The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  Convinced by Riaskin that his orders were coming direct from his hero Trotsky, Cherniavsky was persuaded to form a group back in Moscow to work to topple the Soviet leader.13 He recruited senior members of the Kremlin guard into his group to gain access to Stalin. They resolved to break into the Palace and either execute or arrest the leadership. Riaskin supplied the phone number of the underground liaison person in Moscow who coordinated contacts between the domestic Trotskyist opposition and the exiles. That person was Raisa Bennett.14

  • • •

  So how was such an unstable figure sent to MIT? At the time he undertook his mission to the United States, Cherniavsky ranked number three in the Soviet chemical weapons hierarchy.15 There was no deep pool of Soviet talent with the experience to analyse poison gases or gas masks, and the mission was considered vital.

  Born within a few months of each other, Stan and Mikhail’s lives had followed similar paths, leading them to intersect at Boston, but had it not been for the Communist Revolution it is unlikely they would have met, except perhaps in the army. However, Cherniavsky made choices in Boston that ensured that the two men’s lives ended very differently.16

  Cherniavsky was nearing thirty when he arrived at MIT. He like Shumovsky had already led a full and eventful life.17 He came from Misupt, a small village in the Myadzel in the Tsarist Vilnius province, which today is in Belarus. Cherniavsky had been active in extreme radical peasant politics as a teenager, only turning to Communism in March 1920. In 1917, he was a member of the extreme Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Left SR), a radical peasant party, and an active member of its terrorist wing. The Left SRs were at one stage coalition partners of the Communists and openly espoused a policy of political assassination to achieve their goals. On joining the Left SRs, Cherniavsky met his lifelong mentor Yakov Fishman, a senior figure in the movement, learning from him all about the methods of assassinating political leaders.18 The pair were members of a committee violently opposed to the peace signed with imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk and to the presence of the Kaiser’s troops occupying Ukraine. The Left SR movement unleashed a campaign of violence designed to restart the war on the Eastern Front by assassinating world leaders, including President Woodrow Wilson. The campaign began with the murder of the Kaiser’s ambassador, Count Mierbach, in Moscow in July 1918. Fishman made the bombs and organised the murder.

  ’Death to Germans!’ Left SRs in Ukraine, 1918. Yakov Fishman (extreme right, front row) and Mikhail Cherniavsky (centre, back row)

  Cherniavsky hid from the subsequent round-up by enlisting in the Red Army, and served in the military continuously until his arrest in June 1935. He received his formal education in the army, graduating from the 1st Soviet Command Course in 1920, the Higher Military Chemical School for Commanders Course in 1921–3, and an advanced class for the Chemical Corps of the Red Army in 1924–5.19

  Like Shumovsky, Cherniavsky fought with distinction in the Civil War in battles against the Whites and the Poles. He served in the 17th Infantry Division from May 1919 to March 1920, operating in Lithuania, Ukraine and Belorussia. Promoted to platoon commander, he was then transferred as a company commander to the 15th Syvash Division, serving with them from November 1920 until September 1921. In November 1920, the division fought its way into the Crimea across Lake Syvash, an enormous natural obstacle of stinking mud, and fought in the mopping-up operation against Baron Wrangel’s forces. Later he was made head of chemical defence of the 37th Division in Novocherkassk as the unit was readied for an attack on the White holdouts in Siberia.20

  His collaborator, Yakov Fishman, was nothing if not a survivor and a savvy political operator. Despite murdering the German ambassador, he was now the rising star of the Red Army’s Chemical Warfare Division. Dr Fishman was a devotee of US General Amos Fries, head of the US Chemical Warfare Service. Fries helpfully published in 1921 a detailed book expounding every aspect of chemical warfare, including formulae and dozens of pictures.21 Fishman used the book as his indispensable guide when in 1925 he began organising the Soviet chemical weapons capability. Describing the plan as the ‘American model’, he focused on four elements: developing the supply of chemical weapons to the army, testing the gases for combat use, acquiring protective equipment, and pyrotechnics.22

  In 1926, and in need of a trusted colleague to work with the German army specialists now testing poison gases in a secret base outside Moscow, Fishman remembered his old friend.23 He made Mikhail head of his military laboratory as well as assistant chief of the secret chemical weapons test site. In Dr Fishman’s lab, Cherniavsky worked on biological as well as chemical weapons, including tests on the effects of live anthrax spores on animals. Dr Fishman had gained a PhD at Naples University. For the next five years Cherniavsky also spied on German technicians at work in Russia, first for Fishman and then for Military Intelligence. The highly secret and illegal chemical testing project jointly carried out by the Soviets and the Germans was codenamed ‘Tomka’, and as the work expanded it was moved from Moscow to a larger base at Shikhany, near Volsk in the Volga area. The new site was large enough to test-spray powdered poison gas from aircraft. The results were described to Stalin as ‘promising’. It was while working with the Germans that Cherniavsky first demonstrated the skill with languages that would lead to his appointment on missions to the USA.24

  Mikhail joined Military Intelligence officially in February 1927, becoming chief of the chemical sector of the 3rd (information-statistical) Department.25 He spent his time reporting on the work of the German specialists in Russia. It had become apparent that the relationship between the Soviets and the Germans was less one of close cooperation than of mutual suspicion. The Soviets believed the Germans were failing to share their latest technology, while the Germans were nervous of being caught openly breaching the Versailles Treaty, and suspicious of the Soviets as they supported the German Communists.

  Cherniavsky’s military record goes on to show that from June 1931 until January 1935 he went abroad on a series of what are described as ‘business trips’.26 These were his missions to the USA. In his 1934 self-appraisal he explained what he had done in America: ‘I studied the chemical capabilities of foreign armies.’27 His final role was as head of the 3rd branch of the 3rd (military equipment) Department of Military Intelligence between January and June 1935.28

  Unlike Shumovsky, who arrived as a student, Cherniavsky used the cover of a genuine business trip to New York sponsored by AMTORG to secretly enter America. After disembarking, he quickly disappeared from view; probably he spent his time visiting factories up and down the East Coast as part of a purchasing commission, gathering intelligence. When the opportunity arose to enrol on a course at an elite university, allowing him to extend his visa, he grabbed it. But Cherniavsky was not interested in gaining an education; he already had the practical experience to teach the chemistry course, given his recent assignment working with the Germans. In fact, he never finished the chemistry course, vanishing from campus one day in 1934.29 His sole goal at MIT had been to collect the valuable intelligence on chemical warfare and high explosives demanded by his mentor Dr Yakov Fishman in line with his American plan.

  Fishman is known as the father of the Red Army’s biological weapons capability. He was called by Vladimir Ipatiev, an ex-colleague and a defector to the US who formed an intense dislike for him, ‘a miniature chemical Napoleon’. As far as Ipatiev was concerned, Fishman was a fanatical plodder, a political animal hand in glove with the security service.30

  Having been a spy himself, Fishman loved undercover work. In the mid-1920s he had been posted to Berlin as the military attaché as cover for his spying. His letters from the time survive in the Russian archives. He had a double reporting line, writing with news of his discoveries directly to Mikhail Frunze, then head of the Red Army, but also to Yan Berzin, head of Military Intelligence.31 His interests were widespread, ranging from chemical warfare and aircraft to politics; among the results of his espionage was the discovery
that a gas mask offered to the Soviets by the Germans for mass production was obsolete, and that the German army was introducing a more advanced model. No doubt Fishman would have trained his pupil Cherniavsky in the dark arts of acquiring information.

  Germany, the most scientifically innovative country after the US, was viewed as a key target, and secret military cooperation, including on chemical weapons, between Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period is well documented. Less is known about the parallel collaboration between Italy and the Soviet Union. As Italy had used gas extensively in its colonial war in Ethiopia, it had experience in its use. Dr Fishman headed a Soviet mission to meet Benito Mussolini, seeking to buy Italy’s expertise in chemical weapons. They were an unlikely pair to share toasts – a fascist dictator and a committed Communist.

  It was a combination of the publication of Fries’ book Chemical Warfare and an official visit to the United States by the head of the German army that brought Cherniavsky to the US. Unwisely, in his attempt to lobby Congress for budget dollars to fund his programme, Fries had given away to his Soviet readers vital secrets of chemical warfare. Ironically, as events turned out, this Dr Strangelove figure, fanatical about using gas in war, was a fierce anti-Communist, believing that attempts to disarm the US were an evil plot. He went as far as building up his own intelligence network to infiltrate groups that he considered his opponents. His passionate belief in using gas in war went against the 1925 Geneva Protocol, a treaty signed by thirty-eight countries, including the USA, which made the use of such weapons illegal. Fries taught the Soviets a persuasive and horrifying story about future gas warfare. The next war, he envisaged, would involve the mass release of powdered mustard gas – now called Yperite, after Ypres where it was first used – from aircraft adapted to spray chemicals over civilian areas such as factories or farmland. With the help of the Germans, the Soviets learned how to spray Yperite gas. The Americans had hosted a long trip for the head of the German Army High Command, General Wilhelm Heye, in 1927. Heye was a close friend of Hans von Seeckt, the driving force behind cooperation with the Soviets. Heye’s observations on his trip to every US military facility, including the headquarters of the US Chemical Weapons Service, were passed in their entirety to the Soviets.32 Based on the trip, Cherniavsky was sent to America to learn from the US experience how to industrialise the production of chemicals and explosives.33

  Like Shumovsky, Mikhail sourced his information from the works in the university library, from lecture rooms, from working in the chemical laboratories, and most importantly from MIT’s connections such as Edgewood Arsenal, the HQ of US Chemical Weapon Services. But their methods were very different. Mikhail went about his work in an extraordinarily brazen manner. He was described by the Russian students as running between libraries in search of chemistry material and behaving in the oddest way. There was no finesse to his work and certainly no attempt to leave the pond undisturbed.

  Mikhail was not at MIT to recruit agents but to obtain as quickly as possible much of the knowledge that America had gained since the publication of Fries’s book in 1921. His mission was a smash-and-grab raid on MIT. Conveniently, the head of MIT’s Department of Chemistry at the time, Professor Frederick G. Keyes, had served in the US Chemical Warfare Service during the First World War and had established a laboratory for the American Expeditionary Force in France.34 In February 1918, he had organised a complete laboratory for research and testing in chemistry, physics and bacteriology, and oversaw the shipping of that laboratory to France. General Pershing cited Keyes for outstanding service, and he received the Purple Heart. His specialisations included the thermodynamic properties of gases and experimenting at low temperatures. While studying in the Chemistry Department at MIT, Cherniavsky was able to take ‘military science’ courses on ‘Defense against Chemical Warfare’, which gave him the opportunity to examine first hand US gas masks and other technology, as well as to copy recent research.

  The main issue with chemical weapons, then as now, is how to make them effective on the battlefield. The First World War’s static warfare was ideal for the release of poison gas from storage tanks, and later from shells, but its effectiveness was reduced by changes in wind direction or a drop in temperature. The Germans had first attempted to use tear gas against the Russians at the Battle of Bolimov on 31 January 1915, fired in liquid form contained in 18,000 15 cm howitzer shells. This first experiment proved unsuccessful, with the tear-gas liquid failing to vaporise in the freezing temperatures prevalent in Russia. Mustard gas replaced chlorine and phosgene as the ‘king of the battlefield’ by 1917. The Russians suffered the largest number of gas casualties, and of those a much higher proportion of fatalities, than any of the other combatants in the First World War. The reasons are twofold: first, the prevailing wind direction was towards their lines, making the use of gas more frequent; and second, they lacked effective countermeasures.

  America had a key secret the Soviets wanted. In 1903 a young American priest, Father Julius Arthur Nieuwland, working on his doctoral degree at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, created a new substance. This would prove to be America’s significant contribution to chemical warfare. While he was mixing compounds during an experiment, his flask turned black, and the mixture formed a black, gummy mass with a penetrating odour. The gas released caused the priest to become seriously ill. Later, in 1918, Winford Lee Lewis, an associate professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, was given the task of developing and producing novel gases. He recreated the priest’s compound, with the result that it ‘took on a nauseating odor and [caused] marked irritation effect to the mucous surfaces. A headache resulting persists several hours and the material seems to be quite toxic.’35 The perfected product was named Lewisite after him.

  The inventors Lewis and Nieuwland believed in gas warfare. They thought the use of poison gas would make wars more humane by shortening them and avoiding the suffering of innocent civilians. General Amos Fries named Lewisite the ‘dew of death’ in his book and revealed there had been plans in the First World War to spray it over the enemy from aircraft in order to end the fighting. The gas was thought to be so deadly that ten planes armed with it could eliminate every trace of life in Berlin. Many newspaper articles sensationalised the effects of Lewisite; one reported that it was seventy-two times more potent than mustard gas, a single drop on the back of a hand a fatal dose. Another stated that Lewisite was capable of sterilising the ground so that ‘nothing will grow upon it for at least two years and perhaps longer’, and that one drop of it on living flesh caused ‘mortification’.36

  The news fascinated Fishman. Lewisite was an ideal gas for Russian conditions as it was believed to be most damaging in dry conditions of low temperature and low humidity. The gas could be fatal in as little as ten minutes when inhaled in high concentrations. It had other benefits too: it was persistent, lasting up to six to eight hours in sunny weather, and even longer in cold, dry climates. The poison vapour was about seven times heavier than air and would therefore hover along the ground and enter caves, trenches and sewers. Having mastered the production of Yperite, Fishman now wished to learn how to mass-produce Lewisite.

  US mass production of Lewisite took place at Edgewood Arsenal. In 1921, two British scientists, Stanley Green and Thomas Price, published the formula for Lewisite in The Journal of the Chemical Society. Cherniavsky was ordered to find out how to manufacture the gas on a grand scale. His efforts at Edgewood Arsenal and its partner MIT were successful, and following his mission the Soviet Union began producing massive quantities of the material, eventually disposing of approximately twenty thousand tons of it in the Arctic Ocean during the late 1940s and ’50s. Churchill offered Stalin thousands of tons of British poison gas in 1941 to repel the German invasion.37 Thanks to Soviet espionage efforts, Stalin, who had his own vast stocks, could decline the offer.

  By the early 1930s, Fishman’s and Cherniavsky’s work had come to Japanese attention. The Japanese
army saw conflict as inevitable and were planning for a grand land war against Russia. It is unclear whether their information about chemical weapons came from espionage; it may have been revealed when the Soviets used mustard gas sprayed from an aircraft in western China. The Japanese responded by building in Ping Fan, a small village near the city of Harbin, the largest biological and chemical warfare laboratory known to exist at the time. It was known as Unit 731, a vast complex covering six square kilometres and consisting of more than 150 buildings, with living quarters and amenities for up to 3,000 Japanese staff members, 300–500 of whom were medical doctors and scientists.

  The prospect of chemical warfare was not mere paranoia; it was a serious threat. During the fourteen years of the Sino-Japanese War (1931–45), Japan used poison gases more than 2,000 times in direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, to which they had been a signatory. Japanese attacks killed tens of thousands of Chinese, including many civilians. There were reports, moreover, during the Second World War of isolated incidents of the use of biological weapons on the Eastern Front.