A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Hall went right back to the test range on his return to Los Alamos. In three detonations in the first half of February 1945, Rossi’s group, employing special quick-firing electrical detonators devised by the Berkeley physicist and subsequent Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez, finally got the result they had been seeking. The gamma ray reading on the oscilloscope in the blast shelter showed a symmetrical implosion of the core. At the end of the month, Oppenheimer and Groves and other leading figures at Los Alamos settled on the final design of the plutonium bomb, although they ordered continued Ra-La testing right up until shortly before Trinity on July 16 in order to achieve absolute certainty.

  When Sax returned to Harvard in early 1945, Hall acquired a new courier, Lona Petka Cohen, an attractive Polish-American woman, then in her early thirties, who, along with her husband, Morris, was to become a legendary operative in the Soviet secret service. (She died in retirement in Moscow in 1992, Morris three years later.) Her second trip to New Mexico occurred after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, when the secret of what had been going on at Los Alamos was out and the laboratory had become a much publicized place. The Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had greatly increased security in the whole area. As soon as Hall passed her his report at a rendezvous on the campus of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, she hurried back to a boardinghouse in the New Mexican town of Las Vegas, about eighty miles away, where she had been staying to avoid the attention she might have attracted by putting up at a hotel in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. She stuffed the papers Hall had given her under the top tissues in a box of Kleenex, grabbed her suitcase, and headed for the railroad station.

  At the station, she discovered that plainclothes security men were questioning everyone getting on the train and searching their baggage. She waited inside until just before the train was due to depart, then walked up to two agents on the platform next to one of the cars. She put down her suitcase and began to play the helpless female who was late for her train, fumbling at the zipper on the handbag in which she had placed her ticket. Making believe she needed to free her hands to work the zipper, she passed the Kleenex box holding the fruits of Hall’s atomic espionage to one of the agents. After the handbag had been opened, she displayed her ticket and answered the agents’ questions. They searched her bag and suitcase. She then picked up the suitcase and proceeded toward the steps into the car, deliberately leaving the Kleenex box behind with one of the agents. She shrewdly assumed he would think she had forgotten it and be gallant enough to call this to her attention and hand it to her, which is precisely what he did. Back in New York she joked with her NKVD handler from the consulate on East 67th Street that Hall’s report had been “in the hands of the police.”

  That Hall’s information, if less detailed, equaled in importance the material from Fuchs was something best understood by the agents at 7 East 67th Street and by their superiors at Moscow Center who were collating it into summary memos for Lavrenti Beria, the chilling figure who was in charge of the NKVD and the archipelago of slave labor camps known as the Gulag, an acronym formed from the initial letters of the Russian words for Main Camp Administration, the bland official term for the camps. Beria was as cruel and as morbidly suspicious as his master, Stalin. He suspected for a long time that American intelligence might be feeding these reports to his agents in New York in order to trick the Soviet Union into wasting prodigious resources trying to build a bomb that was a fantasy. Stalin had initiated a small-scale project to design an atomic bomb in 1943 at the urging of some of the more farsighted Soviet physicists. Igor Kurchatov had been chosen to head it. The choice was a wise one. A well-built, energetic man who was liked by his colleagues, Kurchatov was known as “the Beard,” for the one he grew during the war, or as “Prince Igor,” for his self-confident, take-charge manner. Little in the way of resources had been assigned to the enterprise, however, and it was more in the nature of a research group than an organization to build a bomb. Other, not so farsighted Soviet physicists were saying it was impossible to create such a bomb or that it was something far off in the future. Had the amateurish and frequently incompetent reports from David Greenglass, the Army machinist who ground sections of high-explosive cast into solid forms called lenses for the plutonium wrapper, been the only touchstone against which to compare the materials from Fuchs, the suspicion of Beria, and in turn that of Stalin, would have been that much greater and the agents in New York and those in Moscow doing the collating might have been more hesitant about passing on the fruits of the espionage. They knew that if they were being hoodwinked, their lives would be forfeited. Beria had said to one of his senior intelligence officers as he was being handed a report: “If this is disinformation, I’ll put you all in the cellar.” The cellar of the Lubyanka Prison was one of the places where torture and executions took place. Ted Hall made the difference. His was the sophisticated spying of another physicist and Fuchs’s information checked out against his.

  13.

  “THE BALANCE HAS BEEN DESTROYED”

  Hiroshima woke up Stalin. Perhaps because he was preoccupied with the conclusion of the war against Germany and then a race to join the war against Japan in order to seize Japanese territory before Tokyo could surrender, Stalin does not seem to have understood the strategic importance of the atomic bomb, despite the wealth of intelligence information he possessed on the American nuclear weapons program. The flash of atomic fire that destroyed a Japanese city six thousand miles from Moscow destroyed in the same instant the sense of security that Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership thought they had achieved in their victorious struggle against Nazi Germany. Four years of the most devastating war of annihilation in history, a titanic conflict with Hitler’s legions in which tens of millions of Soviet citizens, civilian and military, had perished and much of the nation had been laid waste, had ended with security a mirage. They were once more in peril should the Americans, in future years, ever turn on them. What stunned Stalin most was not merely the power of this new weapon, but the fact that the United States had not hesitated to use it against a nation he considered already beaten and on the verge of giving up.

  “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed,” he said in a meeting with Kurchatov in the middle of August. There would be no safety now until the Soviet Union had its own atomic bomb. On August 20, 1945, the State Defense Committee, which Stalin chaired, issued a secret decree establishing a special committee, headed by Beria, to oversee the nuclear weapons project. Igor Kurchatov was to continue as scientific director, in effect the Soviet equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project, but his organization was no longer to be stingily funded. No expense was too great. “If the child doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs,” Stalin told him. “Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.”

  Making an atomic bomb entails much more than the creation of a laboratory city like Los Alamos, and this is where the industrial espionage of the third major Soviet spy, George Koval, counted. It requires the establishment of an entire nuclear industry, from mines to garner raw uranium ore, plants to process it into metal, and large-scale reactors and gaseous diffusion facilities, such as those General Groves had built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at Hanford, Washington, to enrich uranium into the U-235 isotope and to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The undertaking had cost the United States $2 billion, an enormous sum in 1945. The Soviets would have to spend the rough equivalent, in labor and resources if not in cash, because they would have to replicate what the Americans had done, and Stalin was ordering this accomplished in a land suffering from destruction on a scale difficult to imagine.

  What had not been blasted in the fighting, the German invaders had systematically burned down or blown up during their retreat. (Nazi cruelty toward the Russians was deliberate and without limit, emanating from the racial doctrine that all Slavs were subhuman —Untermenschen. Hitler had planned to raze Russia’s two greate
st cities, Leningrad and Moscow, and to turn Russia and its associated lands into a vast new Teutonic colony in which all the Slavic peoples would be reduced to serfs, deprived of education and medical care. The largest group of human beings murdered by the Nazis, aside from the Jews, were Soviet prisoners of war—about 2.7 million of the 4.5 million captured. The Germans did not waste poison gas on them. Especially at the outset of the war, when they were confident of winning and few of their own men had been captured, the Germans either worked Soviet prisoners to death or herded them into barbed wire stockades and gave them the slow death of starvation. Mass shootings of civilians in areas where there was resistance from partisans and looting and rape were commonplace. The Germans were fortunate that they committed crimes like this in the modern era. In ancient times the customs of vengeance would have demanded the dismemberment of the defeated German nation, a pitiless slaughter of the males, and the selling of the women and children into slavery. There was revenge—wholesale rape of German women and uncontrolled looting—after the Red Army, its soldiers enraged by what they saw as they fought their way westward, finally penetrated the Reich. And there was some vengeance killing in Berlin brought on by the ferocity of the fighting there. These were reprehensible war crimes, but hardly equivalent to the killing of millions.) The cities of western Russia and Ukraine—industrial centers as far east as Stalingrad on the Volga—were in ruins. The flaying hand of war had reached out to smash 4.7 million houses, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages. Twenty-five million people were homeless. Agriculture and transportation had also been devastated. One hundred thousand collective and state farms had been ravaged, along with thousands of tractor and farm machinery stations. Seven million horses were gone and 20 million of the country’s 23 million pigs. More than 40,000 miles of rail line had been torn up and 15,800 locomotives and 428,000 freight cars destroyed or damaged.

  The task of reconstruction just to restore the prewar status quo was daunting, and yet Stalin was immediately ordering an immensely expensive project that would detract from reconstruction and delay homes for the homeless and adequate nourishment for the hungry. And he was soon to order other expensive military programs in radar, rocketry, jet-propelled fighter aircraft, and the building of a fleet of long-range bombers copied from the B-29, which would further detract from civilian reconstruction. That he did not hesitate to make the choice told a great deal about the nature of the Soviet state, the character and personality of this man who had fashioned it in his image, and why Americans like Bennie Schriever returned home from one war to find themselves quickly caught up in a new and different confrontation.

  14.

  THE STATE THAT WAS STALIN

  If Louis XIV could say “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) of seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century France, Joseph Stalin could have said the same of the Soviet Union he created. Vladimir Lenin may have founded the Soviet state, but Stalin shaped it into what it became subsequent to Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin was, after Adolf Hitler, the second great monster of the twentieth century. He cared not a whit for human life, nor did the suffering of the Soviet people ever trouble him. To enforce collectivization of agriculture, he deliberately provoked a famine in Ukraine in 1932–33 that starved millions. The lives of human beings had to him the same value as those of laboratory rats in the historic experiment he was presiding over to build socialism, which would one day transmogrify itself into Communism. (To Stalin, however, there was nothing tentative about his revolutionary society. He believed that he was bringing a new reality to fruition.) The fate of individuals did not matter; the fate of the experiment was everything. He had his best boyhood friend shot. He and Molotov, his closest collaborator after Beria, once signed death warrant lists for 3,187 people and then went to watch Western movies in his private theater in the Kremlin, a favorite nightly relaxation for the Soviet dictator. Yet while the outcome of the experiment provided a rationale for Stalin to justify whatever he wanted to do, his character and personality were the real determinants of his conduct.

  Until he adopted a Party pseudonym (Stalin means “man of steel”) during his revolutionary youth, he was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, born in 1879 in the then czarist province of Georgia in the Caucasus. A diminutive figure, slim and just five feet, four inches, he had a withered left arm from a childhood injury and a pockmarked face from smallpox. His eyes were hazel, with a dash of yellow that seemed to glint when he was angry. There was nothing diminutive or withered about the man himself. He had a remarkable talent for organizing and manipulating people and bureaucracies and he was a cunning actor with two pronounced traits—suspicion virtually to the point of clinical paranoia and cruelty to the point of sadism. He once remarked that the most pleasant experience a man could have was to lead an enemy into a trap, arrange his doom, and then sleep soundly that night.

  In his mind, he and his needs and the Soviet state and its needs were inseparable. Whatever might threaten his security also threatened the security of the Soviet state and therefore amounted to counterrevolution and treason. Whatever he wished to accomplish, the Soviet state needed to accomplish and thus was justifiable in the national interest. No one knows the precise number of his victims. The most authoritative source, Dimitri Volkogonov, a former Red Army general turned historian, had unrestricted access to the Soviet archives while they were still secret and published a biography of Stalin in 1989. He estimated that Stalin’s forced transformation of Russian agriculture from private into collective and state-owned farms from 1929 to 1933 cost 8.5 to 9 million peasant lives. Another 19.5 to 22 million persons were arrested for various offenses, real and contrived, between then and his death in 1953. Of these, Volkogonov estimated that more than a third, approximately 6.5 to 7.3 million human beings, were sentenced to death or perished in the slave labor camps of the Gulag.

  Leon Trotsky’s support within the Soviet Communist Party was virtually nil by the time Stalin exiled him, initially to Turkey, in 1929, but Stalin continued to see “Trotskyist conspirators” and “Trotskyist plots” everywhere and tens of thousands paid with their lives for his obsession. It was a favorite charge during the Great Purge of 1937–38, when 4.5 to 5.5 million people were arrested. He even had the NKVD search the civil war archives for the names of anyone who had served under or been associated with Trotsky when he was Bolshevik commissar for military affairs and chairman of the Supreme War Council. Everyone named was tracked down and arrested and shot. In subsequent years when some of the mass graves were exhumed, the skulls all bore the trademark of the NKVD—a bullet hole in the back of the head.

  His suspicion extended to those closest to him. A trick to test their loyalty was to have a member of their family arrested. His factotum was a man named Alexander Poskrebyshev, who worked twelve to fourteen hours a day bringing Stalin documents to read or sign, summoning visitors, and relaying the boss’s orders. Stalin gave Beria permission to arrest Poskrebyshev’s wife on a charge of Nazi espionage. When the anguished husband several times protested his wife’s innocence and pleaded with Stalin to free her, Stalin invariably answered: “It doesn’t depend on me. I can do nothing. Only the NKVD can sort it out.” The NKVD did sort it out. The woman was held in prison for three years and then shot, undoubtedly with Stalin’s consent. All the while, before and afterward, Poskrebyshev continued bringing Stalin his documents. Excessive protest would have condemned him and the rest of his family, and in an example of the bizarre thinking that can develop in a society as twisted as this one was, Poskrebyshev remained personally loyal to Stalin. When Molotov fell out of favor in subsequent years and Stalin replaced him as foreign minister with Andrei Vyshinsky, he arrested Molotov’s wife, Polina, for “Zionist connections.” (She had Jewish ancestry.) Molotov loved his wife, but at the Politburo meeting where Stalin put the matter of her arrest to a vote, Molotov also voted for it.

  It was Stalin’s pathological suspicion that his military leaders were plotting against him that was largely responsib
le as well for the immense losses in the opening months of the German invasion in 1941, including 3 million Red Army officers and men taken prisoner. The purge began in May 1937 with the arrest and subsequent execution on trumped-up accusations of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a pioneering exponent of armored warfare and deep, penetrating maneuver. Tukhachevsky was probably the most talented and resourceful officer in the Red Army, with a sterling record of personal courage and battlefield leadership during the civil war. Stalin then proceeded, in effect, to wipe out the entire command structure of his army. Thousands of officers, the best of the corps, were murdered. Most members of the senior War Council were purged, as were all of the commanders of the military districts, 90 percent of their deputies and chiefs of staffs, 80 percent of the corps and division commanders, and 90 percent of their chiefs of staff and staff officers. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, an incompetent toady whom Stalin made his defense commissar, reported at the end of November 1938 that the Red Army had been “cleansed of more than 40,000 men.” (Many of the lower-ranking officers were sent to slave labor camps rather than being shot.) The purge and its impact encouraged the Germans in their planning for the invasion. “The Red Army is leaderless,” Colonel General Franz Halder, the German army’s chief of staff, declared at a secret conference in December 1940. A rational ruler would have hesitated to decapitate his army when he faced a potential opponent like Hitler, but in Stalin’s sick imagination these men threatened him and therefore they threatened the state.