The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

The metallurgist Alexander ‘Rosty’ Rostarchuk and mechanical engineer Ivan Eremin were to become long-term friends. ‘Rosty’, like Shumovsky, got on well with Americans, integrating quickly and easily with his classmates. The paths of Eremin, Rostarchuk and Shumovsky would cross again in 1941, in the Soviet Union’s hour of need.30

  Most helpfully for Shumovsky, there was another Russian on Course 16 in his house. Ivan Protzenko was no ordinary aeronautical engineer or student.31 He was the Director of TsAGI, and ranked as one of the most prominent figures in the Soviet aircraft industry. What was such a senior figure doing spending those years in an American classroom studying for a Master’s degree? In his early thirties at the time, Ivan was already an experienced aircraft designer. Yet such was the scale and importance of the Soviet Union’s expansion plans that he was sent on a two-year mission to learn, with Shumovsky’s help, how to replicate the MIT aeronautics course in Moscow. He had to complete it first.

  On his return to Moscow in 1933 Ivan would duly begin teaching a prestigious new Master’s course in aviation offered by TsAGI. It was a clone of what he and Shumovsky had learned in Cambridge. The core curriculum included mathematics. theoretical mechanics and hydro-aerodynamics, and aircraft design. To gain a Master’s in aviation at the Soviet ‘MIT’, a Soviet student was required to defend a thesis to a robust panel that included Andrey Tupolev himself.32

  Stanislav Shumovsky – MIT1932 yearbook

  From 1935 onwards, for its fifty-year life, thousands of Soviet aviation engineers would enjoy the educational benefits of the elite Course 16 from MIT without ever having to leave home. In what must be one of the most brazen transfers of intellectual property from America in history, the Soviet Union began to enrol hundreds of students each year. Somewhat ironically, MIT continued limiting itself to turn out just thirty students a year. For a few hundred dollars’ investment in MIT fees, the Soviet Union would catch up with and overtake America in teaching aviation engineering in just a few years.

  • • •

  Shumovsky soon settled down into the daily routine of lectures and laboratory work in Building 33, the Daniel Guggenheim Laboratory. Around the facility were clustered several wind tunnels. To ensure it stayed as the top-rated aeronautics department in the country, the department was planning the world’s first pressurised wind tunnel. The Guggenheim family’s extraordinary philanthropy extended to an interest in promoting aviation. MIT was the best choice of university for the Russians not just because its course was America’s oldest – the study of aeronautics had begun at MIT before the Wright brothers’ 1903 pioneering flight, when in 1896 mechanical engineering student Albert J. Wells built a thirty-square-inch wind tunnel as part of his thesis – but because it was also the most respected university aeronautics programme.

  The department had a tradition of strong scholarship and solving industrial problems. Shumovsky’s profile fitted right in with the other students and faculty staff, who were universally enthralled with the challenges of flight. Later alumni have pursued careers that include astronaut, air force secretary, NASA deputy administrators and chief technologist, air force chief scientist, aerospace executive, and corporate founder. Its alumni are described as entrepreneurs, policy-makers, educators and researchers pushing technology’s boundaries.33 Shumovsky’s classmates between 1931 and 1936 would make major contributions to the development of aerospace in the fields of transport, communications, exploration and national security, as well as developing innovative educational programmes. As the yearbook boasted in 1933, ‘the men whose pictures you see on the pages immediately following are destined to become important to the world in this generation as its builders, its designers, and its administrators.’34

  Shumovsky derived great satisfaction from the unlimited access he was offered to his teachers, all world-leading specialists. His new professor was one of America’s most influential aviation figures.35 During a long and illustrious career that spanned the entire existence of the aerospace industry, from the very beginnings of aeronautics to the exploration of the solar system, Jerome C. Hunsaker would keep MIT at the forefront and heart of development.36 The driving force behind the beginning of aeronautics studies at MIT, he worked with everyone from the first flyers, the Wright Brothers, through to Charles Stark Draper, linchpin of the Apollo project. In between he got to know most of the founders and leaders of aeronautics and astronautics. He became an MIT institution, having enrolled in 1909 and never retiring.

  The number-one US Naval Academy graduate of his year, Hunsaker, nicknamed the ‘Einstein of the Navy’, had enrolled in MIT’s graduate programme in naval construction, but instead developed a fascination with the growing amount of aeronautical literature in MIT’s library. Hunsaker and Shumovsky shared the same hero, Louis Blériot. In 1912 Hunsaker caught the flying bug by watching a Blériot plane flying around Boston harbour. In 1914, MIT offered the nation’s first course in aerodynamics, taught by Hunsaker himself. MIT’s Course 16, aeronautics, had first been offered in 1926 under the auspices of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Proving widely popular and oversubscribed twice over from the start, it was a major coup for Shumovsky to be allowed to enrol.

  No doubt Hunsaker and Shumovsky spoke of their admiration for the great French pilot, though equally Shumovsky would not have revealed his NKVD codename. Hunsaker introduced Shumovsky and the other students to his friend Donald Douglas. The pair had built the first structure on MIT’s new Cambridge campus, a wind tunnel. Douglas was the founder of Douglas Aircraft, the manufacturer of the iconic DC-3, one of the world’s great planes. Although his company was based on the West Coast, he was a regular visitor to MIT, and was a member of the department’s advisory committee.

  Hunsaker’s contribution to the development of the US aviation industry cannot be overestimated. Most publicly, he managed the new institutions needed to deal with the growth of the aeronautics industry, such as the crucial National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of NASA. In fact, he initiated and wrote for NACA the first industry-wide research paper. Recognised as the leading innovator in the field of aviation research, its inventions unrivalled, NACA is rightly credited with contributing to winning the air war for the Allies by its work on introducing the superchargers necessary to maintain the performance of high-altitude bomber and fighter engines. The committee’s research was so respected that it became the number-one target for Soviet aviation espionage and much in demand elsewhere in the world.

  At MIT, Hunsaker was the advocate of the modern engineering approach to aircraft design. His idea was to render obsolete the ‘build it, fly it and see’ model that had previously prevailed across the industry. The commercial and safety risks entailed in that approach could be eliminated in the laboratory and through calculation. Scale models tested in wind tunnels were cheaper than prototypes. New construction materials would first be stress tested on the work bench.

  By the early 1930s, when Hunsaker first met and taught Shumovsky, he was at the pinnacle of the aeronautics industry in the US, holding leadership roles in academia at MIT, in government at NACA, and in industry as president of Goodyear Zeppelin. MIT’s aviation programme was fully integrated into industry despite being located away from the main centres of manufacture on the East and West Coasts. In his role as president of Goodyear Zeppelin, Hunsaker brought to the Institute much commercially valuable research work on dirigibles. In recognition of his many achievements, in 1933 he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Medal, only the fifth such recipient.

  Among Hunsaker’s associates was C. Fayette Taylor,37 professor of mechanical engineering and director of MIT’s Sloan Laboratory for Aircraft and Automotive Engines, funded by General Motors.38 Earlier in his career, Taylor had been the engineer in charge of the US Army’s Air Service Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. While there, he met Orville Wright and before joining MIT he oversaw aircraft engine design at the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. He was heavily involved in developing the air-cooled ‘
Whirlwind’ engine used on Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight. Through his research and teaching, Taylor developed the scientific framework for engine design and operation that is still in use today, establishing MIT as an internationally renowned centre in the field. He became a firm friend of Shumovsky and even began publishing his seminal works in Russian. In 1935 his work ‘Critical Stresses in Aircraft Engine Parts’ was released simultaneously in the USA and Moscow by AMTORG.39 Curtiss-Wright,fn6 Taylor’s former employer, was one of only three US companies Stalin allowed to maintain its contracts in the USSR when the hard currency crisis hit in 1931.

  In 1939, Aeronautics became a distinct department at MIT. Hunsaker announced that the early try-and-fly days of aviation were indeed over and, as he had foreseen, the era of the engineered aircraft had fully emerged. He underscored the successes of his department by emphasising that ‘the total effect of our graduates on the airplane industry cannot be estimated’.fn7

  5

  ‘A NICE FELLOW TO TALK TO’

  As the weeks passed at MIT, Shumovsky integrated into college life. He became indistinguishable from his American classmates, attending lectures, working in the lab and attending ‘smokers’. He began to learn in his conversations more about America and how the system operated, becoming aware of fissures in the capitalist system that he could exploit for his mission.

  In these years of the Great Depression, MIT was an oasis of prosperity for most students, but some felt like fish out of water. The full scholarship boys were different from the others. Their families were suffering from the economic downturn. They were smarter and worked harder, but were less privileged than their peers and felt their lack of money excluded them from the social whirl of college life. The Soviet system, Shumovsky told them, had sent guys just like them halfway around the world to an elite university, paying for everything and supporting their families while they studied. There was, he said, a different way.

  As the Depression dragged on, students from all backgrounds grew increasingly concerned about their employment prospects after graduation. Some felt that as the elite they would get a job, if perhaps with reduced salary expectations; others were worried. Shumovsky noticed that most students either had disposable income or the potential to achieve it, and advertisers knew it too. He saw The Tech and the yearbook plastered on every page with eye-catching commercial advertising.1

  Advertisers had a lot to teach a talent spotter; they targeted the intellectual cream of society, employing the proven techniques of mass commercialism to create demand for their client’s products. Suggesting that a product made the consumer more alluring to the opposite sex was one effective technique – although it mystified the Russians, who had fewer sexual hang-ups and insecurities. Adverts pitched the sexual allure or health-giving qualities of competing brands of cigarettes; those who caught new smokers early had an affluent, loyal customer for life. Shumovsky thought he could successfully pitch a different view of society to the young and naive in a similar way.

  As Shumovsky would prove to Moscow Centre, an agent recruited at a young age would be an asset for life. His vision was to realise that a talented MIT graduate aeronautics engineer would most likely go on in his career to achieve a very senior position in industry or a research institute. Such potential sleeper agents were easier to approach and recruit than a person in mid-career with a family to worry about and a position in society to lose if exposed. Targeting the young, idealistic and naive was a lesson honed on Madison Avenue. Applying Freudian-based mass marketing and advertising techniques to the secret world of espionage recruitment was Shumovsky’s novel idea.

  Another lesson Shumovsky adopted from the world of advertising was the use of the so-called ‘halo effect’. A respected figure who endorsed a positive view of the Soviet Union might well influence others to think the same. Shumovsky understood that public opinion needed creating, it could not be left to form on its own. American consumers followed endorsements. So Soviet intelligence identified, and tried to recruit, American opinion shapers to endorse favourable attitudes to the Soviet Union. Movie stars, journalists and writers in the public eye were targets. Those approached included left-leaning writers such as Ernest Hemingway and – as we shall see – Upton Sinclair.

  Although this method would in itself achieve little success, at the same time Shumovsky was evolving his own plan, going to work on MIT’s top brass. At his suggestion, the Russians hosted a dinner for fifty guests on 8 November 1933 in the Walker Building to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of the Communist Revolution; it was to be attended by the remaining students and the great and the good of MIT. As president of the Institute, America’s leading scientist Karl Compton was the guest of honour.2 He made a speech, and received in return from the Russian group a gift: an official chart of the many successes achieved through the Five-Year Plan and a book on the organisation of industry in Russia.

  For the wider student body, interest in the Soviet event centred on the showing of ‘talkies’ at MIT for the first time. The Russians had brought from New York some Soviet movies and assumed America’s number-one technical university would have the equipment to show them. It did not, but luckily one department was experimenting with amplification equipment, and so the evening was saved.3

  The films showcased the role of science in the achievements of the Five-Year Plan, and the timing was spot on for Compton. Amid the emergency of the Great Depression he was chairing a presidential committee to report on how science, if federally funded, could contribute to an economic recovery. In December 1934, his committee proposed a major investment programme: a federal appropriation for scientific research of $75 million for five years, justified because new knowledge would lead to new industries, new jobs and a boost to recovery.

  When no government money was forthcoming, Compton – understandably deeply disappointed – came to believe through his interactions with Shumovsky and others that other countries had further-sighted policies.4 Convinced that Russia spent more on scientific research than on any other part of its budget, including defence, he began using every opportunity to promote the Soviet Union as a beacon of scientific research.5 Science had been elevated to a level of national religion, he told audiences, adding that the Soviet Academy of Sciences had established 200 world-class laboratories with the best equipment in the world. He convinced audiences that, having seen what it had done to raise living standards in America, Russia was centring its entire economic programme on science. In contrast, the US government was doing nothing. He used the example of the sending of the brightest and best Russians to MIT for training to show how committed the Soviets were to scientific development.

  Shumovsky would keep in touch with Compton until early 1939. It became his habit to send a Christmas holiday gift of caviar and cigarettes to the president and his wife. Compton would politely write back thanking Shumovsky for the gift and – clearly without realising the implication – wishing him luck in his work.6 In 1945 MIT suggested that its distinguished alumnus Shumovsky was the ideal person to represent it at the celebration commemorating fifty years of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The world’s most famous scientist Albert Einstein declined his invitation due to poor health.

  • • •

  Advising that more agents should be sent, Shumovsky reported to Moscow Centre that campus life was the ideal, gentle introduction for a novice Soviet S&T spy to learn about America and its way of life. At the same time he had begun to talk, think and act, even subconsciously, as a regular American aviation student. Gradually Stanislav, the Slavic officer from the NKVD, was becoming the Americanised Stan from the Class of ’34. In just a few weeks from his arrival, he had become a member of a highly elite club.

  In this, he was helped enormously by the ethos of MIT. The Institute reinforced the ideal of total loyalty to your class. There was a tradition of hazing, designed to create a spirit of loyalty to the year group. As one student described, ‘in undergraduate, you’re buil
ding a social network based on shared life experiences. Your college buddies are the ones that you tap into for job opportunities for the rest of your life, and you help each other out because you became fast friends at an important time in your life.’7 The MIT tradition was that the sophomores would abduct freshmen and generally throw them in the river or some nearby lake. Another jape was to wake a victim at 3 a.m. and take him miles from campus in the dead of night, abandoning him at the roadside to make a weary journey home. It was all designed to build esprit de corps. These strong class bonds included Stan.

  Of course, Stan was fundamentally different from the other students on his course; there was a greater purpose behind his education than to get a top job. He had reports to prepare for Moscow on the state of the US aviation industry, so his questions were asked for a reason beyond a desire to simply learn. MIT allowed him the opportunity to develop the industry contacts needed to perform his AMTORG job, and the camaraderie of science created the perfect environment in which to network.

  As the information they gleaned was so valuable, Moscow Centre was impatient and demanding of its sources. Their men on the ground, acting as go-betweens between head office and cautious sources, felt the pressure for results. A bureaucrat running a desk without knowledge of the realities of field work could never understand that a source needed to be nurtured, not bullied. This tension provoked much criticism from Moscow about unproductive sources.8

  The most highly valued sources were those who gave information for ideological reasons and required no payment other than expenses. Moscow was not naive about the motives of some of its sources and was prepared to pay for secrets, sometimes by the page. It preferred not to do so, and such mercenaries, paid by the secret, were despised. But there was also always a place for those at MIT who needed money now, or at some stage in their lives. A relatively small capital investment could harvest long-term benefits in the form of valuable intelligence. Shumovsky’s work with meticulously selected individuals useful to the S&T effort, known also as the XY line, would be instrumental in Moscow ordering its New York Rezidentura head, Pyotr Gutzeit, in August 1934 to abandon the previous policy of mass recruitment in America.9 The Centre had come to value the quality of intelligence over the quantity of information received; it was taking too much time to separate the wheat from the chaff. The close connection with the end users of S&T intelligence no doubt played a part in forcing through this necessary change. Tupolev was too busy to be deluged with uninteresting reports on irrelevant subjects that someone ignorant of aviation thought significant.