In August 1932 Ovakimian returned to Moscow to study chemical warfare at the Red Army Military Chemical Academy, Cherniavsky’s alma mater. In June 1933, at a meeting with Artuzov to discuss his next foreign assignment, he was told that in the new climate following Hitler’s rise to power, the top priority for the XY line (S&T) operations was no longer Germany but the United States, as ‘America has a unique position about questions of politics, economy, and technology.’ Specifically, he was informed, ‘nowhere is technology as advanced in every sphere of industry as in America. The most important thing about the procurement of technical materials for our industry is that the scale of production in America has the closest correspondence to our scale of production. This makes technical intelligence in the USA the main focus of work.’
• • •
But it was the situation with Japan, which had taken a dramatic turn for the worse, that was the pressing problem. There was unrelenting pressure from the Kremlin on intelligence officers in the field to provide information. Not for the first time, the Soviet Union was on a war footing. Stalin believed that Japanese policy in China could only be so brazen if they had secretly agreed on a division of its territory with other capitalist powers. His concern was that Japan’s next step after swallowing a chunk of China was to attack the Soviet Union. Despite Shumovsky’s heroic work, the armed forces of the USSR were not ready for them. Stalin had written to Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar for the Army and Navy, late in November 1931 that ‘Japan plans to seize not only Manchuria but also Beijing. It’s not impossible and even likely that they will try to capture the Soviet Far East and even Mongolia to soothe the feelings of the Chinese clients with land captured at our expense. It is not likely to attack this winter, but it might try next year.’7
Stalin had reason to believe the threat was imminent. He was receiving direct intelligence.8 So concerned did he remain at the threat of Japanese attack on the Soviet Far East and Eastern Siberia that in March 1932 he took the unprecedented step of ordering the NKVD to publish in the newspaper Izvestia extracts from intercepted top-secret Japanese documents, obtained both by breaking Japanese ciphers and from an unidentified NKVD agent working in the office of Lieutenant-Colonel Yukio Kasahara, the Japanese military attaché in Moscow. Though not identifying him by name, Izvestia quoted Kasahara as reporting to Tokyo:
It will be [Japan’s] unavoidable destiny to clash with the USSR sooner or later … The sooner the Soviet–Japanese war comes, the better for us. We must realise that with every day the situation develops more favourably for the USSR. In short, I hope the authorities will make up their minds for a speedy war with the Soviet Union and initiate policies accordingly.9
The Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Koki Hirota, also not identified by name, was quoted as saying to a visiting Japanese general, ‘On the question of whether to start a war between Japan and the Soviet Union or not, I consider it necessary that Japan takes the path of a firm policy against the Soviet Union. The fundamental goal of this war should be not so much in the prevention of Japan adopting communism but in the appropriation of the Soviet Far East and Eastern Siberia.’10
On reading Izvestia, Kasahara immediately identified himself as the author of the report claiming that war with the Soviet Union was Japan’s unavoidable destiny. NKVD codebreakers decrypted a telegram he sent to the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Tokyo General Staff seeking to deflect the blame for the leak by calling for more secure methods to be devised in Tokyo for secret communications with its representatives in Moscow. The copy of Kasahara’s report in Stalin’s files, however, does not make it clear whether it had been intercepted en route to Tokyo (as Kasahara believed) or obtained by an agent recruited by the NKVD in his office (of whom he was unaware).
However the information was obtained, the publication of the Izvestia article on 4 March 1932 led, on the following day, to a fraught and confused meeting between Lev Karakhan, Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and the Japanese ambassador Hirota. The ambassador could not openly admit that he had written one of the confidential reports quoted in Izvestia, and Karakhan could not acknowledge that Hirota’s communications with Tokyo had been decrypted by the NKVD. Hirota thus confined himself to complaining of the damage done by the article to already tense Japanese–Soviet relations, while Karakhan put the blame instead on aggressive actions by Japanese troops and bellicose statements by ‘very responsible’ Japanese officials.fn3
In the autumn of 1933, the combative Hirota was appointed foreign minister in Tokyo in place of the relatively moderate Yasuya Uchida. On 26 November, the NKVD provided Stalin with a decrypted dispatch sent by the US ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, to the State Department ten weeks earlier. Grew emphasised the influence of General Sadao Araki, nicknamed the ‘Tiger’ of Japan, the prime mover in the conquest of Manchuria and a self-confessed ‘great enemy’ of Russia. In the decrypt, which he placed in his personal archive, Stalin underlined the sentence, ‘Hirota is a fervent supporter of the policy of General Araki …’ The dispatch concluded: ‘Nothing stands in the way of the Japanese control of China even by next spring. The next step will be a war with Russia.’11
• • •
Meanwhile, Ovakimian’s new assignment entailed promotion to deputy head of intelligence and head of XY at the legal residency in New York, which was due to be set up as soon as diplomatic relations were established with the United States. His orders left him in no doubt that immediate and dramatic results were expected. And so successful would he be that in sweeping up after him, the FBI believed mistakenly that he was the head of all Soviet intelligence in the US.12
Gaik Ovakimian and wife
Ovakimian was an incredibly talented chemist. He had published seventeen scientific papers in the USSR before becoming a spy. His love for chemistry was so strong that he would even take time out from being a spymaster to enrol part time at New York University to work in the labs and eventually to earn a second PhD. Even with what the FBI described as his ‘broken English’, in 1940 he would publish jointly with Martin Kuna and Phoebus A. Levene a research paper based on his PhD subject, snappily entitled ‘The Correlation of the Configurations of Aminophenylacetic Acid and of Alanine’. Levene, a pioneer in the study of DNA, was head of the laboratories of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York, where Ovakimian would study; Kuna’s subsequent career in chemical research would include a spell as a chemist at the National Laboratories, Oak Ridge, part of the Manhattan Project.
• • •
With the arrival of Ovakimian in New York, Shumovsky’s life changed pace. Ovakimian was charged with establishing the infrastructure for a new ‘legal’ network. Broadly, a ‘legal’ had an official reason to be in America by virtue of his cover job; an ‘illegal’ did not, instead working under a false American identity. Until the arrival of his Armenian colleague, Stan had been working through small-scale ‘illegal’ networks, operating from the only safe houses, microfilm studios and couriers available. The two networks – legal and illegal – would continue to operate in parallel, but Shumovsky was transferred to the legal side once the infrastructure was in place around the middle of 1934. He was too valuable to be caught up in the high-risk world of the illegals.
Early in his time at MIT, Shumovsky had reported periodically to three different heads of the illegal line, the last being the alcoholic philanderer Valentin Markin, the man responsible for the Ludwig Lore fiasco. Stan explained to Ovakimian that he had previously worked with the illegal CHARLIE, Leon Minster, who was in New York from 1928 to 1934. CHARLIE was a post box operating from a photographic shop in Brooklyn.13 He collected information from engineers such as the technical salespeople of commercial companies, sending information to Moscow about lifesaving devices for submarines and two types of tanks. Shumovsky supplied to CHARLIE from MIT data on aircraft engines, the characteristics of a bombsight and details of the construction of seaplanes, providing drawings, formulae and manuals so that Soviet engineers
could recreate the mechanisms and copy the production processes. One of the best such finds microfilmed and couriered to Moscow was a report written by Robert Goddard, the pioneer of modern rocketry, entitled ‘The Results of the Work to Create a Liquid-Fuelled Rocket Engine’. CHARLIE sent to Moscow Centre further open-source material such as technical patents and descriptions of US Army tactics.
The illegal residents were involved in high-risk work as they were the conduit for stolen documents. Having become fully acclimatised to life in America, Shumovsky had now been activated as a full-time agent, operating not just within MIT but across the nation. The legal line established far stronger communications with Moscow Centre. Radio and coded telegram contact replaced the couriers sent to France, Germany and Scandinavia. Diplomatic mail was another possibility, but it was soon discovered that the regular volume of traffic was too low to conceal the amount of espionage material that needed to be sent. The regular mail was found to be reliable but took twelve days to reach Russia. To avoid suspicion, false postal addresses were set up across the Soviet Union that were covers for Moscow Centre. Shumovsky had by now learned to operate with a high level of proficiency in English, and the first tantalising fragments of his handiwork work start to appear in NKVD records in the summer of 1934, when the centre was sent the MIT dissertations acquired by Smilg.14
One immediate problem for the pair was with the Curtiss-Wright aircraft engines contract. Just ahead of the Depression, Curtiss – which under its owner Glenn Curtiss had long been the largest manufacturer of aircraft in the US – had merged with the Wright Corporation to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Wilbur and Orville Wright had been the first to fly a powered aircraft, the Kitty Hawk, in Dayton, Ohio. The goal of the merger was to create the General Motors of the sky; in effect a vertically integrated aviation company. The business built and operated aircraft as well as running flight schools under one holding company.
Stalin’s immediate priority after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the USA was to get hold of the R-1820 Cyclone 9 radial engine that had been ordered for the Red air force. He complained by telegram dated 17 February 1934 to the newly appointed Soviet ambassador in Washington, Alexander A. Troyanovsky, that Curtiss-Wright was unnecessarily dragging out contract negotiations to license the production of the Cyclone 9 in the Soviet Union and provide technical assistance.15 Moscow urgently needed the ready-made engines, and feared that the company might even have decided not to conclude this important deal. Influenced by alarmist political intelligence reports from New York, Stalin blamed Curtiss-Wright’s obstructionism on ‘the influence of Japanese agents’ in the United States.
Following a promise made by Stalin to William Bullitt, the US ambassador to Moscow, to give direct access, President Roosevelt had made a similar promise to Troyanovsky. Hoping to make use of Roosevelt’s assurances, Stalin instructed Troyanovsky to see the President about the issue as soon as possible: ‘We attach a lot of importance to this case. Every day is crucial.’ In the event, the contract with Curtiss-Wright was successfully concluded, probably without the intervention of Roosevelt. If the importance of their work had not been clear already, now that Stalin was overseeing aviation activities in America it was more than apparent to both Shumovsky and Ovakimian. Curtiss-Wright was to become Shumovsky’s number-one priority.
Based largely on his experiences on the ground in Germany, Ovakimian would create a new Soviet model for S&T espionage gathering in America (a system that would be rolled out across the world when he became global head of S&T in 1941).16 But as he had no prior knowledge or experience of the US, he relied for initial advice on Shumovsky, who already had three years of first-hand operational experience to pass on. Stan explained the daunting nature of their task. The American scientific community was vast and geographically spread out: in his field of aviation there were pockets of manufacturing concentrated around New York and Los Angeles as well as clusters of activity in the Midwest. Based in New York and with limited resources, the Soviets could only scratch the surface. However, as Shumovsky had learned at MIT, the science community acted as a club; once you were on the inside it was easy to build a network, you just needed the right introductions. Given US conditions, the pair had no choice but to adapt the established Soviet way of conducting intelligence operations. The only public record of foreign intelligence activity, the ‘Mitrokhin Archive’,17 details how time and again the Soviet Union returned to their playbook.
To join the chemistry club Ovakimian enrolled at New York University and began recruiting fellow scientists. By the end of 1933 he was running four agents, codenamed BEAM, TALENT, IDEALIST and SINGER.18 BEAM was Grigory Rabinovich, a Soviet intelligence officer using the cover of a medical doctor working at the Red Cross. He lasted a year in the USA. Ovakimian’s first serious science recruit was TALENT, William Malisoff, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College at the time of his recruitment. He later worked for several chemical companies before creating his own business, United Laboratories, during the Second World War. Ovakimian wrote of Malisoff: ‘He is one of the few chemistry professors with a grounding in Marxism to be found among all our friends, who are willing to do anything for us, and for whom the interests of our homeland and the worldwide revolution are the principal ideals of his life.’19
Like many agent recruits at the time, Malisoff was easy to approach. Born in Russia, he had emigrated to the US as a child. He was a believer in the inevitability of the triumph of Marxism and had worked productively over many years for love of the Soviet cause. Like so many agents recruited by Ovakimian, Malisoff developed a close friendship with his controller. Later, Ovakimian recalls his admiration for the scientists who had given him information despite the risk of exposure. He sympathised with their situation but felt the risk worth taking for the cause.
Although Malisoff’s own scientific research was highly valued by Moscow Centre and appreciated by Soviet scientists, his greatest contribution was as a recruiter of his own network and freelance information seeker. For the most significant innovation that Ovakimian (with Shumovsky’s help) introduced in 1933 was the idea of an agent group leader. The change was based on the underground revolutionary cells developed in Tsarist Russia to confuse the Okhranka. The best description of how these cells operated appears in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Devils. The cell structure was designed to ensure the best security for its members. Each member knew little or nothing about his network, possibly only the leader. Only the leader knew all the members. The members communicated with the head via a ‘cut out’ courier, who would pass orders and collect material from each source without knowing the agent’s real name or personal details. The member might never meet the courier as they would use a so-called ‘dead letter’ box.
The couriers were not supposed to know anything about the material they were couriering. When two American couriers, Harry Gold and Elizabeth Bentley, broke the rules, Bentley’s defection from Communism in 1945 to become an informer for the US was among the events that caused the virtual collapse of all Soviet espionage activity in America immediately after the war.
Ovakimian decided a few trusted agents would be allowed to recruit friends and contacts as sub-agents in his group. The process transformed the pace of intelligence gathering. Whole networks of cells across America would be established and operate remotely from Moscow Centre. The idea was contrary to the widespread perception of how Soviet operations worked, as it was completely decentralised. TALENT was perhaps the first agent to be given such latitude.
Previously, the recruitment of agents such as Ben Smilg had taken months or years, with every step run through Moscow Centre. TALENT was able to move much faster. The rise of the Nazis in Germany and the roll-out of their anti-Semitic policies acted moreover as a spur for recruitment. Privately many US citizens were aghast at their government’s inaction and in the face of overwhelming evidence of evil were prepared, with a clear conscience, to help the Soviet Union as a counter to Nazism. Giv
en new freedom of action, the size of Ovakimian’s agent networks multiplied. TALENT was an ideal agent group leader as he had lived and worked in academic circles up and down the university cities of the East Coast. He was a far more efficient talent spotter in his specialised field than any recruiter the Soviets could bring in from Moscow. The innovation led ultimately to the forming of cells like that of Julius Rosenberg with his wife as a courier, which was built initially around Communist college friends. The process was not without risk and would go disastrously wrong with the next recruit, Jacob Golos (codenamed SOUND). Russian sources suggest that an agent codenamed DAVIS, identified as MIT graduate Norman Leslie Haight, was another group leader, but no evidence has emerged of his activities.20
Malisoff was a big early win for Ovakimian and his methods. To the delight of Moscow Centre, TALENT seemingly sought no financial rewards for his work, simply appreciation. In 1939 or 1940, however, he ‘discovered that some of the personal processes he had developed and given to us had been used by our chemists and published in Sov[iet] publications as their discoveries’.21 He complained, claiming that Ovakimian had assured him there would be no further plagiarism. But in 1943, two years after Ovakimian’s return to Moscow, Malisoff complained again to the New York legal residency that, despite this assurance, a recent winner of a Stalin prize for chemistry had plagiarised his work. He added that he was not seeking payment from the residency but only wanted his work to be recognised in Russia.
Though the available evidence on the S&T supplied by Malisoff is very fragmentary, it is clear that it covered a remarkably wide range of subjects. Among the more unusual were commercial secrets of the US perfume industry; these appear to have been highly valued by Premier Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, director of the Soviet National Cosmetics trust from 1932 to 1936. Initiatives in the mid-1930s to improve living conditions in the USSR had led to an emphasis on producing consumer goods. There was only one place to go for help, and that was the home of consumerism. The New York legal Rezidentura reported to the Centre in January 1937, soon after a visit by Zhemchuzhina:
The Spy Who Changed History Page 19