N.C. woman spied for KGB

State Progressive Party leader, she was Soviet agent in WWII

Mary Watkins Price, a 39-year old white woman from Greensboro, was chosen as the state's first female candidate for governor.

Raised on a Rockingham County tobacco farm, Price earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. Moving to New York City, she worked as a reporter and became involved in left-wing circles after joining the labor movement. She later moved to Washington to become the confidential and editorial secretary to the influential and widely respected national newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann.

Returning to North Carolina in 1945, Price organized the state chapter of the Committee of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. She lobbied for liberal causes in the General Assembly and in 1948 she became president of the state Progressive Party.

In July, North Carolinians opened their newspapers to read some startling charges. Elizabeth Bentley, a former communist and ex-Soviet agent who had become an FBI informant, testified before a Senate committee that Price had spied for the Soviet Union while she was Lippmann's secretary, providing the Russians with information about national leaders with whom the columnist spoke. Price called the spying charges "fantastic" and said it was an obvious effort to discredit the Progressive Party. But she would not say whether she was a communist, saying "to make a public statement that I am not a Communist would in effect place me among the Red baiters."

Was Price a traitor or a victim of McCarthyism? The evidence that has emerged since the end of the Cold War strongly suggests that she was a Soviet agent. In 1995, the U.S. government declassified the files of what was known as the Venona Project, the decoded secret cables between Moscow and its agents in America.

Price's code name was "Dir" and she supplied the KGB with information about Lippmann's contacts with high government officials, according to KGB cables found in the Venona Project. She worked directly for Bentley and also met several times with one of the top KGB spymasters working in the U.S., Iskak Abdulovich Akhmerov.

Price served as a courier, at one point in June 1943 taking information to a KGB agent in Mexico City. She was also said to have assisted in the Soviet recruitment of Duncan Lee, a descendant of the Lees of Virginia and a former Rhodes Scholar. Lee became a highly placed Soviet spy while working as an aide to General William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Price's sister Mildred also became a Soviet agent, according to the documents.

By July 1944, the stress of spying was threatening Price's health and she asked to retire. The KGB was reluctant to let her go because "she has been working for a long time and had acquired considerable experience." But they relented. A year later she returned to North Carolina.

Price died in Oakland, California, in 1980, active in left-wing causes until the end.