York styled himself as a frustrated entrepreneur who needed capital. Shumovsky presented his suggestion of sending the design to Moscow as a spur-of-the-moment idea to help York with his current financial difficulties, not as a long-planned recruitment. Unsurprisingly, York initially resisted the idea of risking his career for a few hundred dollars per secret, but he did not reject a follow-up meeting. Instead he agreed to bring along a few examples of his work, which as an expert Shumovsky could evaluate on the spot. He explained that if Northrop was selling all the secrets of a dive bomber, dressed up as a postal plane, to the Soviets for $80,000, what was wrong with York profiting from his own hard work?22
The second meeting was the peak danger time for Stan. Having had time to reflect on their discussions, York might do anything at this point. He might alert company security, or worse, US counter-intelligence. The next meeting could easily be a set-up. Shumovsky would thoroughly check the rendezvous location for signs of FBI presence or use his trade craft to lose anyone tailing him, but his future was in York’s hands.
As a former soldier dedicated to his cause, Shumovsky dispassionately weighed up the cost and benefit of the mission. The potential gain from recruiting York far outweighed any personal risk to himself. He knew he was in danger of exposure just as he was starting his work on the West Coast. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. If caught, he had a cover story that he was performing legitimate work. Unlike Ray Bennett, who had approached her mission in California believing she would fail, Shumovsky set to his task believing he would succeed. This was the confidence of a man who rode his luck and had been wounded three times fighting for a cause that he believed was the future.
Having reflected on the offer, York had dropped all his former resistance. He brought with him as a sign of good faith plans for ‘a mechanism for dropping bombs and a reloading mechanism for machine guns’,23 two vital items of technology missing from the plane that had just been delivered to the Russians. York would work productively for his controller Shumovsky for many years. He developed a friendship based on trust and was a diligent and productive source, even asking in advance for vacation time. York was assigned an American ‘cut out’ courier, initially Emanuel Locke, as it became increasingly difficult to meet with Russians without arousing suspicion. But he still met Shumovsky from time to time for a catch-up.
It was not until 1950 that York was formally identified as a Soviet source by the FBI.24 American counter-intelligence had kept a copy of every coded telegram sent by the Soviets since the 1930s, photographing them secretly at the telegraph office. These were the famous ‘black chambers’ – secret rooms in this case at the telegraph office but normally in post offices for the perlustration or interception of mail. But Americans did nothing with the copies until 1943, when a small team began to catalogue and sort them. Codebreaking attempts started late in the war and continued until 1980. The NSA operation, known as Venona, succeeded in breaking only a small percentage of the codes, but those that were broken revealed some teasing details of Soviet operations. The appearance of York’s name was a shock to the FBI. Up to this point the Bureau had believed that all Americans who were Soviet agents were Communist Party members, because it was only this type of agent that they had caught. York, though, was not motivated by political beliefs. He was in it for the money.fn1 Fifteen years too late, American counter-intelligence began to gain a glimpse into the genius of Shumovsky’s plans.
• • •
The NKVD files record that Shumovsky developed several other contacts around Los Angeles. Each was assigned a codename and they were probably arranged through the local Communist Party cell. He first met with a contact in aviation research with the codename TIKHON, ‘who kept on his guard’.25 Stan’s MIT thesis was the subject of their discussion. Unhelpfully ‘shortly before the meeting, a number of Los Angeles newspapers had published an interview with the chief of police [James Davis], about how the series of accidents involving experimental military airplanes (4 planes in 2 months) was the work of an international organization, whose goal is to sabotage the aviation industry.’26
Shumovsky also had a potentially fruitful meeting with a source whose codename, GAPON, was a most unusual one. Father Gapon had been a Russian Orthodox priest and a popular workers’ leader in the prelude to the 1905 Revolution and the massacre of Bloody Sunday. He was discovered to be a police informant and murdered. This source was a Douglas Company employee, and the discussion with Shumovsky was again about high-altitude flight. He revealed that Douglas was conducting secret tests overseen by a friend of his, who luckily was sympathetic toward the USSR. Shumovsky arranged a follow-up meeting with the pair of them. The friend was outgoing and forthcoming, telling him a good deal about the company’s secret tests and giving an update on its progress. He even showed Shumovsky documents, although he would not hand them over.
Disaster struck when GAPON suggested from left field that Shumovsky should appeal officially for further information from the company. The follow-up report sent from New York to Moscow Centre was very critical of GAPON, recording that, ‘such conduct on GAPON’s part attests to the insincerity of his constant declarations of friendship towards the Soviet Union, his Communist attitudes, etc.’27 The door was rapidly shut on this particular avenue of information.
The final meeting in California ended better. FALCON was a draughtsman at Douglas who had joined the company from the Sperry Corporation in New York at the end of September. ‘FALCON strikes one as having a serious view of the Soviet Union and an interest in strengthening the latter.’ The first meeting led quickly to a second. FALCON told Shumovsky, ‘I’m still new to the factory, and my duties here are limited, but as soon as I get the hang of things and make acquaintances, we will find much that will be of interest.’ To illustrate the difficulties of operating in the US, Shumovsky sent Moscow a clipping from the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express entitled ‘Red sabotage suspected in air tragedies’. Following the trip, the NKVD ordered him not only to ‘recruit FALCON’ but, in the same instruction, to ‘develop relations with NEEDLE’, a new potential agent.28 Stan had started to build a roster of agents on the West Coast.
• • •
But before he could devote himself to his studies and aviation espionage, the distraction of the ghost of Cherniavsky arose for the first time. Shumovsky was ordered to investigate what was happening in Boston with the Trotskyists. Moscow had become convinced that the Cherniavsky coup attempt had been organised in Boston on the direct orders of Trotsky himself. Shumovsky was asked to identify any of the other students at Harvard or MIT who might be an undiscovered assassin and to find out what the local Trotskyist cell was planning. In early September 1935 he reported back to Moscow Centre that he had launched a plan to infiltrate the Boston Trotskyists with his undercover agent. This entry is one of only two sections of the files disclosed after the collapse of the Soviet Union about their operations in the USA deemed so important by the NKVD that they underlined them.
The secret service placed enormous emphasis on uncovering the plot to topple Stalin involving Cherniavsky and Bennett. Shumovsky heard about an open meeting in the US organised by birth control activist and long-term socialist Antoinette Konikow to hear James A. Cannon, the editor of the magazine The Militant, speak on the future of Trotskyism. Cannon had been expelled from the CPUSA for his nonconformist views and became a prominent activist in favour of Trotskyism. As he could not attend the meeting himself without arousing suspicion, Shumovsky recruited an undercover agent from his contacts in the Boston émigré community to participate in the meeting and report back to him. Shifra Tarr, a widow in her sixties who had been married to a Jewish Communist, had no obvious political affiliation herself. She moonlighted from her work as a hairdresser earning a meagre 50 to 70 dollars a month to infiltrate the revolutionary underground movement that had ordered a hit on Stalin. At the meeting:
Cannon further reported that although the Trotskyite movement had not embraced the ma
sses broadly enough, it was nevertheless growing and gaining strength. The Trotskyite organization has groups in many countries around the world, and in particular, there is an underground Trotskyite organization in the Soviet Union that connects with foreign Trotskyites.29
With these words, Cannon confirmed the whole Cherniavsky and Bennett conspiracy. He had inadvertently closed the loop as far as the NKVD were concerned, confirming to an American audience that Trotsky, from exile, was using his underground movement in the Soviet Union to order from abroad the murder of his political rival, Stalin. By providing fresh evidence that an underground opposition organisation existed ready to stage another revolution, he had inadvertently condemned many old Communists to show trials, and put his own leader Trotsky in the sights of the NKVD execution squads.
The 1917 Revolution had seen a tiny violent minority seize power in the name of the masses and execute the former leader. As an old seminary student, Stalin knew all about the philosophy of an eye for an eye. He ordered his underground networks to kill Trotsky as an act of revenge and self-protection. The operation took years to complete. Stalin told an audience in a speech in 1935 that he had faced down the opposition bullets to follow the right path. To continue surveillance, the hairdresser ‘Tarr’ was ordered to ‘gradually’ infiltrate the Trotskyists in Boston. It was not the last time that Shumovsky would have to deal with the consequences of Cherniavsky’s ill-fated mission to Boston.
10
GLORY TO STALIN’S FALCONS
On 14 July 1937, a Soviet long-range experimental aircraft, the Tupolev ANT-25 RD – bearing the initials of its lead designer, Andrey Nikolaevich Tupolev – landed at San Jacinto, California after a record-breaking non-stop flight. The plane, which had taken off from a specially extended runway at Shchelkovo air base in Moscow sixty-two hours and seventeen minutes previously, came down in a cow field outside San Diego. None of the three exhausted airmen on board either spoke or understood a single word of English. They carried three cards, to show people on arrival, bearing the words ‘bath’, ‘eat’ and ‘sleep’.1
On arrival in the United States, the two pilots, Mikhail Gromov and Andrey Yumashev, and navigator Sergey Danilin, met the waiting and smiling Stan Shumovsky, who had arranged for them to receive a heroes’ welcome across America. His friend Tupolev’s aircraft had got the crew to America; Stan’s plan was to get them to the Oval Office and to the attention of the world.
Close to the site of the landing in California today is a commemorative plaque. It reads:
Shumovsky on the sound stage of the Hollywood blockbuster In Old Chicago with Shirley Temple, 1937
Three miles west of this site, on July 14, 1937, three Soviet Three Three miles west of this site, on July 14, 1937, three Soviet aviators completed a transpolar flight from Moscow in 62 hours, 17 minutes, establishing a new world’s nonstop distance record of 6,305 miles. The single-engined ANT-25 military reconnaissance monoplane was dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union to take its place in a museum. Aircraft Commander Gromov, co-pilot Yumashev and navigator Danilin would all become air force generals in the Second World War.
The 1930s were the golden age of flying heroes, their daring deeds followed as closely as those of the astronauts and cosmonauts in the 1960s space race. Their names were as famous at the time as those of Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Nations competed to fly faster, further or higher. Americans cheered Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart; the Soviet Union celebrated ‘Stalin’s Falcons’. In 1937 Shumovsky turned these Soviet heroes into international celebrities. In nearby Hollywood, he organised for them to be received by the world’s undisputed number-one movie star, the twentieth century’s most famous child actress, nine-year-old Shirley Temple. She invited the party onto a movie sound stage and later tap-danced at a party at her home. In her later years, she recalled that they were among the best-looking men she ever met.
The Soviet airmen with Shirley Temple
At each city where the Russians afterwards stopped on their celebratory tours – San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, and New York – he ensured there was a gala presentation hosted by the mayor, and ticker-tape parades. Crowds came out in their thousands to cheer the brave aviators, some running alongside their open-topped car. At small-town railway stops, newspapers reported, the airmen’s carriage was mobbed. Stanislav Shumovsky, whose flair for public relations matched his gifts as a spy, had organised it all. In plain sight, he orchestrated the whole show. He was captured on newsreels and gave numerous newspaper interviews. The essential stopping-off points on the celebratory journey were the West Coast aircraft factories. And all the newspaper stories, the meetings with the President and Shirley Temple, were superb door openers that Stan used to ‘talent-spot’ recruits for Soviet intelligence among America’s aviation experts. The mass of information he gleaned in his discussions at factory parties, receptions and dinners was reported back to Moscow.
It was entirely appropriate that the Soviet aviators’ record-breaking flight was also an intelligence triumph. Their aircraft, with its 34-metre wingspan, could not have made that flight without technology secretly obtained by Shumovsky. Having seen the plane at the technical design stage on Pavel Sukhoy’s desk at TsAGI back in 1931, he was proud to have contributed intelligence that found its way into the final design. The aircraft’s enormous range and fuel efficiency were derived from its innovative wings, housing large fuel tanks that gave the rigidity required for take-off, and its massive wingspan. Thanks to the expertise of Stan’s MIT agent Benjamin Smilg, the designers had defeated the dangerous phenomenon known as flutter; the plane’s structure was robust enough to withstand stress, but not so bulky as to impact its overall performance. It is in no small part thanks to Shumovsky’s work between 1933 and 1938 that the USSR broke no fewer than sixty-two world flying records.fn1
1937 poster celebrating transpolar flights
• • •
Planning for Soviet transpolar flights had begun back in 1931, as part of the Politburo’s massive investment in developing its aircraft industry. The People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, Kliment Voroshilov, had suggested building the long-range reconnaissance aircraft which became the ANT-25. Adopting the method favoured by Tsar Nicholas, much of the money for the expansion was raised by public subscription and a lottery. In a remarkable letter held in Stalin’s archive, some Young Communist members asked if their general secretary was contributing the same percentage of his wages to the cause as they were. Stalin wrote back to confirm that he was.2
Support for the expansion of the air force was widespread. To fly the new planes turned out by the factories, the Soviet Union needed to train more pilots. To this end, the air force reserves and the gliding club organisation Osoaviakhim recruited 13 million members in a decade. Even Stalin’s second son Vasily became a pilot.
Although not appreciated at the time, Soviet efforts in developing aviation dwarfed those of every other country in terms of the number and type of planes built. Intelligence reports in Stalin’s archive detail the numbers and types of aircraft possessed by each foreign nation and their factories’ wartime production capacity. Shumovsky was responsible for information on the US, which included detailed and accurate analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the American air effort. In terms of aircraft production, the Soviet Union outstripped every rival nation.
The plane manufactures required vast numbers of engines. By 1937 the Curtiss-Wright aero-engine plant in the USSR alone employed 30,000 workers and was ‘set up on the best American principles’, according to Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier General) Martin F. Scanlon, American air attaché in London during the late 1930s. Curtiss-Wright only developed a plant on a similar scale in the United States during the Second World War.
• • •
While in London in 1938, Scanlon uncovered some of the contributions of Shumovsky’s espionage when he interviewed an American aeronautical engineer who had helped se
t up a Soviet factory to produce, under licence, US-designed Vultee dive bombers. The engineer estimated that the factory where he was based, Moscow Aircraft Factory Number 1, would be capable when completed of producing an unprecedented 1,500 dive bombers a year, many times the capacity of the US. The Vultee production line in Russia was discontinued in 1938 but eventually evolved to manufacture the famous Il-2 Shturmovik, a ground attack plane produced in greater quantities than any other single model.fn2 The engineer told Scanlon he had evidence that ‘the Russian espionage system in America has apparently been very much underrated … The Russian government has agents in practically all American [aircraft] factories.’ He had seen evidence of Shumovsky’s work first hand ‘as Soviet aircraft designers were using blueprints that could only have been acquired by espionage’. Working in the USSR and in fear of losing his job, the anonymous Vultee employee explained that his concerns must remain anonymous and under no circumstances be passed on to the army. His concerns stemmed from commercial imperatives. Given that his company had no orders for planes from the US armed forces, Mr Vultee did not wish to hear complaints about the behaviour of his Russian customers. The company was being kept afloat by orders from the Communists and from warring South American countries.
Scanlon informed Washington that this was not an isolated report, as ‘other Americans associated with the Russian aviation industry have told me of similar cases’.3 No one in Washington paid any attention. Despite the warnings, official inaction meant the spying continued unchecked.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 23