The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  In 1940 Soviet scientists asserted that the creation of an atomic bomb from uranium was a theoretical, but not a practical, possibility. Moscow allocated no funds to atomic espionage, though the NKVD’s scientific desk alerted all foreign stations to be watchful for indications of activity in this field. In the following year the Russians received a series of reports from British informants, John Cairncross notable among them, about work on uranium-based weapons, based on clues from meetings of the British chiefs of staff and the Uranium Committee. An NKVD officer in London, Vladimir Barkovsky, was assigned to address the issue. On 16 September 1940, Donald Maclean forwarded a sixty-page report on the project the British had codenamed ‘Tube Alloys’. This suggested that Churchill’s government was taking seriously the nuclear possibilities, though another British source, in the laboratories of ICI, contradictorily asserted that it had decided a Bomb was impracticable. Moscow next learned of a decision by the British chiefs of staff to undertake a feasibility study. In August 1941 the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, a passionate communist, was recruited in Britain by the GRU’s Jurgen Kuczynski – brother of Ursula Hamburger. When he went to work with Rudolf Pierls soon afterwards, Fuchs became a key Moscow source, providing early information that autumn. On 24 November the NKVD’s New York station chief reported that three American scientists were on their way to Britain to do work on ‘an explosive of enormous power’. The London station promptly questioned Cairncross, in Lord Hankey’s office, about the truth of this. He responded that it must relate to Uranium 235. Cairncross’s handler Anatoly Gorsky remained sceptical, however, because his other informants learned nothing about the visit, which proved most influential in persuading the United States that a Bomb might be built.

  Then came Pearl Harbor. Soon afterwards secret tidings reached Moscow that the British had abandoned their own nuclear aspirations, leaving the US to pursue a Bomb through the Manhattan Project, naïvely regarded in Whitehall as a shared Anglo-American venture. In March 1942 Beria sent Stalin a summary of Soviet knowledge of British atomic research, chiefly based on information from Cairncross. About the same time one of the NKVD New York station’s sources, Franklin Zelman, met an acquaintance named Clarence Hiskey, a Columbia chemistry professor and fellow-communist, who told him that he was working on an American radioactive bomb project; that this was making progress, but that the Germans were far ahead. Hiskey was mistaken on both counts, but his remarks caused alarm in Moscow. Leonid Kvasnikov, a scientist on the NKVD payroll, sought to reassure his masters: after examining the available information from British, American and German sources, he suggested that nobody had yet made much headway. Nonetheless, he urged intensive further enquiries.

  Gregory Kheifetz, Centre’s San Francisco resident who worked undercover as Soviet vice-consul, met Robert Oppenheimer, now secretly charged with the scientific direction of the ‘Manhattan Project’ to build a Bomb, at a fundraising reception for Spanish Civil War refugees, and learned that he was engaged in a large-scale new research operation. Kheifetz was an espionage veteran: he had previously served as deputy resident in Rome, where he targeted Enrico Fermi and Bruno Pontecorvo as prospective sources. Even earlier, he worked as a secretary to Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya, then played a major part in establishing the Comintern in the United States. With such a background, he commanded both interest and respect in San Francisco’s left-wing social circles. Oppenheimer seems to have given Kheifetz some important hints, possibly including mention of the fears of Washington and London that the Nazis might be building a Bomb. He also revealed Einstein’s secret 1939 letter to Roosevelt, drafted by Leó Szilárd, urging him to explore the possibilities of harnessing nuclear energy.

  Oppenheimer was assigned the NKVD codename ‘Star’. Some of his closest friends, including Steve Nelson, born in Croatia as Stefan Mesarosh, were communists and active Soviet informants. Oppenheimer’s formidable and somewhat sinister wife Kitty had once been married to a communist. At the end of 1942, under orders from the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, a communist British chemist instructed the literary academic Professor Haakon Chevalier to approach his old friend Robert Oppenheimer and invite him to share the Manhattan Project’s secrets with the Russians. The scientist, however, immediately reported this approach to Gen. Leslie Groves, Manhattan’s overseer, and Chevalier found himself consigned to outer darkness. In the following year a succession of further approaches were made, one of them by Solomon Mikhoels, the famous Moscow actor with the Yiddish State Art Theatre, who was on a US tour sponsored by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, along with his comrade the Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer. Beria had personally briefed the two men to assure Oppenheimer that anti-Semitism in the USSR was now a dead letter.

  Pavel Sudoplatov asserts in his memoirs that Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilárd knowingly assisted the NKVD to place moles in Manhattan’s laboratories. Even more startling, he suggests that Oppenheimer requested the services of Klaus Fuchs, knowing that he was a Soviet agent. Both propositions seem wildly implausible – Oppenheimer’s most recent biographer Ray Monk calls the notion ‘risible’. Because Oppenheimer indisputably lied to congressional hearings in 1954 about some of his old communist associations, there has been controversy about his loyalty ever since. Yet the most plausible verdict is that, not unlike Harry Hopkins, he was guilty of indiscretions to some communist friends and contacts, rather than of making a conscious commitment to betray his vast responsibility for the most ambitious military project in history.

  Moscow was impressed and alarmed by the revelation that the Americans had begun to commit huge resources to the creation of a Bomb. In this matter as in so much else, Stalin looked far beyond mere victory over Hitler, towards a post-war world in which no aspiring superpower without an atomic bomb could hope to challenge another which owned one. The Soviet warlord seems to have grasped much earlier than Churchill or Roosevelt the game-changing nature of such a weapon. Sudoplatov cites Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilárd and Szilárd’s secretary as Russia’s most important American atomic sources, but whether or not he told the truth about these individuals, it is undisputed that there were plenty of others. Lise Meitner was a physicist who had fled from Germany to Sweden, where she now worked at the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences. Soviet agents run by Zoya Rybkina approached and quizzed her about what she had learned from the international fraternity of scientists about a Bomb; it could be built, she said. In March 1942 Donald Maclean sent a new report from London, emphasising the high priority being given to the Western Allies’ atomic research. On the 10th, Beria wrote to Stalin endorsing this view, which was echoed by Soviet physicist Professor George Florev, who in May declared to the Kremlin his conviction that a Bomb was feasible.

  The NKVD progressively intensified its efforts to penetrate the research plants of the Manhattan Project. Semyon Semyonov – ‘Twain’ – the long-serving science specialist in Centre’s US operation, was assigned to recruit sources. The Russians recognised that they had little prospect of securing the help of the top atomic scientists through bribery or coercion; instead, they must appeal to their finer instincts, to a supposed community of interest and culture with the Soviets, America’s allies against Hitler, who were bearing the lion’s share of the struggle and of the sacrifice. Semyonov quickly identified most of the key Manhattan scientists, but had limited success in recruiting them. He supervised the NKVD veteran Harry Gold, who worked with Fuchs, but failed in the wooing of Ukrainian explosives expert George Kistiakowsky.

  The Russians meanwhile puzzled endlessly about what Germany was, or was not, doing about atomic research. The evidence was thin and confusing. For instance, if heavy water was an important element of the process, why was Berlin not taking far more serious steps to guard its Norwegian production? The British obviously took heavy water seriously: the NKVD’s Norwegian agents told Moscow about the November 1942 SOE attempt to destroy the Rjukan hydro-electric plant, which failed with the loss of the entire assault party of glider-b
orne engineers. Kim Philby also forwarded a report on the fiasco, which was followed by the successful February 1943 operation conducted by six SOE-trained Norwegian saboteurs. Soviet paranoia about Anglo-American deceitfulness was intensified by the fact that the Allies neither sought Russian help in launching the raid, nor informed Moscow about it afterwards; this, though the history of British attempts to collaborate on secret operations was one of unyielding Soviet intransigence.

  Beria now controlled a Special Committee on Atomic Energy, under the nominal chairmanship of two deputy prime ministers, with Sudoplatov attached as director of intelligence. A Soviet academician, V.I. Vernadsky, suggested that Moscow should formally invite the Western Allies to exchange knowledge on nuclear research. Stalin responded contemptuously: ‘You are politically naïve if you think that they would share information about the weapons that will dominate the world in the future.’ Hozyain agreed that Russia’s intelligence agencies should intensify covert efforts to prise information out of Western scientists. They got nowhere with Niels Bohr, though the great Danish physicist did urge upon Churchill and Roosevelt that they should voluntarily share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. In January 1943, Semyonov took delivery of Bruno Pontecorvo’s report on the first nuclear chain reaction. Pontecorvo also described Fermi’s 2 December 1942 experiment in Chicago, heralding this with a cryptic phone message to the NKVD officer: ‘The Italian sailor reached the new world.’

  In February 1943, Sudoplatov was authorised to show Soviet scientists nuclear intelligence from America, without disclosing the sources. Such ring-fencing was unsuccessful, however. The physicist I.K. Kikoin took one look at a translated report in Sudoplatov’s office at the Lubyanka and said, ‘This is Fermi’s work. He is the only one capable of producing such a miracle.’ Sudoplatov displayed other documents in English, with the authors’ names masked. The scientists guessed most of their identities, and told him not to be naïve: the nature of such supremely sophisticated research findings enabled them almost instinctively to divine the authorship. Thereafter the NKVD officer secured Beria’s authority to show the Soviet group most incoming material from the US. By July 1943 Moscow Centre had received 286 US classified documents on Manhattan, and with the guidance of Russian scientists began to brief American agents about specific technical questions that needed answers.

  The importance of Bomb intelligence was emphasised in February 1944, when Beria added to Sudoplatov’s responsibilities the direction of a new, autonomous ‘Department S’, to handle atomic espionage and disseminate its fruits to Soviet scientists. The Russians gave their own penetration programme the uncharacteristically appropriate codename ‘Enormoz’. Sudoplatov later claimed that he had not wanted the job, because he preferred to focus on his main responsibility – providing support for partisan operations behind the German lines. No Soviet official, however, refused either an increase in his power or an order from Beria. Sudoplatov wrote later that he derived comfort from his faith in Semyon Semyonov, together with his longstanding friendship with Vasily and Elizabeth Zarubin. Klaus Fuchs, who had become a critical technical source, was transferred from GRU handlers to the care of Department S.

  Its new director was instructed to forge close working relationships with Russia’s top scientists. This was easier said than done: like all Soviet citizens, they lived in terror of any contact with the NKVD. The dinner parties that the spymaster initiated in the sitting-room behind his office in the Lubyanka must have been appalling ordeals for these wretched men. At a time when much of Russia’s population subsisted on the verge of starvation, in the Lubyanka sumptuous meals were served by maids. Tensions cannot have been eased by the fact that, while the guests were urged to drink deep of Sudoplatov’s Armenian brandy, he himself was teetotal. He told the scientists that he was empowered to provide further inducements for them to give of their best for Stalin’s Bomb programme, through access to extra rations and shops accessible only to the Party’s chosen few. He did not record what matching threats were offered, in case of failure.

  In 1943 the Russians were still learning more about the Manhattan Project from their British sources than their American ones. Fifty-six years later, when eighty-seven-year-old Mrs Melita Norwood was exposed as a former Soviet agent, the British media treated the revelation as comic: ‘the suburban granny who spied for Moscow’. Norwood issued an impenitent statement, justifying her actions: ‘I did what I did not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new [Soviet] system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, given them education and a health service.’ Not only was she spared from criminal trial and punishment, but her fellow-countrymen treated her past treachery with good-natured indulgence. Yet other than Klaus Fuchs, Mrs Norwood – ‘Tina’ – was Moscow’s most important wartime and post-war source of nuclear intelligence in Britain, through her role as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.

  The daughter of a Latvian father and a British mother, she was a lifelong secret communist, recruited by Centre in 1937. MI5 failed to notice her involvement in the Soviets’ Woolwich Arsenal spy ring, exposed in 1938. Moscow’s files categorised her as ‘a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance’. She provided a mass of data on American and British nuclear activities from their beginnings into the 1950s. These were forwarded by her courier, none other than Ursula Hamburger, once a key figure in the ‘Lucy’ Ring, who now operated a wireless link to Moscow from cottages in a succession of idyllically rural Oxfordshire villages such as Great Rollright, Glympton and Kidlington. Centre described Norwood’s reports as ‘of great interest and a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field’. Soviet scientists said later that the technical detail provided by herself and Fuchs contributed more than any other informants to the creation of their own first bomb.

  Beyond Norwood and Cairncross, another important British source was ‘Eric’, a young communist physicist who has never been identified. This man asserted that the Americans were making big strides, and his reports caused Moscow to urge its New York station to strain every sinew to find out more. Five times in 1942 Klaus Fuchs supplied further batches of material about his team’s theoretical calculations on atomic fission. Fuchs’ courier in Britain from that autumn onwards was a supposed German Jewish refugee living in Britain, a ‘Mrs Brewer’ – once again Ursula Hamburger. For her contributions to Russia’s secret war in Switzerland and Britain, she later became the first woman to be made an honorary colonel in the Red Army.

  The first significant American breakthrough came from ‘Mar’, a scientist working for DuPont, who forwarded material through his sister-in-law. In April 1943 she delivered a letter to the Soviet consulate in New York, detailing the plutonium route towards a nuclear explosion. ‘Mar’ asserted that his motive was to defeat the ‘criminal’ efforts of the US military to conceal the construction of a bomb. On 1 July the NKVD New York station reported that five hundred people were now working on the Manhattan Project – an underestimate: by that date some 200,000, including construction workers, were engaged, a total that ultimately reached 600,000, if sub-contractors are included. Penetration of its most secret plants had thus far proved impossible. The Russians reviewed their strategy. First, they made the sensible decision to end the GRU–NKVD contest for nuclear information, by transferring all the GRU’s sources to NKVD handlers. Pavel Sudoplatov was given overall responsibility for directing Enormoz. Centre then reviewed prominent names known to be associated with the bomb project, with a view to identifying recruitment targets. Enrico Fermi? Clarence Hiskey? Robert Oppenheimer? Moscow asserted that Oppenheimer was a secret Party member, but this was never proved, and seems unlikely. One NKVD source, a Senate staffer named Charles Kramer, met the Manhattan director several times, but reported back that he was a visionary, rather than a prospective Moscow agent.

  In December ‘Mar’ passed documents on the construction of a nuclea
r reactor; its cooling system; the extraction of plutonium from irradiated uranium; and radiation protection. Another source, ‘Kvant’, or ‘Hustler’, about whose greed Semyon Semyonov had complained, as usual merely wanted money. In June he received $300 for a report on uranium isotope separation through gaseous diffusion. Moscow enthused. By Christmas 1943 its scientists had received a mass of relevant British and American material, some of the latter from a ‘progressive professor’ in the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. Still, however, the NKVD had failed to secure the services of any informant inside the Los Alamos development centre.

  In the winter of 1943 Klaus Fuchs was posted to the United States, where Harry Gold became his courier, though the two men disliked each other. Through the early months of 1944, on the first and third Saturdays of each month Fuchs presented himself at 4 p.m. at the entrance of the Henry Street settlement on New York City’s Lower East Side, initially with a green book and a tennis ball in his hands, meeting a man wearing gloves who asked directions to Chinatown. After the first meetings this elaborate performance was simplified, at Moscow’s insistence. Later, Gold travelled to the Cambridge, Mass., home of Fuchs’ sister, an American Party member. The visitor presented his credentials by saying, ‘I bring you regards from Max.’ Ms Fuchs responded, ‘Oh, I heard he had twins.’ ‘Yes, seven days ago.’ All the parties had been reading bad thrillers. Nonetheless, the material Fuchs provided was eminently serviceable, mostly about his own work on the separation of isotopes. Moscow expressed frustration that Gold’s reports did not tell them enough about Fuchs as a man. From mid-1944 onwards the NKVD’s Anatoly Yatskov controlled him through Gold, because Semyon Semyonov had become so closely watched by the FBI that he could no longer meet agents, and indeed had to be recalled home. Moreover, in October Fuchs returned abruptly to Britain, causing an interruption of his reporting.