The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  The company headquarters and aircraft assembly plants were a longer journey away in Buffalo. Curtiss were in ebullient mood as they put the finishing touches to their hope for the largest peacetime contract for a fighter from the US military.

  • • •

  Long Island was known as the ‘cradle of aviation’, being the base for two dozen companies that built military and civilian aircraft. More aircraft manufacture was concentrated on the island than anywhere else in the country. Grumman, Republic and Sperry Gyroscope were all located there, as was Seversky, a business owned by a one-legged former Tsarist pilot often described as ‘flamboyant’ and a ‘showman’. Alexander Nikolaievich Prokofiev de Seversky was as aristocratic as his name implies. A genius inventor, having patented air-to-air refuelling and the gyroscopic bomb sight, he was however a poor businessman and none too choosy as to whom he sold his aircraft. According to some reports he agreed to sell a fighter to Tupolev, a contract that would have political repercussions both in the US and USSR. While he secretly sold advanced planes to the Japanese in 1938, he had second thoughts about dealing with Communists, writing a letter to the State Department trying to get his fighter sale banned on the grounds the technology was too advanced to be exported. He had, however, staffed his enterprise with Russian émigrés who later proved a happy hunting ground for Shumovsky’s recruitment.

  • • •

  The Soviet party remained in New York for several weeks before boarding their seven newly purchased cars to set out. By that time, they had acquired New Jersey driving licences. The experience of travelling with Tupolev, a ball of energy whose mind and body were always active, was exhausting. The schedule was equally punishing, with many visits to factories, airfields and research institutes crammed in, and stops along the way to take in natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon.

  The party rose each day at 5 a.m. with a plan to be on the road by 5.45. It was impossible to keep to the schedule, as Tupolev would stop his car without warning and take out his camera to examine anything that caught his fancy along the way, technological and natural marvels alike. At each hotel, he would become fascinated with the workings of the heating or the cooling systems. Colleagues complained they had to sleep with the windows open as Tupolev experimented with how hot he could make their room.

  Ever the visionary, the trip inspired Tupolev to embark upon a new round of innovation for the Soviet aviation industry. He reported in the Soviet magazine Industrialization that ‘our trip abroad gave a lot of valuable information. Particularly useful was getting to see American aviation.’14 In fact there was much they had not been allowed to see, but Shumovsky was planning the means to get Tupolev what the Americans would not openly sell. While the Soviet party drove a hard bargain over the purchase of a few examples of key planes, Shumovsky had begun creating an agent network on the West Coast to gather intelligence for the Tupolev Design Bureau.

  • • •

  Since 1934 Shumovsky had been expanding his intelligence-gathering activities beyond MIT to encompass as much of the East Coast of the United States as lay within reach of Boston. It was an easy drive from Boston to Long Island to visit factories and Ovakimian in New York. The West Coast though was new to him, so he was helped by the entire party and local Communists to identify recruits. In 1953 the FBI noted that ‘engineers, technicians or others designated to visit a country to buy military or naval equipment were handed over to the intelligence departments for a short course of instructions on the particular secret mission to be carried out during their visit. They were also instructed to find contacts working in factories they entered through whom the Soviets could continue to obtain information.’15

  Despite Tupolev’s $600,000 budget, the Soviets had not come with an open cheque book. The Russians were careful shoppers, buying only the best equipment, in small numbers and on fine terms. They were demanding, insisting on having their people installed in US factories to learn every element of the production process. There were specific problems. The two countries used different measurement systems: America worked in feet and inches whereas the Soviet Union used the metric system, so all its manufacturing capability and machinery was calibrated in millimetres and centimetres. Each tool in an American factory was precisely calibrated for the imperial system. The Russians laboriously calculated tolerances for the conversion to the metric system, but there was never an exact solution, so the Soviet copies of American planes were notorious for rattling. The noise was not only caused by poor build quality but by the difficulty of converting imperial blueprints to metric standards.

  Just like the British capitalists of the great age of cotton weaving, the Americans knew when they had a technical edge and demanded extraordinary prices for their innovation. Shumovsky had learned at MIT about the introduction of aluminium alloys to replace wood. The American Aluminum Company had built itself a near monopoly position as the supplier to aircraft manufacturers of finished parts and sheets. The Soviets cast envious eyes at the quality and consistency of ALCO’s output, but when they enquired about the cost of a turnkey plant in the USSR they were quoted a take-it-or-leave-it price of $100 million. The Soviets could see when they were being overcharged. Later they bought enough equipment themselves to outfit two plants and a factory blueprint for a fraction of the price.

  • • •

  Shumovsky had completed his undergraduate studies on 5 June 1934, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Science. He received his degree at a ceremony conducted on the ornamental square in front of Building 10, but he was far from finished with MIT. A commemorative photograph was taken to record the end of the students’ first chapter. The guest speaker at ‘Commencement’ was Howard Blakeslee, the first full-time science correspondent of the Associated Press, and later to be one of the few journalists to witness the first secret atomic tests in the deserts of New Mexico. Now able to use the cover of a graduate student working on a thesis at the cutting edge of aviation research, Shumovsky would arouse no comment while gathering intelligence. If he were at AMTORG, he would be dogged by the FBI in doing the same work. So his strategy continued, using the MIT letterhead to contact the leading experts in his field, who fell over themselves to be of use. Shumovsky joined all the national professional societies linking the acknowledged experts in aerospace and was given access to their directories, a Who’s Who of the leading practitioners. His name appears on the same pages as Igor Sikorsky and Alexander de Seversky, Russian exiles putting all their efforts into building weapons for their adopted country.

  Having finished his course, Shumovsky now had the time and flexibility to begin running agents. From the limited public records disclosed by the KGB, NSA and FBI, it appears that he became active in July 1934. The records finally confirm that Ben Smilg, who had left MIT to work at the Budd Company in Philadelphia, an aviation parts supplier whose greatest innovation was the spot welding of metal sheets, joined up. Meanwhile Shumovsky immediately embarked on the research for his Master’s degree. He remains the only graduate student to have the subject of his thesis selected by an intelligence agency.

  As recorded in the KGB files, Shumovsky began two years’ work gathering information on ‘high altitude flying’,16 presenting his results to MIT in a thesis entitled ‘The Effectiveness of the Vertical Tail of the Aircraft for Various Combinations of Wing and Fuselage’. He spent hours working with MIT’s pressurised wind tunnel to perfect the models.

  High-altitude flying was believed to be the best way forward for the slow long-range heavy bomber, which until the advent of radar would be undetectable by the enemy at high altitude. Moreover, the lack of oxygen at altitude meant that a pressurised-cabin bomber such as the B-29 Superfortress was invulnerable to fighters whose pilots could not reach the same cruising height, given that it was impossible to pressurise the small cabin of a fighter with the available technology. The same research also pointed the way forward for civil aviation. Air travel was smoother above the clouds and engine
fuel efficiency increased, creating a greater potential range. However, in 1935 all this was theoretical; Boeing only began work on pressurised long-range bombers in 1938 in response to a military request. Shumovsky was at the cutting edge of the research. His Master’s thesis worked out the most efficient angles for wings to fly at high altitude.

  The visits Shumovsky organised for Tupolev in 1935 included not only factories but the research facilities at MIT, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena and NACA at Langley Field and Wright Field. Thanks to the largesse of the Guggenheims, CalTech had recently completed a ten-foot wind tunnel around which their aeronautics faculty was built. They attracted to the faculty as professor the jet engine pioneer Theodore von Kármán, as well as Douglas Aircraft’s chief designer Arthur Louis ‘Maj’ Klein. Von Kármán has been quoted as saying: ‘I can never pass up the opportunity to dominate the conversation for an entire hour’; given Tupolev’s reputation, theirs must have been an interesting meeting. Auzan, an engineer in the party, commented that

  Research work on aerodynamics in America is well placed not only in research institutes but even in educational institutions. An example is the California Technological Institute in Pasadena. The Aerodynamic Laboratory of the Institute is led by the world-famous professor of aerodynamics Von Karman. A German by birth, he worked until 1926 in Tokyo. Then he moved to America. Previously, Karman visited our country (in 1927) and got acquainted with the wind tunnel at TsAGI. Showing us the wind tunnel in the institute, Karman said among other things ‘Here you are. You will recognise the TsAGI pipe pattern?’ This visit to the CalTech in Pasadena showed us that the pupil Von Karman was ahead of his teacher.17

  Douglas would use CalTech’s facilities more than five hundred times to perfect the aerodynamics of a single aircraft, a level of dedication to testing that impressed the visitors. Von Kármán made another visit to TsAGI in 1937, an indication of how scientists ignored frontiers and politics.

  With his interest in building a series of new wind tunnels, Tupolev had already visited NACA at Langley earlier in the trip. This was the largest facility of its kind, capable of testing full-sized aircraft. The Langley facility was based on the pioneering work of a friend from Tupolev’s Tsarist student days: the nomadic Vladimir Margolis, a fellow pupil of the founder of aeronautics in Russia, Nikolay Zhukovsky. Margolis was now living in exile and had sold his pioneering work to the Americans, publishing a much sought-after NACA research note, and had also helped the French and the Japanese.

  The key reason for leaving Shumovsky in place at MIT was explained by Auzan in For Industrialisation magazine in 1935:

  What accounts for the high level of American aviation technology? Why are Americans so quickly and confidently breaking the accepted technical principles? How can they boldly introduce on a large scale all kinds of innovations? They are all good questions and deserve a detailed answer. The whole secret lies in the excellent organization of scientific research and experimental work with the results deployed quickly through mass production. I state upfront that the Americans have no rivals in this field. The Soviet Union must take special care to examine the American experience of research in aviation and apply it to the science of socialist planning.18

  • • •

  At the end of the trip it was the time they spent in California that proved most rewarding for the Russians, both in terms of purchasing and espionage. Tupolev found at the Douglas factory the model to export to Russia. The DC-2 exemplified American manufacture – simplicity in design and execution – and the Russian visitors were struck by the innovations in design and construction methods. The company had incorporated into its design process ‘lofting’ and the use of full-sized plywood templates. It was a method of creating three-dimensional templates from two-dimensional drawings. Lofting had evolved from shipbuilding and derives its name from the tradition of drawing offices being in the eaves above factory floors. Applying geometrical principles and using mathematical tables, draughtsmen were able to create curves in streamlined objects such as a wing or fuselage. The Russians learned that standardisation of parts was a byword and new designs incorporated as many machine-made components as possible, to speed production and reduce cost.

  The trip to California was highly successful and Shumovsky later made a second trip. He continued his West Coast recruitment campaign, after his masters in Moscow ordered him to interact with the workers and designers in the aviation plants. These trips involved significant time away from college and he was able to use his thesis as a cover story. Douglas and Boeing, the two companies actively researching high-altitude flight, were based on the West Coast, and Stan’s work had a commercial value to both. His mathematical models, based on hundreds of observations in the wind tunnel at MIT, eliminated some of the cost of developing high-altitude prototypes, so he went armed with the preliminary results of his work.

  Monitoring the manufacture of aircraft bought by Tupolev gave him the new cover to return to California so soon after the summer visit. There was extreme urgency to his second trip. In late September, a small party of Soviet engineers arrived in Los Angeles for the official handover of the two planes ordered by Tupolev back in the summer: one the DC-2 destined for testing at TsAGI, the other a Northrop 2ED-C, a dual civilian and military use plane. It was a long process: the Russians had to understand every feature of each plane, as well as label each lever and knob in Cyrillic once they understood what it did. To speed the US government export process to Russia the Northrop was designated a civilian version, designed to deliver mail and fitted with no weapons or bomb racks, although a Soviet photograph of the aircraft taken while testing shows that it was in fact a different design with the cockpit set further down the fuselage. Once in the Soviet Union, pilot Mikhail Gromov, one of ‘Stalin’s Falcons’, tested it as a dive bomber and concluded that it was an excellent aircraft but lacked sufficient punch in this role. The Northrop included a cockpit heating system which was much admired and the suggestion was that it should be copied and made standard on Soviet bombers. It would have been a welcome addition to Russian bomber crews but, pilot comfort not being a priority, it was not installed widely. However, the instinctive cockpit control panel layout and easy-to-read instrumentation made it a valuable addition to the Soviet fleet. Tupolev spent only $179,000 of his $600,000 budget on acquiring the two planes.

  While working on the handover in the Northrop factory at El Secundo, one of the Russian engineers fell into a ‘meaning of life conversation’ with Jones Orin York, a designer in the plant. There was a deal of unhappiness in the labour force at Northrop, which would lead ultimately to Donald Douglas dissolving the joint venture and his co-founder, Jack Northrop, moving on. York was unhappy with his rate of pay and had a profound feeling that his talent was underappreciated by the management. The Russian inspector, Belyaev, was alive to an opportunity to recruit an intelligence source. Unable to make an approach himself, he contacted Gaik Ovakimian at AMTORG.19 The plan behind the recruitment was that the Soviets would have the chance to see cutting designs at the planning stage, rather than years down the road when the plane might be available for sale. If intelligence could land York as a source, they would move at a stroke from saving money by acquiring obsolete designs, to providing vital information on technology even before it went into production. Tupolev argued that the Soviet Union needed to move away from buying foreign planes for military use unless the plane was a new class. (The Northrop was a dive bomber or ‘stormer’, a type of aircraft the Soviets did not yet have in their fleet.) Moreover, by the time the Soviets got a foreign fighter into mass production and deployed it into front-line service, it would be obsolete. A plane that was slower, less manoeuvrable or could not climb fast enough would cost a pilot his life in combat. The whole industry was moving forward so quickly that a lead time of years was too long. If his information allowed the Soviets to get ahead of the curve, York and others like him might be the answer. If there was any chance of landing hi
m as a source, it was worth taking the risk.

  Hurried arrangements needed to be made for a recruiter to meet urgently with York in Los Angeles. A date was set. The Russian aircraft inspectors had arranged a celebratory dinner to commemorate the handover of planes, and York was invited. The plan was to infiltrate an intelligence recruiter into the party without arousing undue suspicion. The ideal candidate had to have a reason to be at a Northrop celebration. Shumovsky was the designated recruiter. If anyone asked him why he was at the dinner, he would be able to explain that he was there on legitimate business as he had been a member of Tupolev’s purchasing team a few months ago. NKVD records show that Shumovsky spent from 5 to 15 November away from his studies at MIT in California with the specific goal ‘of the cultivation and recruitment of workers in the Douglas and Northrop aircraft factories’.20 In advance of the trip Ovakimian had given Shumovsky extensive training in how to land new agents and how to conduct the all-important first meetings. Recruitment was a question of trust, not just money. A potential source, especially one motivated by money, might be more unreliable than a true believer like TALENT. Shumovsky was instructed in the methods of putting a source at ease. The primary concern of any potential source was to avoid getting caught if the information he disclosed was traced back to him. The greatest point of risk for source and controller alike was being observed, perhaps by accident, at a meeting where the information exchange was to take place and having no cover story.

  Shumovsky sat next to York at the celebratory dinner and listened attentively to his tale of woe.21 York needed money in a hurry and could not see how he was ever going to earn it working at Northrop. Shumovsky learned that York in his own opinion was a brilliant designer but was not appreciated by his managers. He needed finance to set up his own business. Currently assigned to designing weaponry, he had created a new aero engine but no one at Northrop would look at it. Shumovsky suggested sending the design to Moscow to get the opinion of Tupolev and his people, who worked on engines. In comparison to the sacrifices of Soviet workers, to Shumovsky York’s problems were small beer.