By July 1944 the surveillance would become so intense on Semyonov that he was unable to perform his activities and returned to Moscow. The Bureau similarly followed BLERIOT’s replacement Raina (Shevchenko) at the Bell aviation factories in Buffalo, turning two of his sources.fn7 The Soviets responded by withdrawing the leadership of their espionage network and severing ties with the CPUSA.
Luckily for the Russian spies, as the Manhattan Project moved towards its conclusion several members of the international scientific community grew alarmed at the possibility that a single nation might acquire a monopoly on nuclear power for military purposes. One unidentified source, codenamed KEMP, said to his controller: ‘By giving documents to you, I am defending the future that an atomic bomb could destroy if it remained in the hands of the politicians of only one country.’ Like KEMP, many scientists had joined the programme expressly to fight Nazism and hoped the secrets of the bomb they were creating would be shared. As a result, even from within the most top-secret facilities information leaked out to the Soviets on the goals, progress and methods of the Allied work. By mid 1944 the flow of technical intelligence on the atomic issue had reached such a level that the relatively small number of trusted scientists it was sent to could no longer process it all. It was proposed that a special bureau be established to deal with the thousands of pages of material. Intelligence officers could now chide scientists for being slow and inefficient. ‘In 1944 we handed over 117 items of works, of which 86 conclusions have not yet been received, despite repeated requests from our side,’ agent Pavel Fitin recorded in a letter in 1945.
Understandably, given the conditions of wartime Russia, research had remained small-scale in comparison to the vast Manhattan Project, employing perhaps twenty physicists. Despite assessments becomingly increasingly concerning that an atomic bomb would be a reality quicker than anyone in Russia thought, it had also been clear that the large amounts of raw materials, uranium and graphite required exceeded the known reserves in the Soviet Union. So even if its scientists could surmount the technical challenges of building a bomb, the project might be stumped by a lack of raw materials.
However, by 1945 Stalin had enough confidence that Russia could build a bomb to put Lavrenty Beria, deputy prime minister and head of the NKVD, in charge of a project to manufacture the Soviet Union’s own weapon, following the path mapped by the US, UK and Canada. In March 1945 Igor Kurchatov decided that a plutonium device would be easier to build if enough uranium could be found.
When the Soviets moved to producing a bomb yet more scientists were given access to intelligence. As they began practical work, they gained a fresh appreciation of how valuable the intelligence was and the pressure to produce results shifted again. Yet Soviet scientists had the luxury of blueprints to work with while following the trail the Americans had unwittingly created. In April 1945 Yuri Khariton, as the designer of the Soviet bomb, was given permission by Ovakimian to access all intelligence material. By 10 July Kurchatov was told the Americans were ready to detonate their first device in the Nevada desert ahead of schedule. He was provided with a complete description of the plutonium device, including the vital firing mechanism. (Later he received the technical specifications of both devices dropped on Japan.) At the start of the year it had been believed the test would not happen before 1946 but this changed when in July Beria handed a copy of the document to an ailing Stalin who was recovering from a heart attack.
Following the Americans’ successful ‘Trinity’ test in the Nevada desert, Soviet intelligence gained the final specifications, material composition and inner workings of the atomic bombs assembled at Los Alamos. At the same time Stalin ordered Tupolev to begin construction of the strategic bomber, the Tu-4, to carry his atomic weapons.
Despite this, at the end of 1945, after a series of defections, further work became impossible given the risk. Intelligence gathering wound down and the majority of experienced Soviet intelligence officers were recalled and their contacts put on ice. With his networks unwound, Ovakimian was exhausted, and left espionage behind him to return to academia. He researched fertilisers and possibly chemical weapons. Semyonov returned to Moscow and conducted a highly successful operation in France, gathering intelligence while operating as a film distribution agent. After being tried for spreading lies, Mironov was treated for his mental condition in a sanatorium. He persisted in trying to contact the Americans and was eventually executed. The MIT alumni awaited the fruits of their long labours to produce a nuclear-armed strategic bomber capability.
Yet Soviet work continued. In December 1946, supported by German scientists, the Soviet team achieved its first nuclear chain reaction using a copy of the original American reactor. By 1948, having finally secured sufficient supplies of uranium and graphite, the Russians commissioned their first plutonium production reactor. Soon after, in 1949, to the astonishment of President Truman who believed the ‘Asiatics’ (his description) incapable of such a sophisticated task, they achieved the extraordinary feat of detonating an atomic device.fn8 ‘First Lightning’ was a copy of the American bomb ‘Fat Man’ that had destroyed Nagasaki. By using detailed intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project’s progress, the Soviets’ had cut two years or more of research work from their device’s development. That the Soviet atomic programme relied so heavily on intelligence had been kept from the majority of Russian scientists working on the project. If their leader Kurchatov arrived with answers to problems, they believed he had obtained them from another Soviet institute working on the same project. When their device was successfully tested on 29 August 1949, the watching scientists cheered, knowing the bright flash and rising mushroom cloud signified the end of the Americans’ four-year monopoly of the A-bomb.
In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War the US reacted to the Soviet test with shock, and started an investigation into the ‘theft’ of their prized nuclear monopoly. The ‘Asiatics’ could not have built a bomb without significant help. With hindsight it is clear that the only secret behind the bombs lay in their specifications, material composition and inner workings, and that any government with the determination and the resources to develop an atomic weapon could do so given enough time. The FBI quickly found informers, Harry Gold and then David Greenglass. These led them to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Under sympathetic British interrogation Klaus Fuchs confessed his part, exposing Harry Gold.fn9 The Rosenbergs were executed, Fuchs jailed. The case was closed.
But the FBI investigation knew they had only scratched the surface of the Soviet operation. Harry Gold was to become the FBI informer-in-chief, albeit an unreliable one. At times he would prove too eager to please his masters. He talked earnestly in several interrogations about his second Soviet controller, a man he knew as FRED. FRED taught Gold on-the-job fieldcraft like how to check if you were being followed by stopping to tie a shoelace or ducking down an empty street; or that documents should be exchanged concealed in newspapers or brown envelopes. Short and fat, with a waddling gait not unlike that of his codename GOOSE, the distinctive Gold was no master of fieldcraft. Anyone who met him remembered him, a disadvantage for a spy. Under investigation, he had been filmed and photographed with ease by the FBI when a suspect in the Fuchs case. Sources preferred working with individuals who demonstrated some scientific knowledge and FRED had tried to persuade Gold to enrol at MIT to become more effective. Gold’s fees would be covered by the NKVD in exactly the same manner as his fellow agent Norman Haight. In the accumulated clutter of Gold’s life that the FBI recovered from his apartment were his draft applications to MIT. FRED had given him detailed instructions on how to dispose of incriminating paperwork by screwing it up and scattering small balls over several blocks. Gold had ignored the advice and unwisely retained every scrap of paper, ticket and hotel receipt. He believed that FRED had a close connection with MIT and this persuaded the FBI to focus its investigation on the campus. Leaving no stone unturned in the 1950s, the FBI wended their way to Boston. The Bureau drew up a long lis
t of suspects for FRED, including the entire 1931 student party, the 1938 party and an MIT chemical engineering professor, Edwin R. Gilliland. For a while Stan Shumovsky became the number-one suspect. Eventually it dawned on the investigators that Stan was at least six inches taller than Gold’s description of his controller. FRED remains undiscovered, perhaps a figment of Gold’s fertile imagination.
When prompted, local Boston residents did try to remember Shumovsky in detail. Eager to please, one described him as driving an array of fast and expensive cars and having a commanding air of authority. Another recalled seeing him hunched over a powerful radio transmitter. Despite these vivid memories from helpful patriotic Bostonians, Shumovsky was living in New York during the period. Nonetheless the investigation cost him a plum job at UNESCO. Tipped off by the FBI, the US State Department objected to his appointment as head of department and instead offered him a subordinate position.
14
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pace of new developments in aviation was always rapid, and never more so than during the last year of the war. The Bureau of New Technology was still publishing ‘Express Information’ at a frenetic pace; in 1944 it produced forty-three separate reports on topics such as ‘USA and Canada Developments in the War Years’, ‘Tables for the Translation of Anglo-American Measurements into Metric and Metric into Anglo-American Ones’ and ‘Post-War Aviation’, and the forty-eight reports published in 1945 included a special edition on ‘Aviation air-jet engines’.1 The scope of the reports had expanded to include work on Allied aviation tactics and aircraft, and the BNT were still examining German aircraft that were either downed or captured.
The combatants were in a race to develop and deploy new weapons in the hope of changing the outcome of the war. Even before the outbreak of conflict, the Soviet Union had been investigating two key areas of German research, jet aircraft and rockets. Shumovsky had been intimately involved in both projects. Appointed deputy chairman of rocket plane test commissions and chairman of those for the first jet engine, he oversaw the first Russian test, in which two ramjet engines had been attached to a Polyakov I-15 biplane. The strange craft had flown over the city of Moscow. A ramjet engine has to be ignited in mid-air, and the test pilot described the terrifying experience as flying ‘a wall of fire’.2 The next stage of development was to fit the rocket plane with ramjet engines to create a real beast of speed, but with the outbreak of war the highly ambitious project was cancelled. By the time Shumovsky arrived in the US in early 1942, however, he was one of very few experts on jets and rockets.
After three years of destructive war, the Soviet Union was an impoverished country whose factories to the west of Moscow lay in ruins. Soviet technological developments lagged behind those of the Germans and the British, the leaders in the race to deploy jet-powered aircraft, and there was no investment capital available to compete. The war on the Eastern Front was being fought and won with more conventional weapons. None of the new technology in development, save the atomic bomb, would have a decisive impact on the outcome. Germany was close to completing its pilotless rocket programme, utilising the V1 ‘Doodlebug’ and the V2. By 1944 Allied intelligence sources reported that the Germans were on the brink of using in front-line service the rockets and jet fighters termed by Hitler ‘revenge weapons’, with which he hoped to rain down destruction on London.
Following the advice of Richard Wilmer Rowan in his book Spy and Counter Spy, Stalin used his limited budget on espionage. His intelligence service pierced his allies’ veil of secrecy, learning of others’ successes and failures. The Soviet Union would later enjoy all the cost and time advantages of being the second mover. Ovakimian had expanded the reach of S&T intelligence gathering to include the UK, mirroring how the British and Americans conducted their scientific research.fn1 Thus, Operation ENORMOZ gathered intelligence simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.
Shumovsky’s Project ‘AIR’ had made it a priority for his intelligence network to monitor American jet developments. In February 1944, the Soviets started afresh their initiative to build jet planes that had come to a halt in 1940. At the newly re-organised Jet Engine Research Bureau, Soviet scientists built a jet engine to their own design. Four leading aircraft design bureaus were given the job of developing a prototype airframe. The planes all flew, with varying degrees of success.
From 1944 onwards German jet aircraft, built with armies of slave labour, began tackling the fleets of US bombers that crowded the skies over the crumbling Reich. But the planes were too few in number and arrived too late to make a difference to the outcome of the war, while a shortage of heat-resistant metal alloys meant that the German engines disintegrated quickly with use. Allied bombing had destroyed German fuel stocks, so many jets were abandoned, unable to fly. As Soviet troops advanced, a large bounty from conquered German territory fell into Soviet laps, halting the need for further tests. The German Messerschmitt Me-163 ‘Komet’ rocket plane could achieve unprecedented speed in level flight. Although fast in combat, it was an ineffective interceptor and more of a risk to its pilots than enemy aircraft, while it had a powered flight of just seven minutes. The Allies had nothing in their armoury to match the speed, but the simple expedient of avoiding flying near rocket planes’ bases rendered the Me-163 useless. The Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter was more successful. Its introduction into the skies was revolutionary. Given its high acceleration, cruising speed and rate of climb it was a potent heavily armed threat to enemy aircraft. The first operational jet, it could only be tackled by Allied fighters when it was taking off or slowed down for landing. The speed and manoeuvrability of this first jet fighter at altitude was a glimpse into the future of air combat.
All Hitler’s vaunted ‘wonder weapons’, however, failed to alter the outcome of the war, and each fell into Soviet hands. It was not long before the Allies added captured German technology to their own jet programmes. In common with the Western Allies, the Soviet Union organised an extensive technology transfer operation in the German territories they occupied. Fortuitously, the Nazis had based many of the highly dispersed factories in the east, out of easy range of American bombing raids. Specialist Soviet teams followed close behind the front line, securing factories, research laboratories and any examples of rockets, planes and radar equipment they came across before the physical transfer of equipment to the USSR. Within two weeks of the end of hostilities, on 21 May 1945, a commission including Shumovsky had begun the methodical looting of German aviation technology with the stated goal of quickly relocating and rationally distributing the equipment of German research institutes, laboratories and pilot plants, as well as arranging the improved processing of German technical materials, their translation, reproduction and distribution by NKAP, the People’s Commissariat for Aviation Industry.3
Shumovsky’s Bureau of New Technology began translating a vast number of captured documents, analysing the material and producing detailed technical drawings and photographs. Dozens of captured trophy planes that could still fly were taken to the flight testing ground at LII, located next to TsAGI; jet engines went to the specialist Aviation Motor Institute, conveniently located on the same site. It was a monumental task given the scale of material captured from the Germans. Shumovsky and the BNT were also receiving thousands of pages of material from espionage sources in the US about the American analysis of German technology. The US was copying captured Nazi technology at an impressive rate, far quicker than the Russians. The V1 flying bomb was reverse-engineered at high speed in just three months of 1944. Salvaged parts were recovered in southern England only during June; yet by 8 September, the first prototype JB-2 ‘Loon’ had been assembled at Republic Aviation, which with help from Ford was building the device’s pulse jet engine. The weapon was tested at Wright Field. (Bizarrely, later in the 1950s, the FBI became concerned that Smilg had passed on the secrets of their reverse-engineered flying bomb to his friend Stan. The investigators interrogated Smilg and a friend of his at Repub
lic about the possibility.)4 The US built thousands of these early cruise missile weapons to rain down on the Japanese home islands, the potential use of the ineffective German ‘wonder weapon’ on Japan being made an official US top secret. The Soviets had no significant interest in the pilotless American drone, as the BNT analysis was that it was ineffective. When they wanted to build a V1, they had all the information they needed from captured German documents and equipment, a possibility that escaped the FBI investigators interrogating Smilg. Shumovsky’s former deputy Andrey Raina was now in charge of aviation espionage and was providing updates from his source at Republic.5
The Russians established factories and laboratories in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, allowing thousands of German engineers and scientists to carry on their high-technology work. Russian specialists were seconded to work side by side with the German scientists on projects that included a renewal of work on jet engines, long-range rockets and radar. Germans working for the Russians enjoyed better food rations and rates of pay. However, the arrangement would end within a year when the Allied agreement to demilitarise the whole of former German territory required the relocation of the scientists and their families to the USSR. Shumovsky was sent in March 1946 on a second month-long trip to Germany to arrange the export to the enterprises of the People’s Commissariat of the Aviation Industry of equipment and materials from the German aviation plants of Hirt in Berlin and Arado in Warnemünde, and its branches in the cities of Malchine, Stavenhagen, Teteren, Tissen, Tutow, Greinzwald and at the Gil station.6
Shumovsky relied on the itinerary of his first trip to Germany in 1940 to identify the most useful targets. Among his key goals was the Arado Company, which had designed and manufactured the first operational jet bomber, the AR-234. The last German aircraft to fly over Great Britain during the war, it was so fast it could not be intercepted; the Americans had already taken two captured AR-234s intact to Wright Field. If mass produced it would make a startling addition to the Soviet armoury.
The Spy Who Changed History Page 35