Leonard Mins

Who is Leonard Mins?

Leonard Emil Mins was an American who worked in the Russian Section of the Research and Analysis Division of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Mins also worked for Soviet Military Intelligence.

Mins joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1919 and worked for the Communist movement in Germany in 1920 and 1921. In 1924 and 1925 Mins worked for the Executive Committee of the Comintern as a translator. From 1927 to 1932 Mins did Communist Party work in the United States. In 1934 he transferred his party membership to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Mins was in France in 1938 working with exiled German writers, one of whom was the father of the later notorious East German spymaster and Stasi officer Markus Wolf. In his 1997 memoirs Wolf recalled his old friend as, “a Communist exile who had been my parents' close friend” in Russia. “He had been the channel through which my father was able to communicate with us during his internment in France.”

Mins worked for the OSS from 1942 to late 1943, and worked mostly on a survey of strategic minerals and oil reserves in Asia and the Soviet Union.