by Howard Blum
While doing graduate work at the University of Florence, she had a fling with fascism; Mussolini’s strident right-wing rantings gave her, she’d gush, “goose bumps.” But after she returned to the States and began studying for a master’s in Italian at Columbia University, she did a complete about-face. Bentley joined the Communist Party, mostly attracted, she would later explain, by the convivial community and rigid structure it brought to her lonely graduate student life. And for several years, this new infatuation served her well. Bentley was, as she frankly described herself, an “average run-of-the-mill Communist,” her previously empty social calendar now jammed with a hectic schedule of meetings, demonstrations, and working dinners with her tight circle of Party friends.
Looking to earn some money while she continued her studies, in 1938 she found a job as a secretary at the Italian Library of Information, just a short subway ride from her apartment near Columbia. She hadn’t been working there long before she realized that the only information the library dished out was fascist propaganda. A loyal Party member, she approached the leaders of her cell, offering to get the goods; she’d give them the proof of what the library was really up to. They brusquely explained there were more important concerns. But Bentley, her indignation at being duped when she took the job fueling her persistence, wouldn’t take no for an answer. And in time the harassed Party officials passed her plan on to Jacob Golos.
Golos was the real thing, a Russian-born and Moscow Center–trained KGB operative based in New York. And he always had his eye out for new talent. He saw something in Bentley’s enthusiasm, her amateur’s eagerness to play spy. So he let her run with her small-time operation against the Italian Library. Under his tutelage, she was listening at closed doors, furtively sorting through her boss’s trash.
And as Bentley lurked in the shadows, as she discovered the thrill that came with her new covert life, something unexpected happened. Golos had first struck her as “rather colorless and shabby—a little man in a battered brown hat, non-descript suit and well-worn shoes.” But their shared danger proved to be a powerful aphrodisiac. She no longer paid much attention to his scuffed shoes. In her revisionist history, Golos grew in stature. He was now “powerfully built with a large head, very broad shoulders and strong square hands. His eyes were startlingly blue, his hair bright red.” And, as if to seal the deal, she decided “his mouth was very much like my mother’s.” With her eyes wide shut, Bentley fell in love with the KGB man.
Golos, who had a wife and a son back in Moscow and a mistress in Brooklyn, soon added Bentley to the queue. Only, in addition to being his lover, she also served as his courier. Golos ran a wide-spread network of diverse and valuable contacts, from a chemical engineer who was passing on blueprints of secret industrial processes to a Washington-based cell with high-placed assets in the Treasury Department and even the White House. And Bentley was Golos’s indefatigable legman, to use the jargon of her new profession. In her knitting bag—an inspired bit of tradecraft that even the veteran KGB man admired—she brought back haul after haul of secret documents; after just a single trip to Washington, she’d brag, her bag was stuffed with forty undeveloped rolls of microfilm.
On Thanksgiving 1943, Golos, as he’d requested, devoured “a super special meal with all the trimmings.” It turned out to be his last supper; he died that night of a heart attack. And Bentley inherited his networks.
But her new KGB handler soon grew uncomfortable with the double mystery she presented—as a woman and as a possible traitor. At first he was eager to play matchmaker. “She is a rather attractive person,” the agent runner informed Moscow Center. “If [only]I could give her in marriage to one of our operatives,” he nearly pleaded. “If there is no one [here], why not send someone from home?”
Then Bentley’s behavior grew erratic. She showed up drunk at one debriefing. At another she reported that she had found a new lover, a man she met in a hotel lobby. At still another, she revealed she was considering “an intimate liaison” with a woman. The KGB handler, now in full panic, didn’t need to wait for any more warning signs. He cabled Moscow: “Only one remedy is left—the most drastic one—to get rid of her.”
Did Bentley know what Moscow Center was mulling? As she tells the story, she simply had, after long, thoughtful walks on a Connecticut beach, reached the conclusion that “Communism . . . had failed me. Far from answering the problem of suffering and injustice, it had only intensified it.” And so with “shaking knees” she walked into the FBI field office in New Haven in late October 1945, and announced, “I’d like to see the agent in charge.”
Bentley hadn’t arrived at the FBI’s doorstep lugging the sort of hard, incriminating evidence Gouzenko had stuffed under his shirt. She was asking simply to be taken at her word. Compounding the problem, her allegations were as incendiary as they were incredible. She named more than eighty Soviet sources and agents, and identified a dozen U.S. government agencies whose secrets had routinely been passed on to the KGB.
A shaken Hoover, even before her charges could be investigated and substantiated, felt he had no choice but to inform the White House. On November 8, 1945, a special messenger delivered the director’s preliminary report. “Information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information . . . to espionage agents of the Soviet government.”
FROM HIS DESK IN THE New York SE section, Bob read the classified transcripts of Bentley’s interrogation by the Bureau. And as he did, his exasperation mounted. Why wasn’t the FBI, he’d complain to his colleagues, “forcing things by moving in aggressively and interviewing everyone connected with her?” Why weren’t warrants obtained to search the homes and offices of the Russian agents she’d identified? The time had come, he believed, for action.
Bob’s outlook had changed. He had walked down a path that led from an anonymous letter written in Russian received at Bureau headquarters, to the defection of a Soviet cipher clerk in Canada, to Elizabeth Bentley’s arrival at the New Haven field office. And with this journey all his prior complacency faded. He began to understand that he was in the midst of an “intense but nearly invisible combat.” It was a war, he acknowledged with a newfound alertness, where “the Soviets had built up an early lead.” The Bureau would be forced to “play catch-up ball.” Most disturbing, he could only wonder where this path he was on would ultimately lead him. What, he asked himself with a suddenly tremulous sense of foreboding, would he find at the end?
8
LIKE BOB LAMPHERE, BUT FOR far different reasons, the man known throughout Moscow Center by the work name of “Viktor” was also following with mounting apprehension the events unfolding in America. The successive defections in the fall of 1945—this “chain of failures,” as the official KGB finding would bluntly concede—had suddenly put all his networks in jeopardy. Viktor—who, as General Pavel Fitin, was the stony master spy who headed the Foreign Intelligence Division—knew he had to make a difficult operational decision.
For the time being, he could reassure himself, security had been maintained. The betrayals had been an embarrassment; the air of mourning wafting through the corridors of the First Directorate was nearly palpable. But the enemy had not shown the ingenuity, or, in crueler professional truth, the requisite savagery to translate the traitors’ raw intelligence into action. The FBI had not rolled up a single network. His agents still remained in place. The purloined scientific, commercial, and diplomatic secrets could continue to flow.
Or could they? Was this an unreasonable expectation, grounded more in wishful thinking than in prudent konspiratsya? Could he trust the continued loyalty of his American assets after they’d been sweated by the FBI? Perhaps Hoover was biding his time, allowing the existing networks to putter along because he’d already turned them. It was conceivable that the FBI director was embarking on a long game, determined to play the Center’s own agents ba
ck at him, to use the existing networks as channels of disinformation. That was, Viktor knew, the sort of patient strategy he himself would employ if he’d been handed a bounty of similar riches.
In the annals of Moscow Center, Viktor had become mythic, largely because, against brutal odds, he had managed to survive. He was only thirty-seven, but he’d bobbed and weaved his way through a perilous lifetime of Stalin’s bloody purges (his prediction of a Nazi invasion had particularly riled the Central Committee; only the sighting of German tanks crossing into Russia, as the oft-told story had it, saved his life). And now Viktor understood he was at another Rubicon: the future of the First Directorate’s operations in America hung in the balance, and, just as likely, also his own. A bullet in the head could be the cost of rashness.
In the end, though, according to the testimony in the KGB archives, Viktor’s decision was motivated by a single argument: nothing could be allowed to jeopardize Operation Enormoz. Of all the Center’s ongoing plots against America, Enormoz was the crown jewel. It had been moving forward slowly, but with increasing promise. And, remarkably, in total secrecy. But now the defectors’ incriminating testimony, he conceded with a doleful resignation, would certainly shake the enemy’s watchers out of their doldrums. Increased scrutiny of the New York rezidentura must be expected. And with the enemy on battle footing, the likelihood grew of their discovering, whether through doggedness or plain dumb luck, his agents’ connection to Enormoz. The clue might be just a single loose thread, but give it a judicious yank and—the whole ball of yarn would unravel. That must not be allowed to happen. The future of the Soviet Union, he understood without an iota of drama or embellishment, depended on Enormoz’s success.
So, his mind firmly set and his motives clear, Viktor issued his instructions. In December 1945, a cable marked “urgent” was delivered to a metal-shuttered third-floor office in the Soviet Consulate on East Sixty-First Street in Manhattan, a short stroll from Central Park. This was the headquarters of the entire New York KGB station, the handlers running the agents and assets on the front lines in the secret war against America.
It ordered: Shut down all your sources. All intelligence activities in the United States must come to a halt. For the next six months, all agents were to go to ground.
RECEIVING THIS NEWS, ALEXANDER FEKLISOV, a KGB captain working under diplomatic cover at the consulate, felt as bereft as if he had just been informed of a close relative’s death, which in a way he had been. He was being told to dismantle the very networks—his proxy families—he had painstakingly put in place. The intensity of his anger and disappointment took him by surprise.
Yet, as he would concede with a soldier’s steely logic, “an order is always an order.” So he went to work, contacting his agents one by one, telling them to cease and desist. He made sure, though, that they understood that the war was not over. This was just a strategic pause in the long-running fight against capitalism. In six months, the trumpet would sound and the comrades would be called back to battle. Therefore, he also pointedly instructed, on the last Monday of the sixth month, each was to appear at a specific location. If Feklisov himself couldn’t manage to be there—the demands on a KGB agent runner were, after all, unpredictable—he gave them their recognition signals: carry a copy of the prior day’s New York Times and look for a man wearing shoes with two differently colored laces. When he bends to tie them, that means all’s right with the world: the agent could approach.
During the course of a painful week, Feklisov—since childhood, Sasha to his friends—obediently buried all his networks. All the while, every professional instinct in him wanted to rebel; it seemed unnatural to be performing what should be the opposition’s work. Still, even as his mind raged through its silent tirades, he also fully realized Viktor was right: long-term security must be the essential concern.
For he, too, shared the secret. He, too, was aware of what was at stake. When the order came to stand down, Sasha was running agents working in the very heart of Operation Enormoz. He knew Moscow Center was getting closer and closer to stealing America’s greatest prize—the mystery of how to build an atom bomb.
INTELLIGENCE WORK IS, MOST FUNDAMENTALLY, the job of collecting information. In that way it has much in common with journalism. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the operational history of Moscow Center’s quest to steal the atom bomb can be traced, in significant measure, to the KGB’s paying shrewd attention to an insightful piece of reporting.
On Sunday, May 5, 1940, a dramatic headline was splashed across the front page of the New York Times: “Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened for Science.” William Laurence, the paper’s diligent science correspondent, had been following Nazi Germany’s groundbreaking research into uranium-235 and had come to realize what they were after. The German scientists’ discoveries, he concluded, had “tremendous implications . . . on the possible outcome of the European war.” “Every German scientist in this field, physicists, chemists, and engineers . . . have [sic] been ordered to drop all other research and devote themselves to this work alone.” Yet Laurence, restrained by a journalistic prohibition on speculation, did not connect all the glaringly obvious dots. He did not articulate his belief that Germany must be working feverishly on an atomic weapon. Instead he wrote only what he could confirm, and then waited for the summons to Washington to share all he really knew with the generals and policy makers. To Laurence’s great disappointment, it never came.
But across the globe, in the gloomy offices of the Lubyanka, the Times report was greeted with the sort of concern Laurence would no doubt have felt more appropriate from the U.S. government. For the Moscow Center decisionmakers, its implications were alarmingly clear.
Leonid Kvasnikov was a bull of a man, the ruddy-faced, hard-drinking son of a railroad worker from Tula. He had grown up not far from the bucolic estate where Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, although his scrappy, struggling childhood might just as well have been lived in another country. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik authorities, scouring the proletariat for a new breed of Soviet heroes, read the glowing reports extolling young Kvasnikov’s first-rate mind and he was recruited for the prestigious Moscow Institute of Chemical-Machine Building. After graduating with honors, then flying through the even more rigorous postgraduate engineering courses, he attracted the ever watchful attention of Moscow Center.
Kvasnikov had just completed his KGB training course when Lavrenti Beria, the cold-blooded tyrant (“our Himmler,” was how Stalin, without a trace of irony, praised him) who ran the secret organization, plucked him out of the troops for a special job. He was assigned to a three-member scientific intelligence unit. Its mission: keep a sharp eye on what the capitalist scientists were up to.
Proving himself surprisingly deft in the dark art of Moscow Center politics, Kvasnikov rose quickly to become deputy chief of the section. And with that appointment, he earned a bit of freedom; Kvasnikov could now define his duties as he thought best. On his own volition, as much out of curiosity as foresight, he began following the flurry of recent articles in Western scientific journals outlining the advances in uranium research. But it was the Times report, heavy with its implicit warning, that served to shape all his inchoate instincts into a firm intelligence priority. Not without genuine personal risk in the cutthroat corridors of the KGB, he lobbied for action, and late in 1940 Moscow Center had the sense to agree. A cable went out ordering the KGB station chiefs in America, Britain, and Germany to gather “evidence on possible work in those countries on the creation of atomic weapons.”
In the race to comply, the London rezidentura won, as the jargon might have put it, by a mole. A member of the Kim Philby spy ring, a group of long-term British penetration agents the Soviets had recruited after their graduation from Cambridge University, and who had over the years burrowed their way deep into England’s establishment, passed on a thick top-secret United Kingdom Cabinet document titled “On the Use of Uranium for a Bomb.” The report, while laden with
laborious scientific data, delivered its conclusion with a swift punch: an atomic bomb “is possible” and would be “a very powerful weapon of war.” It could be built by Britain, the report announced with unsupported certainty, within two and a half years.
The New York station took its time finding its own kernel of intelligence, but in the end what it delivered was no less tantalizing. Franklin Zelman, a KGB spook working under student cover, had gone up to Columbia University with the hope of convincing Clarence Hiskey, a chemistry professor who, from time to time, had shown up at Communist Party meetings, to write him a recommendation for his postdoctoral research. Afterward, as the unsuspecting professor accompanied the secret agent back to the subway, Hiskey, as if just breezily ruminating, sketched a doomsday scenario. “Imagine,” he began, according to the report Zelman subsequently sent off to Moscow in March 1942, “a bomb dropped in the center of this city which would destroy the entire city.” Zelman listened, but had no time for such nonsense. By his own abashed admission, he “scoffed at that.” But as it turned out, that was the perfect response. The professor, goaded, stated firmly, “There is such a bomb. I’m working on it.”
Both the pilfered British report and the chance conversation on a New York street pushed Kvasnikov, who now had caught the scent, into further action. He drafted a long, comprehensive memo. One section offered a detailed historical perspective, describing the burgeoning state of atomic research in the United States, Britain, and France. Another offered a rudimentary primer on how the bomb might work; and, considering he was writing three years before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, his physics was impressively accurate: “In designing the bomb, its core should consist of two halves, whose sum total should exceed the critical mass.” And the final section, articulated with a daring presumption, was a call for action: the State Defense Committee should establish a special scientific advisory group to coordinate atomic research in the U.S.S.R.