What Made Sam Run

A month ago, a short, scholarly-looking man named Jack Lewis rented a shabby basement apartment on Manhattan's West 74th St. He and his wife were a quiet couple who had few callers and got no mail except for one lone postcard. It was from "Joe" in Haiti and said only, "Having a swell time." Lewis told the landlord that he was a statistical engineer, that he was gathering material for a book on mathematics. Henna-haired Mrs. Lewis, 42, never spoke to the neighbors.

One morning last week FBI agents knocked at the apartment door. When they left, they took Mr. Lewis with them. A few hours later the FBI announced that Mr. Lewis was the long-sought Sam Carr, a top agent of the wartime Soviet spy ring in Canada. Carr was turned over to the U.S. Immigration Department to await a deportation hearing on Ellis Island. There he was joined by his wife, who had come down to the U.S. from Toronto last December without a visitor's permit, and had stayed beyond the 29-day limit. Mrs. Carr was asked if she knew that her husband was a Russian spy. Said she: "I suppose I did."

Three-Year Search. Sam Carr's arrest ended a three-year search. The Mounties had plastered Canada with "Wanted" signs after Carr disappeared early in 1946 just ahead of a subpoena from the Royal Commission on espionage. The commission, whose report gave a full chapter to Sam Carr, called him "the main Canadian cog" in the Russian military espionage organization in Canada.

Almost from the time that Russian-born Schmil Kogan (alias Cohen, alias Carr, alias Lewis) arrived in Canada in 1924, the commission found, he was a professional Communist. After a stint on the prairies as a laborer, he showed up in Montreal as an organizer for the Young Communist League. Within two years he joined the Communist Party (outlawed by an Ontario court in 1931 and by the Dominion government in 1940, reborn in 1943 as the Labor Progressive Party).

Arrested and tried in 1931 as an officer of an illegal organization, he served almost three years in Kingston Penitentiary. After he got out he helped stage the 1935 March of the Unemployed on Ottawa, conducted a training school for Communists, edited the Communist Clarion. At the outbreak of World War II he went underground.

Hideout. For two years--which police think he spent at a hideout in Philadelphia--Carr wrote for Communist papers in Britain and the U.S. When Russia had been in the war over a year, Carr gave himself up to the Mounties. After a ten-day internment he was released on his promise to stay out of Communist activities.

Instead, Sam Carr, like a good Communist, went back on his promise and headed right into the spy ring operated by the Soviet Military Attache Colonel Zabotin. Documents niched by Igor Gouzenko from Zabotin's files showed Carr's record. It detailed various payments of Moscow money to him, among them $3,000 to bribe an official who issued a false passport for a Russian agent in California. That bribe is one of the counts in the Mounties' warrants charging Carr with violating the Official Secrets Act and the Criminal Code. Last week Canada's Justice Department was considering other charges to lay against Carr when the U.S. authorities were through with him.

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