The Valkyrie Option

by Markus Reichardt

  Kurchatov seemed surprisingly confident of himself despite bringing Stalin bad news. Occasionally stroking his impossible beard, he made his points brief. There were no serious uranium deposits found so far on Soviet soil or anywhere near Soviet territory. There are some promising indications at two prospects but the ore was low grade and even working thousands of political prisoners to death, it would be at least another two years before the Union could produce its first own weapons grade uranium. Even then he could not guarantee quantities sufficient for a nuclear weapon. Nevertheless his staff, with Beria’s help, were working around the clock to eliminate all the bottlenecks that might present themselves. The location where uranium processing would happen had already been chosen: the Leninabad mining-chemical complex in Tajikistan for which construction had just commenced. Once enough weapons grade material was assembled it would still be up to a year before they would have a functional nuclear weapon ready. But having a weapon and being able to deliver it were two separate issues. Kurchatov had been very explicit to Stalin, the bomb would be very heavy; heavier than what Russian bombers could currently carry and that would limit its value as a strategic weapon. Beria had been very grateful that the scientist himself had delivered the bad news and amazed at how well the Vohzd had taken it.

  I hope very much that your administration will make it possible for us to pass smoothly from this position of dependence on the United States to one in which British forces could be independent.

  Churchill to President Truman in discussions on July 24th, 1945

  Late January 1945

  Ottawa

  Canada

  His name was Igor Guzenko and he had worked as a cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. The Kremlin would later say that he was corrupt and an alcoholic who turned into a thief to avoid being disciplined. And indeed Guzenko had succumbed to the materialist temptations of western capitalism and transgressed some key rules of conduct. Now he was in debt and on the run; he and his wife But all this made no difference anymore because over a period of two months Igor Guzenko had systematically made copies of key messages from the handlers of foreign agents acting as embassy staff to MVD centre in Moscow. That morning his nerves had snapped when a colleague had made a causal remark about new security procedures about to be introduced at the Embassy. One last time he had gone to the radio room archive and had simply taken a batch of messages waiting for filing. Together with what he had squirreled away over the past weeks, these would give the Canadian security police, the RCMP, an insight into the Soviet spy networks in North America, most significantly the spy networks inside the American nuclear weapons program. It was dynamite, and although the Canadians took a few days to take Guzenko serious, they granted him asylum. As a Dominion of the British Empire it was SIS who first got sight of the Guzenko transcripts and who realized just how extensive the Soviet espionage effort was.

  Amid howls of diplomatic protests, three Soviet embassy staff were asked to leave almost at once. Another one was expelled two weeks later, once President Truman’s advisors had assured him that this spy network reached deeply into the American government and nuclear establishment. Give-em hell Harry had no time for spies, nor for that matter their masters. The Russian Ambassador in Washington was told that America expected such behaviour from enemies, not allies and that it was time Russia chose what she was. The ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, who harboured ambitions of being foreign minister himself one day, snarled that he had never been spoken to like this in his life. “Keep your agreements and you will not be spoken to like this, “ had been Truman’s curt remark. A week later, Alan Nunn May, a scientist who had worked on the early phases of the atomic bomb project was arrested for passing secrets to the Soviets. Two others identified by Guzenko’s material were left in place and observed to catch bigger fish.

  Chapter 12

  Only the dead have seen the end of war

  Plato

  If once God told Abraham that he would spare Sodom if only ten of its citizens were just and good people, so it is my hope that God will spare Germany because of our [assassination] attempt. None of us should regret his death…. The moral value of a person only begins when he is willing to lay down his life for his beliefs.

  Henning von Treskow to Fabian von Schlabrendorff

  July 21st 1944, hours before he killed himself after

  the failed assassination attempt

  February 2nd

  Metz, France

  Dominique Lafarge sat on the sidewalk facing the burnt-out double-storey house that had been his home. After weeks of hold-ups and processing in by the Red Cross he had finally made it back to the little hamlet on the outskirts of Metz. There his family home had stood with one shoulder leaning against the embankment of the railway bridge. Now all that was left were ruins in which weeds had begun to take hold.

  Once his family had lived here, his grandfather had bought the house, extended it to accommodate a sick brother and his destitute family. His father had inherited it at a young age, and it had survived the ravages of the 1870s war and the Great War while another generation grew up and prospered.

  But that had been before the Germans had taken him away to work in their factories. He had survived the factories, the SS caverns of death where they had put together the rockets because of his will. He would live to see his family again. Two weeks after his release from Nordhausen and during his time of recuperation in the Red Cross hospital, an allied bomb had missed the railway bridge and ripped the heart of his house and that of his neighbour. The raid had been part of the American effort to limit the strategic mobility of the Wehrmacht as Rommel had redeployed his forces to the east. Strategically it had accomplished little but the Lafarge family like nearly 6 000 other French and Belgian victims of these strategic missions between August and November 1944, were dead.

  Dominique Lafarge barely took in the sympathy of the passers-by, hardly noticed the gentle efforts of the padre to console this last survivor of a family of five. Without a purpose to live for, the Frenchman died three days later in the ruins of the burned out cellar while digging for aimlessly family momentous, when a roof beam collapsed on him. The padre found his body the next morning. Dominique Lafarge was buried next to the remains of his family.

  “We shall always remember that you held the barbarians until we could prepare.”

  Letter from President Truman to Churchill

  dated 30 July 1945 following Churchill’s election defeat

  February 14th, 1945

  The White House

  Truman, pushed yet another briefing file away, wishing for the hundredth time that day that he had stayed in his home state politics. Even though he had made some tough, and even momentous decisions after being thrown in at the deep end due to Roosevelt’s death, he now wished privately to be spared the complex issues of Europe that for all his classical reading seemed to confound him. His own administration could not speak with one voice on the matter. Although Russia had been the key force in defeating Hitler, it seemed that this new devil seemed merely to replace that of Hitler. Worse, a very morose Admiral Leahy had informed him that the ghost of Hitler’s deeds still hung over him: The possibility that the Germans could destroy the economy with fake currency was real and scared the living daylights out of him. At the same time the Russian spy network angered him. A naïve President, Leahy, Marshall and Stimpson had admitted had never worried about the risk of the Soviets stealing America’s secrets. In fact Roosevelt seemed to have encouraged the sharing of military technological secrets with the Russians while receiving nothing in return. Although he could not remember a single decision that had been decisively swayed by the knowledge of the Bernard threat, President Truman knew it was the reason he dismissed the erratic Morgenthau so quickly and had held back on some of the more difficult economic issues between British and American interests. It was horrible to live with the uncertainty; it was not something the poker-playing President was used to.

  But ultimately hi
s decision was also guided by instinct, something very powerful for a poker player. And that was that he simply had to agree with Churchill. For all their problems the new crowd in Berlin were being reasonable, although the fake money issue was not in their hands. They had made it clear that they would not offer any further resistance once the allies moved across the western border, and they had not. Truman wondered why Roosevelt had been so insistent on continuing with unconditional surrender once it was clear that the Germans were withdrawing, handing over prisoners and putting war criminals on trial. Having been soldier himself, Truman thoroughly appreciated the unwillingness of allied soldiers to push hard on the heels of the retreating Germans when the same goal could be achieved without bloodshed. Without German help they might have not gotten to Poland in time to occupy the western third of the country before the Soviets overran it. Also representing a different segment of the Democratic Party, more loosely aligned with business than much of the Roosevelt administration he did not see to depth to which the German handover of secret weapons designs had robbed American business of their expected war loot. By contrast Stalin was not in a reasonable mood and had done things that just did not sit well with Truman. Key to all of this was Poland.

  The problem lay in his predecessor’s legacy: having exaggerated the prospects of peacetime collaboration with the Soviet Union in pursuit of his United Nations dream, Roosevelt had ignored too much while at war. He had known Poland would be a problem for Stalin so he had dismissed it and then tried to avoid it; eschewing , as ever, direct confrontation over the matter with whomever he spoke. Now many in the west, confronted with Stalin’s brash actions were realising that the Stalin of 1939 who had carved up Poland with his ally Hitler and who had crushed Baltic independence in 1940, was much the same as the Stalin of 1945, even if FDR had called him Uncle Joe in between. The difference was that now some of the reports of what was happening in eastern Europe and Greece were finding their ways into the mainstream American newspapers. The resulting realisation was creating outrage, because too many had compromised their perception of totalitarian reality.[107] Émigré Balts, Poles and Greeks were now beating the anti-communist drum. The Guzenko case although not yet widespread public knowledge would swing matters heavily against the democrats in the next election if he failed to act. Against that was the paper tiger of the United Nations. Gradually the Grand Alliance and its UN illusions were giving way to a sense of betrayal and Truman the politician was acutely aware of that.

  A the same time he was acutely aware of Churchill’s plea: of Britain’s post-war plight. Britain, Churchill had noted had spent more than half of her foreign investments since the time it had stood alone for the common cause, and now emerged from the conflict as the only nation with an external debt of more than 3 000 million pounds. This debt, Churchill had highlighted had grown up from the purchase of war supplies from prior to the lend-lease arrangement. Truman had had a simple response to Churchill: The United States owes a great debt to Great Britain “for having held the fort at the beginning.” [108] No, the Morgenthau memo arguing for harsh repayment terms to be imposed on Britain for ‘deviation from US policy’ reminded Truman of something out a Kremlin press release, both in tone and style. It, and its author, were gone, no longer official policy or of any consequence. Three weeks into his administration he had asked Roosevelt’s friend to leave. Of this he had assured Churchill. There would no doubt be some areas where Britain and America would clash in months to come over money, but the soldier Harry Truman had been swayed by Churchill’s pleas. Britain had stood alone while America woke up to the danger. Just like in the Great War. And in any case, Stimpson and Leahy had assured him, the Germans had accepted that everything was up for negotiation in the peace negotiations, that would soon begin in occupied Berlin. There was nothing to be gained from kicking Britain in the teeth now. And anyway there was still a war with the Japanese to be concluded. From George Marshall and Admiral King he had a clear idea of the magnitude of effort that would still be required. Already the American dead on Luzon had surpassed 5 000. British forces and their Dominion troops would play critical roles in ending this conflict, particularly in Burma where they were pinning down thousands of Japanese troops. No Harry Truman concluded, his predecessor had erred in putting the viability of the United Nations model ahead of such alliances as that with Britain. All in all Harry Truman did not really believe in the United Nations concept anyway, nations would always have self-interest to defend. Sitting together in some hall in one of the world’s great cities debating issues of high principle, would be just another repeat of the impotent League of Nations if Stalin were let in. Harry Truman had no intention of being bound to such a white elephant. Because it was Roosevelt’s legacy he would not kill the project, but it would be up to other to champion it.

  Another matter, Churchill needed to raise was the atom bomb project. Slowly but surely, co-operation between the United States and Britain in the atomic field had begun to wither. Even before July 1944 the relationship had only been kept alive by the personal rapport of Churchill and Roosevelt. With Roosevelt departed from the scene, London grew increasingly alarmed at the reality that British scientists lacked the comprehensive knowledge required for the wide range of work required for the making of an atomic bomb. At the same time Americans seemed less and less inclined to provide further insights, as the German secret weapons affair continued to poison relations. Churchill had initially brushed aside the fears of his advisers about the atom project by referring to an agreement he and FDR had made in mid-1944 that: “Full co-operation between the United States and the British Government in developing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue until after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement. To Churchill these words were a guarantee, but they were not. It was symbolic of the AngloAmerican partnership that the American President failed to inform his relevant advisors of the memorandum and then promptly proceeded to lose it because the code name – tube alloys – fooled the clerks into misfiling it under naval matters. Thus when Churchill invoked the agreement to Truman, nobody on the American side had ever heard of it. In any case Truman pointed out this was not the sort of agreement that an American president could enter into without consulting Congress. And that’s where ‘give’em hell Harry’ let the matter rest.[109] Churchill quietly accepted that it was all he could ask for, for the moment, anyway. The Americans now had most of what the Germans had given Britain in terms of secret weapons design and Churchill wondered whether it would speed up the design of the ultimate terror – the atom bomb.

  February 16th

  9 kilometers west of Lodz

  Poland

  On a clear day he thought he could see the church towers of Lodz through his field glasses, but he was not sure. He was one of nearly 100 000 Russian soldiers in the uniform of the ROA. He stood guard on the frontline in southern Poland looking east. East where he wanted to be but where he could never go again as long as the Soviet system ruled. Sergei Sibirko had been among the first of the ROA volunteers having fought in the uniform of the Red Army under General Vlasov before that. The two years in the POW camp had been hell. Many comrades had died, their death the result of neglect and the inability of the Germans to cope with such large numbers. But he had survived, survived because at time conditions in the Red Army for a young Ukrainian recruit with no political connections had not been much better. The mistreatment at the hand of some of the Russian NCOs had been harsh especially at boot camp.

  They had fought at the front, and they had fought with honour he knew that. Two major efforts by Konjev’s 1st Ukrainian Front to push beyond his early January gains had been beaten back. Konjev had been more successful to the south where his men had pushed into Hungary. The Russians had reached the outskirts of Budapest but had been held. Now it was just a matter of days before the Americans and British would come and take over. Sergei was unsure exactly what that would mean, but anything would be better than c
apture by his fellow-countrymen.

  He had survived and he had trusted Vlasov, who now sat in a command post just a few meters away, observing the frontline. General Vlasov had promised them they will help liberate the Rodina from Stalin, but they were far away from Russian soil. And yet the ROA commander had built a force over 100 000 men, with its own small tank unit, their own chaplains and hospitals. They were a force to reckoned with, a factor to consider in Europe’s future and they had proven that in some vicious fighting over the past two months.

  General Vlasov was on a tour of his units what he knew would possibly the last time. Peering through the field periscope over the trench edge to avoid the danger of snipers, the General made a great show of exuding confidence. But privately he worried. The Germans were letting the western allies occupy their land and that would mean the end of supplies and official support. Then things would come down to how realistic the allies were about the post-war realities in Eastern Europe. He had already sent out emissaries to offer his services both to the western allies and to the Poles. He had hopes that the allies would take his men under their wings, but the Poles would a consolation prize. There was little love lost between Russians and Poles, but for the moment the Government hanging on in the almost encircled Warsaw shared his anti-communist views. They could be useful to each other.