Linn Farrish

Linn Markley Farrish (October 3, 1901 – September 11, 1944) was an American rugby union player and alleged spy.

Olympic medal record
Men's rugby union
Representing the  United States
1924 Paris Team competition

Rugby

Farrish competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics. He was a member of the American rugby union team, which won the gold medal.[1]

Espionage

Farrish was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War. While acting as the OSS liaison officer to Josip Tito's Yugoslav Partisans, as part of Maclean Mission (Macmis), he submitted a one-sided assessment of anti-Nazi resistance, grossly exaggerating the effectiveness of the Communist Partisans and denigrating the anti-Communist Chetniks as collaborators.[2] He was also allegedly serving Soviet intelligence. Farrish is referenced in the following Venona project decryption: 1397 KGB New York to Moscow, 4 October 1944. His code name in Soviet intelligence, as deciphered in the Venona project, was "Attila". He died in an aircraft crash in the Balkans in September 1944.[3]

Biographer Mark Ryan states "Patriotic Farish would never do anything to harm his beloved USA."[4] Fitzroy Maclean jocularly referred to him in his memoir Eastern Approaches as "my American chief of staff". Farrish was also referred to as "Lawrence of Yugoslavia" (as was William M. Jones).

Sources
  • John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999), pp. 194-195.
  • M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, Random House (2007), pp. 95-97.
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References
  1. profile Archived 2007-08-30 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Evans, Blacklisted by History (Random House, 2007).
  3. "Olympians Who Were Killed or Missing in Action or Died as a Result of War". Sports Reference. Archived from the original on 17 April 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2018.
  4. For The Glory – Mark Ryan (JR Books)
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