The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  Chemical weapons were stored just behind the front by all sides, but the mobility of the war, rather than ethical qualms, made them hard to use. The US deployed 400 chemical battalions consisting of 60,000 men in the Second World War. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged the use of poison gas to break the stalemate in Normandy and to bomb industrial sites. In 1944 an air raid on Allied shipping in Bari harbour, southern Italy, caused the accidental release of Allied mustard gas, killing an unknown number of Italian civilians and eighty-three servicemen.

  • • •

  As soon as he arrived at MIT, Cherniavsky began to scour the libraries for publications and research papers on chemical warfare. In an era before the invention of the photocopier, this involved many hours making handwritten notes. Military Intelligence did not provide him with a secure communication network to transmit his information back to Moscow. Instead, he gave it directly to Military Intelligence’s top man in New York, the Rezident, to forward to Moscow. Interrogated a dozen times in 1935 by the NKVD, Cherniavsky revealed that he regarded his espionage mission to MIT as a failure. He put the blame for the failure of his work to narrow the technology gap between the USSR and the rest of the world on his former boss at the Lyublino chemical warfare research centre, located in a Moscow suburb. Cherniavsky denounced Vladimir Rokhinson, number two behind Fishman as a cynical, bureaucratic time-server (the comparison with the supportive, productive relationship Shumovsky enjoyed with Tupolev is notable). Cherniavsky had hoped that the intelligence he collected at MIT would undermine Rokhinson’s attempts to conceal from the Soviet leadership the backwardness of his research centre. Although the revelations would cost him his life, his whistleblowing was effective. Rokhinson was removed.38

  Cherniavsky claimed that Rokhinson had been given samples of the US Army mortars he had acquired. The US models had superior range, rate of fire and accuracy. They easily ‘outclassed’ those in use by Red Army Chemical Units. But Rokhinson had made no attempt to imitate them. Instead, to satisfy his superiors, he had exaggerated in his reports the performance of the Soviet mortars, whose range and rate of fire was only a third of what he claimed. The troops on the ground were kept ignorant of the fact that their equipment was inferior while the leadership was deliberately misled.

  It was the same story with Soviet gas masks. Through his espionage activities, Cherniavsky had acquired the most advanced model. He had worked with the Reichswehr, secretly testing chemical weapons in Russia. The German gas mask was years ahead of the primitive and outmoded Soviet version. The German model offered protection against the latest generation of gases, which the Red Army and the civilian population were likely to encounter in the next war. Yet, to his frustration, Rokhinson refused even to examine the German gas mask, let alone commission improvements to the Soviet one. The best espionage network had hit a roadblock. Cherniavsky came to blame the entire system.

  • • •

  Cherniavsky was later arrested for his part in the ‘Kremlin Affair’, his plot to kill Stalin on 21 June 1935. Dismissed from the Red Army, on 27 July 1935 he was sentenced at a closed court session to be shot.39 Having been executed on the personal orders of Stalin, the only one of the hundred or so arrested to receive a death sentence, he was rehabilitated in 1958.

  Cherniavsky could have enjoyed the same kind of successful espionage career as his more pragmatic colleague Shumovsky, but instead, his life ended in tragedy and disappointment. His life story is preserved in stunning detail in the NKVD files that record Cherniavsky’s interrogation at their hands. Notably, Cherniavsky’s responses to his interrogators show the immense pressure each of the agents was under, and the difficulty some of them had in reconciling their expectations of a socialist utopia with the great suffering and failures that seemed to characterise the country’s attempts to catch up with the rest of the world. He exclaimed his despair at the state of the USSR relative to the modern USA by saying, ‘Is this really my Motherland?’40

  For many, Cherniavsky was a ghost that could not be laid to rest. The whole Politburo discussed his case at length, believing him to be a terrorist and themselves a target. Stalin explained in a speech what it felt like to be threatened by assassin’s bullets because of his policies. Cherniavsky was pilloried nationally as a notorious example of evil in the league of John Wilkes Booth. His fate caused deep ripples in the Soviet intelligence community and resulted in the defection of two wavering agents. It was an uncomfortable time for the MIT party, several of whom were called in for interrogation by the NKVD. For Shumovsky, Mikhail remained a problem. There were awkward questions to be answered in the future.

  7

  ‘QUESTIONABLE FROM CONCEPTION’

  Joy1 Bennett was just two years old when she arrived for the first and last time in what should have been her home country, the United States. She had sailed across the Pacific to Los Angeles, California in late 1932 with her mother Raisa, universally known as Ray.2 The pair then disappeared for several months, only breaking cover when they made a desperate dash to the local hospital, where Joy’s mother hoped to have a last meeting with her dying, estranged father. Although – or rather because – she was an American, Ray was Soviet Military Intelligence’s primary agent on the West Coast. Two-year-old Joy was her cover.

  Ray arrived too late to see her father, but some eight decades later in Moscow, 86-year-old Joy can still recall a few details of the months she spent in the US, playing on the beach and meeting relatives. Joy was later robbed of her mother forever as a result of Mikhail Cherniavsky’s confessions. Ray Bennett was arrested and jailed by the Soviets in 1935, but Joy only learned the reasons why in 2017. Ray’s story provides the earliest contemporary evidence of the involvement of some of the leading figures of US-based Soviet spy rings and is one of the few accurate, unvarnished first-hand accounts of working for Military Intelligence.

  Ray Epstein Bennett, as she styled herself, was one of a unique generation of Russian-Jewish socialists, a firebrand in search of a cause. Like many of her generation, she found that cause in Communism. In search of a better life, the parents of young people like her had crowded into the tenements of Brooklyn and other cities to take low-paid jobs, often in the garment industry. But in America, their children came to believe as they grew up that the game of life was stacked unfairly against them because they were Jews. The majority accepted their lot and got on with their lives quietly. Some chose to join unions fighting for better pay and conditions. But several thousand joined the radical political parties of the left. Finding themselves at the bottom of the social pile, the Jews felt they had least to lose and most to gain from seeking social change. Among this generation, Soviet intelligence found dozens of volunteers who, like Ray, wanted to make a difference. Without them, Soviet espionage would not have been able to function in the US in the 1930s and 1940s.

  Ray was born with a fierce independent streak. Her family understood she was different, and that with her fiery character she was destined to be trouble. As she grew up, she would openly challenge the established order, convinced that unfairness must be confronted, society changed and injustice beaten. The family remembers Ray as a strong-willed, round-faced girl with bright blue eyes who was always laughing. After her disappearance – her family lost all contact with her without explanation. It was not a time to ask too many questions – her brother recalled, ‘nobody cried when they spoke of Ray, there would just be a far-away look, a sigh filled with regret or envy, sometimes a resigned shrug of the shoulders.’3 She had found her cause in life, and she followed it.

  Soviet sources record that Ray was born in April 1899 in Petrozavodsk in Karelia Russia, later the site of a famous UFO sighting. Following the premature death of her mother, an actress, her father Solomon Epstein emigrated alone to America in 1907. The three motherless children, Ray and her two brothers, went to Slutsk, a famous rabbinical centre in Belorussia, to live with their grandmother. Following her brothers, in November 1913, at the age of just fourteen, Ray sai
led aboard SS Kursk from Libau in Latvia for New York to rejoin her demanding father. She barely knew him. Solomon, as the family recalled, ‘was a hellion, a man so involved in himself that he didn’t realize that he had children to look after. So they looked after themselves, forming a kind of co-op, with the boys looking after their fiery sister.’4

  Ray joined the large Russian Jewish community in Brooklyn. She came from a family of printers, and her father was a linotype compositor. Almost immediately, she began to challenge her father’s traditional views that she should devote her life to looking after him, her elder twin brothers Jacob (Jack) and Julius and her father’s new family. One emotional argument culminated in the daughter throwing a loaf of bread at her father.

  Ray adjusted quickly to life in America, mastering English in just three years. She terrified her family, when making the valedictory speech at her graduation in 1917 from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, by proclaiming her view that it was immoral to buy Liberty Bonds in support of America’s participation in the Great War. Ray saw the conflict as evil and imperialist, and was happy to share her opinion even during the wave of popular patriotic fervour that followed the entry of the US into the war. The family feared that her school might cancel her graduation; instead, the rebel was merely banned from the rest of the celebrations.

  The brightest of her family, Ray was the only one who pursued her education, graduating from Hunter College New York in 1921 as a teacher. She taught English as a foreign language and instructed new immigrants about the American way of life. These were skills that would prove useful for her espionage career. She paid her way through college by working as a courier for a publisher, a candy seller for the Soft Candy Store in Brooklyn and a bookseller on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the National Education Association store. She married Nisson Neikrug, a remote relative, in 1919 before graduating. She had met her future husband through her brothers Jack and Julius and their union activity. Neikrug had studied engineering at nights at the Cooper Union but could find no work as an engineer and instead became a linotype operator. He had fled Russia to escape military service in the Tsar’s army in 1914, and then dodged the US draft in 1917 on the grounds that he was not a US citizen. At some point, in a vain effort to escape the anti-Jewish prejudice that he believed prevented him from pursuing his vocation to be an engineer, he changed his name to Julius (Jules) Bennett.

  News of the twin revolutions in 1917 gripped the Russian émigré community in New York with much excitement. Few were more enthusiastic than Ray. She and Jules became immersed in underground activities for the Jewish section of the Communist Party. Ray was a junior Party leader and educator of new recruits. The family recall that Ray and Jules would have people over most evenings for political meetings at their home and songs sung in Russian could be heard from behind closed doors. Once she found her cause there was no stopping her: there were no limits to her anger at the exploitation of human beings, at the injustice meted out to women and at the brutal way the city and national authorities would seek to control and break the growing labour unions. She joined the CPUSA in 1922, a year after her husband.5

  Ray was one of many eager volunteers who wanted to go to the USSR immediately, but with no relevant skills to match her enthusiasm she had to be content, like many hundreds of others, with helping the Revolution from afar. To maintain her interest, the Party told her that she was a valued active worker of its New York organisation and that, due to a ‘lack of activist cadres’, her departure to the Soviet Union had been refused by the Central Committee. She was too valuable to be sent away. Few would remain so persistent in wanting to travel to the land of Lenin.

  Eventually, her lobbying to go to Moscow bore fruit. In 1923, she gained permission from the Central Committee of the American Communist Party for a short trip to the Soviet Union. She could finally be spared from her activist duties in New York. She earnestly hoped that if she were to get a job in the Soviet Union, then she would be able to remain and petition for a transfer to the Soviet Communist Party. Her loyalty to the cause was so great that she was prepared to leave her family and her adopted country.6 Family records suggest that Ray may have taken the trip to recover from the loss of her first child, a daughter, in infancy.7 She later told the NKVD that the child had been named Stalin.8

  Ray journeyed to Europe under a false name, as the wife of a doctor. She had first obtained US naturalisation papers and a passport, stating to the authorities that she was travelling to Latvia via Germany as a trade representative of her relatives’ leather and fur company. The relatives had no idea she was using their business name in this way.

  When Ray finally made it to the Soviet Union she spent months there as a tourist, living in Moscow and visiting her grandmother in Slutsk. Before her departure from New York, she had agreed with her husband Jules that if she were to find a job in the Soviet Union she would remain there permanently and he would come over and join her. In fact, Jules could not travel, as he had lost the right to a US passport and re-entry thanks to his refusal of the draft in 1917, when he had stated he was not a US citizen and had no desire to be so. If he left the US, he would be unable to return.

  As it turned out, Ray was unable to find a job in the Soviet Union and so returned to the US. Still waiting for any opportunity to serve the Revolution in the USSR, she worked thereafter at AMTORG’s offices promoting Soviet cinema and for a Russian-language newspaper published by the Communist Party in New York. Telling her family that she and her husband had saved enough money to make their dream of living in the USSR a reality, she travelled back to the USSR, this time with Jules, in 1927. They boarded a ship and went to the Soviet Union via Germany. This time she thought she was going back to the land of her birth for good, to a place she believed held new promise, and where the future worked. However, before their departure from America Jules had encountered some serious difficulties in his workplace. Caught by the management of AMTORG trying to break into the desk of a colleague, Jules explained his actions by saying he had believed the fellow employee was involved in various ‘unlawful purchasing operations’– in other words taking bribes.9 To confirm his suspicions, Jules had decided to examine the documents stored in the desk. Unsurprisingly AMTORG’s management did not believe him, and he was fired for attempted theft.

  After arriving in the USSR, Jules transferred his membership from the CPUSA to the All-Union Communist Party, eventually becoming deputy head of the RUDA (Iron Ore) Trust in Pivdennorudnyi, Ukraine. He was finally an engineer.

  To no one’s surprise, the Bennetts divorced shortly after arriving in the Soviet Union. Jules was softly spoken, a gentle soul, while his wife was a force of nature. Ray found herself a job in Moscow teaching English and the American way of life at the Frunze Red Army Military Academy Eastern Division. She began an affair and soon married one of her pupils, Joseph Ovadis, a senior member of the Intelligence Directorate and a man of action. She taught every agent heading to the Far East English, getting to know as friends most of the military intelligence community. She officially joined Soviet military intelligence under what she described as ‘rather random circumstances’. In 1928, while staying with a pupil from the Intelligence Directorate in the spa town of Kislovodsk – the hometown of the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn – at a newly opened sanatorium resort named after the ten-year anniversary of the October Revolution, she met of all people Yan Berzin, head of the Directorate, who by chance was holidaying there. After an introduction from her companion, she struck up a conversation with Berzin; when he discovered she spoke English and held an American passport, he suggested she should start working for the Directorate. Ray had finally found the opportunity to serve the cause that she had spent her whole life looking for.

  Upon her return to Moscow, Berzin enrolled Ray in the central intelligence apparatus of the Red Army, although her background was completely unknown to the Intelligence Directorate. She became a deputy section head. Later on, during her interrogations, the NKVD would ex
press surprise at the lack of any vetting by their fellow espionage agency.10

  After a few months of training in field craft and radio work, Ray was dispatched on her first overseas mission, to China in July 1929, when she was appointed assistant to the Shanghai-based resident, the head of Military Intelligence in the city. Uprooting herself from Moscow using her now former American nationality, Ray spent twelve days on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, travelling in the luxurious but dangerous international first-class compartment. The route was notorious for the presence of foreign counter-intelligence officers posing as passengers, looking out for Russian agents on their way to China. In order to maintain their cover story, Soviet agents were told never to speak Russian in conversation with their fellow passengers from the moment they boarded the train, and even if possible while asleep. Ray had another important task on the journey: she would have to remember a cipher of thirty-two random numbers, each corresponding to a letter of the Russian alphabet. For security reasons, the cipher could never be written down.

  After the train journey, there was a further two-day trip by boat to reach Shanghai. On her arrival in China, she made no mention of a Russian husband and her new nationality when registering with the local authorities. Before her departure, she had renewed her American passport at the consulate in Riga, Latvia. The new passport contained no clues such as inconvenient stamps revealing her long stay in Moscow that would arouse suspicion. She rented an apartment on rue La Fayette in the stylish French concession, near the 50,000-seat greyhound racing track. The premier residential and luxury retail district of Shanghai, the French concession was popular with foreigners and wealthy Chinese alike. At the time Shanghai was the entertainment centre of Asia and a playground for the rich and famous. Foreigners and Chinese flocked to Shanghai to get rich quick and indulge in the pleasures on offer, which included brothels, gambling houses and drug dens. The infamous Triad gangs controlled much of the city, the most notorious being the Green Gang headed by Du Yue-sheng (‘Big Eared Du’), a staunch and murderous ally of the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek.