1947 Medal In Commemoration of 800th Anniversary of Moscow.
September 1951 Head Lecturer, Moscow Aviation Technological Institute.
October 1952 Dean, Moscow Aviation Technological Institute.
March 1953 Acting Deputy Director of Studies, Moscow Aviation Technological Institute.
September 1954 Deputy Director of Studies, Moscow Physical-Technical Institute.
February 1961 Head of Methodological Directorate, Ministry of High and Secondary Special Education of RSFSR, Moscow.
July 1961 Awarded Order of the Badge of Honour for great service in preparing specialists and developing science.
September 1964 Appointed Member of the USSR Commission for UNESCO Affairs.
October 1969 Consultant professor, Moscow Aviation Technological Institute.
October 1975 Awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour, for his work establishing the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
February 1982 Awarded the badge for 50 Years of Membership in the Communist Party.
1 October 1984 Dies in Moscow.
APPENDIX II
NKVD Reports on Stanislav Shumovsky, 1942
FBI Report on Stanislav Shumovsky, 1951
FOOTNOTES
Introduction
fn1 The march was composed as a response to the Curzon Ultimatum. The British government threatened the Soviet Union with the end of their diplomatic and trade relationship. The Soviets anticipated that the next British step would be a resumption of military action. Despite being in no position to resist the demands, the Russians rejected them robustly.
fn2 Yakovlev designed the YAK series of fighters. Lavochkin designed the La-5 and La-7 fighters; the top Allied ace of the Second World War, Ivan Kozhedub, shot down sixty-two German aircraft flying Lavs. Ilyushin was a bomber designer whose Il-2 ground attack aircraft, of which 36,183 were made, was the single most-produced combat aircraft design in history. Sukhoy was among the first Soviet designers of jet aircraft. Mikoyan and Gurevich were the brains behind the famous MiG design bureau.
fn3 The plutonium device was a copy of ‘Fat Man’, the bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. It was detonated ahead of a Soviet-designed bomb as the model was reliable.
fn4 The five spies were Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, all of whom attended Cambridge University. ‘Magnificent Five’ is the Soviet term.
fn5 There is one report that US Naval Intelligence made enquiries about his activities in 1940. However, it was not until July 1958 that the FBI tipped off the State Department that Shumovsky had operated as a spy in the US during the Second World War.
fn6 The Rosenbergs were the only Americans executed for espionage in the Cold War; Klaus Fuchs, a naturalised British scientist who worked at Los Alamos, was a German-born Communist who spied for the Russians on both the US and later the British atomic projects.
fn7 The author approached the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and the FSB, its domestic security service, for information about Shumovsky’s career; both declined to cooperate with the writing of this book.
1 ‘Son of the Working People’
fn1 Taken from the Red Army oath of loyalty, sworn by each new recruit.
fn2 It was to the chagrin of the British Daily Mail that a Frenchman was the winner of the £1,000 prize offered by the newspaper to the first man to fly across the English Channel.
fn3 Mikhail Yefimov, on 21 March 1910 in Odessa, then the centre of Russian aviation, was the first Russian to fly. However, a Russian naval officer, Alexander Mozhaysky, had flown a monoplane powered by two steam engines 20–30 m near Krasnoye Selo in 1884. A ramp was needed for the take-off.
fn4 The statue now resides in Central Park, New York City.
fn5 Theodore was first imprisoned in 1938 for anti-Soviet activities along with the son of the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. He continued his protests throughout his life. Theodore was the first to translate the Qur’an into Russian.
fn6 Officially children under twelve were banned from working; in practice foreign owners ignored the regulation.
fn7 Tsarist secret agents would infiltrate a revolutionary organisation, arranging terrorist acts before betraying their fellow revolutionaries.
fn8 A Military Intelligence officer who played a major role in the atomic espionage operation.
fn9 Koval worked as a supervisor in the Oak Ridge Atomic facility. He was the only Russian spy to penetrate the Manhattan Project. Harry Gold was an American who acted as a courier for the Russians. He was turned by the FBI and became a key if unreliable witness. Theodore Hall, the youngest scientist to work at Los Alamos, provided the Russians with the design of the bomb trigger. He was not prosecuted by the FBI.
fn10 The Russian calendar was changed in 1918 to bring Russia into line with the rest of the world.
fn11 The coniferous forests of Siberia.
fn12 His Communist Party card records that he was rebuked for inflating the length of his military service by adding his partisan service to his military record.
fn13 The Red Army had scrapped ranks and adopted a system loosely based on job titles. Authority was displayed by lapel insignia. The author believes Shumovsky’s brother’s account is probably wrong because Shumovsky later came to the US as a colonel, which would have entailed a demotion from general.
2 ‘We Must Catch Up or They Will Crush Us’
fn1 Báthory was the nemesis of Ivan Grozny, known in English as Ivan the Terrible. The Polish king defeated Ivan’s forces in the 1580s, securing an advantageous peace.
fn2 The war between Sweden and Russia lasted from 1610 to 1617. In Russia’s Time of Troubles, a Swedish duke was put on the Russian throne. The war ended with a large Swedish territorial gain in the Treaty of Stolbovo which excluded Russia from the Baltic Sea.
fn3 Napoleon’s failed invasion of 1812 saw him capture Moscow, no longer the capital but the main population centre, but still lose the war.
fn4 Secret clauses in the Treaty of Rapallo established cooperation in air, mechanised and chemical warfare. The Germans additionally trained much of the Red Army High Command.
fn5 The CHEKA created and ran a fake White opposition movement between 1921 and 1926, trapping and turning agents sent into the Soviet Union. The White General Kutepov believed for years that there was an underground movement just waiting for an opportunity to revolt.
fn6 Kapitsa was the first director of the Royal Society’s Mond Laboratory and a fellow of Trinity College.
fn7 After the Soviet atomic explosion the FBI belatedly began an investigation into Soviet espionage.
fn8 An earlier name for the NKVD.
4 ‘Agent 001’
fn1 The last recorded arrest of Russian ‘illegals’ was in 2015. During Operation Ghost Stories in 2010 several illegals had used universities as cover to recruit contacts.
fn2 In 1937 the NKVD would conduct ‘special operations’ under the leadership of the feared Sergey Shpigelglas (codename DOUGLAS) that included murder and kidnaps across Europe, and his hand reached across to strike in the US.
fn3 The total is incomplete as the source is from US immigration records. On arrival some students did not record a particular university as their destination.
fn4 Today there is a small dark circle in the hall ceiling amid the stars above the image of Pisces. It is an unintentional monument to this trip. For in 1957, in an attempt to counteract feelings of insecurity spawned by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, a giant American Redstone missile was set up in the main concourse. With no other way to erect the rocket, a hole was cut in the ceiling to allow a cable to be lowered to lift the rocket into place. Members of the student party in 1931 on their way to MIT, including Shumovsky, were later credited with working on Sputnik.
fn5 He was later a primary target for Soviet intelligence operations. Several agents worked at Kodak film and explosive plants.
fn6 Curtiss-Wright was the largest US aircraft a
nd engine manufacturer at this time. The Soviets adopted the Wright engine as the standard for their own industry. The ties between the company and the USSR were extremely close.
fn7 MIT graduates included the chief engineers or engineering directors of Curtiss-Wright, Glenn L. Martin, Pratt & Whitney, Vought, Hamilton Standard, Lockheed, Stearman and Douglas, as well as the engineer officers of the Naval Aircraft Factory and of Wright Field. The individual at Wright Field was an active source of intelligence for the USSR.
5 ‘A Nice Fellow to Talk To’
fn1 The FBI have never traced Haight.
fn2 Upton Sinclair wrote to Stalin on behalf of this individual, after which he was freed.
6 ‘Is This Really My Motherland?’
fn1 Confusingly the Soviet Union operated two foreign intelligence services, one political and a smaller military one. They often had identical missions.
fn2 I have been unable to trace Riaskin so far. Bennett knew him as a leading member of the CPUSA.
7 ‘Questionable from Conception’
fn1 They tried first to get a fake birth certificate for the two-year-old. Kipper understood that a birth certificate was needed to obtain an American passport through unlawful means.
8 ‘The Wily Armenian’
fn1 Benzine later became a key blending agent in high-octane fuel. The Soviet chemical industry found it hard to introduce advanced Western production processes because of the state of their old-fashioned equipment. The CIA reported as late as the early Cold War that benzine still remained ‘in short supply in the USSR even for the priority chemical and explosive industries, and cannot be counted on to augment the supply of high-octane gasoline.’
fn2 Auer was the main contractor in the Nazi atomic programme.
fn3 Though it would have seemed unbelievable in 1933, the careers of both Karakhan and Hirota were to end in execution. At the height of the Terror in 1937, Karakhan was shot after being found guilty of charges of espionage and terrorism, though he was later posthumously rehabilitated. A decade later, Hirota became the only Japanese civilian official to be hanged for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
9 Whistle Stop Inspections
fn1 York told the FBI that Shumovsky was his recruiter and that he had worked for the Russians passing technological secrets for some fifteen years. Belatedly, the FBI found Stan’s codename BLÉRIOT and could now begin tracing his footsteps. In their 1951 report, the FBI stated that ‘Stanislaus Shumovsky came to the United States in September 1931, as an exchange student. In June 1936, he received his Master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to the statements of his classmate, Ben Smilg, his paid tutor, Shumovsky was frequently away on trips to the West Coast or Texas with no explanation except that arrangements had been made at AMTORG. Subsequent assignments and contacts support the belief that Shumovsky was an active agent of the Soviet Government.’
10 Glory to Stalin’s Falcons
fn1 Ilyushin, Tupolev, Sukhoy and the MiG design team (Mikoyan and Gurevich) incorporated the best of American know-how into their end products. It has been forgotten that in the 1930s most of these Russians visited US factories escorted on their tours by their man on the ground, Shumovsky.
fn2 The incorporation of the best Vultee design features into the Il-2 goes some way to explain the striking similarities between the two planes. The Vultee business survived to manufacture a range of trainers, dive bombers and fighters for the Allied armed forces in the Second World War. Its planes made an enormous contribution to winning the war in the Pacific.
fn3 The plane crashed over Moscow in 1935.
fn4 The plane was later moved to March Field, crated and shipped back to Russia.
fn5 Such disasters were all too common in the early pioneering days of aviation. Chkalov was the next to die in an accident, pushing an experimental fighter aircraft beyond its limits. As his plane threatened to crash on houses below, he made the ultimate sacrifice to avoid casualties on the ground rather than bail out to save himself. Stalin was a pallbearer at his funeral.
fn6 Rich or exploitative peasants.
11 Back in the USSR
fn1 She arrived in Boston a few months later.
fn2 Semyonov might have met the future atomic spy Ted Hall at the fair. Hall decided to become a source for the USSR after visiting the Russian stand as a boy.
12 Project ‘AIR’
fn1 In 1941 the NKVD introduced a linear organisational structure. S&T was formally separated from political intelligence gathering. It is tempting to consider the NKVD as a highly structured and bureaucratic organisation, but at least in its early days it was not.
fn2 In September 1943, the operation to place spies in US universities restarted when twenty-one female students enrolled at Columbia, including Zinaida V. Osipova. A spy herself, she married Alexander Feklisov, one of the major players in Operation ENORMOZ who was already based in New York.
13 ENORMOZ
fn1 Codenamed ATOM, Muraviev later travelled to Moscow to work on a secret military project to create an electric ‘death ray’ powered by atomic energy.
fn2 In 1956 Semyonov was awarded a Nobel Prize for this work.
fn3 The majority of the workers were left completely in the dark as to the exact nature of the vital war work they were involved in.
fn4 Semyonov had chosen TWAIN as his codename in tribute to his favourite American writer. Mark Twain was an early tourist to Russia in 1867, visiting Semyonov’s home town Odessa, publishing a travelogue. Twain was the number-one foreign writer in the USSR, selling 1.5 million books in just three years, and in New York translations were exhibited at the Soviet Pavilion where Semyonov worked.
fn5 Podolsky was a professor of mathematics at the University of Cincinnati. The university played no part in the Manhattan Project.
fn6 He was Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law. He later testified against his sister and brother-in-law at their trial.
fn7 Raina (Shevchenko) was a professional intelligence officer who later had the responsibility of dealing with the fallout from Klaus Fuchs’ confession.
fn8 Truman demanded that each member of the commission investigating evidence of a Soviet atomic test individually sign a letter saying that they believed the Russians had the bomb.
fn9 There was no firm evidence against Fuchs that could be used in a court of law. Venona intercepts identified him but the FBI would not allow them to be used. In May 1950 the FBI recognised that ‘the fragmentary nature of the messages themselves, the assumptions made by the cryptographers, in breaking the messages themselves, and the questionable interpretations and translations involved, plus the extensive use of cover names for persons and places, make the problem of positive identification extremely difficult’. The NSA intercepts were useful in so far as they confirmed suspicions in already open FBI files.
14 Mission Accomplished
fn1 Ovakimian is still the only intelligence officer to have possessed the talent to run hundreds of agents across the US, Mexico and Canada while at the same time conducting groundbreaking scientific research. With his return to academia at the end of his service, after a distinguished career in which he had reached the rank of major general, he enjoyed equal success, picking up his research where he had left off.
NOTES
Abbreviations
MFTI – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NSA – National Security Agency, USA
RGASPI – Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Moscow
RGAVMF – Russian State Archive of the Navy, St Petersburg
TsAGI – Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute, Moscow
Preface
1. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Tasks of Business Executives. Speech Delivered at the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry 1, February 4, 1931’, www.marxists.org
2. The Mitrokhin Archive, Ch
urchill Archive Centre, Cambridge University, trans. Svetlana Lokhova. The FBI described the Mitrokhin material as the ‘most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
Introduction
1. Russian Central Studio of Documentary Films. ‘The Cold War Superfortress Russian Style’: Newsreel Footage of Tushino Airshow 1947. Moscow: Russian Central Studio of Documentary Films, 2004.
2. Yuliy Abramovich Hight (music), Paul Davidovich Herman (lyrics), ‘March of the Pilots’. Moscow, 1923.
3. Communist Party Membership Records of Stanislav Antonovich Shumovsky, RGASPI. Moscow, 1973.
4. Contemporary Soviet newsreels.
5. FBI files on Rosenberg, Gold and others released under FOIA.
6. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), FBI Records: The Vault. The files on Harry Gold and the Rosenbergs contain information on Shumovsky. https://vault.fbi.gov/
7. The Stalin Digital Archive, RGASPI. This archive contains a selection of documents from Fond 558, which covers Stalin’s personal biography, his work in government, and his conduct of foreign affairs. Opis′ 1: documents written by Stalin in 1889–1952. Opis′ 2: documents written by Stalin in 1911–1944. Opis′ 3: over 300 books from Stalin’s personal library with his marginal notes. Opis′ 4: Stalin’s biographical materials. Opis′ 11: Stalin’s correspondence and documents. This opis′ covers a period from 1917 to 1952. http://rgaspi.org/
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