A part-time instructor in the University of Southern California (USC) vanished from a California beach in 1945. Several years later the U.S. Congress described him as an important Soviet spy whose true identity remained a mystery. The recently declassified documents and publications bring to light many details of the events and reveal what happened to this enigmatic “rezident” of the Soviet military intelligence in Los Angeles. The story includes defection of a Soviet code clerk in Canada, the recruitment of agents by the spy and his achievements as a USC student, fraudulent passports and the Spanish civil war, FBI investigation, and secret messages. The Soviet homeland did not treat well the spy on his return. In the end, the state-directed anti-Semitism has brought him to a point of leaving the country that he had served so loyally all his life.