Mary Price

Mary Wolfe Price (1909–1980) was an American who was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Early years Born in 1909 in Rockingham County, North Carolina, Price graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1931. She eventually made her way to New York City, where she worked as secretary to journalist Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald. Espionage career Sometime prior to March 1941, Mary Price allegedly agreed to furnish Jacob Golos, controller of the secret apparatus of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) on behalf of the Soviet Union, with all the information she could concerning the material Lippmann was writing and his contacts. Elizabeth Bentley was made the courier between Washington D.C., where Price worked, and New York City, where she and Golos lived together. Price allegedly became a "cut out", or go-between, for government employees who were also members of the CPUSA secret apparatus. Among them were Maurice Halperin, Duncan Lee, Helen Tenney of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Robert Miller of the U.S. State Department, and Michael Greenberg, an associate of presidential aide Lauchlin Currie. Lee was the personal assistant to OSS head General William J. Donovan, the first intelligence chief in America's newly created wartime intelligence agency. The material from Halperin was considered extremely valuable especially how it related to the Polish government in exile.