KGB Interest in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Friend Shown in Released Cable

Trude Lash doesn’t recall Russians ever trying to use her to influence Eleanor Roosevelt. And she wonders why they called her Gertrude, a name she didn’t use.

“They were very interested, of course, in my husband-to-be, Joseph Lash,” she said. “I didn’t particularly interest anybody.”

But the top Soviet KGB agent in New York, Vassily Zubilin, told his bosses in Moscow in 1943 that the woman he knew as Gertrude Pratt was a “great friend” of the President’s wife.

The cable was one of scores of documents declassified and made public by the National Security Agency.

The 1943 cable began: “For processing Captain’s wife we [indecipherable] her great friend Gertrude Pratt, wife of the well-known wealthy Elliot Pratt.”

“Captain” was Soviet code for Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Processing” meant recruiting, according to NSA spokesman Ed Rockstein.

Mrs. Lash often stayed at the White House and eventually divorced Pratt and married Lash, an Eleanor Roosevelt confidant.

“I don’t know what this might mean,” Mrs. Lash said in a telephone interview Friday from her home in New York. “The only connection I ever had with the Soviet Union was that I was in charge of an international student meeting.”

She recalled the meeting was in 1941 or 1942 in Washington and “we managed to get some young Russians to the assembly.” By then, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and there was considerable sympathy for Russians in the United States.