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Donald Nivan Wheeler was a graduate of Yale and later a member of the faculty. He also attended college in England with Duncan Lee who described him as a really "progressive person". Wheeler was associated with various Comintern organizations before being employed by the government, first in the United States Department of Agriculture, later the Department of Treasury. From 1941 to 1946, Wheeler was employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, D.C. Wheeler was a member of the white collar unit of the Communist Party of the District of Columbia. Franz Neuman, who worked with him in the OSS gave a good report to Moscow, describing him as "a calm and progressive man".

In November 1943, Earl Browder, Chairman of the CPUSA, turned control of the Perlo group of Soviet spies over to Jacob Golos two months before his death and the group was subsequently taken over by his girl friend, Elizabeth Bentley.

As a member of the OSS Research and Analysis Division, Wheeler received secret and confidential 'ditto' copies of monthly and semi-monthly reports of political developments throughout the world. Wheeler passed these reports as well as handwritten and typewritten material of cable reports from State Department and the OSS to Soviet intelligence. Wheeler provided information on the organization and policies of British intelligence services and furnished memoranda prepared by the Foreign Nationalities Branch of OSS on material relating to the particular racial groups and activities within the United States.

Beginning in 1944, the entire range of OSS planning documents on the postwar occupation of Germany were supplied to KGB head Pavel Fitin through Wheeler. Wheeler was considered the most active operative within the Perlo group and his complicity was corroborated by information exhumed from the NKVD archives in the 1990s. Wheeler appears in Venona as a Soviet source under the cover name "Izra".

• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
• Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999), pgs. 106, 225, 251-56, 257, 259, 261, 264, 286.