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Linn Farrish

US international rugby union player & alleged spy

Field	Value
name	Linn Markley Farrish
birth_date
death_date
death_place	Balkans
repteam1	United States
repyears1	19??–19??
ru_ntupdate	January 14, 2026
module	{{infobox military person
embed	yes
allegiance	United States
branch	Office of Strategic Services
service_years	1941-44
battles

World War II
- Yugoslavia

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

Rugby

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

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 an assessment of anti-Nazi resistance. 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.

Biographer Mark Ryan states "Patriotic Farrish would never do anything to harm his beloved USA." 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: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, Random House (2007), pp. 95-97.

References

"Linn Farrish". Olympedia.
link. (2007-08-30)
Evans, ''Blacklisted by History'' (Random House, 2007).
"Olympians Who Were Killed or Missing in Action or Died as a Result of War". Sports Reference.
For The Glory – Mark Ryan (JR Books)

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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