by Howard Blum
Beria read the report, found nothing to take issue with, and, once the imprimatur of his signature was added, it was sent off to Stalin in April 1942. Stalin, in good bureaucratic turn, passed the memo on for implementation to Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, protégé, and, for all practical purposes, partner in a litany of crimes. But with the heavy fog of war spreading across the Soviet Union, clouds made darker by the ongoing German sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the long-term development of a science-fiction bomb seemed irrelevant. The Motherland was fighting for its life—now! Running from crisis to crisis, Molotov let the memo sit on his desk.
Yet as the fortunes of war began to turn, so did the foreign minister’s vision. He looked increasingly toward the future. And when he reconsidered the KGB memo, he discerned the significance in its implied promise. Under his edict, in the spring of 1943, Laboratory Number 2 was established. The name was purposefully banal, a bit of cover designed to cause a snooping enemy to move on. The squat building on Pyzhevskii Lane in the center of Moscow was the headquarters of the Soviet effort to build an atom bomb.
From its inception, the KGB had its long arms firmly tethered to the program. Kvasnikov, now Molotov’s eyes and ears on the state of uranium research, drew up the short list of three candidates to run the top-secret laboratory. Molotov interviewed them, and in the end he judged by personality; any objective evaluation of scientific accomplishment, he conceded with a helpless shrug, was beyond his grasp. He chose the youngest, Igor Kurchatov.
One of Kurchatov’s first requests was a meeting with the KGB. Kvasnikov showed up on Pyzhevskii Lane and listened as the physicist made an ardent plea: Russian science needed assistance. The West was far ahead in its work to build a bomb. To keep pace with American atomic research, the KGB would need to help. And by “help,” Kvasnikov knew, the young scientist meant steal.
The KGB man quickly dashed off a stern cable to the New York station chief. “We attach great importance to the problem of Uranium-235 (we call it Enormoz),” he began. But just in case the rezidentura had missed the warning in the sentence, the next was a certain threat: “Although we are having some rather good opportunities working on the problem in the U.S., we haven’t yet begun such cultivation.”
A response swiftly came—but it was not the sort Kvasnikov had anticipated. Molotov summoned him, and he went off to the meeting with considerable dread. In Stalin’s autocratic Russia, one never knew if he was to receive a medal or a bullet, and either could be delivered with the same chilling smile.
The foreign minister, though, had something else in store. He announced that he agreed with Kvasnikov’s assessment: the New York station was sitting on its hands. He had, however, found a solution. He paused dramatically, and then went on brimming with a confidence that the KGB man would in retrospect find totally unnerving. Comrade Kvasnikov was being shifted out of Moscow Center. He was to leave at once for America. His new title: Deputy Chief of the New York Rezidentura. His assignment: to pursue all leads and gather all information about America’s top-secret efforts to build an atom bomb.
It was an impossible mission. And at that moment, who could have blamed the beleaguered KGB man if he’d have preferred the small mercy of a swift bullet rather than the long anticipation of the one waiting inevitably for him down the road?
IT TOOK, OR SO IT seemed to a weary Kvasnikov, an eternity to reach America. First there was the grueling trip across wartime Russia to the port of Vladivostok, and then on to Japan where his transit visa problems dragged on and on. But in March 1943—nearly three months after boarding a train in Moscow—he arrived in New York.
For cover, he was assigned to Amtorg, the Soviet trade group located in midtown Manhattan. Yet he didn’t even bother with the pretense of establishing himself as another in the flock of wheeling-and-dealing commercial apparatchiks; apparently he feared Molotov more than the FBI. He went right to work solely on the atomic problem. “Like a vacuum cleaner,” he would later explain, he began to gather all the information he could find.
He hadn’t been at the job very long before Moscow Center realized it had a problem. Kvasnikov was a superb deskman, a visionary even. He could see difficulties looming on the horizon and then offer up cogent solutions. But he wasn’t a fieldman. It wasn’t just that he didn’t speak English, although certainly that didn’t help. It was that he lacked the ability, the mix of charm and natural friendliness that inspired devotion, that was necessary to recruit agents willing to put their lives on the line. He was a gruff, detached, and overbearing presence, while an agent living with constant danger required, from time to time, a reassuring pat on the back and a grateful smile. Kvasnikov needed help.
9
KVASNIKOV RECEIVED NOT ONE BUT two legmen. Yet even before they were put into the field to help run the Enormoz networks, the two spies were already best friends. Alexander Feklisov, just twenty-five, and Anatoly Yatskov, barely a year older, had met in June 1939, on the bus taking new recruits to the KGB training school in Balashikha.
The School of Special Assignment, as it was formally known, was about an hour’s drive from Moscow, and the bus trudged east along the Vladimir Highway, the same route infamously traveled by those exiled to Siberia—“the road of the enthusiasts,” as the Stalinists, with a rare stab at wit, smirked. All the while, the two young men couldn’t help but have a nagging fear that they were about to be interned in another sort of Siberia. They imagined a grim military compound patrolled by armed sentries and growling attack dogs. Their expectations were reinforced as the bus drove deeper and deeper into a dense forest, and then passed through a gate in a high wooden fence. Yet when they finally arrived, both enjoyed a similar sense of relief mixed with nothing less than a total surprise: the school was a palace.
Or it might just as well have been when measured against their squalid childhood homes. Every recruit shared a room with only a single other trainee, and there were two large beds, thick blankets, and—an even rarer luxury—a shower with ample hot water just down the hall. Sasha took it all in, and then confided to Yatskov that at his home on Worker’s Alley in Tula he’d slept during the winter curled up on a hard wooden chest behind the oven, and in the summer, on a pile of wood stored in a nearby shed. Yatskov playfully boasted that his life in the Ukraine was far more grand—he crowded into a narrow bed along with his two younger brothers. And with that, a shared feeling that they both were born under the same dark star, their friendship began.
It was, of course, no accident that the two men with such similar backgrounds had been thrown together. It was all part of Moscow Center’s careful design. Viktor had set the guidelines for recruitment, and he favored boys from peasant and worker stock; if they had a college degree, it had better be from a technical university. He had no interest in the delicate children of intellectuals; they’d never muster up either the determination or the endurance required to survive the rough-and-tumble demands of the Great Game. And, not least, the spymaster shared a strong streak of Stalin’s icy paranoia: intellectuals simply could not be trusted.
The training program lasted a year, and its intensity, as well as their own competitive streaks, brought the two new friends even closer. There were six grueling courses each day. They juggled academic subjects such as foreign languages, Communist Party indoctrination, and the history of foreign countries along with the nuts-and-bolts classes in tradecraft. They learned from wily handlers just returned from the front lines the subtle skills of recruiting and managing agents, working a meet, and breaking a tail. They became masters of the black arts: sabotage and silent killing. At the end of the long year, there were a series of written exams followed by an interview before an unforgiving commission headed by Pavel Sudoplatov, the cold-blooded hood who had directed the operation to assassinate Trotsky. And when the results were posted, the two friends beat out all the rest, each winning an assignment to the prestigious First Directorate’s American Section, each promoted to the lofty rank of captain.
Yet for all they had in common, “in many ways,” as Sasha would frankly admit, “Anatoly was the opposite of me.” A quick glance confirmed that judgment. Feklisov was big and broad, a handsome man with a towering blond pompadour over a wide Slavic face. Yatskov had the dreary look of an apparatchik, short and stocky, already old beyond his years.
Yet there were other, more fundamental differences. Sasha, who had been a brawler in a tough Worker’s Alley youth gang, famous for his powerful right hook, was a hard piece of work. Push him and he’d shoot back an unflinching stare; it warned—don’t mess with me. And when things got dangerous, when, as he put it, “my heart would be in my heels,” his instinct was to charge on, to show neither indecision nor fear.
When Yatskov stumbled into a sticky situation, he’d slow down, turn contemplative, trying to sort out all the possible consequences before making his next move. He was a man who felt comfortable with stealth, with subterfuge. And he had natural gifts that his friend couldn’t even begin to challenge. Yatskov could learn any language in just months, or so it seemed. Give him an instrument, and he’d play it. Put him in front of a chess board, and he’d checkmate any opponent.
The two friends, however, were not troubled by their differences. They were certain that together, working as a team, each bringing his talents to the mission, they would make a single perfect spy.
But Moscow Center had other ideas. Yatskov was sent to New York, with the impressive cover identity of vice consul. While Sasha, to his dismay, was ordered to report to radio school.
RADIO SCHOOL WAS ENDLESS DRUDGERY. Sasha was put in front of a receiver and transmitter in Moscow Center’s communications room, and the demands were exacting—a single mistake in a single digit and the entire encoded message was rendered unintelligible. And while he’d learned to speak some semblance of English during his year at spy school, it proved to be insufficient for what the KGB had in store for him. Every morning, under the watchful tutelage of an illegal—that is, a field agent without the protection of either diplomatic or trade cover—who had just returned from the West, Sasha was made to translate arcane intelligence reports from English to Russian, typing out the results in his stiff two-fingered way.
At first, Sasha was a disaster. With his KGB trainers leaning literally over his shoulder, he’d reach out to covert operators in neighboring countries. But he’d make such a mess of his transmissions—too slow, too many mistakes—that a “change operator” request would be abruptly sent by the annoyed receiving station. The entire experience, he conceded, left him “quite tense.”
But KGB captains didn’t have the option of going into another line of work; their destiny had been set when they were recruited. With a sojourn in Siberia looming as the consolation prize for failure, Sasha made up his mind to master all the nuances of radio work, and after two months of diligent practice he was close to succeeding. At least, he quietly celebrated, the insulting “change operator” codes had stopped appearing in the midst of his transmissions.
Then in early December 1940, the radio instructors decided it was time to put him through his operational paces. Sasha was given a specially designed radio transmitter and receiver, a device powerful enough to send signals across the world to New York. He was ordered to contact stations in Minsk, then Kiev. Finally, they instructed Sasha to transmit to a station at Ashkhabad, in the far reaches of Turkmenia, some 2,500 kilometers from his post in the middle of Moscow. When he passed all these trials with flying colors, next came the field test. Take the equipment and go to Batumi, in the depths of remote Georgia, and then contact us here at the Center. And he did it: the transmission came through loud and clear.
When he returned in January 1941, his sternest taskmaster, Fyodor Budkov, a stuffy KGB deskman, delivered the news without a hint of congratulation: Comrade Feklisov was being sent to New York. He must prepare to leave as soon as possible.
Yet before Sasha had a moment to rejoice, the rigid Budkov went on without missing a beat: If his wife could not be ready on such short notice, he must depart without her.
Sasha patiently explained that would not be a problem. He wasn’t married.
Budkov turned somber; and then let loose with a long incredulous whistle. “How can you recruit any agents if you can’t recruit a wife?” he challenged with the unshakable certainty of a man thoroughly persuaded by his own shaky logic. “Tomorrow we shall discuss this with Comrade Fitin.”
The next day Sasha walked into a war council. Seated across from Fitin, the KGB commander, was Andrei Vlasov, the director of foreign affairs. At the head of the table was the man who would cast the only vote that counted, the all-powerful Molotov—and Stalin’s henchman, the People’s Commissar, wore the grave, resigned face of a hanging judge.
“You know that we never send bachelors overseas, especially to America,” Molotov announced as the tribunal ground down. “The Americans will slip a blonde or a brunette into your bed very quickly and you’ll be quite a mess.”
As he stood at rigid attention, Sasha realized his dream assignment was floating away from him with every passing moment. There was no need for the tricky Americans to go to any further trouble. He was already “quite a mess.”
But then Vlasov, the man whose service would provide Sasha with his cover job at the consulate, spoke up. Why did Vlasov dare to challenge Molotov? A combative nature? A sudden whim? All Sasha knew was that the foreign affairs director had boldly dared to interrupt Molotov. “Comrade Feklisov’s superiors have every confidence in him politically and morally,” Vlasov countered. “What’s more,” and now Sasha would swear he detected a salacious leer, “there are quite a few pretty girls in the Soviet colony in New York. He will have the luxury of a choice to get married over there.”
Molotov mulled in silence, and whether he was considering Sasha’s fate or the bevy of attractive Soviet women in New York was anyone’s guess. When he finally spoke, though, his tone was conciliatory. “Go ahead, Comrade Feklisov. Do your best and don’t betray the confidence we have placed in you.”
Sasha was, by his own measure, “stolid by nature.” “I am someone who is so fearless and so sure of myself that no one will ever see me jumping for joy.” But he walked out of Moscow Center that afternoon feeling both exhilarated and for once scared. “New York is as far away as the moon,” he couldn’t help thinking.
10
SASHA WAS RIGHT. IN NEW York, as things turned out, he had for all practical purposes been exiled to the moon—and the dark side, to boot. The New York rezidentura kept him at bay; he didn’t even know where it was located, or who were its agents. Instead, he worked as a “clean” diplomat, doing his best to solve visa requests or bailing the occasional drunken Soviet merchant seaman out of jail. Even his reunion with Yatskov was no comfort.
Rather, it stirred all his competitive spirits. Yatskov’s desk faced his in the consulate on Sixty-First Street, and his friend, too, had his share of diplomatic chores. He’d spend a good part of each day forwarding the legal documents and personal affidavits filed by the Russian community in New York to the proper authorities in Moscow. But Sasha couldn’t help noticing that his friend would often disappear. He’d watch as Yatskov, a focused and determined look on his face, the time for small talk over, would rise from his desk without a word and vanish mysteriously. Sasha knew better than to ask what he was up to; a cardinal rule of intelligence work is that it is compartmentalized: you only know what you need to know. Nevertheless, Sasha had no doubt Yatskov, his contemporary as well as his rival, was doing something important. While Sasha was shuffling papers.
Bursting with his own sense of victimization, and feeling, Sasha would frankly say, “wronged,” he confronted Yatskov.
“Don’t worry,” his friend insisted, working hard to soothe Sasha’s dangerous anger. “It’s standard procedure here. I went through the same thing myself. Right now they’re observing you. Don’t think about it anymore!”
But he did. It was nearly all he ever though
t about.
“COME ON, WE’RE GOING UPSTAIRS.”
It was a bright spring morning in May 1941, and Sasha had been sorting indolently through the papers on his desk when he looked up and saw Yatskov, a beaming, genial host, towering above him. Sasha didn’t grasp what was happening, so his friend repeated his invitation.
Sasha at last stood and followed Yatskov. He led the way up to the third floor and then to a locked door. It was opened by someone on the other side and for the first time Sasha walked into the New York rezidentura.
A man he’d never seen before in the consulate welcomed him. He was old enough to be his father, and had a pitted face. He talked and carried himself like a soldier, a man accustomed to giving commands. His name, he announced as if he were reading a decree, was Pavel Klarin, and he was the number two rezident of the First Directorate in New York. In his hand, he explained, were Comrade Feklisov’s orders; they had just arrived that day from Moscow Center in the diplomatic pouch.
He recited: Your mission is to maintain a clandestine radio link between the rezidentura and the Center. You must prove yourself capable before you can be trusted to manage agents. Now follow me!
Klarin led the way up to the attic. It was not much bigger than the outhouse his family had in Tula and the dropped ceiling only made the space seem tighter. Sasha was able to stand up straight, but just barely. An alcove fronted a small round window that had been boarded up. There, Klarin pointed, was where the radio transmitter should be placed.
Klarin found his commander’s voice again. “Daily reports on the work done!” he barked. “You are dismissed!”
AND SO SASHA BECAME THE rezidentura’s radioman. His day would begin at five a.m. He’d tune into the Center’s frequency and transmit in code, “I read you loud and clear.” “Do you have any messages to send?” Moscow would reply. Afterward, Sasha would start sending the day’s pile of encrypted messages, all written in numbers. When he finished, the Center would start sending its own traffic to New York. In the afternoon, he’d listen in to the Moscow radio news broadcasts and write up a summary that he’d deliver to Klarin each evening.