Never uncovered before, Haight would remain on the Soviet intelligence payroll for decades; he was considered such a vital potential agent that the NKVD, learning from the Smilg recruitment, paid for his Master’s degrees at MIT.34
• • •
Stan’s priority at MIT was acquiring the first-class education necessary to be able to operate at the highest levels as an S&T spy and aviation expert. His experience would set the benchmark for future S&T spies. In the future, the Soviets would use top scientists as intelligence officers, finishing off their education with a few years at MIT. These men became their best operatives in the US. Stan developed a first-rate knowledge of American aviation and technology, ensuring that the Soviet Union invested its dollars wisely in purchasing only the best planes and equipment.
US salesmen peddling the ordinary as extraordinary often saw the Soviet Union as a soft target; gullible Communists were easy prey to slick sales patter. But purchasing the wrong product in the Soviet Union could have disastrous consequences. Unfortunate investments could lead to charges of treason or sabotage. One individual upgraded the entire Moscow film stage with what he considered to be the most up-to-date film-making equipment available, only for the advent of ‘talkies’ to render the entire investment pointless within weeks. The man responsible was arrested and charged with ‘wrecking’.fn2 Under these circumstances, those trusted with responsibility for state acquisition programmes were diligent in pursuit of technology which worked. They came increasingly to rely on the expert knowledge of the man on the ground.
Stan was assiduous in acquiring copies of student theses. The main library at MIT was located just above the steps of Building 10 where the newly arrived Russian party had posed for their landmark photograph on that first day. It was a treasure trove of technical publications, original research and graduate dissertations. Seventy years of America’s industrial innovation and technological discoveries were there for the taking. At a stroke, the Soviets had managed to place Stan and twenty-four other experts at the heart of America’s technology powerhouse, with impossible-to-obtain long-term visas.
• • •
Boston’s proximity to New York was another bonus for Stan. The main point of transit between the United States and Europe, New York was the centre of Soviet espionage in the US. Before the establishment of diplomatic relations and the associated ability to transport large quantities of material via the diplomatic bag, the main way of transporting material was by careful smuggling. This was usually done by sending microfilm messages concealed inside mirrors carried by the seamen – either communist sympathisers or those paid to smuggle information – on transatlantic liners. Soviet illegals describe setting up a mini factory to process the stream of information that made its way across the Atlantic, and on from Bremen and Cherbourg to Moscow Centre. The NKVD Resident in New York organised a network of Americans to support the new operation in Boston, Cambridge and around the country. The students identified documents and publications to be exfiltrated by the agents.35 The support network did that work. Exfiltration involved borrowing documents, copying them (normally photographing them) and arranging their safe return.36 In exceptional circumstances, students would be risked in the extraction process. The original organiser of the support system was to have been Military Intelligence officer Ray Bennett. At an early stage of the planning of this mission, Military Intelligence proposed her as the ‘dean’ of the student party. Her role was to travel around the colleges monitoring the progress of the students and conducting illegal intelligence work.
• • •
An essential skill of most spies is to be unremarkable, but Shumovsky was not one to hide in the shadows. Even on his first day at MIT, he stood close to the dean in the front row, his natural air of authority on full display. The Soviets knew that scientists freely exchanged information with their colleagues without regard to borders. Thanks to his position as a leading expert placed in an academic environment, Shumovsky learned far more than an ordinary agent could hope to. He knew what information was valuable and innovative and what to dismiss as merely run of the mill.
What has not been appreciated before is that there were direct communication channels between Shumovsky, the agent in the field, and his customer in the Soviet Union. Other than his agent reports, Shumovsky’s work went directly to the Tupolev Design Bureau, with questions and requests coming by return. The success of Soviet S&T was to a great extent down to this close cooperation between the man in the field and his end customer. The intelligence officer as a trained scientist understood exactly what his customer wanted and could provide speedy answers to specific questions. A dialogue developed via this expert agent between the leading aeronautics experts of the two countries – even if the American side was unaware of it.
Like Hunsaker, Tupolev was fascinated with acquiring as much knowledge as possible via the use of wind tunnels.37 In an age before computer modelling, an aircraft designer could spend vast amounts of time with scale models and complicated mathematical algorithms calculated by hand, juggling power, weight and strength to build a plane that could fly faster, higher and further than before. Building a prototype became the culmination of a long process. Tupolev’s obsession with wind tunnels eventually got him into hot water,38 but it did bring him to MIT on his final visit to the USA before he was imprisoned. MIT possessed a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, allowing its students to experiment with scale models to enhance aerodynamics, lift and structure. To complete his mission, Shumovsky needed more than the knowledge that was already on paper. He planned to recruit the brains. But, with rare exceptions, American engineers do not hold left-leaning political views. They tend to be too grounded or practical to be interested in politics. Luckily for the USSR the dire straits of the US economy came to his rescue.
Graduates in the early 1930s, even from top schools such as MIT, faced the worst job prospects for a generation. Graduates from the elite aviation course were in demand by employers even in the depth of the Depression as the MIT President’s Report recorded that they could all find jobs in the industry. It was not the same for students on other courses. Chemistry major Edwin Blaisdell said that only one out of his graduating class of twenty-four had been able to find a job in 1932, and that was through a family connection. He decided, perhaps having read Stan’s articles in The Tech, to enrol in Moscow University’s summer school.39 When the course was cancelled, he spent a few months travelling around the USSR. Impressed with what he saw, on his return to Boston he found the address of the Communist Party in the phone book and joined.40
A survey of Columbia’s prestigious engineering school conducted at the time shows that graduates’ salary expectations were depressed.41 As the economic crisis dragged on, many graduates were forced to consider different options. An alternative that appealed to some was the possibility of working on a lucrative contract in the USSR. As the US closed factories and pulled back from capital infrastructure projects, the USSR threw vast resources into its development. Stan was besieged with enquiries. The interest led him to his first successful experiment with public relations. There were so many questions about the mysterious USSR that it made sense to reach out to the entire student body. To gain approval for his plan he could not ignore the official leader of the student group, Party loyalist Yefim Medkov, a prickly character very protective of his authority. He roped Medkov into co-authoring a series of articles for The Tech, but it is evident from the prose style that they were written by Stan.42
Through his articles, Stan sold the MIT student body a vision of student life in the Soviet Union that was attractive and compelling. Under the headline ‘Students in USSR Maintained by Government, Families Supported Too’, he explained that Soviet students, unlike Americans, were immune from economic worries. There was no need to work your way through a Soviet college or win a scholarship. There were no student loans as there were no fees. The generosity of the state went further; stipends were offered to students and their families. Uni
versity places were open to any age group, including those with families. Education was open to every worker irrespective of age or gender. Truthfully Stan confirmed that the Russian school system was receiving a massive boost, unlike that in America which was in decline. In Stalin’s Russia, for the first time, every child now received ten years’ formal education and the opportunity to attend university. No child worked in a factory, as had been the case before the Revolution. Workers could leave work to study full or part time. There were no formal academic entry standards, as this would exclude many who, like Trashutin, had been employed from childhood and had been unable to attend school.43 To enrol at the university, he explained, students joined the appropriate union for their course, be it engineering or music. The union then paid for all teaching, living expenses and family stipends. Extraordinarily for the time, Shumovsky revealed that 12 per cent of the overall student body was female and that there were no professions that women could not enter. In contrast, only four women studied aviation in his four years at MIT.44
Shumovsky talked excitedly about the scale of his alma mater, the Moscow Aeronautics Institute (MAI), which he said had an enrolment of 5,000–7,000 students. To cope with the demand, there were three intakes a year of new students, each roughly 600 strong. Students spent their first year working on the factory floor at the various aircraft factories around Moscow. The Institute was fully integrated with industry and focused on mass-producing engineers for the growing Red air force and Soviet civilian airline. Stan pointed out that MAI was already double the size of MIT but specialised in a single academic field, aviation. The institute was in its infancy and just before coming to the US, Stan had helped construct its first buildings. It was to grow into Russia’s most prestigious technical university, providing the backbone for the design bureaus of Sukhoy, MIG, Ilyushin, Tupolev and Yakovlev.45
• • •
Being around the MIT campus had some unexpected benefits. On a visit to MIT, the FBI invited all comers to a presentation and demonstration of their latest crime-fighting technology.46 This was the only time representatives of the Bureau appeared on campus while Stan was at MIT; but in truth, although they did not know it at the time, he and his fellow agents had nothing to fear either from US counter-intelligence or the FBI. The US security agencies had neither the interest nor the budget to look too closely at Soviet espionage activities in the US. The Soviets were just one of a handful of espionage threats and were never a priority, while political pressure focused anti-communist energies against the domestic US Communist Party (CPUSA). Many 1930s Soviet intelligence operations were abandoned prematurely or unnecessarily because of the assumed threat of discovery by US counterintelligence.47 Russians were very accomplished at counter-intelligence themselves and because of this believed their rivals equally so. They were not. The US was unguarded.
Stan’s experience at MIT proved to Soviet intelligence that the right individual could break into and become a member of America’s elite science club. Artur Artuzov would ensure that Shumovsky’s mission became part of the syllabus at Moscow Central spy training school. A decade after the events, trainers would still repeat the details of how and why he had been able to recruit American students as agents. The intelligence officers who sat in those classes would follow him to MIT, contributing to the Soviets’ greatest espionage successes.
The United States was not only unprepared to counter the Soviet espionage efforts in the 1930s but uninterested in doing so. There were higher political considerations, and low commercial ones as well. The FBI’s lecture at MIT in December 1935 had demonstrated the Bureau’s relative innocence at this time. E. P. Coffey, the deputy director in charge of the Bureau’s technical laboratory, had made his invitation to the students oblivious to the presence of Soviet intelligence personnel in the audience. Incredibly they were all invited to visit the lab and inspect the polygraph, a lie detector which was then under development and was later to become a primary tool in counter-espionage.48
Furthermore, stealing the design of, for instance, the latest fighter plane was classified at the time as a commercial patent theft, not a state secret. The FBI’s investigations into Soviet espionage between the 1930s and 1950s caught few spies and put even fewer on trial. Despite the fact that between 1936 and 1952, its budget ballooned from $5 million to $90 million, and its staff grew from 1,580 employees to 14,657, the Bureau devoted few resources to counter-espionage, preferring to focus on other priorities. Prohibition had created the opportunity for organised crime to thrive, which kept the forces of law and order at full stretch. The newly formed FBI based its counter-espionage methods (such as they were) on its experience of solving common crimes, and these proved inadequate when it came to grappling with battle-hardened Soviet revolutionaries. Nonetheless, the Russians would continue to overestimate the FBI, believing them far more capable and competent than they were. One reason was that the FBI under its leader J. Edgar Hoover was a master of public relations, exaggerating its successes and when necessary the threats to America.
6
‘IS THIS REALLY MY MOTHERLAND?’
Among the residents of the Russian student house in Bigelow Street was one of Soviet Military Intelligence’s leading officers. His teachers and classmates knew him only by the pseudonym Mikhail Ivanov; the name was a cover, the Russian equivalent of ‘John Doe’. The Russian students knew better than to ask his real identity, but they quickly formed their suspicions. In fact Ivanov was Mikhail Cherniavsky, a talented and determined Military Intelligence officer (the Fourth Department, later known as the GRU, was the smaller of the two best-known Soviet intelligence agencies. The other, the NKVD, became the KGB) who arrived ahead of the main party hidden within a small group of nondescript engineers.1 The organisers of his mission felt that, given his seniority in the GRU, Cherniavsky needed a cover story in order to enrol as an undergraduate at MIT. It was believed that he was at risk following the defection of leading chemist Vladimir Ipatiev to the US.
The students had no idea of his colourful past and his future plans. His Russian colleagues had dark suspicions about this man. He dropped hints to them that he was on a ‘special mission’.2 They were also somewhat fearful of him. And Mikhail Ivanov – or Cherniavsky, to give him his proper name – was, it would transpire, a dangerous man to know.
Cherniavsky led a party from Bigelow to eat their meals every day in the Russian quarter of the West End of Boston. Perhaps homesick, and finding it hard to adjust to American life, some students had taken to frequenting the Russian kitchen run by Ms Starr, an émigrée and recent widow whose late husband had been a radical socialist.3 Local Communists gathered in her noisy dining room to discuss politics over borsch, pelmeni and tea. Some regulars went for the food, others for the local women. Several students began affairs and even started living with the wives of the radicals. One relationship grew so intense that the American woman pursued her man to Moscow after his graduation.4 The recently returned Russian already had a wife back home who was far from amused to meet a rival. Another student became inebriated at an émigré’s house. During prohibition, he had to be rescued and smuggled back to college by taxi.5
Such gatherings soon began to attract the very people the students had been told back home so many times to avoid: local revolutionary Russian émigrés who had sought asylum in the US. Most disturbingly of all, the students started to receive at their college addresses Trotskyist literature calling for the overthrow of the Soviet leadership.6 It was Cherniavsky who had sought out the Trotskyists and had begun plotting with them. When the gossip and scandals reached the students’ Communist Party cell leader, Yefim Medkov, he was presented with many disciplinary headaches.7
Cherniavsky’s behaviour around campus was becoming increasingly troublesome. Although a serving intelligence officer, he was apparently making every effort to reveal himself and was just one step from being exposed to the US authorities, thus putting at risk not just the student exchange plan, Shumovsky’s vital mis
sion, but Stalin’s grand schemes. Already suspected by his housemates of being an NKVD secret policeman sent to keep an eye on them,fn1 Cherniavsky was irresponsible, unsociable and odd. Worse, he was a political fanatic. No one knows exactly what he told the Trotskyists about his mission, but he certainly told them he worked for military intelligence.8 His moods were fuelled by a growing sense of frustration and impatience at the political situation back in Russia. His politics was rooted in the soil and in the fortunes of the peasant. Cherniavsky harboured anarchist tendencies, believing that violent action was the way to replace Russia’s leadership. Remarkably for an intelligence officer on a secret mission, he gladly included in his political discussions those who did not share his extremist views.
Medkov recognised Cherniavsky as a troublemaker, but what he knew was the tip of the iceberg.9 At some stage during his studies at MIT, Cherniavsky had fallen in with a leading American Trotskyist whom he called Riaskin.fn2 Riaskin was a friend of Ludwig Lore, who was leading the NKVD a merry dance with his fake intelligence reports. Lore and Riaskin had split from the American Communist Party in the late 1920s – Lore was expelled for political heresy – and Riaskin had worked for AMTORG at some time. The pair had long political discussions, and at some point, Cherniavsky was recruited to the Trotskyist underground movement. Riaskin convinced Cherniavsky he was receiving direct orders from Trotsky.10
At the monthly Party meetings, Cherniavsky would create disputes by making deliberately provocative statements.11 By temperament he was close to Trotsky’s ideal of a permanent revolutionary, he also intermittently embroiled himself in the political infighting of the US Communist Party and in the controversies in Russia provoked by collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan. Cherniavsky was aghast at the devastation produced in the Russian countryside by the brutality and speed with which collectivisation had been implemented, his conviction that the process had failed horribly becoming part of a broader loss of faith in the Soviet system. He became increasingly disenchanted when he realised that Stalin and his Politburo had abandoned the Soviet Union’s commitment to fomenting world revolution, while his time at MIT convinced him that Stalin’s planned economy could not catch up and compete with American capitalism. By 1934 he had come to believe that ‘Trotskyism’ alone could rescue Russia from what he considered to be the dead end of the Stalinist bureaucracy. For Russia to find a way forward and be able to compete with the West, ‘the only solution was to overthrow Stalin’.12
The Spy Who Changed History Page 14