What did the bosses in Moscow do about it? In a nutshell, any officers involved in the Oppenheimer case who might in any way attract the attention of official American authorities or of CPUSA members were simply recalled to Moscow, mostly “in disgrace.” Some were reportedly rehabilitated, some allegedly killed (but the last fate was presumably disinformation). By February 1944, Sudoplatov had taken the Oppenheimer case securely under his belt in his new and autonomous Department S, where it was handled exclusively by illegal officers and agents with no connection to anything or anyone else.
Grigory Kheifetz was recalled to Moscow in July 1944. Sudoplatov reports only that thereafter, Kheifetz became involved with Jewish affairs, for which he was eventually arrested and ended up in a prison hospital.2 Kheifetz is not even mentioned in the voluminous Mitrokhin Archive, a reliable source consisting of documents in the KGB’s normal foreign directorate archive that were smuggled out to England in 1993 by the defector Vasili Mitrokhin.3 The spurious Vassiliev notebooks, on the other hand, which the KGB officially released for publication in the U.S. in 2009, contain voluminous references to Kheifetz, his recall for “failing to cope with his job,” and even his alleged written report defending his failure to recruit Oppenheimer because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did not come through with its plans to introduce him and because the GRU was working on Oppenheimer and had failed to turn him over to the KGB. The American editors of the Vassiliev notebooks firmly dismiss all of Sudoplatov’s reporting on atomic espionage as the ramblings of a weak mind based on “sparse documentation with no provenance.”4
Vasily Zarubin and his wife, Yelizaveta, were also recalled to Moscow in mid-1944. According to Sudoplatov, one of Zarubin’s subordinates in the United States, Lt. Col. Vasily Mironov, had denounced Zarubin for having been careless in meeting American agents and accused him of being a double agent for the FBI in a letter to Stalin. The investigation against Zarubin “lasted six months and established that he was not working with the FBI,” but in 1946 he was fired with the rank of general.5 The Mitrokhin Archive records Mironov’s letter was sent anonymously to J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, and dates it August 7, 1943. The letter reportedly identifies ten other intelligence officers, including Mironov himself, working under diplomatic cover in the United States. Mironov also accused Zarubin of being a spy for Japan and accused his wife of working for the Germans. Another Mironov letter to Stalin accused Zarubin of being in contact with the FBI. In the summer of 1944, both Zarubins and Mironov were recalled to Moscow. Zarubin quickly established his position in Moscow and was appointed deputy chief of foreign intelligence, which was not good for Mironov. Zarubin retired three years later, allegedly for ill health, while “taking much of the credit for the remarkable wartime intelligence obtained from the United States” and was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, one Order of the Red Star, and numerous other medals. His success in the United States is attributed to his having worked closely with the CPUSA.6 Regarding Mironov’s letters denouncing the Zarubins, Vasiliev’s notebooks say that the Zarubins were recalled, investigated, and cleared and that Mironov was demoted, sent to a labor camp, and executed in 1945 for trying to smuggle a letter out to the U.S. embassy.7 Sudoplatov says Mironov was recalled and arrested but then diagnosed as schizophrenic, hospitalized, and discharged from the service.8
We coauthors suspect, though we cannot prove, that the contradictory “Mironov affair” may have been part of an effort by state security leaders to clear the decks in the United States. From Central Committee CPSU archives, Sudoplatov’s American coauthors, Jerrold and Leona Schecter, later learned that Kheifetz was promoted to lieutenant colonel of State Security on December 15, 1944, and that Zarubina was promoted to the same rank on December 22, 1945.9
Lev Vasilevsky, foreign intelligence station chief in Mexico City at the time of the Oppenheimer operation, met with illegal couriers, Zarubin’s wife, and officers at the Washington and New York stations as part of the improved if still risky chain to move the “take” from Oppenheimer to Moscow. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, in August 1944 Lev Tarasov (Vasilevsky’s cover name in Mexico City) was denounced by Kheifetz for having bungled his part in the Trotsky operation and for spending too much time on his house and birds in Mexico instead of working. He was recalled.10 According to Sudoplatov, Vasilevsky was then briefly deputy chief of Sudoplatov’s Department S. Arrested in 1948 in connection with the anti-Semitic purges, he was nevertheless permitted to retire on salary. He died in 1949.11 According to the Vassiliev notebooks, around October 1945 in Moscow, Vasilevsky drew up a plan of action for Boris Merkulov, head of state security, approved by Pavel Fitin, head of foreign intelligence, that said more case officers were needed in the western USA to work on the atomic bomb target because so far nothing had been done on that. He suggested setting up a “new operations center on the West Coast that would focus on work at the University of California,” specifically listing three targets for technical intelligence: “Ernest Lawrence and the still elusive Oppenheimer brothers.”12 (Robert’s brother Frank was also a communist and professor at Berkeley.)
The above contradictory stories leave us with certain obvious conclusions. Sudoplatov was on the scene to know the truth, and his memoirs were never censored by Moscow, so he is credible. Mitrokhin knows what foreign intelligence officers were told. He wasn’t censored by Moscow either, but he was not personally involved with the Oppenheimer case, so he reflects the “in-house” disinformation spread among uninvolved foreign intelligence officers so as to make the Oppenheimer case known only those with a “need to know.” The Vassiliev notebooks are not credible, because they were created by the KGB specifically for publication in the United States and surfaced shortly after the publication of Sudoplatov’s memoirs. Its many references to the unrecruited Robert Oppenheimer appear to us to be disinformation designed to conceal the fact that he was actually a cooperative source who enabled Russia to build its own atomic bomb.
General Pavel Sudoplatov died peacefully in Moscow on September 26, 1996, but his campaign to expose the truth about Russia has been carried on by his American coauthors, Jerrold and Leona Schecter. In 2003, the Schecters published a book of their own entitled Sacred Secrets, based on newly released documents from Russian and American archives. Included is one fascinating letter that lends support to our conclusions about the Oppenheimer case.13
This letter is dated October 2, 1944, is classified TOP SECRET and URGENT by Boris Merkulov, the head of state security, to his boss, Lavrentiy Beria, the commissar for internal affairs. The Schecters reproduce a photograph of the original Russian letter and their English translation. The typed letter contains underlined blanks that have been filled in by hand, evidently as a security measure. This is copy number two of three, apparently Merkulov’s copy that had been returned to him signed with Beria’s approval.
The Schecters do not state how they obtained the photograph of this letter, but from its contents, we coauthors believe the letter to be genuine. Merkulov writes:
In accordance with your instruction of September 29, 1944, the NKGB USSR is continuing measures for obtaining more complete information on the status of work on the problem of uranium and its development abroad.
In the period 1941-1943, important data on the start of research and work in the USA on this problem was received from our foreign agent network using the contacts of Comrades Zarubin and Kheifetz in their execution of important tasks in line with the executive committee of the Comintern.
In 1942, one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor Oppenheimer, an unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder, informed us about the start of work.
At the request of Comrade Kheifetz, confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to the research for several of our tested sources, including a relative of Comrade Browder.
Due to complications of the operational situation in the USA, the dissolution of the Cominter
n, and the explanations of Comrades Zarubin and Kheifets on the Mironov affair, it seems expedient to immediately sever the contacts of leaders and activists of the CPUSA with scientists and specialists engaged in work on uranium.
The NKGB requests to obtain the agreement of the leadership.
This copy of the letter is not the one Merkulov signed and sent off; it is the copy he got back, signed and approved by Beria and dated October 2, 1944. Merkulov notes at the top that he received Beria’s agreement on October 3, 1944.
During the summer of 1944, Merkulov had cleaned house in his U.S. stations. One way or another, all the officers who had been on friendly working terms with Earl Browder and his CPUSA had been sent home to Moscow. The “uranium” project, as Merkulov called the atomic bomb research, was by the time of Merkulov’s letter already in Sudoplatov’s competent, tightly clenched fists and did not need any help from the CPUSA. Oppenheimer and his friends were providing the best intelligence possible on the atomic bomb, and any contacts with CPUSA members such as Browder’s relative only endangered the really valuable sources.
It is noteworthy that in this letter, Merkulov flatly stated that in 1942 Oppenheimer “informed us” about the start of work on the Manhattan Project. “Us” was clearly Soviet state security, not the CPSU. The two state security officers in direct touch with Oppenheimer in 1942 were Grigory Kheifetz and Elizabeth Zarubina. They had done an outstanding job working with Oppenheimer, but in the summer of 1944 they had been abruptly recalled to Moscow for what proved to be completely false accusations. The real reason they were recalled, along with Zarubina’s husband, was their prior close cooperation with the CPUSA. The above letter shows that Merkulov recognized a potentially serious threat to the security of his extremely valuable Oppenheimer case inherent in any connections with the CPUSA.
Beria understood the problem. That was why he had put Sudoplatov in charge of the whole atomic bomb operation in the first place. According to Sudoplatov, in January 1945 the Soviets would receive a description of the design of the first atomic bomb.14
Moscow never publicly acknowledged that Robert Oppenheimer had helped the KGB steal the technology of the nuclear bombs and build Iosif-1. It feared that any publicity around Oppenheimer would deter other potential American sources from helping the KGB keep in step with American nuclear progress on this, the weaponry of the future. The 1985 redefection from the U.S. of KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko proved the KGB right. After twenty-five years of serving the KGB, Yurchenko did what General Pacepa had done a few years earlier—he requested political asylum in the U.S. during an assignment abroad in the summer of 1985. As had Pacepa, Yurchenko asked the CIA to keep his defection a secret. Yurchenko had also left a child behind, and he was afraid that Western publicity about his defection could make his child’s life a hell.
Unfortunately, a few months later, Yurchenko’s defection became front page news in the U.S. Also unfortunately, one of the CIA’s debriefers of Yurchenko was Aldrich Ames, who in 1993 was sentenced to life in prison without parole for being a paid Soviet spy. During a dinner at Au Pied de Cochon, a restaurant in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., in November 1985, Yurchenko told his CIA guard, “I’m going for a walk. If I don’t come back, it is not your fault.” Yurchenko never returned. Several days later the Soviet embassy in Washington called a press conference, at which Yurchenko told the media that he had not defected to the CIA. He had been drugged and kidnapped by the CIA. It was, of course, a lie, but that press conference was followed by a virulent dezinformatsiya campaign aimed at transforming that lie into truth. It seemed that the whole Soviet bloc intelligence machinery—almost a million officers—did nothing during those days but pour vitriol on the CIA, which was painted as the most evil of evils. To a professional intelligence officer, that grotesque KGB portrait of the CIA looked like an unsavory cartoon. Unfortunately, it put down roots within American public opinion and became “the truth.”
In 1986, Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey sent General Pacepa a letter explaining the failure that had led to Yurchenko’s redefection. “The root cause,” Casey explained, was the CIA’s inability to keep Yurchenko’s defection a secret.15 That was indeed true. But it was also manna from heaven for the KGB, which launched a disinformation campaign aimed at persuading the media and America’s main Sovietologists into believing that the real “traitor” was not in the KGB but rather in the White House: Harry Hopkins, the closest confidant of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
During his relatively short debriefings by the CIA, Yurchenko, who had once been chief of the KGB station in Washington, identified the KGB’s most important agents in the Washington area that he knew of: Ronald William Pelton at the NSA and Edward Lee Howard at the CIA. Both were arrested by the FBI and sentenced for espionage. Yurchenko never mentioned Hopkins, to the best of our knowledge, yet as chief of the KGB station in Washington, Yurchenko should have been aware of Hopkins had he been a Soviet agent, and revealing him would have greatly increased Yurchenko’s standing in the U.S. Hopkins lived in the White House during the last years of his life. To the best of our combined knowledge, the KGB never had any agent there. President Roosevelt did everything in his power to extend the life of Hopkins, who suffered from an aggressive intestinal cancer.
Yet suddenly, after the Yurchenko redefection, Hopkins was suspected everywhere of having been a Soviet spy. The evidence to support that accusation is weak, but as Chairman Mao once said, a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Soviet foreign intelligence in the U.S. had loose security in both its legal and illegal stations. Quite a few important Soviet agents were compromised, and their names were published. Hopkins was not among them. In September 1945, when a military code clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected in Ottawa, Soviet state security boss Lavrentiy Beria realized how lax security had been. On April 7, 1946, he therefore issued a book cable to all his stations abroad, saying that “the most elementary rules of conspiracy were being ignored” and telling the stations to pay special attention to tightening security.16 Again, Hopkins was never mentioned. KGB General Sudoplatov, who in the late 1980s exposed all the high-ranking Americans who had collaborated with Soviet intelligence in the nuclear field, didn’t mention him either. As we read the totality of the evidence, Hopkins was not a Soviet agent.
In a way, the study of espionage is like the study of fine art; the more you know about it, the easier it is to spot a fake. In espionage, the art of forgery is called disinformation. After World War II, American and European leftists needed a new enemy, and the Kremlin’s dezinformatsiya machinery obliged. President Truman was painted as the “butcher of Hiroshima,” Eisenhower as a war-mongering “shark” run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player, Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer, and Ronald Reagan as a third-class Hollywood actor.
The case of Harry Hopkins, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers during World War II, was added by Moscow on this list of forgeries in 1985. The specific allegations that Hopkins was a Soviet spy lie in KGB General Yurchenko’s 1985 post-redefection statements, when he publicly lied, telling the U.S. media that he had in fact never defected to the CIA but had been kidnapped by the CIA, and in a 1985 report from Oleg Gordievsky, one of the most knowledgeable defectors from the KGB.
We do not trust Yurchenko, who during the same year of 1985 redefected to communist Moscow, but we have high confidence in Gordievsky. The problem is that Gordievsky learned about the so-called KGB recruitment of Hopkins under dubious conditions and from dubious sources. In about 1964, while working in the illegals directorate of the KGB, Gordievsky heard a lecture at the Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow given by Iskhak Akhmerov, a former illegal KGB officer in Washington, D.C. Akhmerov devoted most of his lecture to his relations with Harry Hopkins, whom he described as “the most important of all So
viet wartime agents in the United States.” Akhmerov was evidently an impressive speaker, going into great detail about how he had handled Hopkins over the years, passing him personal wishes from Stalin and molding Hopkins into a hugely valuable agent.17
This story simply does not add up. There is no factual basis for assuming that Akhmerov even met Hopkins, much less that he handled him as an agent. We know that after his retirement Akhmerov used to give lectures for the illegals directorate, but we also know it was against all KGB rules to discuss real cases by true names or in any identifiable way. On the other hand, it was quite common to embellish lectures for educational purposes, improving on the true scenario. In other words, we have no reason to question what Gordievsky remembers about Akhmerov’s lecture, but we believe Akhmerov’s whole story was cleverly delivered disinformation designed to inspire its listeners. Furthermore, we have found no other source—including defectors and electronic intercepts—that suggests any contact between Hopkins and Akhmerov.
The portrait of Hopkins in Akhmerov’s lecture was certainly a forgery, just as the KGB and FSB portraits of all post–World War II American presidents were forgeries. Akhmerov’s whole life was a forgery. The basic skeleton of his Hopkins story might have been drawn from the case of Lawrence Duggan, a rising State Department star recruited and handled by Akhmerov himself. Later, Akhmerov also handled Michael Straight, a wealthy young American recruited in England by one of the famous Cambridge spies who in 1938 returned to the United States, where Eleanor Roosevelt helped him get a job at the State Department. There is, however, no factual basis for assuming that Akhmerov ever even met Hopkins, much less that he ever handled him as an agent.
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