• • •
Semyon Semyonov, in particular, was producing extraordinary results. Semyonov learned from Stan to use ‘his connections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ to discover ‘which of the prominent scientists are participating in the so-called Manhattan Project for the creation of an atomic bomb’.1 He ‘managed to establish firm contacts with physicists close to Oppenheimer’. Semyonov employed as a route into the highly secure Los Alamos facility the couriers Morris and Lona Cohen, and as a ‘backup’ Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Semyonov’s outstanding contribution to the success of Operation ENORMOZ was the creation of channels around the elaborate US security which allowed scientists to give intelligence information on the atomic bomb. The materials he sent back to Moscow described the main nuclear experiments, the reactors, various types of uranium-235 diffusion separation units and the results of atomic bomb tests. Besides nuclear secrets, Semyonov is known to have saved hundreds of lives by acquiring the secrets of the mass manufacture of the drug penicillin.
• • •
By the time of Shumovsky’s return to his home in Moscow, the tide of war had changed decisively in favour of the Red Army. For the first time the Soviet Union, with its armament factories in full production, was preparing for a massive summer campaign to confront and defeat the German army. The pivotal battle of Kursk, following soon after their humiliating surrender at Stalingrad, was another bloody disaster for the Wehrmacht. Their extensive losses in manpower and equipment blunted German ambitions for the summer of 1943. In its last strategic offensive, the German army’s objective was limited to pinching out a giant salient in its front lines. Yet, despite two years of fighting, the German High Command still underestimated Soviet ability to resist. In the summer of 1943 the Red Army met, matched and destroyed the next generation of Hitler’s tanks, the Tigers and Panthers, with MIT graduate Ivan Trashutin’s upgunned T-34s and thousands of attack aircraft. After this battle, Germany lost the initiative in the war against Russia and could never envisage an offensive on the Eastern Front again. Instead they fought a stubborn retreat, destroying everything, including houses, factories and dams, in the process. The destruction of the Soviet Union was on such a scale that when FDR was taken on a shocking tour of recently liberated Crimea, he had a controversial conversation with Stalin about the possibility of executing 50,000 Prussian officers to eliminate German militarism once and for all.
The long journey home took Stan five days by plane. When he eventually arrived back in Moscow, he discovered TsAGI’s research facilities had been repaired. The laboratories had suffered extensive damage during the air raids in late 1941 after the Germans identified the site and the scientists as a target of high military value. At a time of extreme shortages, Stalin had personally authorised the extensive repairs in January 1942.2 Two hundred and fifty staff were transferred back to Moscow from Kazan and Novosibirsk to repair the damaged wind tunnels and aircraft testing facilities. The rest of the workers returned to Moscow in September. Given the numbers, it was a massive operation involving special trains to bring the hundreds of evacuees and equipment back to Moscow. The Institute was back in full operation by early 1943, another sign that the Soviet Union was gradually returning to some sense of normality.3
On his arrival, Shumovsky remarried. The fate of his first wife and daughter is unclear, but he met his second wife Tamara at the Aviation Ministry, and they had a son, Alexander, in 1945.4
After a lengthy debriefing at the NKVD’s Lubyanka headquarters, Shumovsky left espionage behind and returned to his first love, science. He had remained deputy head of TsAGI and head of the Bureau of New Technology throughout, despite being in America for fifteen months. The Soviets were now starting to turn their minds to the future after the war. The BNT was at the forefront of preparations for the next generation of aviation. There was no secret as to the new challenges: jets, missiles and radar. After the British inventor Frank Whittle publicly patented his innovative jet engine in 1930, the rearming German Luftwaffe bought a copy of the design from the UK patent office, although the Royal Air Force had failed to invest in the revolutionary development until 1940.
By 1943 the Red Army had learned after eighteen months of hard fighting how to defeat the Wehrmacht in summer as well as winter. They had grown in strength and confidence, becoming the dominant army in the European theatre. The Soviets could deploy more men, tanks and guns to the battlefield than any opponent or any other army. They were masters of the giant set-piece battle. But in a future war the USSR would have to face an opponent with a radically distinct strategy. The Americans fought a different style of war from the Soviets and Germans. They embraced a philosophy that attempted to minimise their own casualties by committing few ground forces and deploying strategic air power against their opponents on an unprecedented scale. The idea of precision bombing had been replaced by that of enormously destructive area attacks; today we would call such raids carpet or saturation bombing. There was no attempt to limit ‘collateral damage’– in fact civilians were the target. The aim of the air war was to destroy the enemy’s will to resist. In Europe, the cities of Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden were destroyed. In the latter two a deliberate firestorm was created using incendiary bombs to maximise casualties and destruction. However, it was the US attacks from 1944 on the home islands of Japan that showcased the full destructive power of the US bombing force. Under its leader General Curtis LeMay, the Americans had firebombed sixty-three Japanese cities, killing as many as 400,000 civilians. The B-29s’ nightly raids overwhelmed Japan’s civil defence, which had no ability to cope with the scale of casualties. The Japanese even stopped their air force from trying to intercept the attackers.
On 8 April 1945, in one of his final acts, President Roosevelt sent Stalin an unusual present. It was a collection of air reconnaissance photographs of German cities before and after USAAF raids.5 The book contained a warm greeting and expressed the hope that attacks could be made from aircraft based on Soviet territory. Following Roosevelt’s death, the Americans sent Stalin a follow-up book of photographs from the devastating B-29 Superfortress firestorm raids on Japan’s home island cities. A single attack shattered Tokyo, killing 100,000 civilians, injuring a similar number and leaving a million homeless. The new volume was entitled Japan On Fire.6
Stalin interpreted the book as a threat. The Soviet Union had no defence against a high-altitude US bombing campaign and was now within its range. Having abandoned its strategic bombing development because of a shortage of resources, the Russians lacked any means of retaliating if such an attack was launched against it. Stalin felt the book demonstrated how prickly the alliance between the two powers was becoming. Relations with the Americans were deteriorating, not least because Stalin was receiving intelligence that the Manhattan Project was nearing completion.
Bombing of Japan, 1945, from album sent to Stalin
Despite planning the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for August 1945, the Americans intended to conceal from their ally Stalin the existence of the atomic bomb until the last minute. For unlike their fellow allies the British, the Soviets had been excluded from the nuclear club that was developing the first bombs. It was not until the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, that President Truman sidled up to Stalin to tell him obliquely about America’s development of a ‘new weapon of unusual destructive force’. Truman was puzzled when Stalin did not react to his news and believed Stalin had not understood him. Churchill would later write: ‘I was sure that [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told.’7 Churchill could not have been more wrong. The lack of reaction was because Stalin had known for years about his allies’ worrying development of an atomic bomb. In fact, thanks to Soviet intelligence, he had found out about the Allied project well before Truman. The incoming president was only trusted with the knowledge when he assumed office on 12 April 1945. For years Roosevelt had kept the secret from his vice president. Stalin re
turned to Moscow from Potsdam intent on speeding up the USSR’s scientific efforts and redoubling intelligence gathering towards making his own bomb. He knew the Soviet Union’s only defence against the US’s weapon would be to develop its own.
• • •
The race to create an atomic bomb sprang from the peace-time scientific work of the 1930s. From splitting the atom in 1932, scientists had made great strides towards unleashing the energy trapped within. The collective dream of researchers was to unlock the atom’s power to create unlimited safe electricity. Before the clouds of war descended, the international community shared all scientific advances, publishing discoveries in magazines and for peer review. But after 17 December 1938, when for the first time German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann split the uranium nucleus, research began shifting to the potential military use of atomic reactions. Hahn and Strassmann had witnessed a new type of nuclear disintegration, one much more powerful than any seen before: a chain reaction. Faced with the horrifying implications of the new discovery being in the hands of the Nazis, other German scientists in exile alerted the international community. Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner published analysis of this worrying development in Nature magazine, coining the phrase ‘nuclear fission’. The shocked international community realised that the power released in the chain reaction had military potential, with some fearing the Nazis would use an atomic weapon first.
Early in the war a British team developed the design required to create a devastating atomic chain reaction using an enriched-uranium-fuelled device. Scientists at Birmingham University calculated that the critical mass of the uranium-235 isotope required for a workable bomb twenty thousand times as powerful as a conventional weapon was only 10 kg. A bomber could easily carry a weapon of this size. Initially working alone, the British had made faster progress than anyone else and believed that an atomic bomb was within reach. Yet the British government quickly realised that without disrupting all other vital war work, the tremendous cost of developing their own device would be beyond them. On the other side of the Atlantic, at the urging of Albert Einstein, Karl Compton and others, President Roosevelt had in complete secrecy committed vast resources to an American nuclear programme: the Manhattan Project. With their greater investment, the Americans would soon surpass British achievements.
Even before the idea of harnessing the power of nuclear fission for a bomb was first proposed, Stalin and Soviet scientists had been receiving intelligence reports on nuclear projects underway outside the USSR. At the start of the war the Soviets had in place a world-class team of experts and, thanks in part to the stream of intelligence, enough technical knowledge and skills to begin an atomic weapons programme. Yet the Russians assumed such a weapon would not be ready for use in the war and so the state offered no support for an atomic project for military use. In science-obsessed Russia, the ongoing atomic research was aimed at developing energy and was led by the nuclear scientist Igor Kurchatov and the Cambridge University-educated pair Yuliy Khariton and Pyotr Kapitsa. By the standards of the time, their research was well advanced. Kapitsa had spent more than a decade at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, working as assistant to Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics. It had been Rutherford’s team that first split the atom in 1932. Kapitsa had introduced Khariton to Cavendish, and Khariton gained his doctorate researching the effects of alpha radiation on the human eye.
Thanks in great part to intelligence gathered by Gaik Ovakimian, Soviet scientists were the first to successfully repeat the groundbreaking British experiment to split the lithium atom by neutron bombardment. Ovakimian had successfully recruited Herbert Muraviev, a Russo-German scientist in Berlin who provided much of the intelligence.fn1 Through information from sources like Muraviev, scientists monitored international developments such as the crucial discovery of nuclear fission in Germany. In 1939 the future Nobel laureate Igor Tamm explained the implication to his students: ‘Do you know what this new discovery [fission] means? It means a bomb can be built that will destroy a city out to a radius of maybe ten kilometres.8 In 1941, Soviet chemist Nikolay Semyonov was the first to define the conditions for establishing a chain reaction.fn2 His mentor Kurchatov submitted the results in a paper published in the US magazine Physical Review. Unusually, this important paper elicited no international reaction, causing the Soviets to suspect that nuclear research had become classified. With the German invasion in June 1941, all Soviet research stopped and the scientists were assigned to more immediate tasks or sent to the front.
But in autumn 1941, John Cairncross, an intelligence source at the heart of the British establishment, informed his Soviet controller within days of the British government’s decision to move beyond theoretical laboratory work to begin the manufacture of a practical weapon of ‘enormous destructive power’. Cairncross was one of the infamous Cambridge Spies, who was then working as private secretary to Lord Hankey, the politician in charge of overseeing the British atomic work, known first as the MAUD Committee and later as the Tube Alloys project or Uranium Committee. The British were aiming to manufacture atomic bombs at the rate of three a month by 1943, for use against Germany. The codename of the successful Soviet espionage operation that followed the arrival of the report, ENORMOZ, is derived from the bomb’s destructive power. The espionage would progress in stages, mirroring the eventual progress of the US and UK projects. First ENORMOZ aimed to gain an understanding of the feasibility of the US, UK or Germany creating a device and to discover the possible defences against such a weapon.
Before President Boris Yeltsin ordered the official release in 1998 of a selection of Soviet-era documents on its atomic project, historians in the West believed Soviet intelligence’s involvement in the atomic issue started from the date the British commissioned a weapon. This is not the case. Already by early 1939, when wartime secrecy had made atomic information impossible to acquire, Soviet intelligence suspected, correctly, that its potential foes had begun working secretly on the feasibility of developing an atomic bomb. It became imperative to develop contacts inside the UK and US scientific communities with knowledge of the work underway. Soviet agents began tracking scientists they suspected were involved in any early experiments. They shared the intelligence they gathered with leading Soviet scientists, as well as the political leadership.9 In January 1941, Gaik Ovakimian, the head of the New York Rezidentura, had been alerted by Moscow about the work of US scientists on what was then known as the uranium problem.10 He was told: ‘Soviet physicists are also very engaged in the study of this problem and, apparently, the problem is real.’ Of particular interest to Moscow was the work of University of Minnesota professor Alfred Nier. In February 1940 Nier’s scientific breakthrough had been to use mass spectrometry to isolate a detectable amount of the uranium-235 isotope.11 Ovakimian discovered that the Americans had ‘obtained a new substance, possessing enormous energy, exceeding carbon energy several million times, the substance is called u-235’. Thanks to Nier’s work, a Columbia University team split the u-235 atom, releasing explosive energy in their cyclotron. Moscow noted that the ‘tests yielded positive results and encouraged further efforts in this work’. Physical Review even reported the outcome in an article that was picked up by the North China Daily, enabling Soviet intelligence to track reports of American scientific developments from as far away as China.
Soon after Cairncross’s report reached Moscow in October 1941, the New York Rezidentura made their first contribution from contacts in the US scientific community. They reported that a party of eminent American scientists, including the renowned chemistry Professor Harold Urey of Columbia and leading nuclear physicist William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology,12 had travelled to the UK to study the progress in the development of a uranium-235 isotope-fuelled bomb. The Soviets had been tipped off by a Communist sympathiser, Davrun Wittenberg,13 who was chief assistant to Urey at Columbia University. Wittenberg had spoken to a Communist friend of his horror that the West
ern allies were making a bomb so powerful that a single device would be capable of destroying an entire city.
On receipt of this crucial piece of information, Stalin ordered the launch of the first coordinated, multi-continent intelligence-gathering operation in history. Given the amount of money and the quality of scientific resources the British and Americans were allocating, Stalin made the shadowing of his allies’ scientific developments a priority. Another mistake of some Western historians’ analysis of the Soviet intelligence operation is a failure to understand its goals at the start: these were to assess the feasibility of producing such a weapon and to learn about possible defensive counter-measures to the effects of an atomic explosion. Only later would the operation move on to gather secrets to help build a Soviet device. In 1941 it was still generally believed the Nazis were the most likely to be the first to deploy a bomb and that the Russians would be their target.
In response to the reports received from London in October 1941, the Russians had turned to their expert on the USA and atomic espionage, Gaik Ovakimian. On top of his undoubted scientific knowledge, he had unparalleled understanding of the American system of science and technology. He was the only Russian intelligence officer who knew where and by whom atomic work could be conducted. From mid 1941 onwards Ovakimian had been pulling the strings of all intelligence operations in the UK and US from Moscow. Now he focused increasingly on gathering information on the atomic programme that was the main scientific effort of the Western allies. The problem of u-235 was initially linked to the quest for information on chemical and bacteriological weapons. He later reported in a summary to the head of the KGB, Vsevolod Merkulov, on the first steps of Operation ENORMOZ:
The Spy Who Changed History Page 33