Henry Holdship Ware: a U.S. Military Interpreter, a Soviet Spy, and an Economist

Abstract

This article looks at the life of Henry Holdship Ware (1908-1999), the grandson of the founder of Atlanta University. Captain Henry H. Ware was an aide and interpreter to Major General John Deane, Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the Soviet Union during World War 2. In this capacity, he was an interpreter with the U.S. Army assigned to the Tripartite Conference in Moscow (1943) and Conferences at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and a liaison officer and interpreter during Operation Frantic, a joint American-Soviet campaign of shuttle bombing missions in Poltava, Ukraine, in June–September 1944. He was also present at the official surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany at Karlshorst on May 8, 1945, and interpreted toasts at the banquet of celebration after the ceremony. Henry Ware learnt Russian during his five-year stay as a student at Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, where he studied economics and was recruited by the NKVD to report on the American community in Moscow. Back in the USA, he was independently recruited by the Golos-Bentley Soviet espionage network under the codename ‘Vick”. In 1975, probably inspired by his study of the Soviet economy, he founded the Useful Services Exchange (USE), a community-based organization in Reston, Virginia, enabling neighbors to help each other through the exchange of services. The discussion draws on available visuals, memoirs, newspaper sources, and declassified documents.