Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  For Beria, however, Kheifetz’s best news was that J. Robert Oppenheimer, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who was a longtime loyal although unlisted CPUSA member, was being considered for the job of scientific director. Moreover, Oppenheimer’s wife was also a staunch communist and the widow of a communist political commissar who had died in the Spanish Civil War.

  Does anyone now really still remember who J. Robert Oppenheimer was apart from being a brilliant California scientist who has been called the father of the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, which ended World War II? Wasn’t there some kerfuffle over whether he was or wasn’t a communist? Oppenheimer lost his clearance during the postwar hysteria over the many communists supposedly working in our government, but that all blew over, didn’t it? Anyway, Oppenheimer helped us win the war, so he’s an American hero, right?

  An outstanding atomic physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, by late 1941 Oppenheimer was known to have been chosen by the U.S. Army to head a top-secret atomic research project. From September 1942 to November 1945, he was formally employed as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project’s super-secret Radiation Laboratory located near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He oversaw its physical construction and personnel selection, brought about the first nuclear explosion test at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, and is considered the father of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan that brought World War II to an official end on September 2, 1945. He returned to academia in November 1945.

  At Berkeley, Oppenheimer was generally known to have communist leanings and in fact openly associated with communists. In early 1942, however, he inexplicably stopped attending Communist Party meetings or any political discussion groups or writing for communist publications. His colleagues believed he had experienced an honest change of heart due to his new responsibilities as an employee of the U.S. Army in wartime and as head of a laboratory performing secret work in support of the war effort. At this time he began counseling his left-leaning students not to get involved in Communist Party politics, and he dutifully reported to the Manhattan Project security office whenever party members tried to solicit his support for Russia.1

  We coauthors do not buy that explanation. A sidebar here may illustrate the real story better than a technical digression on Soviet espionage and disinformation. For comparison purposes let’s look at the true story recounted in the celebrated autobiography Witness by Whittaker Chambers, the one-time Soviet spy who later renounced communism and became a high-profile opponent.

  Like Oppenheimer, Chambers was originally a dedicated communist, a talented man who as an agent could be of great use to Soviet intelligence. As editor of The New Masses—an official communist publication—Chambers was well known to local party members up and down the East Coast of the United States. One day in 1932, Max Bedacht, a member of the CPUSA’s Central Committee (and secretly a liaison officer between the CPUSA and Soviet military intelligence), summoned Chambers to his office and announced: “They want you to go into one of the party’s ‘special institutions’ … They want you to do underground work.” He told Chambers he had to leave The New Masses and walk away from the open Communist Party. He also warned Chambers not to mention their conversation to anyone but his wife and told him to give him an answer the following day.

  After talking it over with his wife that evening, Chambers decided not to do it because his wife was afraid and because he thought the people at his office would not understand why he was leaving. Unfortunately for him, when he went back to Bedacht the next day, the latter said: “You have no choice.”

  “He meant, of course,” Chambers writes, “that I was under the discipline of the party and that, if I did not go into the underground, I would go out of the party” and be labeled a traitor. Bedacht immediately took him out for a walk and introduced him to “Don” from the “special institution.” The latter told Chambers he could go to The New Masses one last time but never again. “In our work you will … never have anything to do with party people again. If you do, we will know it.”2

  Oppenheimer’s behavior in early 1942 duplicates what Chambers was told to do, undoubtedly for the same reason. As an intelligence source, he was no longer allowed to associate openly with members of the CPUSA and was instructed to convince everyone in his daily life that he had turned his back on communism. Chambers, shortly after meeting the local party agent “Don,” was introduced to an authoritative Russian who warned him that “henceforth I must absolutely separate myself from communists and the Communist Party, and live as much as possible like a respectable bourgeois.”3 That is just what Oppenheimer did.

  Of course, when Chambers later decided to break with the party and the “underground” (in his case, Soviet military intelligence), he reacted entirely differently. In real fear for their lives, he and his family abruptly fled into total obscurity, only gradually daring to emerge into normal American life.4 That is what Oppenheimer did not do.

  Although Oppenheimer was obviously a very tempting target for recruitment by Soviet foreign intelligence, various disinformation sources later explained that because of his new assignment, he was so well guarded that it was difficult for Soviet assets to break through “the security cordon that surrounded him”5 Or that Soviet military intelligence had made the first move and was already working on him.6 All of this is pure eyewash, as will be seen later in our story.

  Over the years, some of the most respected American researchers have studied Oppenheimer’s case. The virtually unanimous conclusion has been that Oppenheimer was never a Soviet spy. In 2009 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr published a book in which they flatly state that the available evidence is “of such quality and quantity that the case for Oppenheimer’s innocence of the charge of assisting Soviet espionage is overwhelming: the case is closed.”7 Unfortunately, what is truly overwhelming is the barrage of disinformation the Russians have spread about Oppenheimer and the gullibility of educated Americans to believe it.

  For the facts on Oppenheimer’s activity as a spy for Soviet intelligence, we recommend Special Tasks, a remarkable memoir published in 1994 by Lt. Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov.8 As a deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence, Sudoplatov was aware of the beginnings of the Oppenheimer case, although his own bailiwick was originally the Directorate of Special Tasks, the unsavory operations of which—“sabotage, kidnapping and assassination”—were carried out by illegal officers and agents completely divorced from the espionage being conducted by officers like Kheifetz.

  Over the years, Sudoplatov has been unjustly maligned, primarily because his information does not fit with the universally accepted disinformation narrative that has been built around Oppenheimer and the bomb. Sudoplatov ran a tight little ship that didn’t share personnel with other Soviet intelligence units and didn’t leak. That was why Beria eventually put him in charge of atomic espionage activities at the Los Alamos Radiation Laboratory and why there exists virtually no independent confirmation of Sudoplatov’s memoirs except in their own intrinsic logic and credibility. Beginning in 1943, Sudoplatov’s illegals began playing a supporting role in handling the atomic intelligence received. Then in 1944, Beria put Sudoplatov directly in charge of a highly secret, new, and completely independent unit to handle the specific intelligence on the American atomic bomb that was being provided by Oppenheimer. Sudoplatov knew the facts because the Oppenheimer case was his responsibility.

  Among Russian intelligence officers, Sudoplatov was initially praised for speaking out about his remarkable career, most notably for successfully organizing the 1940 assassination in Mexico of Stalin’s main enemy, Leon Trotsky, without implicating the Soviet Union. After Special Tasks appeared in 1994, however, Russian officials wrote Sudoplatov off as a crazy old man, as did many Americans. In fact, Sudoplatov’s memory was phenomenal. He made a strenuous effort to be accurate, having his son and his American coauthors, Jerrold and Leona Schecter, check out every detail wherever possible. He did not try to clear his book with Russian
authorities, and he intended for it to be published in the United States, as it was. It rings absolutely true.

  After hearing about Oppenheimer from Kheifetz, surely Beria could scarcely believe his luck. Kheifetz was clearly immediately instructed to find a way to meet Oppenheimer and try to win him over to helping the Soviet cause. In those days, the Soviet intelligence services (civilian, military, and party) had been happy to recruit agents from CPUSA members, knowing that they would be reliable sources and would follow instructions. Soon, however, Moscow realized that in foreign countries, identifiable party members attracted the attention of local police and security services, and since they all knew each other through party meetings, the arrest of one could compromise the whole group. Active agents who were party members were instructed to make a show of breaking with it.

  Beginning in the 1950s, the intelligence services were in fact forbidden to recruit from among the members of foreign communist parties.

  How could Lavrentiy Beria’s foreign intelligence representatives in the United States manage to approach a brilliant scientist like Robert Oppenheimer in the ivory tower world of academia at the University of California at Berkeley? Even if he had been a longtime communist and therefore presumably friendly toward the Soviet Union, how could Oppenheimer be persuaded to engage in espionage in order to help the Soviet Union develop its own atomic bomb?

  Sudoplatov’s memoirs provide the only credible and recorded source to help us find an answer to these questions. He was directly involved on the Moscow end throughout the Oppenheimer case. Sudoplatov’s memory of how the case developed not only makes perfect sense, it is a gripping story.9

  Living in San Francisco at the time was a wealthy woman named Louise Brantsen, a paid CPUSA agent rumored to be Grigory Kheifetz’s mistress. During the period 1936 to 1942, she threw soirées for people sympathetic to communist causes at her large house, where CPUSA members and Soviet intelligence officials could make interesting contacts.10

  In late 1941, Vasily Zarubin, the Soviet foreign intelligence station chief in Washington, instructed Grigory Kheifetz, his very accomplished station chief in San Francisco, to find a way to approach Oppenheimer and obtain his cooperation. On December 6, 1941, Oppenheimer and his wife attended a cocktail party hosted by Louise Brantsen to raise money for Spanish Civil War veterans, which Kheifetz also attended. A personable Jew, he easily made friends with the Oppenheimers. He met them once again that month for cocktails, and by the end of December he managed to have a private lunch with Robert. That was when Oppenheimer agreed to cooperate with Soviet intelligence.11

  It was surely not a coincidence that in January 1942, Robert Oppenheimer began renouncing all Communist Party connections.

  Oppenheimer was the only person who would eventually have across-the-board access to all the Manhattan Project’s scientific information and who understood its significance. According to Sudoplatov, Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project close friends Enrico Fermi and Leon Szilard were afraid that the Nazis would produce the first atomic bomb. They believed that if the Americans shared their information with the Soviet Union, the Germans would be beaten to the bomb.

  Beginning in 1942, Oppenheimer and his like-minded friends reported to the Soviets on the progress being made at the Manhattan Project orally, through comments and asides, and in documents clandestinely transferred “with their full knowledge that the information they were shar ing would be passed on. In all, Oppenheimer sent five classified reports describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.”12

  At the same time, however, Sudoplatov says the Manhattan Project scientists were treated as friends who cooperated with the Soviets but not as recruited agents. (In those days, becoming a Soviet “agent” was a formal step, with the agent signing his agreement to cooperate, receiving pay for his services, and being officially approved by Moscow. The atomic scientists were far too prominent to be asked to comply with any such bureaucratic procedures.)

  From the beginning, extraordinary attention was paid to the security of the Oppenheimer operation. Vasily Zarubin, the Washington station chief, instructed Kheifetz to “divorce all intelligence operations” from the CPUSA, which was known to be “closely monitored by the FBI, and to have Oppenheimer sever all contacts with communists and left-wingers.”13

  In early 1942, Kheifetz introduced Oppenheimer’s wife, Katherine, to the Washington station chief’s wife, Elizabeth Zarubina—herself an intelligence officer with the rank of captain. Elizabeth began making frequent trips to California and building a close friendship with Katherine Oppenheimer. Kheifetz bowed out of the relationship, and from then on the contact ostensibly became a social connection between Elizabeth Oppenheimer and her close friend from out of town, who was unknown to the locals, including to the local FBI and CPSU.

  Little by little, Sudoplatov’s illegals began entering the picture. When he became head of Special Tasks in 1941, he made his old associate Leonid Eitingon his deputy. Eitingon, a principal organizer of Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, was an old hand at illegal operations. During the period 1939 to 1941, he had recruited some forty unregistered illegal agents and planted them as sleepers around the U.S. and Mexico for possible use in sabotage operations. In 1941 he reactivated a dentist and his wife living in San Francisco, Polish Jews he had brought over from France in the 1930s. Eitingon introduced them to Zarubina, who introduced them to the Oppenheimers, and the couples began to socialize together. The Polish couple thereafter acted as couriers, passing Oppenheimer’s documents at first to the Washington and New York foreign intelligence stations for forwarding to Moscow and later taking or sending them to Mexico City after the stations in the U.S. were, for increased security, cut out of the operation. Kheifetz and the Zarubins were not only removed from the Oppenheimer case, they were later recalled to Moscow for alleged transgressions—an in-house disinformation operation that we shall discuss later. A drugstore in Santa Fe, which had been used as a meeting point but was not compromised in the Trotsky assassination, became a safehouse where the Polish couple could also pass documents to other unregistered illegals. The latter would then act as couriers, taking the documents to Mexico City, where the Soviet intelligence station chief Lev Vasilievsky would receive them and ensure their clandestine transmission to Moscow.

  This is only a sketchy summary of Sudoplatov’s detailed account of how otherwise unknown assets and illegals left over from his previous “special tasks” operations were used to provide extreme security to the Oppenheimer operation and its intelligence product. Sudoplatov may not have had any scientific qualifications for his new job, but with his background in hush-hush dirty tricks and the whole apparatus that went with his specialty, he turned out to be a brilliant choice to handle atomic espionage.

  In February 1944 Beria appointed Sudoplatov to be the director of a new, autonomous Department S “organized to supervise atomic intelligence activities of the GRU and the NKGB [state security].” At the same time, he was made head of the “Special Second Bureau of the newly set up State Committee for Problem Number One, whose aim was the realization of an atomic bomb through uranium fuel.”14

  On August 29, 1949, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was in Moscow anxiously awaiting some very important news. Finally Lavrentiy Beria, his former state security chief and atomic espionage expert, called in from the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan to report that the Iosif-1 (the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb) had produced the exact same kind of mushroom cloud as in the American tests. With that news, Stalin found himself sitting on his very own cloud nine.

  Coauthor Pacepa first heard the above story about Iosif-1 from the French physicist and prominent communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie when they were both in Geneva attending a United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy. Joliot-Curie claimed to have been in Moscow at the time of the Iosif-1 test. A year later, Pacepa heard the same story from Igor Kurchatov, who headed the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan Project and was attending a scientif
ic meeting that the Romanians were hosting in Bucharest. Note that Stalin heard the good news about Iosif-1 from Beria, not from Kurchatov or from some military bigwig conducting the test. Iosif-1 was state security’s bragging point.

  CHAPTER 5

  DISINFORMATION: THE ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS

  Disinformation, or “fake news,” is not always a weapon used against an enemy. It can also be a corollary of the need-to-know principle observed by every intelligence service in wartime, inasmuch as “loose lips sink ships.” Correspondingly, in the interest of victory in war, lies may be told. In the intelligence services we once managed, both coauthors observed misleading cables reporting that a recruitment attempt had failed, when in fact it had been a huge success; cable traffic on the real story had been moved to a very secure eyes-only channel to limit the number of officers aware of the case. Something similar happened in the Soviets’ Oppenheimer case, although the measures taken were sometimes fairly drastic.1

  By 1943, Moscow’s foreign intelligence headquarters realized that too many of its officers who were under official cover and members of the CPUSA had been involved with the Oppenheimer case. It was true that the contact was now being handled more securely, thanks to Sudoplatov’s experience running operations with illegal officers and agents, but conditions were still too insecure now that the FBI and Manhattan Project security were trying to identify communists hovering around American secrets.

  Grigory Kheifetz was one officer whose CPUSA friendships and professional connections made him insecure. He had arranged to meet the Oppenheimers at the home of a paid CPUSA agent, Louise Brantsen. Vasily Zarubin said that most of his U.S. recruitments had been based on CPUSA leads. His wife had been meeting with the Oppenheimers to receive documents for transmission to Moscow through official channels. Mexico City station chief Lev Vasilevsky also had past CPUSA connections and was now being given Oppenheimer materials from illegal couriers, or even from Zarubina, for transmission to Moscow by various means, including through the Washington and New York stations. These working relationships with the CPUSA were holdovers from the Comintern period, when the CPUSA had broken with Moscow and the intelligence services had temporarily bridged the gap. But that was no longer necessary. All of the above people were considered to be fine officers, but their close contacts with the CPUSA and their ingenious but unprofessional means of transmitting top security materials were by definition a worrisome security risk in the Oppenheimer case.