The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  It was the prickly aircraft designer Andrey Tupolev who insisted on the recruitment of Shumovsky for intelligence work. Since 1925 INO had been tasked with gathering S&T on top of political intelligence. There was a significant overlap with the work of Military Intelligence. Under the Five-Year Plan, the demand for S&T ramped up, creating the need for a fresh approach. A new type of intelligence officer with a unique set of skills was required. Besides the ability to speak languages and operate in a foreign country, this new breed of spies had to be at the top of their field in their chosen technical specialisation. Tupolev needed an aeronautics specialist on the ground in the US to bring TsAGI – the Moscow-based Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute, the country’s leading centre of aircraft design – answers to thorny questions, not just blueprints. Above all, the agents needed to be unquestionably loyal.

  Shumovsky’s interview at the NKVD was a mixture of background checks and ideological questioning. Given his record as a Russian Civil War hero, endorsements from the local Committee of the Communist Party and Tupolev, he passed. Accepting the job without a moment’s hesitation, for he was a Party loyalist prepared to do anything for his proletarian motherland, he began a year of intense training, starting in Leningrad. Artuzov was responsible for developing the Soviet spy training programme using veteran practitioners as teachers. Later he industrialised spy training by building a dedicated school in the woods outside Moscow. Some previous operations had proceeded with no training at all, even in basic foreign languages; intelligence operatives used the cover of being a foreigner to explain away their accents and lack of language proficiency. One Soviet agent deployed to England had to get blind drunk to avoid exposure when he discovered the ambassador of Hungary, the country he claimed to be from, while speaking not a word of the language, was arriving to join the house party. Luckily, his English aristocratic hosts were used to such eccentric behaviour.18

  Later, KGB defector General Oleg Kalugin would describe attending large classes in the 1950s that trained hundreds of newly minted agents to operate both domestically and abroad.19 An heir of Shumovsky, Kalugin was to attend Columbia University to complete his assimilation into American life. By then, espionage training was conducted with military-style discipline, befitting those entrusted with protecting the Revolution. Shumovsky had no such formal training, but he received instruction from experienced officers in the skills of intelligence gathering, agent recruitment and how to avoid being followed. He also learned radio operations, working with codes and had a refresher on shooting a pistol. He was taught how to microfilm documents for ease of storage, concealment and transport.

  Shumovsky was to operate as an intelligence officer without the benefit of diplomatic cover. As the USA was always his intended destination, he undertook a six-month intensive course in the English language, American customs and way of life. Intelligence officers, even novices, were well paid and, more important in a land of shortages, fed three hot meals a day. For recruits joining the NKVD, the experience was life-changing. One of them, Alexander Feklisov, described sleeping in a real bed for the first time in his life at the training school. The intelligence code included a vow of silence, which included never admitting to working for the organisation, even to one’s parents. A new recruit would need to develop a good cover story, for his friends and family.20

  Shumovsky’s mission to enrol at MIT as a science student evolved into the perfect cover for a Soviet intelligence officer on a long-term S&T assignment in the USA. The plan was that he would enter the US concealed among a large party of students, thus attracting little attention. In 1930, the best of the ‘Party Thousand’, the crème de la crème, were chosen to study abroad. The Soviets used scarce foreign currency and gold reserves to give their elite the best education money could buy. With his exemplary academic record and political background, Shumovsky made the list with the help of the secret service. He resembled his fellow travellers in every respect. His background was identical to that of his companions, as he was a recent graduate of Moscow’s premier technical university. Crucially, as a student studying at a leading academic institution Shumovsky was granted a long-term visa by the US government without being asked probing questions, unlike an AMTORG employee.

  As part of the plan, the Party Central Committee appointed a ‘plenipotentiary’ official to monitor the progress of the students abroad and send six-monthly reports back to Moscow.21 This official had the power to order back to the Soviet Union any student making unsatisfactory progress or proving to be politically unreliable. However, their main job was to coordinate the information gathering. Raisa (Ray) Bennett, a Military Intelligence officer, was appointed to this important role.

  • • •

  Stalin’s final priority within the Five-Year Plans was improving worker education. Among the greatest achievements of the Revolution had been universal literacy and access to education. The Tsarist government had feared education; successive rulers took active measures to limit literacy levels in their subjects by taxing village schools. They came to believe that if they allowed their people to read, they would become revolutionaries. The prohibitive measures ensured precisely the outcome the government feared.

  Ministers shook at the thought of what might happen if the fate of the reforming Tsar Alexander II, who had promised a modicum of universal education, was repeated. Alexander’s short-lived experiment with liberalisation had resulted in his assassination by anarchists. Lenin’s beloved older brother was hanged for his part in the plot. After that unhappy episode, the autocracy did everything it could to stifle education for the untrusted masses, from whom they demanded devotion. It was no surprise that adult literacy rates in Tsarist Russia were less than 30 per cent, while literacy among males was roughly double that of females. My own great-grandfather, a leading Communist in the Crimea, was unable to sign his name until he learned to read after the Revolution. (Today’s Russia has 99.7 per cent literacy.) As Professor Shumovsky, as he became, later told UNESCO, in 1917 only 9,656,000 students were in school out of a total population of around 175 million.22

  The unenlightened policy held back the economic development of the country, as there was only a shallow pool of educated workers. Hundreds of thousands of Russia’s most literate individuals emigrated, primarily to the United States, taking their talent with them in a dramatic brain drain. With less than half the Tsar’s army able to read and write, the country was vulnerable to military attack. After the October Revolution, the idealist journalist John Reed (the only American to be interred after his death in the Kremlin Wall) wrote:

  All Russia was learning to read, and reading – politics, economics, history because the people wanted to know … In every city, in most towns, along with the Front, each political faction had its newspaper – sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts – but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol and Gorky.23

  In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, education policy was overhauled with a tenfold increase in the expenditure on mass education. Lenin argued: ‘As long as there is such a thing in the country as illiteracy it is hard to talk about political education.’ Despite the utterly grim conditions, he launched national literacy campaigns. Victor Serge, a first-hand witness of the Communist Revolution, saw the tremendous odds facing educators and the miserable conditions that existed in the wake of the Russian Civil War. A typical school would have classes of hungry children in rags huddled in winter around a small stove planted in the middle of the classroo
m. The pupils shared one pencil between four of them, and their schoolmistress was hungry. In spite of this grotesque misery, such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere.24 In its first year of existence, the Communist literacy campaign reached an incredible five million people, of whom about half learned to read and write. In the Red Army, where literacy and education were deemed crucial, illiteracy was eradicated within seven years.

  The Five-Year Plans and the Stalinist project to transform the Soviet economy were born of idealism as well as insecurity. The prospect of a great leap forward into a fully socialist economy kindled among a new generation of Party militants much the same messianic fervour as had inspired Lenin’s followers in the heady aftermath of the October Revolution and victory in the Civil War.

  The young Communist idealists of the early 1930s, among them Soviet intelligence officers and other Russian students at MIT, believed in Stalin as well as in the coming ‘Triumph of Socialism’. Hailing from a generation who believed that the end justified the means, they would certainly not have recognised the prevailing view of Stalin among contemporary historians. The first group of elite Soviet students under the Politburo order was to be sent abroad in 1931. Individual Soviet specialists were already at many foreign universities, including a few in the US. The renowned Soviet atomic scientist Pyotr Kapitsa was number two in Ernest Rutherford’s team at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University,fn6 while Dr Yakov Fishman learned about the chemistry of poison gases at the Italian university at Naples.

  As Shumovsky and his party prepared to depart for the United States, US legal firm Simpson Thacher began the process of arranging the visas.25 (According to the 1948 FBI investigation,fn7 Shumovsky was a late addition to the roster. It is unclear if that was a decision taken in Moscow or one determined by the availability of places on courses.) Like Shumovsky, the students in his party were not fresh-faced teenagers just out of high school, but married ex-military men who had not been able to begin formal education until the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and had since been fast-tracked towards greatness. Many were from humble backgrounds and acutely aware that, but for the Communist Revolution, they would never have had any prospect of an education. Central to their motivation was the desire to enable Soviet industry and military technology to catch up with the West. The offices of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations facilitated finding places at appropriate universities to help foster better international relations.26 Back in Moscow, the finance was organised. As with every decision in the Soviet system, the budget was decided centrally at a Politburo meeting in 1930. Several thousand gold roubles was allocated for the trip, amounting to a total fund of $1 million. Each student was assigned from a key industry and that industry’s management had the responsibility of paying.

  The one tricky condition imposed by the American universities was that the students must demonstrate a high competence in English. Typically, the exam followed a two-year course, but this talented group was given just six months to reach the required standard.27 There was a desperate need for teachers to give the Soviet students English lessons in Moscow before they went off to study at MIT and other US universities. Among those selected for the task was Military Intelligence officer, American Ray Bennett. Another was Gertrude Klivans, a young Radcliffe College-educated teacher from a family of Russian-Jewish jewellers in Ohio.

  • • •

  Klivans had become bored with life as a high school teacher in the Midwest and started travelling adventurously around the world. She was first talent-spotted by General Vitaly Markovich Primakov while both were journeying from Japan to Vladivostok aboard a cargo vessel, described by Klivans as ‘an ancient hulk’, which forced its small group of passengers to cling together ‘as we pitched and tossed’.28 Klivans’s letters to her family reveal that during the voyage she became quite friendly with Primakov.29 They clearly began an affair on board. Primakov, Klivans gushed to her family, was ‘the youngest full general in the Red Army’, a man whose travels (in fact they were spying missions) had taken him as far afield as Afghanistan, China and Japan: he ‘fought throughout the Revolution and on every battlefront during the Civil War – wears three medals, is always armed to the teeth – an expert swordsman and a cavalryman from a Cossack family that have been horsemen for generations, and withal, his head is shaven. But his eyes, the real gray blue, Russian eyes and fair skin make you forget that military custom.’

  Gertrude Klivans, Radcliffe College, Harvard – yearbook. The picture is captioned: ‘Her eyes were stars of twilight fair/Like twilight, too, her dusky hair’

  Klivans reported to her family that, during the long trans-Siberian train journey from Vladivostok to Moscow, ‘I spent most of every day in Primakov’s compartment, so I enjoyed all the privileges of first class, even accepting the offer of taking a bath.’ She fell deeply in love. Although the train arrived a day late, ‘I didn’t care – I didn’t want it ever to end.’ She had intended to return to New York, but Primakov promised to help her find a teaching job in Moscow. Remarkably, she admitted to her family that he had suggested she work for Soviet intelligence: ‘Imagine – I was offered a job in the [O.] G. P. U.fn8 as soon as I learned the [Russian] language.’

  Primakov had enjoyed a glittering career in the Red Army and the intelligence service. He cut his teeth leading a squadron of troops in the attack on the Petrograd Winter Palace in 1917. The highlight of his espionage career came in 1929 when, disguised as a Turkish officer named Ragib-bey, he led a special operation of Soviet troops to try to reinstate Amanullah Khan as ruler of Afghanistan. He was arrested in 1936 and executed in the following year’s Great Purge.30

  Although in letters to her family Klivans complained that living conditions in Moscow had left her with ‘a few bedbug bites’, she declared herself ‘very happy with my work’. She worked diligently to teach her charges all about America:

  You can’t imagine how well I know these boys, all of whom are at least five years older [than me] … They will do anything for me and believe me I do plenty for them, besides keeping them in cigarettes and informing them of certain Americanisms. I mean as far as deportment is concerned, I try to make each of them letter perfect in the President’s English and if you think it isn’t hard work you are mistaken. But there are always three at least who are making love to me outside of school hours so that I can never keep a straight face for at least five minutes going in class. If you would see them, all in their fur hats, high felt boots, and a week’s beard for nobody shaves more than once in five days you would laugh. But they are fun, and I certainly will always have 15 fast friends in Russia. Probably someday one of them will be another Stalin – they are all party men, active and so understanding of my distorted view of life as they can understand the limitations of my bourgeois environment, the only thing they can’t understand is why I haven’t already embraced Communism without any reservations.31

  To celebrate the end of the examinations after her language course, Klivans threw a party for the students on 15 April 1931, for which she prepared the closest approximation she could manage to American sandwiches and salads. The only woman at the party, she wore a ‘Chinese suit’ acquired on her travels. It was an emotional occasion with many hours of dancing and singing. Klivans travelled to the United States ahead of her Russian students, describing them in her letter home:

  Let me tell you who the boys are. They are all 27 or 28. One [Alexander Gramp] is half Georgian and half Armenian – speaks both of these languages and knows every place on the map of Russia with his eyes shut – has a disposition that even Russian conditions cannot spoil. Another is a White Russian [MIT-bound Eugene Bukley] – as clever as any three people I’ve met and had a sense of humor that works equally well in any language – the third [Peter Ivanov, a future student at Harvard] is a serious electrical engineer who served as a sort of lever in our hilarious spirits. Of the first
two, one is a railway engineer, in fact, that got us tickets everywhere – something almost unheard of in Russia today. The other one is also an electrical engineer.32

  Alexander Gramp’s graduation, Purdue University,1933

  Klivans’s closest relationship was with the railway engineer, Gramp, one of the five students with a place at Purdue University. He married her after his graduation, returning with her to Moscow following his appointment as Dean of the College of Railway Engineering.

  Eager to ensure that her students made a good impression on their arrival at MIT and other US universities, Klivans pressed successfully for scarce foreign currency reserves. When they landed in New York, she wanted to buy them smart, well-cut suits.

  3

  ‘WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS IS A REAL BIG LAUGH’

  To the disappointment and astonishment of Communists, the American working people did not rise up en masse during the Great Depression to demand even the overhaul – much less the overthrow – of their system of democratic capitalism, despite the failure to relieve their sufferings for more than a decade. Arriving at the height of the economic misery, a confident Gertrude Klivans held court in her stateroom on SS Bremen at the New York docks. She was back at long last in the United States, a returning political pilgrim and a secret convert to Communism. While she was already an agent of INO, Klivans did not consider herself a traitor to the US, but rather a contributor to helping the peoples of the Soviet Union.