Shumovsky therefore set himself the task of identifying as potential agent recruits the brightest students who had the most empathy for the Soviet cause, sending their details up the line to New York. If the ‘talent’ he identified was considered worth recruiting, a specialist recruiter would make an approach. This ‘cut out’ approach protected Stan and his network. No one contacted would know he was the talent spotter.10
Stan’s list of industry contacts reached outside the campus. Visitors to the faculty included a bevy of leading industry figures each year, such as the Russian émigré Sikorsky and Donald Douglas, who shared freely with the students their insights on the future of the industry.11 There would be a faculty dinner at which the guest of honour would speak, giving Stan the opportunity to make himself known. He shrewdly joined every national professional association of automobile and aeronautical engineers he could, and obtained the name, address and company of every leading engineer in the US annually. His name appears on the same page in the membership directories as the Russian émigrés and leading aircraft designers Igor Sikorsky and Alexander Prokofiev de Seversky. In his vacations, he would visit factories to inspect the progress and build quality of the giant seaplanes that the Soviet Union had bought. He became familiar with how an American factory assembly line was organised. He would contrast the experience with a Russian one. The US industry was moving from being craft based, where each part for a plane was individually produced by hand in a single factory, to modern mass production techniques where aircraft were assembled from parts built off-site by different manufacturers. Increasingly aircraft makers used a high percentage of standard parts in their planes, manufactured by third parties to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Stan learned how the supply chain functioned and noted the growing use of subcontractors to mass-produce these standard parts.
In their vacations, the students either worked in US factories on assignment from college or helped inspect the quality of machinery destined for export to the USSR. Trashutin spent his summer inspecting equipment for the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, later converted into the Tankograd, or Tank City.12 This was his first link to the city where he would live for forty years, becoming an honorary citizen with a street named after him.
• • •
Overlooking obvious differences such as his country of origin and ideology, Stan’s fellow students had become his friends. With his amiable manner he could put anyone at their ease. He could charm both the president of MIT and the laboratory technicians. In conversation Stan avoided the subject of American politics, talking mostly about his specialised subject, aviation. He would solicit opinions on people around campus, but even if pressed would never comment himself, developing the art of managing not to answer even a direct question.
Ben Smilg, Shumovsky’s college friend and his tutor, was his first agent recruit in America. Smilg’s family, when they were interrogated by the FBI in the 1950s, described Stan as an open, jovial individual never without a smile on his face. He would talk to them about their interests – chess, music and literature. Equally at ease discussing reminiscences of the old country with Smilg’s émigré parents or the Jewish question in Europe with the worried younger members, he was respectful to his elders but always ready with a joke.13
Smilg himself was an exception to the ‘cut out’ recruitment technique. In July 1934 Stan recruited him directly,14 taking the risk as there were no NKVD specialist recruiters in New York at the time. (The intelligence service was small and suffered from frequent staff shortages, particularly of experienced operatives.) Smilg was the prototype of a new kind of recruit for Soviet intelligence. As a student, he would not produce secrets immediately, but he represented an investment for the future, a long-term asset.
Benjamin Smilg in MIT yearbook, 1932
To get close to lonely Ben, Stan became his buddy. Smilg was low-hanging fruit. Just eighteen, he was a fresh-faced college kid, while Stan was a 29-year-old man of the world, a Russian Civil War veteran. A shy, awkward genius, Ben was acutely conscious of his Jewish background; Stan was tall, confident and outgoing. On the face of it, the two could have had little in common. Ben was like Stan’s awkward kid brother. Stan began calling his classmate ‘Benny’.15
Ben’s background was very different from that of most other students at MIT, and he did not fit in. Neither middle class nor a WASP, he made his way in life tutoring less able but wealthier students, making himself their hired help. To escape anti-Semitism his parents, Harry and Rebecca, had emigrated to Boston from Tsarist Russia before the Revolution, arriving around 1912.16 The family scraped by, living in straitened circumstances in one of the poor Jewish areas of the city. His father Harry worked in a shoe factory as a leather cutter.17 Ben was the elder of their two brilliant offspring; a mathematical prodigy, he gained a place at MIT on the aeronautics course that Stan joined in its second year. His father claimed somehow to have found the $400 for his son’s first year’s tuition fees from savings.
The pair probably first met after a lecture or by striking up a conversation in the department building. Under questioning, however, Ben would give conflicting and implausible accounts of their meeting. According to one version he had noticed during an aerodynamics examination in 1931 that Stan had considerable difficulty with the maths. Ben offered to tutor him, and would continue to do so until he left MIT. In another version, Ben claimed that he knew Stan was a Russian student and had once seen him handing in an examination paper written in Russian. He asked Stan how he expected the professor to grade such a paper, and offered to tutor him. Stan accepted, since ‘he didn’t want to flunk out of school and go home to Russia in disgrace.’ Although Ben didn’t realise it, he was the one being recruited.
Stan would come over to Ben’s house for lessons several times a week, and it was there he met his mother, father and brother. He made no comment on the family’s circumstances, and quickly established himself as a friend, charming them all. Even twenty years later, and after a deal of trouble, they still considered him a great guy, ‘a nice fellow to talk to.’18 Stan even started helping Ben’s mother with her persistent enquiries about the health of her relatives and friends who had stayed behind in Russia. But all the time he spent in Ben’s house, Stan was ‘talent spotting’. He had the ability, natural to intelligence gatherers, of asking questions without ever seeming to offer any information himself. Despite ten years of close friendship, the Smilgs, other than Ben, knew nothing of Shumovsky’s life and work – and certainly not that he was a spy.19
Smilg noted with some jealousy that Stan was very well looked after by the Soviet government, which paid for everything, even providing him with discounted textbooks. While Smilg himself struggled to get by, still living at home on the other side of Boston, surviving on scholarship funds and what he could earn tutoring his fellow students, Stan was able to live close to the campus with ten others in a luxury boarding house.
Ben was, however, making enough to support his family, tutoring he claimed around six other students from MIT in maths besides Stan. Indeed, Stan was to pay his friend over $2,000 for tuition. This seems an enormous sum. A new car cost $500 at the time, while annual fees at the Institute itself were only around $400. The hourly rates Ben claimed to charge Stan varied between $2 and $5 according to the proximity to exam time. Even at $5 an hour that is a lot of tuition hours to rack up. Stan asked for and kept receipts, as he said he claimed the money back from the Russian government. The receipts came back to haunt Ben. On top of the $2,000, Stan may well have paid some household bills and medical expenses for the struggling Smilg family. It soon became his habit to bring small gifts for each member of the family on every visit.
The NKVD believed they had paid for Smilg to go through college and set him up for life. This became a pattern for their recruits: they wanted them placed under an obligation. Ben began supplying material to Stan which he later described as only classroom notes. He recalled to the FBI that as Stan often travelled away from MIT on
business for AMTORG, he needed the notes in order to catch up on the lectures he missed.20 It is reported in the NKVD files that as early as 1933 they began to receive copies of student theses and much other material from MIT’s aeronautical laboratories.21
The FBI would long suspect Smilg of engaging in espionage for the Soviets. In fact, they knew it; but, hamstrung by a desire not to reveal a vital intelligence secret, they could not – or rather would not – publicly prove it. So when in 1955 they brought Smilg to a jury trial in Dayton, Ohio, they tried to convict him on a lesser charge of perjury.22 He was cleared. It was a pivotal moment in the FBI’s efforts to prosecute suspected wartime Soviet agents. In fact, very few of the hundreds of Soviet agents were ever charged with any crime, as FBI witnesses were depicted as fickle turncoats by defence attorneys and the real evidence could not be produced.
As part of its investigation of Smilg, the FBI decided to dig into the minutiae of Shumovsky’s academic performance at MIT to find out if it was at all conceivable that Ben could have tutored him that much. They reported that Stan’s results in maths-based papers were average to below average.23 Ben noted that Shumovsky seemed to know a lot more about aircraft than he did, even if his maths was weak. But in comparison to Smilg, who was a prodigy, most people’s maths was poor.
It emerged later that Smilg was indeed carefully cultivated and recruited by Shumovsky while at MIT. The NKVD file states:
Benjamin Smilg is code name LEVER, a US citizen, Jewish, born in Boston in 1913. Parents emigrated from Russia in 1905 with the assistance of the Jewish committee. Father is a cutter at a shoe factory. Brother works at the National Cash Register Company. The family has a very friendly attitude toward the USSR. Upon graduating from high school, thanks to exceptional abilities he was accepted at the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology for a free education, where he was always one of the most brilliant students. He remained at the Inst. to obtain a doctorate. Starting in 1935 he worked for the Budd and Glen Martin companies. He is currently part of a group at Wright Field for the study and eliminating of vibration in airplanes and engines. LEVER was a student in the same group with BLÉRIOT beginning in 1931 and had a friendship with him. He was recruited by BLÉRIOT in July 1934. He provided materials on a dirigible, calculations on the vibration of bomber tail assemblies, NACA materials, some students’ senior theses, etc. In 1937 the materials stopped coming in.24
The LEVER case would be taught at Soviet spy school as an example of a perfect recruitment. MIT was a renowned centre for both military and civilian research, much of it at the very least commercially sensitive, and Shumovsky had access to all of it. But the NKVD records show that he took no risk himself, instead using third parties to acquire these secrets: one of those was Smilg.
• • •
During Ben’s long recruitment Shumovsky had to report on each meeting and on his overall progress, seeking approval from Moscow Centre at each step along the way. At this stage, despite the obvious drawbacks Moscow kept all their men in the field on a tight leash, micro-managing every aspect of operational work. Given the distances involved, the time messages took to travel back and forth and the difficulties of communication, it was a cumbersome and inefficient approach. No wonder the recruitment took an age. It was hard work for Shumovsky too. From later accounts of Soviet recruitment at American universities, it is evident he would have to prepare and send off a detailed report on each of his meetings with any target, submit this for approval to Moscow, wait to get permission, and if this was granted wait before moving to the next stage.
From a later intercept of Russian intelligence traffic, we know the duties of a talent spotter were honed thanks to Stan’s experience. The rules are clearly laid out. The talent spotter
should make a broad range of acquaintances among the school’s students and instructors in order to seek out people whom we could recruit for our work in the future. Under no circumstances should he talk to anyone about our work or try to recruit anyone for our work. Every two months he should put together detailed reports about his progress in his studies, his new acquaintances, and scientific activities at the university. The reports should be typed on a typewriter and photographed onto film.25
The two crucial elements of the plan are the segregation of the talent spotter from the recruitment process and how vital it was that the agent was to work hard and achieve strong academic results. Shumovsky invented both these rules.
Smilg’s recruitment had been achieved by means of a deep sense of personal loyalty to and admiration for Shumovsky. Stan stood out as a charismatic figure, a leader, a man committed to a mission, and his ardour was infectious. His life had a greater purpose than some, and he inspired admiration. The pair were friends first and foremost. Shumovsky used Soviet money to help Smilg’s family out financially at times, but that always seemed an act of friendship, not a payment for services. Over the years Ben helped Stan in his work but he did not think he was working for the Soviet Union. He was not political; unlike other agents, he was not even paid a monthly stipend to provide information, or on results.
Smilg’s first-generation Russian-Jewish background was typical of many who helped the Soviet secret service in this period. In fact, the majority of recruits were first-generation Russian Jews who felt excluded from the American dream. The Smilg family worried obsessively about the rise of anti-Semitism in America. There were increasing demands to exclude Jews from American social, political and economic life. Henry Ford himself was overtly anti-Semitic and published 500,000 copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document purporting to contain the minutes of a global Jewish conspiracy.26 Especially worrying to the Smilgs was the rise of the American pro-Nazi Bund. The German-American Bund held large parades as close as New York City, featuring supporters in Nazi uniforms waving swastika flags. At its peak, Madison Square Garden hosted 20,000 people to hear speakers term the President ‘Frank D. Rosenfeld’ and refer to his key policy, the New Deal, as the ‘Jew Deal’.27 The Smilg family had fled one country to escape anti-Semitism and worried they might have to pack their bags again.
Stan would drop into conversation the claim that in contrast to the US, Jews in the Soviet Union were not threatened and that in fact, Jews held disproportionate numbers of key jobs in government and industry. Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, was the country’s second most important leader after Stalin. The Communist Party leadership had consisted almost entirely of Jews at the time of the Revolution.
• • •
Smilg’s primary value as an agent of the Soviet Union was that he was the leading expert in the US on ‘flutter’, the vibration caused by air passing over a plane’s wings at a rate that can cause the airframe to fall apart. Detailed calculations had to be made at the design stage as to the strength of the tabs required to keep the wings attached to the fuselage. During his career, Smilg would be a leading research scientist, author and inventor.28 He patented several scientific inventions and authored books and articles such as ‘The Instability of Pitching Oscillations of an Airfoil in Subsonic Incompressible Potential Flow’ and ‘Application of Three-dimensional Flutter Theory to Aircraft Structures’. After a couple of jobs, MIT helped place him at the top secret Wright Field military research base. NKVD records show that he provided interesting information on aircraft structures, engine design and aerodynamics.29 But he proved a difficult agent for anyone other than Stan to manage.30 Despite many difficulties, the pair would remain close friends into the 1940s.31
• • •
It was Shumovsky who most likely talent-spotted another NKVD recruit at MIT. Radio engineer Norman Leslie Haightfn1 (pronounced ‘height’; his codename was LONG) was British born but had become a naturalised American. The Soviet interest in Haight was his work with the defence contractor Sperry Gyro-systems.32 The NKVD even financed his electronics business in order to maintain extensive contacts with Sperry.33 At the time Sperry was working on two vital projects, bomb sights and autopilots. The Soviet Union wan
ted the secrets of both, and used Haight to try to acquire them.
It was aviator Wiley Post who, in dramatic style, had brought Sperry’s autopilots to the world’s attention. Having set a round-the-world record on 23 June 1931 in his aircraft Winnie Mae, accompanied by his navigator, two years later he set out to beat his previous record by flying around the world solo. Having equipped Winnie Mae with a Sperry gyroscope autopilot and a radio direction finder, he succeeded.
After the atomic bomb, the most expensive investment made by the US during the Second World War, at more than $1.5 billion, would be in bomb sights. The Americans considered an accurate bomb sight an essential weapon if they were to win the war. Only the advent of the nuclear bomb, so powerful that accuracy was irrelevant, caused a temporary halt to the quest for the perfect sight.
The USAAF used Sperry’s rival, the Norden bomb sight, in its front-line heavy bombers. An early analogue computer, the Norden could be unerringly accurate in ideal weather conditions, when linked to a Sperry autopilot, in delivering a bomb close to its target. Sperry bomb sights were installed in many other wartime bombers. Unknown to the Americans, the Nazis acquired the blueprints although, lacking a strategic bomber, they never used the bomb sight. At the start of the war, the workings of its bomb sights remained America’s number-one secret. Downed bomber crews were ordered to destroy the sight at all costs.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 13