The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Michael Straight (NIGEL), in whom Akhmerov had placed such high hopes before the Second World War, refused to resume work as a Soviet agent. Straight had one last meeting with Akhmerov in Washington early in 1942, declined any further meeting, shook hands and said goodbye.50 Most other pre-war agents, however, were successfully reactivated, among them Laurence Duggan (FRANK)51 and Harry Dexter White (JURIST).52 Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term of office (1941 to 1945), said later that if the ailing Roosevelt had died during that period and he had become president, it had been his intention to make Duggan his Secretary of State and White his Secretary of the Treasury.53 The fact that Roosevelt survived three months into an unprecedented fourth term in the White House, and replaced Wallace with Harry Truman as vice-president in January 1945, deprived Soviet intelligence of what would have been its most spectacular success in penetrating a major Western government. The NKVD succeeded none the less in penetrating all the most sensitive sections of the Roosevelt administration.

  Akhmerov’s most productive Washington network was a group of Communists and fellow travelers with government jobs run by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (successively codenamed PAL and ROBERT), a statistician in the Farm Security Administration, later seconded to the Board of Economic Warfare.54 “Greg” Silvermaster retained the untarnished idealism of the revolutionary dream. A chronic sufferer from bronchial asthma, which often left him gasping for breath, he believed that, “My time is strictly limited, and when I die I want to feel that at least I have had some part in building a decent life for those who come after me.”55

  Akhmerov believed, probably correctly, that, despite the security risks involved in Silvermaster’s unorthodox tradecraft, he was able to obtain far more intelligence from his increasing number of sources than if each of them was run individually by a Soviet controller. Silvermaster himself disdained the NKVD’s bureaucratic “orthodox methods.” Though most of his sources must have been aware of the ultimate destination of their intelligence, the network was run under what Akhmerov termed “the Communist Party flag.” Informants regarded themselves as helping the CPUSA, which would in turn assist its Soviet comrades.56

  To limit the security risks, Akhmerov placed two cut-outs between himself and the Silvermaster group. The first was a courier, Elizabeth Bentley (codenamed MIRNA, then, more condescendingly, UMNITSA—“Good Girl”), a Vassar graduate who in 1938, at the age of thirty, had been persuaded to break her visible links with the CPUSA in order to work for the NKVD. Every fortnight Bentley collected classified documents microfilmed by Silvermaster and his wife in her knitting bag. She reported not to Akhmerov himself but to another Soviet illegal in his residency, Jacob Golos (ZVUK—“Sound”), whom she knew as “Timmy.” Golos broke NKVD rules by seducing Bentley during a New York snowstorm. According to Bentley’s enthusiastic description of the seduction, she felt herself “float away into an ecstasy that seemed to have no beginning and no end.” Encouraged by Golos’s unprofessional example, Bentley mixed friendship and espionage in a way which would have horrified the Centre. Each Christmas she used NKVD funds to buy carefully chosen presents, ranging from whiskey to lingerie, for the agents in Silvermaster’s group. These, she said later, were “the good old days—the days when we worked together as good comrades.”57

  Like Zarubin’s, Akhmerov’s illegal residency recruited non-American as well as American agents. Among the most important was the British journalist and wartime intelligence officer Cedric Belfrage (codenamed CHARLIE), who joined British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York shortly after the United States entered the war.58 Directed by the SIS head of station, Sir William Stephenson, for much of the war, BSC handled intelligence liaison with the Americans on behalf of MI5 and SOE as well as SIS.59 Belfrage volunteered his services to Soviet intelligence. Like a number of other American agents in the United States, he made his initial approach to Earl Browder, who passed him on to Golos.60 Given the unprecedented number of wartime secrets exchanged by the British and American intelligence communities, Belfrage had access to an unusually wide range of intelligence.

  The rolls of microfilm forwarded by Akhmerov’s illegal residency to the Centre via the legal residency in New York increased almost four-fold in the space of a year, from fifty-nine in 1942 to 211 in 1943. Zarubin none the less regarded Akhmerov’s refusal to have direct dealings with the CPUSA leadership and his roundabout methods of controlling the Silvermaster group as feeble and long-winded. Akhmerov himself, Zarubin complained, had a “dry and distrustful” manner—which may well have been true as far as his relations with Zarubin were concerned. Zarubin had a much higher opinion of Akhmerov’s wife, Helen Lowry, whom he regarded as more quick-witted, more business-like in manner, and—because of her American upbringing—better able to make direct contact with US agents.61

  THERE WAS THUS a breathtaking gulf between the intelligence supplied to Stalin on the United States and that available to Roosevelt on the Soviet Union.62 Whereas the Centre had penetrated every major branch of Roosevelt’s administration, OSS—like SIS—had not a single agent in Moscow. At the Tehran Conference of the Big Three in November 1943—the first time Stalin and Roosevelt had met—vastly superior intelligence gave Stalin a considerable negotiating advantage. Though there is no precise indication of what intelligence reports and documents were shown to Stalin before the summit, there can be no doubt that he was remarkably well briefed. He was almost certainly informed that Roosevelt had come to Tehran determined to do his utmost to reach agreement with Stalin—even at the cost of offending Churchill. FDR gave proof of his intentions as soon as he arrived. He declined Churchill’s proposal that they should meet privately before the conference began, but accepted Stalin’s pressing invitation that—allegedly on security grounds—he should stay at a building in the Soviet embassy compound rather than at the US legation. It seems not to have occurred to Roosevelt that the building was, inevitably, bugged, and that every word uttered by himself and his delegation would be recorded, transcribed and regularly reported to Stalin.63

  Stalin must also have welcomed the fact that Roosevelt was bringing to Tehran his closest wartime adviser, Harry Hopkins, but leaving behind his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Hopkins had established a remarkable reputation in Moscow for taking the Russians into his confidence. Earlier in the year he had privately warned the Soviet embassy in Washington that the FBI had bugged a secret meeting at which Zarubin (apparently identified by Hopkins only as a member of the embassy) had passed money to Steve Nelson, a leading member of the US Communist underground. 64 Information sent to Moscow by the New York residency on the talks between Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1943 had also probably come from Hopkins. 65 There is plausible but controversial evidence that, in addition to passing confidences to the Soviet ambassador, Hopkins sometimes used Akhmerov as a back channel to Moscow, much as the Kennedys later used the GRU officer Georgi Bolshakov. Hopkins’s confidential information so impressed the Centre that, years later, some KGB officers boasted that he had been a Soviet agent.66 These boasts were far from the truth. Hopkins was an American patriot with little sympathy for the Soviet system. But he was deeply impressed by the Soviet war effort and convinced that, “Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.”67 “Chip” Bohlen, who acted as American interpreter, later described Hopkins’s influence on the President at the Tehran summit as “paramount.”68

  It was at Tehran, Churchill later claimed, that he realized for the first time how small the British nation was:

  There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey…69

  Despite the closeness of the British-American wartime “special relationship” and Roosevelt’s friendship with Churchill, his priority at Tehran was to reach agreement with Stalin. He told his old friend,
Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, how

  Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe.” He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.

  From that time on our relations were personal… We talked like men and brothers.70

  In the course of the Tehran Conference, Hopkins sought out Churchill privately at the British embassy, and told him that Stalin and Roosevelt were adamant that Operation OVERLORD, the British-American cross-Channel invasion of occupied France, must take place the following spring, and that British opposition must cease. Churchill duly gave way. The most important political concession to Stalin was British-American agreement to give the post-war Soviet Union its 1941 frontier, thus allowing Stalin to recover his territorial gains ill-gotten under the Nazi-Soviet Pact: eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Moldova. The Polish government-in-exile in London was not consulted.

  Stalin returned to Moscow in high spirits. The United States and Britain seemed to have recognized, as a Russian diplomat put it privately, Russia’s “right to establish friendly governments in the neighboring countries.”71 Roosevelt’s willingness to go so far to meet Stalin’s wishes at Tehran had derived chiefly from his deep sense of the West’s military debt to the Soviet Union at a time when the Red Army was bearing the overwhelming brunt of the war with Germany. But there is equally no doubt that Stalin’s negotiating success was greatly assisted by his knowledge of the cards in Roosevelt’s hand.72

  Despite the considerable success of the legal and illegal American residencies in penetrating the Roosevelt administration, however, they had failed totally in one important respect. Part of Zarubin’s original brief from the Centre had been to recruit agents from among the large German-American community who could be used against Germany. In the end he recruited not a single one. When asked to explain this omission, he told the Centre that most German-Americans were Jews and therefore unsuitable.73 The Centre, like Zarubin, had become so engrossed in the intelligence offensive against its allies that it appears to have judged leniently his failure against the enemy.

  WARTIME INTELLIGENCE GATHERING continued to expand in Britain as well as the United States. At the beginning of 1942 a second legal residency began to operate in London under Ivan Andreyevich Chichayev (JOHN) alongside that of Anatoli Gorsky (successively HENRY and VADIM). Unlike Gorsky, who remained in charge of the agent network, Chichayev announced his presence in London to the authorities and was responsible for intelligence liaison with both the British and allied governments-in-exile.74 Chichayev also ran an agent network of émigré officials from central and eastern Europe who kept him informed of British negotiations with the Polish government-in-exile, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneˇs, King Peter of Yugoslavia and his prime minister, Ivan Subǎs.75

  The Cambridge Five, meanwhile, continued to generate a phenomenal amount of intelligence. For 1942 alone Maclean’s documents filled more than forty-five volumes in the Centre archives.76 Philby too was providing large quantities of highly classified files. Since September 1941 he had been working in Section V (Counter-intelligence) of SIS. Though Section V was then located in St. Albans, rather than in SIS London headquarters at Broadway Buildings, it had the advantage of being next door to the registry which housed SIS archives. Philby spent some time cultivating the archivist, Bill Woodfield, with whom he shared a common appreciation of pink gin. As Philby later recalled, “This friendly connection paid off.”77 Over a period of months, Philby borrowed the operational files of British agents working abroad and handed them to Gorsky in batches to be photographed.78 Early in April 1942 the Centre completed a lengthy analysis of the SIS records removed by Philby up to the end of the previous year. Though praising SÖHNCHEN for “systematically sending a lot of interesting material,” it was puzzled that this material appeared to show that SIS had no agent network in Russia and was conducting only “extremely insignificant” operations against the Soviet Union. Centre analysts had two reasons for disputing these entirely accurate conclusions. First, though at least partly aware that the evidence used to convict some of their liquidated predecessors of working for British intelligence was fraudulent, they remained convinced that SIS had been conducting major operations against the Soviet Union, using “their most highly skilled agents,” throughout the 1930s. The reality—that SIS had not even possessed a Moscow station—was, so far as the Centre was concerned, literally unbelievable. The Centre refused to believe that the Soviet Union was a smaller priority for British intelligence (which was, in truth, almost wholly geared to the war effort) than Britain was for Soviet intelligence:

  If the HOTEL [SIS] has recruited a hundred agents in Europe over the past few years, mainly from countries occupied by the Germans, there can be no doubt that our country gets no less attention.79

  Such reports merely echoed Stalin’s own acute suspicions of his British allies.

  The intelligence from the London residency during the first year of the Great Patriotic War which ultimately had the greatest impact on both Stalin and the Centre came from Cairncross. On September 25, 1941 Gorsky telegraphed Moscow:

  I am informing you very briefly about the contents of a most secret report of the Government Committee on the development of uranium atomic energy to produce explosive material which was submitted on September 24, 1941 to the War Cabinet.80

  The secret committee which produced the report was the Scientific Advisory Committee, chaired by Lord Hankey, whose codename BOSS reflects the fact he was Cairncross’s employer.81 The report which Cairncross gave Gorsky was the first to alert the Centre to British plans to build the atomic bomb.82

  Vitally important though that report, and others on the atomic bomb despatched from London over the next few months, proved to be, they had a delayed impact in Moscow. When Cairncross’s first report arrived, Stalin and the Stavka were preoccupied by the German advance which in October 1941 forced them to evacuate the capital. It was not until March 1942 that Beria sent Stalin a full assessment of British atomic research. The British high command, he reported, was now satisfied that the theoretical problems of constructing an atomic bomb had been “fundamentally solved,” and Britain’s best scientists and major companies were collaborating on the project.83 At Beria’s suggestion, detailed consultations with Soviet scientists followed over the next few months.84

  In June 1942 President Roosevelt ordered an all-out effort, codenamed the MANHATTAN project, to build an American atomic bomb. Though it was another year before British participation in the project was formally agreed, the NKVD discovered that Roosevelt and Churchill had discussed cooperation on the building of the bomb during talks in Washington on June 20.85 On October 6, following extensive consultations with Soviet scientists, the Centre submitted the first detailed report on Anglo-American plans to construct an atomic bomb to the Central Committee and the State Defence Committee, both chaired by Stalin.86 By the end of the year, Stalin had decided to begin work on the construction of a Soviet atomic bomb.87 In taking that momentous decision in the middle of the battle of Stalingrad, the main turning point in the war on the eastern front, Stalin was not thinking of the needs of the Great Patriotic War, since it was clear that the bomb could not be ready in time to assist in the defeat of Germany. Instead, he was already looking forward to a post-war world in which, since the United States and Britain would have nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union must have them too.88

  For most of the Great Patriotic War Moscow collected more atomic intelligence from Britain than from the United States. In December 1942 the London residency received a detailed report on atomic research in Britain and the United States from a Communist scientist codenamed “K.” Vladimir Barkovsky, head of scientific and technological intelligence (ST) at the residency, later report
ed that “K” “works for us with enthusiasm, but… turns down the slightest hint of financial reward.” With the help of a duplicate key personally manufactured by Barkovsky from a wax impression provided by “K,” he was able to remove numerous classified documents from colleagues’ safes as well as his own. The most valuable, in the Centre’s view, were those on “the construction of uranium piles.” At least two other scientists, codenamed MOOR and KELLY, also provided intelligence on various aspects of TUBE ALLOYS, the British atomic project.89

  The most important of the British atom spies, the Communist physicist Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized refugee from Nazi Germany, was initially a GRU rather than an NKVD/NKGB agent. Fuchs was a committed Stalinist who was later to take part in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Before the war he had been an enthusiastic participant in dramatized readings of the transcripts of the show trials organized by the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, and impressed his research supervisor, the future Nobel Laureate Sir Neville Mott, with the passion with which he played the part of the prosecutor Vyshinsky, “accusing the defendants with a cold venom that I would never have suspected from so quiet and retiring a young man.” Late in 1941, Fuchs asked the leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) underground in Britain, Jürgen Kuczynski, for help in passing to the Russians what he had learned while working on the TUBE ALLOYS project at Birmingham University. Kuczynski put him in touch with Simon Davidovich Kremer, an officer at the GRU London residency, who irritated Fuchs by his insistence on taking long rides in London taxis, regularly doubling back in order to throw off anyone trying to tail them.90

  In the summer of 1942 Fuchs was moved on to another and more congenial GRU controller, SONYA (referred to in KGB files under the alternative codename FIR),91 who he almost certainly never realized was the sister of Jürgen Kuczynski. They usually met near Banbury, midway between Birmingham and Oxford, where SONYA lived as Mrs. Brewer, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. SONYA remembered the material she collected from Fuchs as “just strings of hieroglyphics and formula written in such tiny writing that they just looked like squiggles:”