The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  It seemed on the surface that Germany was being completely open with the Soviets. The leading Russian aviation specialists could examine examples of the Germans’ primary combat machines, including aircraft that had only recently entered operational service with the Luftwaffe. But, beneath the mask of German friendliness and openness, there was a well-planned hidden idea to use German military might to misinform and intimidate their eastern neighbour. The Soviet specialists never got to know anything about the existence of experimental jet planes.

  • • •

  Soon after the trip Shumovsky took up a new job as deputy head of TsAGI and head of its Bureau of New Technology (BNT). ‘Bolshoi’ (big) TsAGI had opened in 1935 with expanded facilities, a brand new state-of-the-art facility at Zhukovsky – ‘the Aerocity of the Soviet Union’, named after the pioneer of Russian aviation – just outside Moscow. Even the American diplomats who holed themselves up in their embassy learned that TsAGI ‘is the heart and soul of Russia’s program for air development. It is rapidly being equipped with all the latest facilities for thorough research and experimentation, including wind tunnels, water channels, and engine development equipment. It is responsible for the giant planes produced in recent years.’21

  TsAGI projects had ranged from prototype aircraft to aerosleds and from torpedo boats to wind-generated electricity. The Institute’s main direction had by now evolved to centre upon aerodynamic research. It had built its first large wind tunnel in 1925, replacing one built by Tupolev before the 1917 Revolution. Two further wind tunnels were completed in 1937, and by 1939 TsAGI had beaten Langley to become the proud owner of the largest wind tunnel in the world, providing the opportunity to study the behaviour of full-scale aircraft. In the following years, TsAGI would found leading aerospace research institutions and design centres such as the Institute of Aerospace Materials, the Institute of Avia Motors, the Tupolev Design Bureau and the Flight Research Institute.22

  The Soviet Union now concentrated a great deal of its research and development for aviation in this one new city. The facilities at Shumovsky’s expanded Bureau of New Technology included everything required to analyse the intelligence gathered on new foreign aircraft and test Soviet prototypes. The department gave the final go-ahead for any new Soviet planes to enter production, publishing to the factories and design bureaux confidential information on international developments in aircraft design. A monthly magazine detailing the latest discoveries was established. The bureau was the hub of the intelligence networks from which information flooded in from Europe, America and Japan. Surviving examples of its work show that downed enemy aircraft and others were dismantled and analysed in detail. Blueprints of every aircraft that fell into the department’s hands were produced down to the minutest detail. TsAGI had its own cinema, which was able to show live testing of sample aircraft, often flown by Gromov or one of his team. Mock dogfights between Soviet and foreign aircraft were filmed at an airfield built nearby specifically for the purpose.

  In comparison, the United States had no intelligence on its potential rivals. The US did not even know the names of the advanced Japanese planes that swooped out of the sky on Pearl Harbor. It was only in November 1942 that a unit would be established by the Navy to begin this work. The US Army and Navy refused to cooperate with each other and worked independently. Japanese planes were given US names such as the ‘Betty bomber’ after a buxom nurse who somewhat resembled the shape of the aircraft.

  The Zhukovsky site included a model factory that was responsible for producing prototypes of every new Soviet aircraft. With the best imported equipment and a motivated workforce, prototypes were put through their paces before mass production. The secret factory matched the quality of any in the world. Sadly this was not true of the many facilities tasked with the mass production of components and assembly. It was found that the performance of a prototype would dramatically exceed that of the production model. In some cases, the top speed in service of a final production model proved to be substantially below that of the prototype; in one case the rate of climb of a production fighter was less than half that of the prototype. Worse, many models rolling off the production line were death traps.

  Stalin placed a high value on the safety of his pilots and demanded to know who was responsible for the many accidents in his growing air force. The man selected for the task was Shumovsky. It was a thankless job. Often the cause of crashes was pilot error; the air force had many inexperienced pilots, unfamiliar with flying powerful machines in challenging weather conditions. However, on a significant number of occasions a component would fail, leading to a fatal accident. Shumovsky and his team had to investigate each crash site in an attempt to identify the cause of the accident and the factor responsible for the failure of the plane. Passing on the news was politically dangerous, and surviving documents show that the circulation of Shumovsky’s conclusions was suppressed.23

  • • •

  In the US, Ovakimian was having a tough time. With Shumovsky’s departure he had lost his most experienced deputy. In his place, he had three new but green recruits. An audit of his Rezidentura revealed that fifteen employees were employed there full time, but only two of them had more than two years’ operational experience. For a group operating in America, finding Russians who spoke English proficiently was a major issue. Only Ovakimian and the three recent MIT graduates were rated good; seven were satisfactory, three poor and one spoke no English at all. Aviation intelligence gathering stopped as he had no one to step into BLÉRIOT’s shoes.

  So the MIT boys were rushed into duty. Semyonov showed the most promise and spent his summer vacation of 1939 recruiting at the Soviet Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.24 He worked alongside Morris Cohen, who with his wife was later heavily involved in Operation ENORMOZ. The 1939–40 World’s Fair covered the 1,216 acres of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The Soviet Pavilion was awarded the overall Grand Prize for its life-size copy of the interior of the Moscow metro’s showcase Mayakovskaya station.fn2

  For his work at the fair Semyonov was criticised for being ‘garrulous’, but such was the need that he was handling agents by the autumn. He was allocated two agents on the West Coast and two on the East, among them the long-term source EMULSION, one of several Soviet agents who worked as scientists at Eastman Kodak. It was an extraordinary vacation for an MIT student. It is not clear if Semyonov knew that the company’s founder had paid for the establishment of MIT.

  • • •

  The pressure of work and exhaustion, meanwhile, was making Ovakimian careless. In April 1941 he detected a persistent tail. Reporting to Moscow that he was under close surveillance, he was instructed to prepare to leave for the USSR.25 On the day of his departure in May, he was arrested by the FBI, having been observed meeting his source OCTANE. He had been betrayed. He was placed in handcuffs and awaited his fate in jail.

  Back at the AMTORG office a plan was quickly created to destroy all paperwork relating to espionage. A message was sent to Ovakimian to admit nothing that the FBI did not already know and hang on as the Soviets would get him out.26 He was released after the German invasion of the USSR. It was not, however, the end of GENNADY’s career. On his return to Moscow he would become global head of S&T; his primary target was America.

  12

  PROJECT ‘AIR’

  The last day of peace for the Soviet Union ahead of the devastating Nazi onslaught was Saturday, 21 June 1941. It was a beautiful summer’s day of clear blue skies. The young flocked to the parks to celebrate their graduation from high school and a few weeks’ vacation before most headed to the armed forces or the factories. The increased military draft was planned to put five million soldiers in uniform by the end of the year. Despite the 1939 treaty with the Nazis, the Red Army’s strength was growing fast. Stalin rightly did not trust Hitler. Regardless of his suspicion, under the terms of their agreement the last train delivering raw materials to Germany departed the Soviet Union that evening as Stalin honoured his si
de of the deal. Many of the army’s principal officers and pilots were absent from their posts on leave.

  On the eve of the German invasion in June 1941, stationed in uncomfortable proximity to their new frontier in former Poland were over a million raw Red Army soldiers, and behind them thousands of aircraft parked neatly in rows on new airfields. But the German attack came at least a year before the USSR was ready. Even after a decade of preparation, front-line military equipment still required updating. Soviet factories were busy producing modern replacements for obsolete tanks, guns and planes, but much work was still needed. The army and air force was still being trained, experienced officers were in short supply and there was a chronic shortage of communication equipment. Further complication was that the military had moved several hundreds of miles from previously well-prepared positions to unprepared defences much further forward in former Polish territory. In the initial days of the attack, the cohesion of the Red Army came apart and defeat stared Russia in the face.

  Facing the Red Army across the frontier in similar numbers was the most powerful military force in Europe. The German army was at the peak of confidence, having cut a bloody swathe across the continent in lightning strikes. So far they had suffered minimal casualties along the way. Germany had defeated France, on paper its most powerful opponent, in just six weeks. The Germans had developed a tactic of mass encirclement that they hoped would lead to the rapid destruction of the Red Army and its air force. They aimed to trap the bulk of their new opponent’s forces close to the frontier and quickly destroy all resistance. Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the German offensive, was expected to last a few weeks, at most three months. If all went as expected, the plan was to demobilise much of the German armed forces by Christmas. Believing Russia had neither the will nor the capacity to resist, the Germans initially deployed no more force than they had against France the previous summer.

  After defeating the Russian military, the next stage of the Nazi plan was to dismember the Soviet Union. The rich, industrialised west, as far as the Urals, would be cleared of its entire Slavic population and resettled with Germanic people. The existing inhabitants would either be deported to the east to starve or worked to death as slaves. It was a plan for extermination. From its very beginning, the war on the Eastern Front was far more terrible than a clash of ideologies; it was a war to determine the survival or total annihilation of the Russian people.

  Few plans in war, however, survive much beyond the first contact with the enemy. The Germans had underestimated the Soviet Union’s industrial development in the last decade. As they advanced, they occupied what seemed to Hitler to be a country of giant abandoned armaments factories. The war dragged on for weeks and then months, with no slackening in Red Army resistance. New types of tanks and aircraft appeared on the battlefield or in the sky that in performance were the equal of or superior to the German models. A single T-34 tank with a Trashutin-designed engine, arriving on the battlefield for the first time, crushed an anti-tank gun, knocked out two German Panzers and left a nine-mile swathe of destruction in its wake before the Germans were able to finally destroy it. The appearance of even one T-34 terrified the German infantry, who had nothing in their armoury to stop it. Despite massive, catastrophic losses in men and equipment in the first few weeks of the war, the Soviet Union was able to mobilise new armies, equip them and stubbornly fight on. As the Germans advanced, the toll on front-line Wehrmacht troops continually mounted. Cities such as Leningrad and Odessa resisted sieges for weeks and months, tying down Wehrmacht soldiers in the rear. It started to dawn on the Germans that they had begun a war of attrition against an enemy with vastly greater manpower resources and industrial capacity. The further the Germans advanced, chasing the illusion of a victory, the more certain became their eventual defeat.

  ’Ivan Diesel’

  The Soviet Union had an evacuation plan for its key armaments industries, and this was executed without a hitch as the German armies advanced into Russia. Equipment and workers were moved from west to east, out of range of German bombers. Some 1,523 large factories were uprooted and put back into production by the end of 1941. One of those was the giant Kharkov tank factory, whose engine department was run by MIT graduate Ivan ‘Diesel’ Trashutin. His and his workers’ destination in the evacuation was Chelyabinsk, east of the Urals, a plant built on the best American principles of mass production. Trashutin had personally supervised the manufacture of its initial equipment in the United States during his vacations from MIT. As planned, the new plant’s 24,000 workers absorbed a further 16,000 skilled evacuees from the Kharkov and Leningrad tank factories and swiftly ramped up output. In this war of production, Trashutin used his American education and manufacturing equipment to build more and better tank engines than the Germans. He powered the Soviet juggernaut as it advanced ever forward from the gates of Moscow to victory in Berlin.1

  Tankograd, 1942

  • • •

  Like all Muscovites, Shumovsky and his family heard his friend Molotov announce news of the German invasion over the public loudspeaker system. The crowds were stunned and silent. Chaos and confusion reigned during the next few weeks of the war. TsAGI had accumulated a mass of data on the combat performance and vulnerabilities of German aircraft, but the VVS was initially in no position to make use of it. Against the greater experience of the Germans in combat their tactics were ineffective. Given this lack of know-how, Shumovsky and his team were mobilised for the war effort. On 17 September 1941, Stalin was informed that ‘The Bureau of New Technology under TsAGI (the head of which is Shumovsky) is engaged in the study of enemy aircraft. The Bureau has special brigades that, on instructions from the People’s Commissar, leave for the crash site and investigate the design of enemy aircraft and issue reports to our designers.’2

  Such work would involve travelling close to the front, at times under enemy fire, in order to acquire as much information as possible from downed enemy planes. Shumovsky received his first decoration for this work. The intelligence was published in Express Information, a TsAGI publication recording in the finest detail every development in German aviation recovered from downed aircraft. Captured examples of planes that were still airworthy were test flown and the performance data recorded. The Bureau highlighted significant innovations with technical drawings. As quickly as possible the team sent out all the information to the design bureaux and the air force. The work was later expanded to include Allied aircraft that came into Soviet hands, as well as all open and some secret intelligence from the UK and US.

  Shumovsky’s other role was to continue his work to eliminate the design and manufacturing problems with new Soviet planes exposed by combat. On 29 September 1941, he wrote a letter accompanied by a report on ‘the elimination of some deficiencies in the design of the LaGG-3, identified in the investigation of accidents and the destruction of riveted seams in the Pe-2’.3 Both the fighter and the light bomber had just come into production. Work continued up to the last minute even as the battle for Smolensk – a city termed ‘the gateway to Moscow’ – ended in late September 1941. Following the fall of Smolensk, just 250 miles from the capital, the German army followed Napoleon’s route to Moscow, even crossing the battlefield of Borodino. It was only a matter of days before the authorities gave the order to evacuate TsAGI.

  But surrender was never on Stalin’s agenda. On 7 November 1941, while the Germans edged forward through the mud towards Moscow, he staged as an act of defiance the traditional Red Square military parade. Moscow was now under martial law. Frozen Muscovites read daily of the great battles as the Red Army tried everything to block the advance. The rains that had slowed the German armoured columns in seas of mud had stopped, and the winter freeze started early that year. The tanks had picked up their pace. German air raids on Moscow left the streets deserted as soon as dusk fell. Intrepid souls spent their nights on the rooftops ready to deal with the incendiary bombs that were the Luftwaffe’s primary weapon. The city was well defen
ded from air attack with searchlights, barrage balloons and massed batteries of anti-aircraft guns. Squadrons of factory-fresh Soviet fighters dominated the skies during the day, ensuring each Luftwaffe visit was a painful exercise for the Germans. In the general population, a sense of fatalism was commonplace and soon many abandoned even heading to air raid shelters when the alert sounded. Thousands of noncombatants had been mobilised to build three giant lines of earthworks as the last defence line. Meanwhile, the city emptied as essential workers and the foreign embassies were evacuated. Stalin stayed in Moscow.

  • • •

  Since the start of the war there had been rounds of meetings in the Kremlin lasting almost all day and night as a solution was sought to the problem of getting more tanks and planes to the front. Despite the loss of some factories, armaments production overall had increased as planned. The aviation and tank factories had been saved by moving them to the east, but now the Soviet Union was using up its stockpiles of essential raw materials at an alarming rate. There would soon be no more aluminium alloys left to make new aircraft or molybdenum for armour plate. New supplies were needed, and quickly. The British were the first to offer help, and then the Americans lifted the moral embargo on selling war materials to Russia imposed after the bombing of Helsinki in November 1939. The system was ‘take and pay’, and so the Soviet Union, having no cash, had to use gold and other minerals to buy planes and aluminium. Under the terms of the US Neutrality Act, the Russians had to pay in advance for their purchases and arrange delivery in their own ships.