all these years?" But his historian's nature as well as his longing to learn more about his father, urged him forward.

Andrew Meier will discuss this incredible story on Wednesday, December 3 at the Museum.