The Spy Who Changed History
Page 28
Manufacturers of aircraft engine parts and metal rolling plants enjoyed similar rates of growth. By the beginning of the war, the aviation industry included in its roster more than 100 enterprises employing 466,000 workers. Furthermore, a strategic decision was taken to simplify production by concentrating from the second half of 1940 on the manufacture of only a few models of the best new types of combat aircraft. The fighters chosen were the Yak-1, MiG-3 and LaGG-3 (in the Soviet Union, fighters have an odd-numbered designation while all other aircraft are even). The Pe-2 was the dive bomber of choice and the Il-2 the ground attack aircraft. The transport aircraft was the Li-2, the Douglas DC-3 derivative. While the Sb-2 and Tu-2 bombers were put into mass production, the emphasis on strategic bombing was scaled back.
The result of these decisions was that the aircraft industry of the USSR had a strategic superiority in military aviation production over Germany and its allies. By June 1941 the USSR was producing over fifty aircraft a day, more than Germany and its allies. In all, during the war, the reforms ensured that 142,775 aircraft were delivered to the front lines, of which 118,140 were combat aircraft.12 By early 1945, the Soviet air force would be eight times the size of the Luftwaffe.
The contribution of the technical committee to this monumental task was immense. The Douglas methods of design and production were introduced across the industry, creating uniformity, simplicity and quality by means of moulding, pressing, the use of profiles and mechanisation. As Douglas himself had predicted, the side that could produce the most would win, and that was the Soviet Union. Douglas would be reminded in 1945 of his prediction and quip, ‘here’s proof that free men can out-produce slaves.’13
The second element of Shumovsky’s job was the supervision of new technology, which included research into new means of propulsion. The ambition was to fly faster and higher than a propeller-driven plane would allow. As well as jet engines Shumovsky became involved in the early days of what would become the landmark Soviet space programme. Following the successful ground testing in the summer of 1939 of the RP-318, the prototype rocket plane bearing the name of its designer Sergey Korolyov, a request to fly the craft was made. A committee of the Technical Department of NKAP was appointed to examine the feasibility of the plan based on the test results, with Shumovsky as its deputy chair. The committee gave its approval and the early manned rocket plane flights proved a success.
For Korolyov this was a godsend. From a tough jail where he was serving a sentence for wrecking, he was transferred to Tupolev’s stimulating sharashka. He dedicated his undoubted talent to aircraft design, helping with the design of the Tu-2 and Pe-2 bombers as well as inventing the innovative rocket armament for its ground-attack aircraft. After the war, Korolyov would achieve worldwide fame by becoming the father of the Soviet space programme. He was responsible for putting both the first satellite, Sputnik, and the first man into space. Nor would 1939 see Shumovsky’s last involvement in the space programme.
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In 1939 Joseph Stalin followed Adolf Hitler, the recipient of the title a year earlier, in being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The treaty which won him the award, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, would prove a deal with the devil and a devastating blow to the Soviet espionage network in the US. Stalin bought time for the Soviet Union to prepare for war, but as a direct result of his manoeuvrings many of Shumovsky’s old contacts in America were put on ice, and others, dismayed by the turn of events, lost for ever.
For 1939 was a year of tectonic change in the political make-up of Europe. As war clouds darkened, Stalin pulled off two masterful coups and suffered one public relations disaster. He spent frustrating months trying to revive the old Great War Entente to form a grand anti-Nazi alliance with Great Britain and France, but grew frustrated at the snail’s pace of negotiations. Through its espionage efforts, the USSR had a better appreciation of the potency of the Nazi military threat than the British and French. The Anglo-French team believed they had the military power to defeat Germany without an ally like Stalin. By sending an underpowered negotiating team to Moscow they failed to engage with the Russians, giving every indication to the Kremlin that they were acting without seriousness or urgency. Within a day of the collapse of the talks in Moscow, a Soviet delegation was in Berlin.
Stalin’s western coup was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939. The treaty included a secret protocol that divided the territories of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania into German and Soviet ‘spheres of influence’ anticipating ‘territorial and political rearrangements’ of those countries.
As the democracies failed time and again to stand up to him, Hitler had long proved to be one of the best recruitment sergeants for Soviet espionage in the US. Later analysis of agent recruits shows they were generally motivated by a combination of factors, broadly money, ideology, blackmail or ego. The most prized recruits were those driven solely by ideology. Most despised those selling their secrets. Shumovsky proved adept at exploiting recruits’ concerns about the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies and territorial grabs, fears which drove many hundreds of recruits into the arms of Soviet intelligence. As his agent Ben Smilg later argued at his court martial, he could see nothing wrong with working with a foreign power to support a greater cause, one that his own government would not get behind. Indeed there were some extraordinary walk-ins at the Soviet consulates and embassy in this period, when packages of classified documents were dropped off anonymously.
Unsurprisingly, a high proportion of the active agents of Soviet intelligence at this time in the US were of Jewish origin. Some recruits wanted recognition for their discoveries or financing for a project; some needed help with medical bills or other expenses. Others just sold secrets for gain. If agents proved reluctant to continue, generally a little coercion would work as a spur. Shumovsky had to shout at one of Gutzeit’s failures, Boris Morros, who had claimed to be a major player in Hollywood but was nothing of the sort.
Stalin delivered his second coup of the year in the Far East. As he had predicted after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, Japan had now turned its military interests to the Soviet territories bordering the region. The first major Soviet–Japanese border incident, the Battle of Lake Khasan, occurred in 1938. After that, there were frequent clashes between Japanese and Soviet forces along the Manchurian border. But in 1939, the decisive engagements of this undeclared border, the battles of Khalkhyn Gol, resulted in the complete defeat of the Japanese 6th Army. Following this crushing victory, the combatants would remain at peace until August 1945, when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchukuo.
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In the West, Stalin was trying to improve his country’s security; after Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, he had ordered an invasion of Poland on 17 September to protect Soviet interests. But his primary concern was the protection of Leningrad, which was only twenty miles from the Finnish border. It was the Soviet attempt to redefine the border with Finland that would cause the biggest problems, both for the USSR and for Shumovsky. Finland refused to concede territory voluntarily, and so the USSR invaded the country on 30 November 1939, beginning the Winter War. After the League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union on 14 December 1939, events took a turn for the worse, bringing Stalin to the brink of war with Britain and France, who sided with the Finns. Soviet losses were heavy, and the country’s international reputation suffered. America was horrified by the strong bullying the weak; and none more so than the Soviet volunteer agent network.
In this short war, the Soviets committed vastly more soldiers than the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft and a hundred times as many tanks. Yet in the early months, Finland repelled the massed frontal attacks much longer than the Soviets had expected.
With a renewed Soviet offensive, the Red Army finally overcame Finnish defences, after which Finland agreed to cede more territory than originally demanded b
y the Soviet Union in 1939. The end of the war cancelled a Franco-British plan to send troops to Finland through northern Scandinavia. But Stalin was furious with the initial results of the campaign. The vaunted Red Army, and by extension Stalin himself, had been humiliated. Its poor performance against Finland’s small armed forces had encouraged the German generals to advise Hitler to attack the Soviet Union and reconfirmed the negative Western opinion of the Soviet army.
Colonel Faymonville, the US military attaché in Moscow, was a shrewder judge. One of the few Westerners who noted that the Soviets, expecting a quick and easy victory against Finland, had initially relied upon hastily called-up reserve divisions ill-equipped for winter fighting, he pointed out that the dramatic Soviet victory against the vastly experienced Japanese army at Nomonhan just a few months before, a conflict that had gone virtually unnoticed in the West, was a better reflection of how the Soviets would fight.
On 20 December 1939, led by former President Herbert Hoover, who was chairman of the Finland Committee, and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a great sympathy rally for the people of Finland was arranged in Madison Square Garden, New York City. Hoover pushed for the recall of the US ambassador from Moscow. Under pressure, Roosevelt extended ‘moral sanctions’ to the Soviet Union. This voluntary code to stop the export of aircraft and associated aviation materials to countries who bombed civilians was a crippling blow. The Soviet Union was critically short of the aluminium alloys needed to make aircraft and other metals to make armour plate. Worse than the ineffective moral sanction was the disillusionment of many intelligence agents on the ground. Many had joined the Soviet networks seeing them as part of a grand anti-Nazi movement. Stalin’s political machinations created much anger and confusion.
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On his return to the USSR, Shumovsky had expected to be working on a stream of intelligence from his contacts in the US and purchases by AMTORG. But in his absence the connections were lost. Instead of getting information from America, however, his division received an unexpected bonus in the form of virtually unlimited access to Germany’s aircraft and component factories. After the Nazis came to power, the USA and to an extent France had replaced the Germans as the USSR’s main trade partners, at least where the aircraft industry was concerned. But some ties with Germany in the aviation sphere remained intact. The aircraft engine designer Alexander Mikulin and several TsAGI and Air Forces Academy aerodynamics specialists visited Germany in 1936 and 1937. German military aircraft were brought from the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War for testing, although most were so severely damaged that they had to be examined on the ground. A few were restored, test flown and filmed in simulated air combat with Soviet fighters.
The results of the tests, in which the Soviet aircraft bested the German planes, gave the Russians some hope. It proved false. Analysis showed many design advantages in construction and equipment on German aircraft, such as self-sealing fuel tanks, oxygen equipment and crew intercom. The issue was that German aircraft tested in the USSR were outdated. New Luftwaffe aircraft, such as the improved Bf 109E powered by a Daimler-Benz DB 601 engine and the Ju 88 high-speed bomber, had appeared in Spanish skies in 1938. Disastrous combat experience against the new aircraft demonstrated that Germany enjoyed clear superiority over Soviet aircraft. Panic ensued.
Fearing an early war with Germany, and taking every possible step to delay it, Stalin now banked on German know-how to equip the Red Army. The official signing of an economic agreement between the two countries in 1940 was a formality as a new phase of military and economic cooperation had begun immediately after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. The Defence Commissariat quickly compiled a preliminary list of German military equipment they hoped to buy for examination. The section on aviation was a long one. The plan was to acquire several examples of each type of aircraft and engine, the total sum allocated for the purchase of German equipment being an astronomical 1 billion German marks.
If the Germans agreed to the sales, it was Shumovsky who would allocate this extraordinary treasure trove. He joined I. F. Tevosyan, a member of the Central Committee and leader of the commission that went to Germany in October 1939 to study the German aircraft industry and select purchases. They were accompanied by factory managers, military specialists, employees of scientific research institutes, and aircraft designers including Nikolay Polikarpov and Alexander Yakovlev. The German Air Ministry showed the Soviet specialists the majority of its aircraft industry. In just over a month, the members travelled all around the country, visiting the key factories.
Just as the Germans hoped, the Soviet aircraft engineers left their trip highly impressed – and misled – by what they had seen. During a 27 December 1939 conference of the Technical Council of the People’s Commissariat of the Aviation Industry at Stalin’s dacha, Polikarpov said: ‘the German aircraft industry had taken a big step forward and emerged in first place in the world.’14 It was not only the high quality of the German aircraft but rates of production that worried Soviet leaders. They believed the German factories could produce between 2,500 and 3,000 aircraft a month, three times the Soviet capability. In fact the figures were false and had been inflated; during the whole of 1940, the Germans only built 10,826 planes.15
Worse was to follow. The Soviet designer told Stalin that high production quality, labour management and top design offices, combined with the work of scientific aviation centres, were among the reasons why Germany had achieved superb results in developing its aircraft industry in such a short time. Yakovlev gushed to Stalin on their return that unlike the Soviet Union, research and development work in Germany was very well organised. German designers had plans that looked forward two years. He pointed out, to Shumovsky’s embarrassment, that TsAGI had been asked to resolve and provide guidance on the perennial problem of radiator weight. In liquid-cooled engines radiators are used to control temperature but those in the Soviet aircraft were both too heavy and, thanks to their design, caused too much drag, preventing the production of true high-speed machines. Yakovlev widened his complaints, pointing out that every German designer had at his disposal wind tunnels, and every experimental plant designer had a strength and a vibration laboratory. They had seen that every designer tested aircraft parts, and the aircraft as a whole, in a testing shop at his plant. Above all the Russians were impressed with the exchange of experience between German designers. The work was organised in such a way that every factory built two or three types of designs. The Messerschmitt plant produced the Me 109 and also made wings for other firms’ aircraft. This led to a natural exchange of know-how and results in the German aviation industry, rather than to the exposure of a factory that built the machine from start to finish to acts of sabotage or an air raid.16
In an extraordinary admission, Polikarpov explained to Stalin the fundamental problem with the Soviet system – that the designers ‘work exclusively and there are no incentives for us to familiarize ourselves with what many other designers are doing’. This led to the situation where ‘very often we have to decide issues already solved by others and run into mistakes from which other designers have already learned’.17
The commission had identified one key espionage target. German designers had ‘special technical literature and periodicals. Several scientific journals publish all modern materials. In addition, they have remarkable books – reference books for designers. These are the most valuable works where you find solutions for a series of elementary things over which we rack our brains. We do not have this, which is sad …’18
Based upon the recommendations of the delegation, an order for German aircraft and equipment for detailed examination in the USSR was arranged through the Commissariat of Foreign Trade in early 1940. It included more than 100 items. What was actually delivered is unclear, but the amount must have been substantial as the Soviet government paid 25 million roubles for some of the equipment supplied by the summer of 1940.19
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/> It was Shumovsky who decided where the German aircraft and other aviation equipment were brought for examination to the Air Forces Scientific Research Institute, Gromov’s newly founded Flight Research Institute (LII), his own TsAGI laboratories. The engines were sent to TsIAM (Central Scientific Research Institute for Aircraft Engine Construction) next door. Many specialists came to Moscow to see the German aircraft first hand. Chertok, an engineer from Plant No. 293 in Khimki, later a missile and aerospace designer and one of S. P. Korolyov’s closest assistants, provided his impressions:
We carried out the inspection of German equipment in groups, without any haste. I was most interested in the electrical equipment, piloting and navigational instruments, radios, bomb launchers, and the bomb sights. Our first-hand familiarisation with the German aircraft showed that the Soviet Air Force, although among the world’s mightiest, was facing a crisis and taking a back seat to the German Luftwaffe.20