The Spy Who Changed History

by Svetlana Lokhova

  A significant factor is a significant rise in activity among counterintelligence and police agencies. The increase in the average American’s vigilance as a result of propaganda in the press, film, and radio against the activities of foreign agents has to do with this same factor. Compared to how it was before the war, there has been a radical change in the methods of storing documents and working drawings. The procedure for gaining access to factories has become significantly more complicated, not only for foreigners but for Americans as well. Workers and managers who are offered jobs at defense plants are carefully vetted by the FBI and counter-intelligence agencies.

  The means and opportunities for travel across the country have become significantly more complicated. Surveillance has increased so much that travel without official reasons to cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Norfolk, and so forth, is completely unthinkable. Even to go to Boston, Rochester, or Chicago, one must be on official business of some kind that can serve as an entirely logical reason for the trip. When buying a ticket to the West Coast, they write down the name and address, and the conductor does the same thing when he checks the ticket. It is practically impossible to get airplane tickets, especially on the day of the trip, and there is no question that all passengers are carefully checked.26

  It had become clear that the Purchasing Commission was a better cover for S&T information gathering than AMTORG. Shumovsky had successfully adapted his methods to wartime conditions while others had not. His role as liaison officer with the USAAF allowed him access to all secure facilities, including NACA and the secret air force base at Wright Field. At some point in late 1942, he managed to secure himself a position at Wright Field, becoming more familiar with the goings-on than many Americans stationed there. Under the auspices of the Purchasing Commission, he installed a hand-picked qualified Russian engineer in each of the major aircraft factories supplying Russia as an information conduit and agent gatherer. At least two of these engineers, Raina (known as Shevchenko) at Bell and Belyaev at Douglas, were experienced spies. As supervisor in chief and in possession of the ultimate security pass, Shumovsky could travel anywhere with a driver supplied by the US government. He could even meet with his old agents. As the New York Rezidentura informed Moscow Centre, ‘BLÉRIOT is meeting with LEVER [Benjamin Smilg] in an attempt to restore the friendly relations that had once existed between them. It is difficult to meet. However, b/c LEVER was drafted into the Armed Forces, and walks around in an officer’s uniform.’27

  Stan rose to the challenge, arranging to bump into Smilg ‘by accident’ at the air force base. According to Smilg, they met a half dozen times afterwards for dinners with his wife. Stan even attended Smilg’s wedding at the airbase in full Soviet uniform. The general commanding the base at the time saw nothing untoward about a scientist working on top secret projects having as a friend a senior officer in the Red air force.28 Stan also travelled further afield to the Lockheed and Douglas factories in California, informing Moscow of his plans at each step of the way. The purpose of the trip was to establish new channels of communication with the West Coast agents. In the future, American cut-out couriers from the illegal network would do the leg-work.

  • • •

  In addition to administrating $11 billion of purchases, the Commission was a cover for large-scale espionage activity. But the reach and success of the operation was placing a strain on resources. On 20 October 1943 Moscow Centre ordered a re-organisation ‘to form 3 independent stations with centers in NY, Washington, and San Francisco, and one sub-station in LA under the authority of San Francisco. There should be a special assistant on XY in each station.’29 It was quite a turnaround from the excuses for inactivity offered in July 1942. The scale of the organisation could be glimpsed in a report sent on that date to General Fitin, head of intelligence. It showed that at least twenty-two agents had been sent to America and become active across various branches of industry involved in Lend Lease. Each agent was a qualified engineer or specialist in his given field, able to perform alongside factory workers while acquiring information and identifying potential sources. Each arrived knowing a code phrase, which was normally a question, and had agreed on the answer to allow a controller to activate him.

  The Purchasing Commission owed an enormous debt of gratitude to MIT, for the university had now trained two of its most senior managers. Ivan Eremin, one of Stan’s former housemates from Boston had arrived with his family in February 1942 to become its deputy head and take charge of the Department of Heavy Industrial Equipment, working alongside Stan. ‘Rosty’ Rostarchuk, another housemate and now the deputy chairman of AMTORG, was transferred to Washington the same month. It was quite a reunion. Photographs show the Russians, dressed in sharp suits, with their charm to negotiate in English billions of dollars of business deals, with the skills acquired in Boston a decade before. The number of MIT alumni grew when the three spies Semyonov, Novikov and Yershov were transferred into the Commission to join Stan. They were appointed group leaders of agents operating under cover in factories.

  On the aviation side, there were two priorities: Project ‘AIR’ aimed to discover the secrets of jet engines and ‘RAINBOW’ those of radar. Bell Aviation, the Soviets’ primary supplier of fighter aircraft, was responsible for designing and secretly building America’s first jet plane, the P-59 Airacomet, powered by twin General Electric versions of the advanced British Whittle engine manufactured in Syracuse. Assigned to work at Bell under the alias of Shevchenko, Stan’s deputy Raina built up a network of sources in the aviation factories in Buffalo and nearby Syracuse.

  When tested, the first American jet was a disappointment, its performance worse than a propeller-driven plane. One of Raina’s sources, Professor Petroff, was head of aerodynamics at Curtiss-Wright, which was also designing jets; he informed the Russians in June 1943 that the British were having much greater success than the Americans:

  Professor PETROV told ARSENY (Raina) that the development of aircraft construction in the ISLAND [UK] in many [4 groups unrecovered] outstripped the COUNTRY [the US]. For this reason, a large group of the COUNTRY’s aviation experts, including three from KEEL’s [Petroff] firm, was sent to the ISLAND to study the experience.30

  Ovakimian had transferred Yershov to London to establish a specialist S&T presence. The MIT connection was used to roll out globally the intelligence-gathering model that had worked so well in the US. Raina was taken to Wright Field in 1944 as a guest of Bell to witness a test flight of the top secret jet. Later he was offered the opportunity to purchase the jet planes from Bell just as the US government withdrew its funding for the project.

  • • •

  Even using cameras and microfilming the vast amount of material gathered was exhausting for the agents. A solution to the problem of shipping intelligence material to Russia finally arrived in November 1942 with the opening of the air bridge. At Great Falls, the planes heading to Russia were loaded with crates of diplomatic cargo. This was ‘Super Lend Lease’, a defector named Kravchenko was to tell HUAC in 1949.31 The committee appeared particularly irritated that the Russians had been smuggling out America’s pilfered secrets in US-supplied ships and planes. The defector described seeing

  Big books like this, approximately (indicating) which contained many pictures of the aviation industry, the special machines, special details, and so on. There were pictures and blueprints. Three large volumes in the Purchasing Commission Office. This material was signed by General Belyaev, Alexander Rostarchuk. I know General Belyaev took them when he flew to Moscow.32

  The Russians also raided the US patent office. Russian officials were able to collect many industrial and military inventions simply by buying the patents, an activity carried out in plain sight. Among the patent reprints supplied to Russia, as listed by HUAC, were those for bomb sights, tanks, aircraft, ship controls, bomb-dropping devices, helicopters, minesweepers, ammunition and bullet-resisting armour.

  At Gore Field in Great Falls could be found a s
elf-appointed, one-man guardian of American interests. Major George Racey Jordan felt he could not stand idly by and watch the flood of secrets leave his country without doing something. He describes how

  Another ‘diplomatic’ cargo which arrived at Great Falls was a planeload of films. Colonel Stanislau Shumovsky, the Russian in charge, tried to prevent me from making an inspection by flaunting a letter from the State Department. I told him the letter did not apply to me. It was a letter authorising this Russian to visit any restricted plant and to make motion pictures of intricate machinery and manufacturing processes. I looked over a half dozen of the hundreds of cans of films. That one plane carried a tremendous amount of America’s technical know-how to Russia.33

  By November 1944 the New York Rezidentura could report back to Moscow that, thanks to American propaganda and Soviet victories, ‘the agent situation for developing work in technical intelligence in America at present is to be considered more favorable than at the start of the war’.34 An emerging interest in the Soviet Union among American engineering and technical personnel had allowed talent spotters the chance to circulate in the milieu of American experts and to recruit new agents:

  Given the wartime labour shortages, progressive elements with a friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union and a wish to provide us with assistance have had more opportunity to get jobs with businesses and institutions that they couldn’t get into before the war. The rapid development of US industry during the war had led to the emergence of many new businesses to fulfil military orders. These businesses have little experience in counter intelligence work such as the safekeeping of secret diagrams, specifications, and documents. Crucially, the agent situation in the area of ‘Enormous’ had become more favourable because ‘the range of scientists, engineers, and technicians allowed into this work is expanding more and more with each passing day, thereby making counterintelligence work in this area more difficult.35

  By May 1943 Shumovsky was on his way home. He had completed his two missions. Aircraft were now flowing in a steady stream to the front from American factories, and his secret work was going from strength to strength. Unlike in 1939, he left behind a flourishing legacy of agents. At his departure, there was a team of four in aviation to carry on his work. His deputy Raina had recruited a dozen active sources. But Stan was still missed; no one was as good as him. The armaments specialist Belyaev (agent MIKHAILOV), a fellow passenger on the storm-tossed convoys and now working at Douglas in California, complained that ‘valuable intelligence was being lost’ since Stan had gone. He harked back to the great days of 1942 when the pair had delivered ‘first-class intelligence’.36

  13

  ENORMOZ

  Stan climbed aboard a Soviet Li-2 military transport at Ladd Army Airfield in Fairbanks, Alaska, bound for Siberia. He turned to take his final look at the country that had been his home for the best part of a decade. America was no longer the peaceful isolationist nation he had found when he first set foot in New York in 1931. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had stirred the beast. The entire industrial and creative power of the world’s largest economy had turned itself over to war production. Billions of dollars and thousands of scientists were devoted to creating and deploying state-of-the-art technology to win the war. The small aircraft factories he had visited in the thirties had expanded beyond recognition, commissioning giant new facilities and taking on thousands of workers. Production lines were running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, turning out aircraft brimming with high technology that no other nation could match either in quantity or quality.

  The evidence of America’s manufacturing power was lined up in rows on both sides of the runway, dozens of factory-fresh American-built military aircraft each adorned with the bright red star of the Soviet air force. Newly trained United States ferry pilots had delivered the aircraft from the giant base at Great Falls in Montana to this remote Alaskan airfield, which was an unexpected hive of activity. Ladd Field in May 1942 served as the forward base for the forgotten American military campaign to evict the Japanese army from the Aleutian Islands. Stan’s departure coincided with the only battle in the Second World War to take place on the soil of the USA. Each of the many aircraft destined for the Eastern Front was given a final service by USAAF personnel in preparation for handover. The planes had arrived at Ladd Field stripped of all but basic instrumentation and armament. After the team of Russian inspectors permanently living at the US military base accepted the aircraft, the first of five regiments of Soviet ferry pilots took their place in the cockpits to fly them in a series of hops from Fairbanks to the VVS pilot training facilities near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. With no navigational aids, the Russian pilots took off on the first leg to Galena, Alaska, on the Yukon River. After stopping to refuel, the aircraft went on to Nome for the short hop across the Bering Strait to Siberia.

  The four other regiments positioned along the route across Siberia were each assigned to a specific segment, becoming familiar with the tricky navigation and inclement weather. The single-seat Bell P-39 Airacobra, and later the Bell P-63 Kingcobra fighters, flew for safety in groups, accompanied by a pair of multi-engined North American B-25 Mitchell or Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers. The lead bomber navigated for the flight, while the trailing bomber watched for stragglers.

  As his plane sped down the runway, the lines of aircraft destined for the battlefields of the Eastern Front were Shumovsky’s final sight of the US. He had crossed the Atlantic in the darkest days of the war to arrange a lifeline for his country. It was fitting that after all his work, the culmination of his trip was the imposing sight of the joint effort to defeat Nazism. The air corridor was just one of three supply routes to the front line. Tons of arms and ammunition were arriving in the Caucasus via the Persian Corridor from the ports of Iran and Iraq, along specially built railways and roads. British, Russian and American ships still sailed the dangerous convoy routes across the Arctic waters.

  Back in 1935, Shumovsky had seen the first Douglas being manufactured in Santa Monica for export to TsAGI. He had visited many times the teams of Soviet engineers who had meticulously redesigned the Douglas DC-3 at the factory in southern California in 1938. The Li-2 in which he now flew was a mass-produced Russian version of the DC-3, planes built under licence first near Moscow and then in an evacuated factory in Tashkent. Donald Douglas had made several million dollars from the fees the Soviets had paid him to build thousands of his planes, and had told visiting Russians how much he appreciated their business. Now running the fourth largest company in America, with a host of plants manufacturing his planes, Douglas was happy to show his Russian friends what the US War Department did not want them to see. He took one group of Russians on a factory tour of his C-47 Skytrain, pointing out the new design features. A company photographer came along to record the tour, allowing the Russians to pose by the significant features. Douglas even promised to provide the Russians with the radar that was included in his planes.

  The route that thousands of planes flew across the North Pole and the Arctic in May 1943 was the same one that the pilots Chkalov and Gromov had opened with their non-stop flights in 1937. Shumovsky had helped organise the groundbreaking trips. It had been hoped then that the route would be a commercial artery, bringing the countries closer together. No one would have imagined that six years later thousands of military aircraft would be repeating the feat. Somewhere in the icy wastes that he looked down on while flying east, Sigismund Levanevsky’s flight had mysteriously disappeared without trace. It had been a terrible month organising the desperate search for the lost airmen.

  Stan’s business trip of October 1941 had lasted a year and a half. He smiled to himself realising that in the holds of the planes, safely packaged in diplomatic crates, were thousands of documents, films and samples of industrial secrets. A mission that he had begun alone in 1931 now employed dozens, working to ensure that the Soviet Union never again found itself left behind in the technology race. On his five-day journey home
, and during the many stops on the way, he broke the tedium by reflecting on the recent past. He had spent the best part of a decade working far from home as a Soviet intelligence officer. Under the intense pressure, few ‘super spies’ had lasted so long. Stan had always operated in plain sight, and without ever being caught. Along the way he had rubbed shoulders with America’s top scientists, businessmen and military officers, a Hollywood star and the US President. Despite being a lifelong and dedicated Communist, he had come to respect American scientists and entrepreneurs for their extraordinary achievements in his beloved field of aviation. He had worked in the heart of capitalism and seen the rewards on offer for a successful entrepreneur like Donald Douglas, but was never tempted to defect; he was too aware of the inequalities and injustices of capitalism. All the American technological treasures he acquired were the tools needed to defend his people from a merciless invader.

  Shumovsky was remarkable as an intelligence officer because he continually adapted his methods to changing circumstances and used America’s strengths and weaknesses to his advantage. He had worked with the disenchanted who felt excluded from the American dream by their ethnic origin, the greedy who sold secrets for cash because they wanted money, and the idealists who believed in the inevitable triumph of Communism. He had always used a legal cover in his operations: first he was a talented student; next he became the representative of a major aviation customer; and finally he was a skilled military advisor. His lasting contribution to Soviet espionage was the development of a new style of intelligence gatherer, the scientist spy. The student programme that he had instigated had brought to MIT spies whose networking into America’s scientific community paid dividends in the most unexpected areas. His successors, using his methods, and their contacts in the scientific community and factories brought to the Soviet Union valuable intelligence on America’s developments in jets, rockets and the atomic bomb: the weapons of a future war.