Bennett’s was not the first Military Intelligence operation in the United States. German Communist Felix Wolf had undertaken a similar mission just a few years earlier, and his fate is demonstrative of the stress that agents like Ray felt themselves under. Having enrolled for a short time at Columbia University in New York as a graduate student, he found, like Ray, working as a spy alone so far from home without a support network extremely stressful, and he cracked. After travelling undercover along the East Coast and as far afield as Chicago in a fruitless search for industrial secrets, he abandoned his mission and fled back to Moscow fearing arrest. But there was no threat to him except the one he imagined. There are no US records of his presence, even at Columbia University.
Ray had one special mission to fulfil, and for this she sought the assistance of the Intelligence Directorate resident. To complete the task, she needed to make contact with a trusted representative from the US Communist Party. Having been put in touch with a former church minister with Communist sympathies, she revealed at their meeting that she came from the Soviet Union and was carrying out an illegal mission. She needed urgently to contact Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer; it was hoped that the minister could make an introduction.
Sinclair had written a letter to Stalin in October requesting the pardoning of a Russian from a death sentence. He had also financed a disastrous film made in Hollywood by the Soviet film director Sergey Eisenstein. Provisionally entitled ‘Que Viva Mexico’, it was a plotless travelogue and in its original version is unwatchable. Eisenstein shot some fifty hours of film before even deciding he was making a six-part social history of Mexico. Having advanced $25,000, Sinclair wanted to dig himself out of the deepening financial hole. Eisenstein’s stock had fallen in Moscow following his extended absence from the USSR, and with the advent of talkies his avant-garde style was considered old-fashioned. As it was, the contract he had signed ensured that the USSR would have the finished film for free.
Stalin wrote back promptly, having gained the impression that as a prominent, popular socialist Sinclair could help the Soviet Union in their Manchurian crisis, perhaps by speaking out on their behalf. Showing his close personal involvement in the mission, Ray was under orders directly from Stalin to contact the writer. Stalin even went so far as to underline Sinclair’s address in Pasadena so Ray could find him.23
Through the good offices of the minister, Ray managed to arrange a meeting with the author, but it was a disaster. Sinclair had a strong belief in the paranormal and the power of psychic prediction, but he was unprepared for what happened next. After introductions and pleasantries, the small, round-faced woman, rather than offer financial support for his film, suddenly announced to Sinclair that she was in America on an illegal spying mission for the Soviet Union and expected him to help her. Sinclair was completely shocked. In panic, and fearing a setup, he started demanding bona fides and a recommendation from the CPUSA. Ray was unable to produce any such assurances and fled.
After the debacle, Ray moved quickly on to San Francisco. She next met with Kipper, the first wife of Morris Childs, a senior member of the CPUSA. In Moscow at the time, studying at the Lenin School and training to become an NKVD agent himself, Childs would later become the FBI’s greatest double agent and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Ray and Kipper would become friends, working together to get Joy an American passport.fn1 24
The resident at the Consulate had given Ray the most valuable introduction possible, to none other than the General Secretary of the CPUSA, Earl Browder. Ray knew Browder in California, and spoke about him later to the NKVD using his codename FATHER. Through FATHER she made contact with two other leading lights of the Party, Irving Kaplan and Nathan Silvermaster; the three would later be exposed as the leading figures in the Soviet wartime spy rings.
All these meetings were unproductive. Ray had access to the top American Communists, but despite all the help she was receiving, establishing a cell on the West Coast was proving impossible. Lack of money for safe houses or recruiting agents was one issue. She found, like Gurvich, her boss in Shanghai, before her, that Moscow Centre underestimated the expense and difficulties of working in the field. In her opinion, there was too little support on offer for her to succeed. Nor was she the first to find that cooperation with the members of the CPUSA was difficult, as the Upton Sinclair debacle showed. The US Communist Party could and should have given her its white signed ribbon, identifying her to Sinclair as a person to trust. But the interests of Moscow and the CPUSA were already pulling in different directions. Following its newly adopted ‘Socialism in One Country’ policy, the USSR energetically sought information from America that was for the benefit of Soviet security alone, while CPUSA members were focused on the prospects for their domestic revolution. Earl Browder, their leader, was revealed by the defector Elizabeth Bentley to be intent less on intelligence gathering for the benefit of the USSR than on finding the details of industrial unrest for his own purposes.
• • •
Given the difficulties she was experiencing, Ray wanted out. She was keen to get home to Moscow and avoid a posting to Japan but suspected that permission would not be forthcoming, so she invented a pretext. She described to the NKVD how she became ‘exposed’. She and her contact, named Odner, made a plan to use a White officer for an intelligence operation:
Upon my orders, Odner had some meetings with this White to work on him. Once Odner reported to me that the White informed him that he was interrogated by a Major from American Counter Intelligence who was also interested in Odner. The Major was also interested in a woman who visited Odner at his flat, and the description matched that of myself. It became apparent to me that the police came to know of my relationship with Odner. Because of this, I was forced to abandon San Francisco and travel to New York.25
US counter-intelligence may have been interested in Odner, but they were in fact unaware of Ray at that time. The FBI’s interest and an urgent investigation started only much later.
Ray fled to New York, staying with a friend from her college days until October 1933 and meeting with her family, old friends and various political contacts. She refused to discuss her life in Moscow with her brothers, and the family knew better than to ask, although they gained the impression she was now married to a Soviet general and was possibly being pursued by the FBI. They were aware she had been in China but did not press her on what she had got up to there. Testing the political temperature, Ray made contact with members of the Trotskyist groups in Boston that were working actively to recruit Mikhail Cherniavsky. Her faith in Communism was as strong as ever, but the official Party line was now at odds with the views she had held since the early 1920s. She opposed the one-country approach to socialism and harboured doubts about the leadership. So she volunteered her services for the dangerous role as a coordinator of the Trotskyist centres abroad with those in Moscow. Her role as a Military Intelligence officer gave her a reason to be in touch with the US, while she passed her contact details in Moscow to the Trotskyist network.
On her return to Moscow, Ray was initially disciplined for abandoning her operation without permission. Suspended from the intelligence service, she was sent to a factory. But her language skills were needed too much. She might not have proved herself as an agent in the field, but Berzin appointed her head of foreign languages at the Intelligence Directorate.
One day in April 1935, Ray’s daughter came to her mother’s bedroom, as was her habit in the morning when they did exercises together. That morning the room was a mess, and there was no sign of her mother. Ray was gone, arrested by the NKVD over the Kremlin Affair. Her relationship with the ‘terrorist’ Cherniavsky – they met a few times in Moscow and discussed sedition – had proved her undoing.
After her arrest, Ray gave wholesale denunciations of her friends and colleagues, although much of what she said about their views seemed innocuous enough, had they not been serving intelligence officers. She also accused her ex-husband Jul
es of making jokes about Stalin and Molotov, reporting to her interrogators without realising the irony of his belief that it was prudent to watch what you said or the next step was a meeting with the NKVD.
Bennett was initially given a light sentence of five years in a labour camp, from where she was able to send secret letters to Joy at her kindergarten:
My little Joy, my Love!
I got your good letter and, you know, I immediately recognized the sunflower and quickly realized that the girl is doing gymnastics, as I did with you in the mornings. Remember how we put pads on the floor and did the bicycle exercise?
Here, two cows gave birth to small calves, one calf is all white with a black mark on the muzzle, and as soon as he was born, he immediately wanted to stand on his feet, and three of us had to hold him while he was bathed.
Then there is a black fox that sits on his tail in front of the cooperative, he is not afraid of people at all and asks for bread from everyone who leaves the store. He is a silver-black fox with a white tip on his tail. You and I have not seen a fox like him in the zoo. Are you now going to the zoo with your Daddy?
Anyuta writes that you are a good girl. You must dress yourself and tidy up all your toys neatly and obey Elena Semenovna and Daddy.
Little Joy, your mother loves you so much and always thinks about you and misses you very, very much. If you are a good girl and study well at the kindergarten, then I will be back with you by the time you go to school. You will already be big then. But do not forget me and know that I always love you and very much want to be with you.
Please give Aunt Anyuta your photograph, choose a good one with dimples, and she will send it to me. And can you draw me pictures and dictate letters to me, and getting them will be such fun for me. Learn to write and write me letters. Give a kiss from me to Elena Semyonovna and Lidochka. I kiss your eyes and dimples. You’re my favourite.
Your Mother.26
Ray’s husband returned from a mission in China a month after her arrest. He had a much better idea which way the wind was blowing and cut Ray out from all family pictures, refusing to discuss her again with his daughter. Ray was to disappear in the madness of the Great Purges. The details of her new crime, most probably a fresh denunciation, are lost for ever.
8
’THE WILY ARMENIAN’
In the summer of 1933, the next in the line of Soviet super-spies walked down the gangplank and straight into the fray in New York. The small and somewhat overweight man had a medium-dark complexion with dark brown hair and blue eyes. As he planned to be in America for a while, he was accompanied by his attractive wife, Vera, and their small daughter, Eugenia.1 Despite speaking somewhat broken English, at least according to the FBI, Gaik Ovakimian, codenamed GENNADY, was rapidly to become the nemesis of US counter-intelligence. The Bureau believed he ran hundreds of agents, and he earned the grudging admiration of his FBI tails for his skills in deception. They nicknamed him ‘the wily Armenian’ despite his cover being so effective that they were not even sure that was his place of origin.2 There is, however, no longer any doubt about Ovakimian’s ethnicity. The intelligence service of the twenty-first-century Armenian Republic still celebrates his successes during the Soviet era. They record with pride specifically his role in acquiring the atomic bomb and the plans for the B-29 Superfortress. Ovakimian was to earn another nickname during his life for his work as ‘the puppet master’, organising Operation ENORMOZ, which targeted the Manhattan Project. He is a true legend of Soviet espionage.
Posted to New York to take over as Stan Shumovsky’s supervisor, Ovakimian and his colleague would energetically transform the scale and intensity of Soviet S&T intelligence operations in the US. With their shared scientific backgrounds, the pair had so much in common that they became a great team. They were excellent planners and schemers. Having inherited a small ‘illegal’ programme with no formal structure, capable of staging only random pinprick missions, they created in its place a vast information harvesting machine employing several hundred American sub-agents run by a small number of intelligence officers.
Ovakimian’s first task had been to put the structures in place to support the new ‘legal’ networks operating out of the embassy, the consulates and AMTORG. As the results prove, he was successful. In 1939, a difficult year when information gathering was slow, his NKVD operation in the United States would obtain 18,000 pages of technical documents, 487 sets of designs and 54 samples of new technology.3
• • •
Gaik Ovakimian was born on 1 August 1898 in the small village of Dhzagrii, close to the Armenian capital of Erevan, then part of the Tsarist Empire.4 The city is overshadowed by nearby Mount Ararat, a dormant volcano and the traditional resting place of Noah’s Ark. He was one of five children of a clerk and, as a railway worker, was among the first to join the Communist Party in June 1917 as an eighteen-year-old. In May 1920, he was imprisoned after an unsuccessful Communist-led rising in Armenia’s second city, Alexandropol. At the end of that year, Sergey Kirov’s 11th Red Army, including the young Stanislav Shumovsky, marched in to found, ‘by the will of the toiling masses of Armenia’, a Soviet republic. Ovakimian was freed from prison and appointed a senior member of the small and newly established Armenian security service, the Cheka, before taking a high position in the government.
At the end of 1924, Ovakimian began studying chemistry at the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School; after a year of study, he went to work at the Economic Directorate of NKVD, which was fighting financial crime. The NKVD was a domestic and international security organisation, but it also had responsibility for border guards and even tax collecting. Resuming his academic studies in January 1925, Ovakimian graduated in December 1929. He moved on to postgraduate work at the Mendeleev Institute (now University) of Chemical Technology, which was renowned for its analytical and chemical engineering laboratories, receiving his first doctorate in 1931, one of the few awarded in the Soviet Union.
• • •
On graduation, and at the suggestion of the local Communist Party, Ovakimian was invited to the Lubyanka for the same friendly chat with Artur Artuzov that Shumovsky had enjoyed the previous year. Having studied metallurgy, Artuzov was the only member of the NKVD leadership with any higher technical education, and he realised the need to recruit outside the service if he was to find suitable XY line (S&T) officers. The Communist Party network at the universities was alerted to look out for scientists with strong language skills as potential intelligence recruits. In his Lubyanka office at the old insurance company building, now the headquarters of NKVD, the goatee-bearded son of an Italian-Swiss cheese maker, Artuzov – whose real name was Fraucci – sat behind a desk piled with personnel files. The opera singer manqué read Ovakimian’s biographical details, noticing he had studied briefly abroad, before asking a few questions about the current political situation. He then explained INO’s foreign intelligence role within the Five-Year Plan and offered Ovakimian a position in his newly formed XY department. Ovakimian immediately accepted. He was delighted to serve his motherland. His initial posting was not to America but to Berlin as an XY line officer based at the NKVD legal residency at the Soviet trade mission. Just before leaving Moscow on his first assignment he expressed to Artuzov some doubts about his ability, but was reassured with the words:
I am convinced that you will be a success in this role. To begin with, you are a scientist. With your education, high intelligence, knowledge of English and German languages you will be able to build friendships with people just like yourself. And not only that, you have a way about you that will persuade them to work with us. You will be able to use these friendships to recruit agents and acquire useful material for us. I have seen that when you are dealing with people, you have qualities of patience, flexibility, politeness and composure. These are vital in our business.5
Ovakimian learned his remarkable agent recruitment skills on the job in Germany. Artuzov was correct in his assessment of Ovakimian’s winning perso
nality, which soon led to his agents genuinely liking him. It was on this mission that Ovakimian had his introduction to espionage in the field of nuclear physics. His greatest success during his first year was to recruit, at a Berlin laboratory engaged in building high-energy accelerators, a German chemical engineer codenamed ROTHMAN. The summary of Ovakimian’s career in the SVR’s official history describes the intelligence he obtained from ROTHMAN as including valuable new methods of creating synthetic benzine and the agricultural fertiliser and explosive ammonium nitrate. Both the Red Army General Staff and the Research Institute of the People’s Commissariat of the Chemical Industry gave his first intelligence reports an ‘exceptionally high score’.6
In the United States, there were high expectations for this new German method of making benzine, even if these were misplaced. According to an article published in the US monthly magazine Popular Mechanics in May 1929, chemists had developed a process for making synthetic benzine. With the limited German supply of crude oil unable to meet the increasing demand for motor fuel, it was estimated that German synthetic production could reach up to 250,000 tons a year, approximately a quarter of the country’s entire fuel consumption.fn1
Apart from ROTHMAN, Ovakimian’s most productive recruit in Berlin was Hans-Heinrich Kummerow (codenamed FILTER), who provided documents on advanced optical instruments, echo sounders and gas masks. Kummerow would remain a Soviet agent for twelve years, becoming a member of the celebrated Red Orchestra espionage ring during the Second World War. He was eventually caught by the Gestapo in 1942 and executed in February 1944. In 1969, the Supreme Soviet posthumously awarded him the Order of the Red Banner. Ovakimian also recruited STRONG, the head engineer at the German company Auergesellschaft,fn2 and LUDWIG, a scientist at the famous Zeiss works.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 18