Koehler’s defection proved a boost to the Manhattan Project. J. Edgar Hoover sent to FDR the questions Koehler had been assigned by the Abwehr, adding, “This information is being made available to you as possibly indicating the degree to which the Germans have progressed in the development of atomic explosives.” The answer, unknown to the Allies, was that Germany was going nowhere. But simply knowing what the Germans were trying to find out suggested that the race was still on and reinforced White House backing for whatever the Los Alamos scientists wanted.
Keeping the secret of the bomb from the enemy was child’s play compared to protecting it from an ally. Thirty British scientists had been chosen to go to America as a result of Churchill’s insistence to FDR that the United States and Britain must share nuclear secrets equally. Among them was the German-born Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs’s salient characteristics were professional brilliance and personal reserve. As a young Communist in Germany hunted by the Gestapo, this minister’s son had fled to England in 1933. The sophistication of his published papers in mathematics caught the eye of British scientists, who recruited Fuchs in 1941 for their embryonic atomic weapons program. While engaged in this work, Fuchs continued to believe the party line that the British and Americans were hoping the Germans and the Russians would bleed each other to death, thus destroying Nazism and communism while saving capitalism. Before the year was out, Fuchs had passed his first secrets to a London agent of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.
Fuchs was admirably suited for the role of spy. He was inconspicuous in appearance. More important, he possessed imagination and self-reliance, had no need for the approval of others, and exhibited the rare ability to live a split life. When he learned in 1943 that he was going to America, he informed his Soviet controller, whom he knew only as Sonya. She was, in fact, Ruth Kuczynski, a German refugee Communist herself, dark-haired and sultry, who shared her sexual favors with other party faithful but apparently not with the monastic Fuchs. Sonya explained to Fuchs how to establish contact on his arrival in New York with an American controller, known only as Raymond. Thus, Fuchs, in a scene out of pulp fiction, found himself on a crisp Saturday afternoon early in 1944 strolling down Manhattan’s Lower East Side clutching a tennis ball in his left hand. A pudgy, pasty-faced, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, wearing one pair of gloves and carrying another, came up to Fuchs and asked, “Can you tell me the way to Grand Central Station?” Fuchs had connected with Raymond. His new controller was actually Harry Gold, also the contact for two other Americans enlisted in Soviet espionage, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Gold, a chemist by profession, had been passing industrial secrets to the Russians since 1936.
*
Several years before, on September 1, 1939, President Roosevelt’s appointments secretary, Marvin H. McIntyre, had received a visitor in his White House office. McIntyre was a former newspaperman who had impressed FDR while working in the Navy Department’s press office during the First World War. He was an outgoing soul whom reporters enjoyed dropping in on for a chat and a bit of White House gossip. His visitor this day was Isaac Don Levine, a forty-seven-year-old Russian-born naturalized American, now a magazine writer and editor. Levine confided to McIntyre that he had a source who knew a great deal about Soviet penetration of the American government and that the man was prepared to talk. But his source insisted on immunity from prosecution and would speak only to the President. World peace at that moment hung suspended by a badly frayed thread, with Germany having just invaded Poland and Britain pledging to go to war if the Germans did not withdraw. McIntyre explained that this might not be the best time for the President to be distracted, but that he would happily arrange for Levine’s informant to speak confidentially to Adolf Berle of the State Department.
On Saturday night, September 2, Berle and his wife received Levine and another dumpy, furtive figure at their luxurious Woodley Place home, formerly owned by Henry Stimson. Levine introduced his visibly uncomfortable companion only as “Karl.” They were meeting at Berle’s because the stranger had said that if he could not talk directly to the President, he did not want to be seen in any government office. Berle, working fourteen-hour days on the world crisis, was exhausted and had only reluctantly agreed to see these visitors. After a desultory conversation about the Polish situation, Mrs. Berle withdrew, and the three men moved onto the lawn to catch a cooling breeze. Karl, Levine explained, was an ex-Soviet spy who was willing to tell Berle his story. The man, tense and uneasy, began to talk, barely opening his mouth in order to conceal his bad teeth. He had been part of a Communist underground cell from 1934 to the end of 1937, he said. He had broken with the party after growing disillusionment with Marxism capped by his disgust over Stalin’s show trials of the late thirties. He was, as a result of his former role for the Soviets, aware of several American government officials spying for Russia. Levine urged the man to provide names, and Karl proceeded to do so, identifying several highly placed officials. These people, he claimed, removed classified documents from their files, photographed them, and turned the copies over to their Soviet underground contacts. Karl stressed that the whole point of this conversation was that he expected Berle to place this information before the President. Berle promised he would do so.
After his guests left, Berle, more tired than ever after the bizarre three-hour visit, did not go directly to bed. He remained in his study and began to jot down Karl’s charges. He headed his notes “Underground Espionage Agent.” Among the names Karl had mentioned were Alger Hiss, then with the State Department and described as “Member of the Underground Com.—Active,” Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, and brother, Donald. Also mentioned by Chambers were Laurence Duggan, another official at State, a “Mr. White,” and, most surprising to Berle, Lauchlin Currie, a valued member of FDR’s personal White House staff alongside whose name he added Karl’s description, “Fellow Traveler—helped various Communists—never went the whole way.”
Did Berle keep his promise and lay Karl’s allegations before FDR? Isaac Don Levine later claimed that Berle did so, as did the radio gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who also heard Karl’s recital and claimed to have informed FDR himself. The President was reported to have scoffed at the idea of Soviet spies penetrating his administration. After all, Berle had checked with respected figures such as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, about the Hiss brothers. According to Berle, Acheson claimed he had known them since they were boys “and he could vouch for them absolutely.” Felix Frankfurter gave the Hisses an equally clean bill of health. Oddly, however, Berle, the President’s chief advisor on internal security, did not make these inquiries until 1941, almost two years after Karl’s disclosures to him. And Berle’s otherwise detailed diaries make no mention of briefing FDR on the Karl matter. Whether informed or not, Roosevelt would have had trouble accepting the accusations of an obscure, unappealing, and anonymous informant. The people Karl had denounced were FDR’s kind of people, and vouched for by FDR’s kind.
Berle’s foot-dragging may have two explanations. First, like the President, he was bound to wonder about charges brought by so seedy a figure as Karl against solid members of the New Deal establishment. Further, by the time Berle got around, in 1943, to answering the FBI’s request for the notes he had taken that odd September night four years before, the Soviet Union was America’s ally and few in FDR’s circle were looking to make waves that might swamp this fragile alliance.
Karl, it turned out, was Whittaker Chambers, indeed an ex-Communist who, six months after the meeting with Berle, went to work for Time magazine as a writer and who in the 1950s was to emerge as the right-hand icon to Alger Hiss’s left in the heavily symbolic trial of Hiss for perjury.
*
The lengths to which Roosevelt and Churchill would go not to imperil the alliance with Stalin emerge in their secret correspondence regarding the Katyn affair. On April 12, 1943, when German radio first announced the discovery in the Katyn fore
st near Smolensk of the bodies of an initial 4,143 Polish officers, the Nazis and Russians blamed each other, claiming the mass murders had occurred when the other side occupied the territory. The world at the time had scant reason to doubt that the massacre of Poles was merely another in the mounting catalogue of Nazi atrocities. Yet, through secret sources, FDR and Churchill knew otherwise.
Stalin, nevertheless, acted quickly to blunt the charge that his regime was responsible for the deaths of the Poles. FDR was in Monterrey, Mexico, on a goodwill visit when Cordell Hull forwarded to him a blistering “Confidential” message from the Soviet leader dated April 21. In it, Stalin told Roosevelt, “The campaign of calumny against the Soviet Union, initiated by the German Fascists regarding the Polish officers they themselves slaughtered in the Smolensk area on German occupied territory, was immediately taken up by the [Polish General Wladyslaw] Sikorski government [in exile] and inflated in every possible way… . In view of these circumstances, the Soviet government has come to the conclusion of the necessity for breaking relations with the present Polish government.” The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was like a tightrope. Stretched just taut enough, it provided a link over which help could pass. Pulled too hard by suspicions, recriminations, or mistrust, it would surely snap. This was an outcome that FDR was determined to avoid. From Monterrey, he drafted a message to “Mr. Stalin, Moscow” all but begging the Soviet leader not to end relations with the Polish government-in-exile and exhibiting a willingness to gloss over the deaths of thousands of Poles in a Russian forest. If anyone was to blame for the ugly issue, it was, in FDR’s view, General Sikorski, who “has made a stupid mistake in taking up this particular matter with the international Red Cross.” Secretary of State Hull managed to persuade the President to drop only the word “stupid” from the cable. On April 29 the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Maxim Litvinov, came to the White House with Stalin’s reply, marked “Private and Confidential.” Stalin was unmoved. It was too late, he said. He had already broken off relations with the Poles. “Since the Polish Government, throughout nearly two weeks, not only did not discontinue, but actually intensified, in its press and radio, a campaign which was hostile to the Soviet Union and advantageous only to Hitler… .” In Stalin’s telling, Sikorski was a dupe who “allowed himself to be led by certain pro-Hitler elements within the Polish government or in its entourage, and as a result the Polish government … became a tool in Hitler’s hands.”
The truth was that Lavrenti Beria, the NKVD chief, had laid out for Stalin the case for eliminating the Polish prisoners while they had been in Russian hands: “The military and police officers in the camps,” Beria wrote on March 5, 1940, “are attempting to continue their counterrevolutionary activities and are carrying out anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waiting only for his release in order to enter actively into the struggle against Soviet authority.” The obvious solution was to hold “[s]pecial tribunals … without summoning those detained and without bringing charges.” The equally obvious denouement was to apply “the supreme penalty, shooting.” Documents released following the collapse of the Soviet Union reveal that between nine thousand and fifteen thousand Polish military officers, government officials, intellectuals, and landowners were murdered in the Katyn forest on Stalin’s orders in April 1940 as “hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority.”
The hypocrisy of the Soviet government during the Katyn affair was egregious even by Stalin’s standards. But Churchill and Roosevelt were prepared to swallow it. That they knew all along the cynical game Stalin was playing is obvious in a long dispatch the Prime Minister sent to FDR on August 13, 1943. More than two months before, Owen O’Malley, British representative to the Polish government-in-exile, had provided to Churchill’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, twenty-four detailed points describing where and when the murdered Poles had been found, the climate and clothing worn at the time of their execution, the past use of the Katyn forest by the Reds to execute its czarist enemies, and the contradicting explanations the Soviets had given for the disappearance of the Poles. Most damning, letters the prisoners had been sending to their families ceased after April 1940, while the Katyn forest was still in Russian hands. O’Malley made clear his own conclusion that “in light of all the evidence” the Soviets had murdered the Poles. The Briton, torn between the case for pragmatism and his humane impulses, accepted the necessity of the former. He told Eden, “[I]n view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.” But O’Malley could not resist adding the price of turning a blind eye to evil. “If,” his message ended, “we, for however valid reasons, have been obliged to behave as if the deed was not theirs, may it not be that we now stand in danger … of falling under St. Paul’s curse on those who can see cruelty ‘and not burn.’” Churchill was prepared to risk Saint Paul’s curse. In his note forwarding O’Malley’s report to FDR, he concluded that it was too convincing to suit their policy of not antagonizing Stalin. What O’Malley had revealed “is a grim, well written story, but perhaps a little too well written,” the Prime Minister wrote. “Nevertheless, should you have time to read it, it would repay the trouble. I should like to have it back when you have finished with it as we are not circulating it officially in any way.”
FDR, too, was willing to respect the Faustian bargain: Keep the Soviets at our side killing Germans, and say nothing of Stalin’s crimes and hypocrisies. The President never made a public statement accusing the Russians of Katyn. Nor did Hitler, after his initial propaganda barrage attempting to bring the Soviets to his moral level. With the stunning defeat at Stalingrad, with the Russian steppes littered with German corpses and the burnt-out hulks of Wehrmacht tanks, and with no major offensive feasible for 1943, Hitler began considering a way out of the Soviet morass. A Magic decrypt picked up between a Japanese diplomat and Tokyo noted, on June 7: “All the fierce anti-Soviet propaganda that Germany started about Soviet soldiers mass murdering a group of Polish officers at Katyn has calmed down and is now scarcely a whisper. This is regarded as being done on Hitler’s own secret orders and that the Chancellor in his own heart is trying to figure out a way to negotiate for peace with the Kremlin.” This decrypt was routed to President Roosevelt, who, determined not to embarrass the Soviets, found himself engaged in this conspiracy of silence.
One of the people whom Whittaker Chambers had fingered as a “fellow traveler” in his meeting with Adolf Berle was the State Department official Laurence Duggan, a studious, quiet man married to a wife described in a Soviet cable to Moscow as an “extraordinarily beautiful woman: a typical American, tall, blonde, reserved, well-read, goes in for sports, independent,” and also of leftist sympathies. Duggan, according to Soviet wartime documents unearthed in the mid-1990s by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev and described in The Haunted Wood, had been passing documents to Soviet agents since 1936. By 1939, Duggan had begun to pull away from direct involvement with the NKVD, although he was still intermittently passing along State Department information as late as 1943. In March of that year, Vice President Henry Wallace received a letter from a Mrs. Ann M. Dziadulskato containing a list of Polish officers, including her husband, held by the Russians and asking the Vice President’s help in obtaining information on the men who had disappeared. Wallace bucked the letter to the State Department, asking, “Is it possible and advisable to do some discreet work on the problem which this woman presents?” The answer that came back on June 9 read: “Mr. Duggan feels that no reply should be made to it.” Laurence Duggan was now a personal advisor to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The advice to ignore the distraught woman’s cry for help may have revealed Duggan’s lingering protective sympathies for the Soviet Union. If so, he was in good company with the President and the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The dead Poles were buried not only physically but metaphorically, their memory subservient to
a colder calculus in the mathematics of war.
*
Soviet practice was not to engage American Communists as spies since they were usually known to the FBI. Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of America, told an interviewer postwar, “There’s been an awful lot of silly talk about the Communists in those days infiltrating the Roosevelt Administration. As a matter of fact, the Communists weren’t interested in anything of the kind… . And we influenced everyone that came under our ideas to get active in mass work and not get into some governmental department.” The New Yorker magazine profiled Browder as “a haggard little man with grizzling hair and a stubby moustache who looks as though he had eaten something that didn’t agree with him … [and] moved about briskly, somewhat in the low-slung manner affected by Groucho Marx.” Browder preferred to portray himself as a corn-fed son of Kansas, a midwestern American who just happened to have chosen communism as his politics over that of the Democrats or Republicans. In actuality, Browder was a conduit who led American Communists beyond street-corner pamphleteering into spying for the Soviet Union.
In 1940 the old Bolshevik had been railroaded into a four-year prison sentence for a minor passport irregularity: he failed to mention that he had obtained passports previously, a violation at its worst incurring a sentence of months, not years. The sentence had been handed down after the 1939 Russo-German peace pact, placing Browder, at that point, on the wrong side of American popular sentiment. His conviction, however, did not deter Browder from running for president in 1940 before entering the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. By 1942, with the international lineup reversed, and Russia now America’s ally, President Roosevelt came under left-wing pressure to release Browder from prison as a gesture of Soviet-American amity. FDR looked for a graceful exit. According to Browder’s account, Roosevelt found it in New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. The feisty La Guardia came to the White House to urge the President to free Browder. FDR asked the mayor, “Tell me one good reason why I should act in this at this time.” La Guardia answered, “Because Browder’s sons are being kept off the baseball teams in school because their father’s in prison.” “That’s the best reason I’ve been given so far,” the President responded with relief. “Let’s release him!” Whether for this explanation or less colorful reasons, Browder was, in fact, sprung from the penitentiary by presidential order.
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