Ignacy Witczak

Ignacy Witczak was a GRU illegal officer in the United States during World War II. Witczak was a pseudonym; his real name was Zalman Volfovich Litvin.

Shortly after the 5 September 1945 defection of Igor Gouzenko, a GRU code clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Ignacy Samuel Witczak, an instructor at the University of Southern California, disappeared from a beach in Southern California. Later his wife disappeared as well.

The FBI learned Witczak had entered the United States from Canada on a false passport and suspected Witczak was not his true name. The FBI initiated a search for Witczak, as described in the memoirs of FBI special agent Robert Lamphere. Later the FBI was able to trace some of Witczak's former agents, but never learned what happened to him.

The existence of an illegal intelligence officer using the name Ignacy Samuel Witczak was first made public in 1946 in the Canadian government’s Report of the Royal Commission, which presented the results of investigations based Gouzenko's revelations.

Witczak was mentioned again in 1952 in a U.S. congressional report titled The Shameful Years: Thirty Years of Soviet Espionage in the United States, which provides additional detail about the FBI’s investigation. The name Zalman Litvin was not known at that time.

Witczak was also briefly referenced in Venona decrypts, which consist of communications between Moscow and Soviet intelligence stations around the world from 1943 to 1946 that were intercepted and decrypted by the U.S. government, and made publicly available in 1995. Witczak's code name in the communications was "R".