• • •
Blamed for causing the Depression, Hoover won only 39.7 per cent of the popular vote in the 1932 presidential election, a dismal result, and in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced him as President. Roosevelt’s reforms derailed the leftward political momentum in the US. A stream of radicals were hired into the federal government to enact depression relief measures adopted from their leftist agenda. Faith in the vitality of American capitalism revived with the economic upturn. Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed to provide support for the millions of unemployed, to grow the economy and to enact reform to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. It was attractive for some Communists who, as members of the Democratic administration, could be anti-fascist fighters, defend the cause of labour and promote the aims of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union while pursuing a government career with a good salary. It was no wonder at the time that Soviet spy rings flourished unhindered at the heart of the American government. But New Deal reform did not extend much beyond the end of the recession in 1937, when urgent plans for war displaced domestic concerns. And as the vision of an imminent proletarian revolution was eclipsed by the war shadows, the slow journey back to a belief in democracy quickened into a stampede. Patriotic fervour swamped the radicalism of the thirties. Conservatives still depict the Red Decade as an ugly spectacle of rampant subversion in America.
One clear demonstration of the broad appeal of the radical message at the time, but not of the socialist name, was given by the writer and politician Upton Sinclair. Having founded EPIC (End Poverty In California) to pursue a solution more radical than Roosevelt’s New Deal, Sinclair came close to becoming Governor of California in 1934. He wrote after his defeat that ‘the American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket, I got 60,000 votes and running on the slogan to “End Poverty in California” I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a frontal attack; it is much better to out-flank them.’16
Sinclair was a lifelong Socialist who had become frustrated with the New Deal’s inability to end the Depression at a stroke. Rather than putting the unemployed on relief, Sinclair proposed, via EPIC, to put them to work within a state-organised ‘production-for-use’ economy distinct from the capitalist marketplace. Under his scheme, the state would take over idle farms and factories, allowing the jobless to grow their own food or produce clothing and other goods. Any surplus could be traded, through a system of barter, only for other goods produced within the system. Considered the front-runner in the election, Sinclair was subjected to intense attacks from both Republicans and Democrats as ‘a communistic wolf in the dried skin of the Democratic donkey’.17
• • •
The Soviet students tripping down the gangplank in the summer of 1931 arrived with fixed expectations and preconceived ideas about America. The views of Shumovsky and his fellow Soviet students were based on their own political ideology, reinforced by selective imported left-wing reading and popular culture including movies. Long before the Revolution, the idea of America had exercised a profound fascination for Russians, and not just for its technological successes. There was a hungry market in Russia for American movies and cheap novels about cowboys and gangsters.18 An unusual import was the staging of selected American dramas. Several American plays were produced in Moscow, notably The Front Page – famously adapted in 1940 for the screen as His Girl Friday starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell – which was rechristened Sensations for a Communist audience. Giving theatre-going Muscovites a further taste of the life and times of the windy city was a staging of Chicago, a ‘tale of America’s foremost big gun and bullet city’ depicting the life of Roxie Hart and today more renowned as a musical. Hollywood movie styles inspired domestically produced Soviet films, which often emulated the style and stunts of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops in delivering their ideological message. In one popular movie, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,19 an American philanthropist, fearful for his own safety having heard lurid tales of bloodthirsty Communists, brings a cowboy to Moscow as a personal bodyguard. The cowboy, played by a Moscow circus clown, is a carbon copy of Keaton, while Moscow’s finest do a passable impression of the Keystone Kops. The philanthropist falls victim to conniving White Guards spinning impossible tales such as that the iconic Bolshoi Theatre was dynamited by the Communists. Mr West returns to the US, and the arms of his relieved wife, knowing that tales of bloodthirsty philistines destroying Moscow are untrue. As the students arrived in America, like Klivans they felt the need to tackle prejudices about the new Russia similar to those held by Mr West and many Americans.
Two Russian satirists, Ilf and Petrov, summed up Russian expectations of arriving in depression-hit New York:
the word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.20
They believed they would find a culture of exploitation in America and that ‘the rich people not only had all the money’ but ‘the poor man was down, and he had to stay down’.21 They had devoured in Moscow the available books on America, mostly those of socialist writers Sinclair and Dreiser about the current state of the US. Without another source of knowledge, they believed them to be the gospel truth. The students expected to find ‘a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances, immorality is exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it is under the system of chattel slavery’.22
As devout Communists, they did not expect a warm welcome on American soil but to be confronted with cold shoulders and suspicion. And they soon learned that outside the narrow circles of intellectuals and émigrés they needed to be careful when discussing Communism. On their travels, they discovered that the deeply conservative soul of America was rooted in traditional churchgoing communities that were suspicious of new-fangled foreign ideas.
Officially, a man will never be forced out of his job for his beliefs. He is free to hold any views, any convictions. He’s a free citizen. But let him try to praise communism – and something like this happens, he will just not find work in a small or big town. He will not even notice it happening. People who do it, do not believe in God but go to church because it is indecent not go to church. As for Communism, that is for Mexicans, Slavs, and black people. It is not an American thing.23
Russians were not yet an urbanised people, and they knew that the real America was to be discovered in its myriad small towns and villages, not its cities. Soviet visitors loved taking road trips, driving across America’s incredible highway system in the freedom of a car. On their journey they discovered in equal measure much to admire and amuse:
Americans don’t like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And indeed, why strain yourself when so many beautiful names already exist in the world? That’s right, an authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province. There’s another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.24
Soviet visitors discovered in America a confusing, happy melting pot of nationalities. One remarked that ‘a Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car.’ However, they encountered racism and discrimination of a type that their revolution had eliminated:
To a Soviet p
erson, used to the nationality policy of the USSR, all the mistakes of the American government’s Indian policy are evident from the first glance. The errors are, of course, intentional. The fact of the matter is that in Indian schools, the class is conducted exclusively in English. There is no written form of any Indian language at all. It’s true that every Indian tribe has its own language, but this doesn’t change anything. If there were any desire to do so, the many American specialists who have fallen in love with Indian culture could create Indian written languages in a short time. But imperialism remains imperialism.25
Russian visitors to the US often found American society shallow: ‘If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he’ll just plain stop talking to you.’26 American workers were too materialistic, seemingly happy with the system of exploitation, easily bought off rather than striking and heading to the barricades. Americans appeared obsessed with their material conditions to the exclusion of culture and the spiritual. The observation of Gertrude Klivans was that to meet demand the Soviets published more books in a year, she estimated, than any other country. However, many of the avid readers had probably had only one square meal in three years. In addition, ‘Art rates [are] very high in Moscow and throughout the Soviet states Opera is highly popular, as are the theater and literature. Among the classic authors, Tolstoy reigns supreme. Gorky is the idol of the modernists. But art, in Russian fashion, must interpret the struggle for expression of the masses, the keynote of present day civilization in that country.’27
MIT welcomed the arrival of the Russians. The Institute had embarked on an ambitious investment plan at the very moment the Great Depression hit, leading to a dramatic fall in US student numbers. In 1932 and 1933, across the nation some eighty thousand youths who in more prosperous times would have attended college were unable to enrol. Universities were thus desperate for the income that the arrival of the Russian students provided and were correspondingly uninterested in asking any awkward questions. America’s finest universities were about to start teaching the cream of Russia’s leadership how to build an even stronger socialist society. And one university was to show inadvertently how to spy on America and create a chain leading to the greatest espionage achievement of all time: the theft of the secret of the Manhattan Project – how to build an atomic bomb.
4
‘AGENT 001’
Throughout the hot summer of 1931, after more than a year of careful planning, seventy-five determined Russians arrived in the US to enrol as students at its elite universities.1 Disembarking at the Port of New York, shaky after a week at sea, the first of the generation of Soviet ‘super spies’ set foot in America when Stanislav Shumovsky, one of the final fifty-four, landed in late September. He travelled on the SS Europa, arriving just in time for the start of the new academic term. The group included architects, town planners, mining experts, transport gurus, metallurgists, ship designers, aeronautics experts, chemists, electrical and mechanical engineers. A few were professional intelligence officers, the rest willing helpers. They had all been sent by Stalin to find out first hand how America had met and surmounted the engineering challenges of industrialisation.
It would be wrong to say Soviet intelligence invented industrial espionage. As early as June 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston businessman and Harvard alumnus, had embarked on an industrial espionage mission for the US. He set off on a two-year visit with his family to Scotland and England as war clouds darkened in North America, using as his cover story ‘poor health’. The mill towns of the north of England were not known for their curative delights and Lowell’s interests lay in stealing the secrets of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The textile industry based in the growing towns of Lancashire and Scotland was at the heart of that revolution, one fuelled by new water-or steam-powered spinning and weaving machines. The flint-hearted capitalists of Britain were never going to allow anyone – and certainly not an American – to buy drawings or a model of a powered loom. So Lowell secretly studied the machines on his visits to the mills, although their desperate working conditions must surely have played havoc with his failing health. In a quite prodigious feat, Lowell memorised the workings of the British power looms without committing anything to paper.
By the time he departed Britain’s shores in 1812, the country was at war with the United States, and Lowell was carefully searched on his departure. Back in Boston, he built his textile factories, funding his enterprises with a pioneering public stock offering, and was awarded the patent for the powered loom, a stolen copy of the British version, in 1815. There was no end to Lowell’s claims; he even suggested that the technology was all his original work adapted to local conditions rather than the fruits of industrial espionage. In recognition of his imaginative schemes, he was inducted into the US Business Hall of Fame in 2013.2
In 1931 the intelligence mastermind Artur Artuzov, Shumovsky’s recruiter, had unleashed a new type of Soviet intelligence operation, one which would do to the Americans what they had done to the British. It was the start of a process of stealing industrial secrets that was to last for almost eighty years. From late 1931 until 2010fn1 a trail of agents would penetrate the US by enrolling as students in elite universities following the textbook rules written by Shumovsky.
• • •
Some of Shumovsky’s travelling companions were enrolled in undergraduate programmes; others, already qualified engineers, were on shorter specialist courses perhaps lasting a year or more to gain valuable experience. Soviet intelligence targeted American universities for two main reasons. First, America’s position as the most competitive modern industrialised society was based on its ability to produce from its universities a steady stream of fresh graduate engineers and scientists who could transfer ideas from university-based research centres to America’s factory floors and production lines. Such constant innovation maintained the position of the US as the world’s leading economy.
Stalin wanted to emulate and surpass the US economy, but he first needed to learn and then adapt this education system to the peculiarities of Soviet conditions. Engineers were to be his new society’s leaders. He termed them ‘cadres who decide everything’.3 But such individuals simply did not exist in the numbers or quality required; hence they needed to be mass produced – and in a hurry. Unlike those in Russia, US universities had a significant number of highly qualified and experienced professors. Stalin planned that on their return to the Soviet Union the newly trained engineers, including Shumovsky, were to become professors themselves. They were to spend their lives transferring to the many the benefits of what they had learned in their time in the US.
Stalin’s second reason for choosing this route is that a university is an unprotected repository of engineering and scientific knowledge. Elsewhere, the same information was either closely guarded in military bases or scattered among dozens of individual factories, and to gather that intelligence the Soviets would have had to deploy hundreds of agents on risky missions. In contrast, the universities happily transmitted that same knowledge by means of their lecture halls, laboratories and libraries – and, in the case of MIT, by factory placements. Each Soviet student, while educating himself to the highest level, would at the same time identify and arrange to have copied every technological treasure he could find. Books, articles, equipment and other material could wend their way back to the Soviet Union as a resource for Stalin’s ambitious industrialisation programme.
The Soviet Union had assembled a remarkable group for the task, its brightest and best talent. They appeared, on the face of it, the ideal team to perform the mission assigned to them: Communist Party loyalists, motivated, intelligent and focused, many went on to be leaders in their chosen fields. Some however disgraced themselves. One was to put the entire mission at risk.
The students, including Shumovsky, travelled to America under their real names,4 but covers were routinely used by Soviet intelligence when the stakes were
high. Two years before, Pyotr Baranov, head of the Red air force, the VVS, had travelled incognito to the US with aircraft designer Andrey Tupolev to visit American factories and trade fairs.5 His cover was blown when his photograph appeared in a book published while he was in America naming him as a leading figure of the Communist Revolution. At the time Russians travelled abroad in fear of attacks both by exiled White Guard organisations and those they saw as heretical Communists; intercepted telegram traffic shows that the NKVD believed the White Guards could replicate the Soviets’ own fearsome counter-intelligence capability.fn2
After their defeat in the Civil War the White exiles had managed a campaign of assassinations and bombings against Soviet targets, but now generally they were men of intemperate words after dinner rather than of deeds. Everyone in the party heading to America was nevertheless warned about avoiding interactions with the White Guards, as well as with ‘Trotskyists’, now a catch-all description for heretical Communists.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 9