The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  In July 1941, using the funds released from their frozen American bank accounts, the Russians bought a few badly needed fighter planes. Next, in early September 1941 the crew of the 1937 transpolar flight were among the first Russians sent into the Oval Office to ask President Roosevelt for help. Major General Mikhail Gromov, following the Russian tradition of never visiting without a gift, and knowing that FDR was a collector, had brought the President a rare postage stamp.4 In return, he had a favour to ask. He had arrived with a delegation on board two flying boats to test fly all the best American military aircraft, having been promised before setting out on the hazardous journey from Moscow that they could buy the best America had to offer, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and Lockheed’s twin-engined fighter the Lightning.

  In an account of his second trip to America, Gromov described his pivotal meeting with the President. In reply to Roosevelt’s questions about his journey, he gave his impressions about the stunningly lax levels of security at the unprotected US military bases he had visited. He had been surprised to meet Japanese and German nationals working at the facilities. There were no anti-aircraft guns in position, or signs of enhanced security.

  FDR spared plenty of time for the Russians, greeting them like old friends. He was sympathetic to the Soviets’ plight and agreed to supply any aircraft they wanted – except those they had been promised. The B-17 was endowed with top secret equipment, namely the Norden bomb sight. Although it was an open secret that the Germans had already acquired the Norden in 1938, the President explained that Congress had forbidden the sale, insisting that the expensive bomb sight must not fall into enemy hands. Based on information from Smilg, Shumovsky had already reported the tightening of security that followed the Norden theft. Gromov had heard the same story throughout his meetings in Washington. He returned angrily to the Soviet Union in November without being able to order either the strategic bomber or the modern fighter he had been promised.5

  After these twin failures, another approach was needed. On 1 October FDR’s special ambassador, Averell Harriman, met with Stalin in Moscow and gave fresh, extravagant assurances of the aid that the Soviet Union could now expect from the United States. The credit financing known as Lend Lease began in mid-October 1941; it lasted until the end of the war. The Soviet Union would be able to buy on credit whatever they needed to continue the fight.

  During the course of the war, the Soviet Union was to suffer over twenty-five million casualties. The US advanced it just under $11 billion in credit, in comparison to the $31 billion sent to Great Britain. Seventeen and a half million tons of supplies were shipped to Russia – including, of vital importance to winning the war, the raw materials to manufacture planes and aviation fuel.

  To manage the process, the Soviets turned to those with most experience in dealing with Americans, the MIT alumni. One senior member of the Soviet Purchasing Commission sent to the US in late 1941 was the now Colonel Stanislav Shumovsky.6 Under the provisions of Lend Lease, Shumovsky’s commission bought over 13,000 American-built military aircraft. Of those eventually delivered to the Soviet Union, 4,746 were of just one type, the Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter.

  • • •

  Conditions in Moscow were deteriorating fast. In four short months of the war, civil society to the west of the capital had virtually collapsed under the pressure of the German attack. The economy had ceased to function. Regular supplies of food to the city had stopped – as, with winter approaching, had fuel supplies. The invader had conquered a vast swathe of the country including much of the productive agricultural land. An estimated sixteen million refugees displaced from their homes were fleeing east. The massive plan to relocate factories and key workers out of harm’s way to the east was in full swing, monopolising the railways. Otherwise, supplies to the armed forces took precedence. In Moscow, the search for food and fuel occupied the majority of daylight hours, while the nights were sleepless with the incessant crash of exploding bombs and answering anti-aircraft fire. Eventually, in October 1941, TsAGI was evacuated to far-off Kazan, some 500 miles east of Moscow, to continue its work.7 The evacuees, taking a few possessions, left the city by a slow train and then travelled by boat down the Volga to Tatarstan. Shumovsky’s family was evacuated with them, although he himself did not travel on what was termed the ‘science train’, after the profession of its passengers. He had other orders.

  Unsure what the future held, Stan bid tense farewells to his family, including his eleven-year-old son, at Moscow railway station. Much as he might want to, Colonel Shumovsky was too old at the age of forty to return to active military service, even if his earlier crash-related injuries had allowed him to do so. Instead it had been his old friend Gaik Ovakimian, now head of global S&T for Soviet intelligence, who suggested on 15 October that Stan must be sent back to America for further espionage work.

  With his family safely departed, Shumovsky left the blacked-out capital city, ready to abandon science once again to return to the invisible front in the service of the motherland. He was about to embark on a long and potentially highly dangerous journey back to the United States.

  As a former official of the Air Ministry (People’s Commissariat), with a thorough understanding of aircraft mass production as well as being the Soviet expert on American planes and their manufacturers, Shumovsky was essential to the success of the Purchasing Commission. He spoke English like an American, knew the key players and got business done. He was to help organise American support for the Soviet war effort in the air, selecting the type of aircraft and ensuring the timely and smooth delivery of the supplies necessary to keep the Red air force, the VVS, in the fight.

  There was no one at AMTORG like Stan, with sufficient aviation expertise and understanding of Americans and American business to oil the wheels. Many of the Russians sent to the US in the early period of panic did not even speak English, let alone understand America. A culture clash had developed between the desperate Russians and American businessmen awash with orders they could not fulfil. Bureaucracy on both sides was causing delay and confusion. Aircraft ordered in America were arriving in Russia without propellers, machine guns or spares. Parts of the same order from America’s West Coast factories would come to Vladivostok, while East Coast plants would ship to Murmansk, 8,000 miles away. It was well-intentioned chaos.

  Stan had a second mission. Ovakimian wanted to revive and perhaps expand the BLÉRIOT espionage network that had dissipated with neglect since Shumovsky’s return to the USSR two years previously. The Purchasing Commission role was his cover. The Commission was known by the appropriate NKVD codename STORE.8 Ovakimian and the head of intelligence, Fitin, merged the existing S&T effort into STORE to create a vastly bigger intelligence-gathering machine operating in a dozen separate industries. Aviation, under Shumovsky’s leadership, would be the largest line in terms of manpower, and the most successful regarding the material gathered. Stan was the brains, the architect. As a top scientist and expert on new technology, he could direct the sub-agents in the factories to the most vital secrets.9

  Shumovsky’s departure was delayed by a major German and Finnish ground offensive aimed at capturing Murmansk and other nearby ports. The Axis plan was to cut the Soviet Union off from the outside world by controlling these key points. Only after fierce fighting was the attack beaten back so that he and his party were able to board a British cruiser, HMS Kenya, which was escorting a joint British and Russian convoy. The ships’ destination was Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands of Scotland (although the convoy dispersed after passing Iceland). Honouring Churchill’s promise, the British had recently begun running small convoys twice a month to Arkhangelsk, bringing their new and unlikely ally a trickle of much-needed weapons and armaments.10

  The sea voyage to Scotland was long and fraught, taking the convoy around the entire coast of German-occupied Norway. The only route brought the slow-moving ships directly into the path of German air, submarine and surface forces, and the journey would later become
the most dangerous convoy passage in the war. But these early convoys caught the Germans unprepared and Shumovsky’s ship slipped through unscathed. In late November 1941, the convoy’s primary battle was with the severe winter weather, including storms, fog and drift ice, in near constant darkness. Describing his return to the Soviet Union by the same cruiser that took Stan to Scotland, Gromov reported riding out sixty-foot waves in one storm.11 When in the midst of a storm the cruiser hit a mine just off Iceland, his party was ordered to prepare to abandon ship for lifeboats. They all knew they would not survive long in a small boat in the freezing sea. Gromov described the experience as the most terrifying of his adventurous life. Luckily the damage was light, and the ship was able to continue its voyage. The fragile nature of life on the wartime convoys was revealed when Gromov watched in horror a British sailor washed overboard to his death by a massive wave. There was no attempt to turn back or start a search; the water was so cold the unfortunate man had no chance of survival.12

  The first experimental convoys were small but very slow, sailing at only twelve knots. The journey to Scotland took two weeks. QP-3 included four Soviet ships for the return leg to Britain, joining the inbound convoy that had brought British tanks to be used in the counter-offensive around Moscow. Two of the Soviet ships had to turn back with mechanical difficulties, delaying some members of the Commission. After a week at sea, the convoy dispersed and the larger Navy escort vessels sailed off for other duties. The first stage of Stan’s journey was over.

  The German advance on Moscow stalled in the snow and ice on 2 December 1941, still fifteen miles short of its objective. Three days later, fifty-eight fresh battalions of Soviet troops launched a massive counter-offensive outside the gates of Moscow that cracked the German front apart, driving the invaders back hundreds of miles. Meanwhile a more challenging journey now awaited Shumovsky’s party, across the bitter battlefield of the North Atlantic. Because the British team at Bletchley Park had broken the German naval codes earlier in the summer, the British Admiralty could use the intelligence gained to track the location of most U-boats and steer convoys away from them. But the threat of attack remained.

  • • •

  On 7 December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; on 11 December, Hitler declared war on the USA, and U-boats were deployed to attack unprotected American shipping along the Atlantic coast. With their eyes fixed on the dramatic events in the Pacific, the US Navy had not introduced even the simplest defensive measures after war broke out. There were no organised convoys or escorts; even a coastal blackout for merchant ships had not been enforced. The vast number of easy targets was a magnet for the U-boats away from more challenging targets in the Atlantic convoys. One U-boat operated undisturbed in New York bay for weeks, sinking ships at will.

  In Scotland, a large party of Russians prepared to board a small Atlantic convoy gathering in the Firth of Clyde to set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Now that luxury liners no longer plied the route to New York at high speed, Halifax was the main Atlantic coast port where convoys destined for Britain assembled. Ports along the Clyde and their docks had suffered from extensive Luftwaffe attacks, the towns bearing the scars of regular bombing raids. While the docks still functioned, most of the nearby housing had been destroyed; over 500 civilian deaths had been incurred in one attack on Clydebank alone. The famous shipbuilding centre and others like it were the keys to Britain’s survival. The U-boat blockade threatened to starve the country into defeat unless Britain built merchant ships more quickly than the Germans could sink them. The visiting Russians commented that Britain showed many visible signs of the two years of bomb attacks. A blackout was rigorously enforced. There were few men to be seen on the streets, and the number of mobilised women in uniform surprised the Russians.

  Stan and his party were to sail in a two-vessel convoy with returning Canadian troops. They travelled on an old Norwegian liner SS Bergensfjord, which had been in New York when Norway was invaded and had since been converted to carry over a thousand soldiers.13 For its return voyages to the New World the ship was near empty, sailing westward with a protective escort of just one British armed merchantman. The convoy’s greatest security was the awful weather, which kept the U-boats at bay; because they travelled on the surface, German submarines avoided operating in the fierce Atlantic winter storms.

  The journey was nothing like the luxury of his trip a decade previously on SS Europa. Instead of bright lights and entertainment, limitless food and drink, the Bergensfjord travelled in darkness with few comforts. The fear was of a sudden torpedo attack and if lucky an evacuation to the lifeboats. For the Norwegian crew, in exile from their occupied homeland, the second day out from port was Christmas Day, but for all on board there seemed little to celebrate. The grand alliance that would liberate their country was taking shape, but victory seemed as far away as ever. For the Russians, New Year was the great holiday, but that night the party had much to reflect on – their families left behind, the desperate life-and-death struggle across a thousand-mile front and the battles to come.

  • • •

  Shumovsky and the other Russians cleared US immigration in Halifax on 2 January 1942.14 In the Purchasing Commission party heading to Washington with him were Colonel (later Major General) Sergey Piskunov, Ivan Kramarenko (the senior technical specialist), Valentin Bakhtin (an aviation instrumentation specialist) and Pyotr Belyaev (the armaments specialist). Piskunov was a much-decorated Civil War hero, a veteran of ‘special operations’, in other words the ruthless suppression of opponents. A tough, no-nonsense soldier, his role was to knock heads together. Belyaev was an aviation engineer and a long-term source for the BLÉRIOT network, working under the codename MIKHAILOV.15 He had relevant experience in America, for while he had been employed as an inspector at Lockheed/Douglas, he talent-spotted the key recruit York (NEEDLE) as an agent. Like Shumovsky he was travelling to perform jobs for both the Purchasing Commission and the secret service.

  The party was to travel to Washington by train from New York, which they found entirely unchanged by the war. The Broadway lights were still on, as bright as ever, and the city was a wall of noise. The Russians were disorientated by the hubbub of city life, the sounds of trucks and overland railways amplified by the tall buildings. The noise never stopped, day or night. But America’s mood had changed since 1938, when Stan had last been there. The news and photos of the Pearl Harbor attack had created a desire for vengeance and a marked upsurge in patriotism. In response to the 2,400 deaths of American servicemen, the President had proposed to Congress the declaration of war on Japan. A nation previously divided over the issue of intervening in a foreign war swung united behind a policy of forcing unconditional surrender on its enemies. Hitler saved Congress the trouble of a debate by declaring war on America.

  The Russians and the Americans were now – in theory – friends. But in the short term, America’s arrival in the war was an added complication, making the arduous task of acquiring large numbers of aircraft for the Soviet Union near impossible. The country was mobilising and rearming. Every plane that came off the assembly line was needed for America’s war in the Pacific and Western Europe. Great Britain was first in the queue for any surplus aircraft. The challenge for Stan’s commission was how to gain anyone’s attention to get aircraft for the Soviet Union.

  There was time for a catch-up meeting in New York with old friend Semyon Semyonov, soon to be the new head of S&T, and Vasily Zarubin, codenamed MAXIM, the new chief of the New York Rezidentura following the arrest of Ovakimian.fn1 Many Soviet citizens had been trapped in the US at the outbreak of hostilities and were desperate to return to the Soviet Union.16 One experienced intelligence officer could not be persuaded to stay in the US and returned to lead a partisan group in occupied Soviet territory. Others seeking to get home on convoys tragically died with their whole families in German attacks. Everyone in the New York Rezidentura was desperate for news from home, especially about the counter-offensive at the gates
of Moscow. Semyonov’s home city, Odessa, had fallen to Axis forces after a long and bitter siege on 16 October 1941 and he was anxious for any news.

  The New York Rezidentura team told Stan that conditions for espionage had worsened since his departure in early 1939. All operations on the XY line had been deactivated following the arrest of Ovakimian on 5 May 1941 and placed on hold for two months. Since then, as the Russians saw it, conditions of work on the XY line had become much more challenging. The US economy was finally enjoying an upswing with the ‘Defense Boom’. Improved job security meant fewer recruits for the Soviets. The US had become the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’, selling arms to the Western Allies and China at the same time as it rearmed. Belatedly the Americans had become security conscious; there were more American intelligence and counter-intelligence operations aimed at foreign agents. FBI teams were camped outside AMTORG. At the time the FBI deployed about fifty agents on surveillance operations against suspected Russian spies in New York; they used methods that later proved effective against the Ku Klux Klan.17

  With the signing of its pact with Germany in 1939, the Soviets had joined the top tier of foreign powers of extreme interest to the FBI. The outbreak of war in Europe had kick-started a ‘spy-mania’ which now gripped America’s imagination. Stan learned that several of his long-term sources were refusing to cooperate. Ben Smilg would provide no information at all, although fortuitously he had not revealed to the authorities Harry Gold’s clumsy attempt to blackmail him as he felt it would be ‘detrimental to the whole Jewish race’.18 Semyonov raged at Smilg’s ingratitude, for without Soviet financial support in paying for his education Smilg would be working on the lingerie floor of a department store.19 York had gone completely off the rails, causing much alarm when he disappeared from his home in 1940. He was now divorced, and his bitter ex-wife suggested he was spending money on his other women.20 He had appeared at AMTORG to report that he had apparently been interviewed by US Naval Intelligence about his meetings with Stan. It was believed that as York had not been arrested, he should no longer be trusted. Shumovsky’s programme of admitting engineers to MIT to carry out espionage had been all set to continue after his departure; on his advice, the Soviet deputy ambassador Andrey Gromyko, a future longest-serving foreign minister, and even head of state, had written personally to Karl Compton to request approval for a further intake of five students to MIT in September 1941.21 The war forced a temporary postponement of the plan.fn2