How the Cold War Began

by Amy Knight

  The FBI finally arrested Carr at his shabby basement apartment on West 74th Street in Manhattan on January 27, 1949, and charged him with entering the United States illegally. Hoover was unhappy with the way the case was handled. When he heard Carr had been located, he noted that “it looks like another three ring circus is being staged.” And upon hearing of Carr's arrest: “I am greatly concerned that Carr has been in the U.S. for three years and we never had any inkling of it. There must be some grievous gap in our Communist coverage.” Carr was taken immediately to FBI offices, “where every effort was made to question him as to his knowledge of Soviet intelligence matters and participation therein.” But he refused to talk. He was then delivered into the custody of U.S. Immigration officials at Ellis Island, who were instructed by the deputy attorney general to “throw the book at him.”27

  A few days later, after another fruitless interview by the FBI, Carr and his wife, Julia, who had been visiting him from Toronto when he was arrested, testified before a Federal Grand Jury in New York. Members of the Grand Jury were interested in a possible connection between the Carrs and the people named by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers in recent testimony before them, including Alger Hiss. Julia Carr had nothing to offer. She politely told the Grand Jury that she did not know any of the people they asked her about, which was probably true. As for her husband, he made it clear that he would not be answering many questions “inasmuch as there is already a rather protracted case [in Canada] which involves many, many things and which I have to face.”28

  Although Carr worked for the GRU and had been living in the United States for three years, he apparently had no knowledge of Hiss, Chambers, and the slew of other names he was presented with. When shown a photograph of one J. Peters, the GRU agent who had allegedly recruited the Chambers-Hiss group, Carr responded, “It looks like an awful criminal, but I never seen him.”29 Carr was handed over to Canadian authorities. In early April 1949, Hoover's deputy reported to his boss that the jury in Ottawa returned a verdict of guilty against Carr on charges of procuring a fraudulent passport. Of a possible maximum sentence of seven years in prison, the judge sentenced Carr to six.30

  Another Canadian fugitive from the Gouzenko case also eluded the FBI for three years. This was the mysterious Freda Linton, said to have been Fred Rose's mistress. Her name had cropped up several times during the Royal Commission hearings. Linton was a peripheral figure in the Canadian spy affair, and the case against her was flimsy: a brief mention of her in two of the GRU documents, along with some added recollections of Gouzenko. Gouzenko testified to the commission that he had met Linton at the home of Major Sokolov in Ottawa in the fall of 1943, and that Sokolov told Zabotin she had given him “some materials.” He described her as a “typical Jewess, dark, black hair, long nose, about 5'6", thin face, single and anxious to get married.”31

  Linton had worked as a secretary to the head of the Canadian National Film Board, John Grierson, and she was mentioned in reference to Grierson in the notebook of one of the GRU officers. Grierson was hauled before the Royal Commission and asked about her. He vigorously denied any knowledge of her communist activities, but Raymond Boyer acknowledged that she was a communist.32

  When the RCMP attempted to serve Linton with a subpoena in May 1946, she was nowhere to be found. The Royal Commissioners concluded that Linton's flight was proof of her guilt, and that she had been used by Fred Rose as a conduit between the GRU and the recruits. But there was no evidence that she had passed secret information or had done anything more than contact some of the alleged recruits. Three years later, Linton, married and seven months pregnant, gave herself up in Montreal. She hired Joseph Cohen to defend her and he managed to get the charges dropped. But she had nonetheless been labeled as a spy, and she lived the rest of her life under a false identity.33

  The FBI was particularly interested in Linton because Gouzenko had said she arranged, on behalf of Fred Rose, for “the handing over” of American scientist Dr. Arthur Steinberg to a Soviet agent in Washington, D.C. This allegedly occurred when Linton had made a trip to Washington in August 1945 as part of her work for the National Film Board. The FBI considered Steinberg to be a possible link between the Canadian spy case and suspected espionage in the United States, which is why bureau agents went to great lengths in investigating him, as did the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). The investigations never came close to showing that Steinberg had spied for the GRU, but Steinberg nonetheless endured years of torment.

  Steinberg's connection with Canada had begun in 1940, when, with his wife, Edith, and young son, he arrived in Montreal to teach in the Department of Genetics at McGill University. He was still completing work on his Ph.D. in zoology, awarded the following year by Columbia University. Like many Jewish academics and scientists at this time, Steinberg was left-leaning politically. When he was a student during the 1930s, he was interested in the “Russian experiment” and was active in leftist anti-Fascist organizations. At McGill, he became close with Professor Raymond Boyer, whose wife was Jewish and had befriended Edith. Steinberg and his wife soon gravitated to the group of communists centered around Boyer in Montreal. As with others in the group, Steinberg became an active member of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society and had even met Fred Rose.

  Steinberg later explained his political interests: “I was not anti- Communist nor was I pro-Communist; I was simply interested in learning what the Russians were doing. I lost interest when genetics was outlawed [in the Soviet Union] and when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. Despite this, when the Russians were allied with us during World War II, I joined the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society, along with many others who were interested in Russia, to help an ally who was taking the brunt of the Nazi attack.”34

  However innocently Steinberg might have viewed his associations, the fact remained that the GRU was cultivating this group, through Fred Rose and others, for its espionage operations. Eventually, judging from a document that Gouzenko furnished, Zabotin and his colleagues earmarked Steinberg as a possible recruit. Steinberg's close friendship with Boyer and his own scientific knowledge made him an obvious candidate. Boyer, as noted earlier, had been working on a new method of producing the chemical explosive rdx, and had devised a formula that greatly accelerated its production. The Canadians and the Americans were shipping RDX to the Russians to support their war effort, but they lost much of it, because their convoys to Murmansk were suffering heavy losses to the Germans. With the aim of saving Russian lives, Boyer decided to give his formula directly to the Soviets.35

  Steinberg had a background in statistics, so he had helped Boyer on RDX by doing a statistical analysis of Boyer's data. But he stressed in an interview with this author that he had “no idea that Boyer was passing information on rdx to the Soviets.”36 Steinberg left Montreal in June 1944, before the rather slow-moving GRU had a chance to make any overtures to him in Canada. He was ineligible for U.S. military service for medical reasons, but until mid-August 1945, he served as a civilian member of its U.S. Navy Operations Research Group, under the Office of Scientific Research and Development, based in Washington D.C. There, he conducted research on various weapons, some of which he designed himself. Steinberg was apparently approached by the Soviets shortly before he left on a trip to Hawaii that summer in connection with his naval research, but he refused to cooperate with them. Understandably, Steinberg would not mention this to the authorities, but his omission soon came back to haunt him.

  When Steinberg was first mentioned publicly as a spy suspect at the Fred Rose hearing in March 1946, it did not attract much attention. The Royal Commission Report released in July 1946, however, had more to say about Steinberg. The report reprinted a note written by Zabotin on May 12, 1945, observing that their agent Fred Rose should contact Steinberg [code-named “Berger”] in Washington and propose that he work for them: “Debouz [Rose] is to tie up with Berger and depending on the circu
mstances is to make a proposal about work for us or the corporation [the Communist Party]. Contact in Washington with Debouz's person. To work out arrangements for a meeting and to telegraph. To give out 600 dollars. If Debouz should be unable to go to U.S.A. then there should be a letter from Debouz to Berger containing a request to assist the person delivering the letter to Berger.”37

  This note was not in itself incriminating because it left open the question of whether the contact had been made, and, if it had been made, whether Steinberg was receptive. But Gouzenko, in his testimony to the Royal Commission, added further details:

  Q: Who is Steinberg, do you know?

  A: That is a scientist in the United States.

  Q: How did you learn that?

  A: In previous telegrams. . . .

  Q: Did you ever hear him discussed by Zabotin or Motinov or any of the others in the Embassy?

  A: There were telegrams which were written by Colonel Zabotin. . . . In the telegram which Colonel Zabotin sent to Moscow he described him as a scientist who was a friend of Debouz [Rose] and was very well acquainted with the development of the atomic bomb. . . . In later telegrams that were sent it was pointed out that Debouz's man had handed over Steinberg to the Military Intelligence in Washington . . .

  Q: Do you know the name or the cover name of Debouz's man in Washington?

  A: No, but in the telegram that reported the handing over of Berger, it mentioned that it was done through Freda [Linton]. It was not a contact; it was handing over.38

  In reproducing Gouzenko's testimony for its published report, the Royal Commission left out his statement that Zabotin described Steinberg as “very well acquainted with the atomic bomb,” presumably because it was so patently untrue. Either Zabotin was exaggerating to his superiors or Gouzenko's memory was faulty. The commission members also failed to mention a much more important document, perhaps because they never received it from the RCMP. The document in question, which was not included in the list of items from Gouzenko that served as exhibits for the commission's inquiry, was a telegram Zabotin received from Moscow reporting on the results of the attempt to recruit Steinberg in Washington: “SORVIN's [a GRU agent in Washington] man conducted the first meeting with ‘BERGER.’ The latter assured him that he was an ordinary draughtsman. Besides which he announced that he must soon depart for Java. We consider that he is simply afraid and wants to get rid of us. Find out all the details about ‘BERGER’ from ‘DEBOUZ’ [Fred Rose]. What kind of a man is he? During the conversation ‘BERGER’ expressed himself thus – ‘but we are allies.’ This is very dangerous talk.”39

  This message shows that Dr. Steinberg, about whom Moscow knew precious little, refused to be recruited. Indeed, he pointed out that he was a mere employee, presumably in order to show that he did not have access to atomic or other military secrets, and that he was going away (to Hawaii, not Indonesia). He also said that his spying would be wrong because the Americans and the Russians were allies. The GRU concluded that Steinberg wanted to get rid of them and that what he said to the Soviet agent was “dangerous.” Steinberg clearly never even came close to being a GRU recruit. Did the Canadians, in addition to omitting this evidence from the Royal Commission Report, forget to show the telegram to the FBI? Possibly. But FBI investigators had been in Ottawa, interviewing Gouzenko and sifting through his evidence from the very beginning. Another possible explanation is that the telegram contradicted a theory – that Steinberg was a spy for the Russians – that the FBI was reluctant to discard.

  In fact, the FBI had already gone further in its accusations against Steinberg. In a secret security memorandum of November 27, 1945, which was circulated among top U.S. government officials, the FBI reported that Steinberg had been recruited by a woman named Freda and successfully transferred to a GRU agent in Washington. But the report added an additional bit of speculation on Steinberg's activities vis à vis the GRU: “Information developed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police indicated that it is possible that X [Steinberg] was the individual who furnished information concerning the Navy's radio proximity fuse to Dr. Alan Nunn May, the British scientist stationed in Canada, who was an agent of the Soviets and who passed on a ‘garbled’ description of the proximity fuse to the Soviets.”40

  The proximity fuse had been developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, under the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Referred to as the “invention that won World War II,” the fuse was a radar device that made anti-aircraft artillery twenty times more effective. (The Americans did not give the Soviets access to the proximity fuse, which was a highly guarded secret. But atomic spy Julius Rosenberg was later accused of assembling a duplicate fuse and smuggling it to the Soviets in December 1944.)

  The RCMP, it seems, had determined that Steinberg was an acquaintance of Nunn May, apparently because they were both scientists at McGill and both involved in pro-communist social circles, as well as being members of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers. Since Nunn May's verbal information on the proximity fuse, as reported in a July 1945 telegram from Zabotin to Moscow, would have come from an American, the RCMP reasoned that it was probably Steinberg.41

  Steinberg's work in naval air operations could have involved the proximity fuse, used by the navy against Japanese suicide fliers, but it is not clear that Steinberg had the technical knowledge to pass on anything significant to Nunn May or the Russians. Also, of course, he had not been living in Montreal since June of 1944, although he visited there on occasion. Most important, the GRU kept its recruits from knowing who its other spies were, so it is highly unlikely that Zabotin would have requested Nunn May to get secret information from Steinberg.

  The FBI apparently took no note of the fact that Steinberg's work for the navy was considered highly valuable for the war effort. In September 1945 he was awarded a certificate of merit for his contribution to the successful prosecution of the Second World War. And in early January 1946, he received a letter of commendation from the chief of Naval Operations, in connection with his work on new tactics in naval air operations. “Your initiative and imagination,” the letter read, “your diligence and conscientiousness in the performance of your duties resulted in a distinct contribution to the war effort.” A few weeks later, the chief of the Office of Field Service of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, sent Steinberg a letter: “May I express the appreciation of the Office of Field Service and my own personal thanks for your splendid work while you were affiliated with this office . . . you did very important analytical and statistical work for the Air Operations Research Group both here in Washington D.C. and at Pearl Harbor. Your studies on anti-shipping operations are the standard references.”42

  This letter arrived just a couple of weeks before Steinberg's close friend Raymond Boyer was picked up by the RCMP and confessed to giving the Soviets the secret formula for rdx. In his subsequent testimony to the Royal Commission, Boyer also mentioned his friendship with Steinberg and admitted that Steinberg was “sympathetic to communism.”43 Arthur Steinberg's life would never be the same.

  Steinberg was first questioned by the FBI in 1947, then by HUAC in 1948 and the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SISS) in 1953. In all the interviews he categorically denied, under oath, any involvement in espionage for the Soviets.44 Because there was no evidence to prove otherwise, Steinberg was never prosecuted. But the investigations and the publicity about them damaged his career irrevocably. As with Israel Halperin and David Shugar, the spy label stuck, even though Steinberg had been guilty of nothing more than an “infatuation with communism” that ceased before the war ended. In 1946, Steinberg joined the faculty at Antioch College in Ohio, where he was chairman of the Department of Genetics. By 1948, however, the accusations against him were being widely reported in the press, which relied on leaks from the FBI and huac. HUAC member Karl Mundt called publicly for an investigation of the Steinberg charges: “It should be explored fully to clear Steinberg or show why his name was so
prominently mentioned in the Canadian spy case.” Antioch College asked Steinberg to seek employment elsewhere.45

  He applied for a professorship at Ohio State University. In April 1948, Steinberg received a letter from a member of the faculty there, saying that the search committee had concluded that he was the man best qualified to fill the job, especially because of letters from several outstanding geneticists who recommended him highly, but that unfortunately the person who made the final decision had heard about the charges against Steinberg and would not allow the appointment to go ahead: “Frankly, we felt we were getting nowhere when we advanced arguments in your favor.”46 As Steinberg said much later in an interview, “The universities were still very anxious and worried and I was quietly shifted from one place to another. Every time I was called to testify I lost a job. There were no hearings at universities. They just said good-by.”47

  Steinberg was finally able to get a position as a consultant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, but the quality and significance of his scientific work was obscured by the HUAC investigation and the ensuing widespread publicity. The Washington Times-Herald reported on September 30, 1948, that “sensational developments in the House probe of Soviet atomic espionage are expected to explode when a subcommittee calls a new key mystery witness for questioning in Milwaukee tomorrow. The witness is Arthur Steinberg.” Steinberg, the article said, was going to be grilled by HUAC in order to establish a positive connection between “spy work of the Commies in the U.S. and the atomic espionage network smashed by the Mounted Police in Canada.” In general the press reports repeated the charges against Steinberg put forth by the Royal Commission and the FBI, making it appear as if they were facts, despite a statement by Representative Richard Vail of HUAC – who interviewed Steinberg on October 1, 1948 – that Steinberg was “in no sense a suspect.”48