• • •
Another of Shumovsky’s tasks was to protect the crew from the effects of their sudden immersion in capitalist America. The pilots were astonished by the entrepreneurial spirit of the farmer in whose field they had touched down. Having quickly organised ticket sales to view the plane and enlisted the military to guard his franchise after roping off the field, he made a tidy sum from the crowds swarming to see the strange plane. He approached the Soviet pilots and received permission to siphon off the remaining gas, after which he began selling small souvenir bottles of aviation fuel. The onlookers were hungry for other souvenirs. One of the aviators dropped his glove, only to see it snatched up by an eager member of the crowd. The glove was never seen again. Later the airmen reported the incessant theft of the shoes that they left outside their hotel rooms for cleaning. The co-pilot, Yumashev, in particular, was taken aback by the aggressive attention of American women. He was blessed with rugged good looks and was regularly approached by interested members of the opposite sex looking for a kiss. He even received an offer to remain in the United States and appear in Hollywood movies. He declined.
When the crew did eventually appear in a movie, it was a Soviet film, not a Hollywood blockbuster. The 1939 film, entitled If War Comes Tomorrow, was pure propaganda, showing how the Soviet Union would defeat a Nazi invasion. The crew of the historic flight to America were featured as bomber pilots leading the counter-attack on German cities.
The importance placed by the Soviet Union on developing long-distance strategic bombing is reflected in the decision taken after the success of this flight that Stan would focus full-time on the West Coast factories. Some of the agents he recruited would provide vital information to Moscow.16
Other newspaper articles showed that Russia had a very different message to deliver to its enemies. In one edition of the Oakland Tribune, the front page carried a warning to Japan and Germany. Military chiefs in Moscow had published a statement saying that Japanese and German cities were within the range of Soviet bombers. The slow-moving ANT-25 was, in reality, no threat to Japan, but the Soviet Union had demonstrated its intention. For the Nazis engaged in the Spanish Civil War, this was another warning that the Soviet Union was building the capability to defend itself. If Hitler attempted to deliver on the promise made in Mein Kampf to dismember the Soviet Union, the price Germany paid would be heavy. Fleets of Soviet heavy bombers could easily reach every German city in the first wave of retaliation. The nightmare of terror bombing of civilian cities that Hitler had inflicted on Spain would be revisited on Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt by the VVS.
• • •
The year was to end in tragedy for Soviet aviation. The first two flights to cross the North Pole to America in 1937 had been successful, but a third ended in disaster. The most famous of all Stalin’s pilots, Sigismund Levanevsky, and his crew died in their attempt to fly to America in a four-engined plane. It had been his idea to develop the trans-polar route, but after his failed attempt in 1935, it was his misfortune to be overtaken by others.
In an effort to showcase Soviet dominance in large multi-engined planes and raise the possibility of passenger travel, Shumovsky had flagged Levanevsky’s flight to the US press on the day after Gromov’s flight successfully touched down. The pilot, a compatriot of Stan’s, was introduced to the American public as the Soviet Charles Lindbergh. Because he did not trust single-engined aircraft following a near fatal incident in 1935, when an oil leak had ended his transpolar flight, Levanevsky would attempt the same journey in an untested four-engined plane. With the full attention of the American press, Shumovsky announced that Levanevsky’s red-painted DB-a would depart Moscow on 12 August 1937, its destination Fairbanks, Alaska.
With the weather changing for the worse in the Arctic by August, the window for safely attempting a trans-polar flight was closing fast. After fourteen hours thirty-two minutes in the air, the crew sent their last radio message to ground control that one engine had failed, but that they still intended to press on with the flight to Fairbanks. They never arrived. Levanevsky’s flight disappeared somewhere in the Arctic, and its final location remains a mystery. Stalin’s leading Falcon was dead; for the family of Soviet flyers, it was the equivalent of losing their father figure.
Many rumours have since circulated about the causes of the tragedy; there were allegations that the aircraft’s designers had been arrested and accused of sabotaging the flight, although these are untrue. It seems clear that having lost one engine, the unproven experimental plane went off course and crashed in bad weather. Over three hundred streets in the Soviet Union would be named after their lost hero.fn5
The loss of the Soviet plane cast a dark shadow over an otherwise splendid year for Shumovsky. But worse news was to follow. This was the great year of suspicion in the Soviet Union. No one is certain what precisely triggered the start of 1937’s Great Purges, but news from Spain of the collapse of the Republican government due to infighting played a significant role. When Nationalist general Emilio Mola was asked by a journalist which of the four columns of troops that were marching on the key government stronghold of Madrid would take the city first, he replied famously that the capital would fall to a ‘fifth column’ already within the walls. A new phrase for traitors entered the popular imagination. There were swirling accusations throughout the Spanish Civil War of treachery and betrayal, adding layers of suspicion to an already murderous environment.
The unthinkable defeat of the workers’ movement in Spain by the forces of Fascism despite the full international support of the Communist movement was a seismic shock to the Soviet Union. The obvious message to Stalin was that only a unified country would be strong enough to survive the inevitable Fascist onslaught. It became an imperative to weed out the real and imagined ‘fifth column’ in place in the Soviet Union, the allies of fascist and other capitalist enemies, before any coming attack. It did not help that the quisling Trotsky, in exile, was working with the Germans to put himself forward as an alternative leader to Stalin in a dismembered USSR.
Under NKVD head Nikolay Yezhov, the Great Purges or Terror began innocently enough with the administrative expulsion of thousands of members who had found their way into the Communist Party. Out went the ‘former people’, kulaksfn6 or simply those who had not been entirely truthful in their applications. It was believed that such elements could, as in Spain, act to weaken the whole Communist movement in wartime from within. Background checks showed that many members did not meet the strict criteria of membership and they were expelled. The loss of Party membership was devastating for these individuals, as one’s job, housing and benefits such as schooling went too.
Throughout the Soviet Union, a pervasive atmosphere of arrest and accusation spread like wildfire, victims including any individual or national group that might form an opposition or rally to the side of an invader. A leap to mass executions and imprisonment was soon to follow. The enemies of the people included members of the highest echelons of the Communist Party, perceived as the leaders of a hidden Trotskyist underground, former Whites, some ethnic groups, and a clique in the top leadership of the armed forces. The purges widened to exact a price for the many failures in delivering on the current Five-Year Plan, including the aviation industry. As war approached, official patience with failure and incompetence had run out. It was a time for results, not excuses.
Tupolev and many members of his design team were arrested and imprisoned, some receiving sentences of up to ten years. There remain many theories to explain Tupolev’s arrest. The official charges include the formulaic offence of espionage and wrecking; the former resulted from his contacts with White émigrés, namely the aircraft designer de Seversky and the wind tunnel expert Margolis. Tupolev’s correspondence with his old friend, and a meeting on the French leg of his 1935 trip, had led to the accusation that Tupolev was working for French intelligence.
An audit of the results of Tupolev’s expenditure on foreign aircraft, moreover, con
cluded it had been wasteful. He had been too powerful for too long and had created many enemies and jealousies while he was at the top. The former hero paid the price for the failures in combat of the planes that bore his name and the abandonment of the heavy bomber strategy that had failed in Spain. He was imprisoned with his design team in a ‘sharashka’ detention camp, where they could concentrate on aircraft design shorn of other responsibilities.
The fallout from the sudden change of atmosphere spread to the intelligence service in America. The main casualty was the head of New York station, Pyotr Gutzeit, who was summoned back to Moscow and eventually shot. Gutzeit had focused his time and considerable amounts of money on infiltrating the fragmentary White Russian opposition movement in exile and American politics,17 recruiting at great expense a US congressman appropriately codenamed CROOK. Among the other grand schemes he proposed to Moscow was the purchase of an entire US newspaper publishing house to spread pro-Soviet stories as a challenge to Randolph Hearst. He suggested interfering in US elections to secure ‘the entry into the Senate and Congress of people capable of directing and influencing US politics’.18 Gutzeit was an expensive luxury, a dreamer in a service that was becoming increasingly professional and results orientated. His messages to Moscow ran to pages, irritating the recipients who spent hours decoding and then searching for the one nugget of information that could be useful.
The Soviet culture of denunciation and suspicion spread to the intelligence service. Overnight, heroes were denounced as villains, and few were spared criticism. The initial fallout followed the defections to the United States of senior intelligence officers Walter Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov. Despite the many sacrifices he had made for the cause in the last six years, which included being away from his young family, Shumovsky himself faced several rounds of accusations – even if, at least in INO, few of the wilder charges were believed.
Shumovsky had moved to New York on receiving his Master’s degree from MIT in June 1936 to take up a position at AMTORG as cover for expanding his espionage activities.19 Officially, he was now Deputy Plenipotentiary for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. He travelled around the country when required in his role as a controller of agents, appearing in Chicago to meet Smilg, and on to California to receive from York (who was now working at Lockheed) the plans for either the twin-engined high-speed P-38 Lightning or the Hudson bomber. Despite this hard work, an inspector from Moscow attacked him for lack of productivity and described his material as only being up to the quality of easily available open-source material, not real intelligence.20
Worse, the ghost of Cherniavsky returned to haunt Shumovsky. Back in 1935, Moscow had sent a flurry of urgent messages to New York demanding a major effort to get to the bottom of what had happened in Boston, where Shumovsky had been attempting to infiltrate the organisation. Now, in 1937, he was described as one of a group of Trotskyists surrounding the leadership in New York centre. However untrue, it was a tough charge to face.
By August 1938 the NKVD in New York felt the need to write a stern rebuttal of Moscow’s wild allegations. They pulled no punches:
The content of this report, which was supposedly sent by Navy Intelligence on the West Coast to its office in Washington, is utter hogwash and does not reflect a single authentic fact from our work. You no doubt remember the ridiculous story of how the American multi-millionaire Bendix supposedly sends money to local Communists through BLÉRIOT. In reality, BLÉRIOT met Bendix face to face only once in his life, three years ago, in the company of twenty other Soviet engineers. Or take that other ridiculous story about how BLÉRIOT’s son supposedly travels between Moscow and NY, thereby maintaining a connection. Whoever compiled this report does not even have the basic information about such easy-to-establish facts as BLÉRIOT’s age, which in fact is only 36, or that of his son, who is not yet 10 years old.21
Even Gaik Ovakimian faced an accusation of being in the pay of the FBI. It was alleged that as he had operated for so long in the United States ‘brazenly’ as a spy and he had not been caught, he had to be a traitor! The suggestion to recall every single intelligence officer in the US and replace every source as they were counter-intelligence plants was, luckily for the Soviet Union, rejected.22
But it was becoming increasingly tough to gather intelligence. Shumovsky discovered in his travels across the country that security measures were being stepped up, not just to combat Russian intelligence gathering but because other foreign security services were at work after the same or similar secrets. Moscow Centre was informed about one of Shumovsky’s missions. Before the New Year, he had travelled to Chicago to meet Smilg. His contact had moved jobs, securing a plum position in the research division of USAAF at Wright Field. On the face of it this was a major coup for Shumovsky; all Wright Field employees were supplied with plenty of information regarding developments in aviation not only in the USA but from other countries. The network of US military attachés in Europe supplied detailed reports to Wright Field describing the characteristics of aircraft fighting in Spain. But Smilg was nervous. He explained to Stan that because Wright Field was a repository of secrets from various aviation companies, there was a prevailing fear that employees might give one company’s secrets to another. He believed that all employees, especially civilians, were kept under constant surveillance.23 The regulations categorically prohibited Wright Field employees from meeting with representatives from commercial companies, especially outside the walls of the establishment. Smilg explained that the surveillance was set up so well that, no sooner had someone dined with a company representative, than the very next day he was summoned by the boss for questioning and disciplining.
Shumovsky was worried that he might lose a valuable source just when Smilg had reached the heart of US aviation research. He demonstrated his independence of thought and ability to adapt to the change of LEVER’s circumstances by suggesting alternative arrangements for the passing of information. As a new employee and a Jew, Smilg felt he would be shadowed even more closely than other employees. He asked that they should not meet for the next three months, at the end of which he would travel to Boston on vacation and hand over the materials he had accumulated. Moscow was told:
Despite BLÉRIOT’s best efforts to convince him that it would be preferable to meet earlier and set up a regular connection, LEVER held his ground, asserting that it would be better to lose 3 months and afterward begin regular work than to get exposed from the start. Considering the complexity of the situation and the fact that we agree with some of LEVER’s arguments, we will not meet with him until April. By that time, we will have developed a system for contacting LEVER that would allow us to receive materials from him with ease while minimizing the risk. Because BLÉRIOT is a Soviet engineer, he will not meet with LEVER after April to avoid compromising the latter.24
The system Shumovsky devised as a less suspicious means of maintaining contact with sources of such valuable information was the use of American couriers. It was now too risky for Russians to be seen meeting American workers in the defence industries. And the new system worked well, until Ovakimian suggested Harry Gold as LEVER’s courier. Luckily for the Bureau, Gold had a hoarding disorder and never threw anything away. His apartment was a treasure trove of ticket stubs, itineraries, and maps from every single trip he had taken on behalf of Soviet intelligence. As a result, he was later to betray Smilg and many others to the FBI.25
As Shumovsky had found, the Soviets were no longer the only country to have established an active intelligence-gathering presence in the United States. German, Japanese and Italian spies were chasing down the same or similar secrets. In response to the German theft of the top secret Norden bomb sight, it was reported:
Between the 20th and 30th of Sept. ’38, LEVER informed BLÉRIOT that in view of the discovery of a German spy ring working, in part, at Mitchell Field [the eastern base of the USAAF] and at Seversky’s factory, which filled orders for fighters, the US War Department is taking special precautions
to check up on its staff and increase vigilance. At Wright Field, all the locks on doors, closets, desks, etc., have been changed. Tables are searched more frequently. We have information that all workers are being shadowed by detectives.26
The team had built an extensive network of sources but were feeling the strain of constantly operating under the threat of surveillance and arrest. Each source required careful nurturing: they brought their problems, financial and marital, to their controllers, who also had to cope with the frustrations of missed rendezvous and the alarm engendered by unexplained absences. While the sources were becoming more conscious of the risks involved, their controllers were caught in the middle, faced with the increasing demands of their bosses in Moscow for more and better information.
• • •
The authoritative American Aerospace Industries Association had been disparaging about the Soviet aviation capability, but by 1937 it was forced to revisit its assessment in the light of the success of Russian fighters and bombers in Spain. The US embassy thought it could account for the unexplained triumph of Soviet aviation, as reported in the association’s yearbook:
Russian planes produced in 1937 were vastly improved over former models. They were much cleaner in design, and this was reflected in better performance. Russia’s flying personnel, like Italy’s, had extensive practical experience in Spain, where Russian planes flying for the Republican cause had been matched with both Italian and German machines operating under the banner of the Insurgents. Both the German and Russian equipment proved capable, and Italy had been forced to send in her latest machines to prevent being hammered out of the air.27
The secret, they thought, was not the impact of Tupolev’s 1935 trip and the tremendous level of investment, but that
The Spy Who Changed History Page 26