Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Further disruption to NKVD operations in the United States followed Akhmerov’s recall, soon after his last meeting with Straight, to Moscow where he was accused by Beria of treasonable dealings with enemies of the people. 25Though, for unknown reasons, the charges were dropped, Akhmerov was placed in the NKVD reserve and remained under suspicion for the next two years while his record was thoroughly checked. For the first time, the center of NKVD operations in the United States was moved, after Akhmerov’s recall, to the legal residency headed by Gayk Ovakimyan, later known to the FBI as the “wily Armenian.” Ovakimyan found himself terribly overworked, all the more so since he was also expected to take an active part in the complex preparations for Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico City. He would sometimes return home exhausted after meeting as many as ten agents in a single day. 26

Ovakimyan’s main successes were in scientific and technological (ST), rather than political, intelligence. He was unusual among INO officers in holding a science doctorate from the MVTU (Moscow Higher Technical School) and, since 1933, had operated under cover as an engineer at Amtorg (American-Soviet Trading Corporation) in New York. In 1940 he enrolled as a graduate student at a New York chemical institute to assist him in identifying potential agents. 27Ovakimyan was the first to demonstrate the enormous potential for ST in the United States. In 1939 alone NKVD operations in the United States obtained 18,000 pages of technical documents, 487 sets of designs and 54 samples of new technology. 28

Ovakimyan was probably also the first to suggest using an INO officer, under cover as an exchange student, to penetrate the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first such “student,” Semyon Markovich Semyonov (codenamed TVEN), entered MIT in 1938. The scientific contacts which he made over the next two years, before changing his cover in 1940 to that of an Amtorg engineer, helped to lay the basis for the remarkable wartime expansion of ST collection in the United States. One of his colleagues in the New York residency was struck by Semyonov’s “large eyes which, while he was talking to somebody, [revolved] like parabolic antennae.” 29By April 1941 the total NKVD agent network in the United States numbered 221, of whom forty-nine were listed in NKVD statistics as “engineers” (probably a category which included a rather broad range of scientists). 30In the same month the Centre for the first time established separate departments in its major residencies to specialize in scientific and technological intelligence operations (later known as Line X), a certain sign of their increasing priority. 31

According to an SVR official history, the sheer number of agents with whom Ovakimyan was in contact “blunted his vigilance.” In May 1941 he was caught by the FBI in the act of receiving documents from agent OCTANE, briefly imprisoned, freed on bail and allowed to leave the country in July. 32But for the remarkably lax security of the Roosevelt administration, the damage to NKVD operations might have been very much worse than the arrest of Ovakimyan. On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, Whittaker Chambers had told much of what he knew about Soviet espionage in the United States to Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and President Roosevelt’s adviser on internal security. Immediately afterwards, Berle drew up a memorandum for the President which listed Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the other leading Soviet agents for whom Chambers had acted as courier. One of those on the list was a leading presidential aide, Lauchlin Currie (mistranscribed by Berle as Lockwood Curry). Roosevelt, however, was not interested. He seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd. Equally remarkable, Berle simply pigeon-holed his own report. He did not even send a copy to the FBI until the Bureau requested it in 1943. 33

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, Vassili Zarubin (alias Zubilin, codenamed MAKSIM) was appointed legal resident in New York. Already deeply suspicious of British commitment to the defeat of Nazi Germany, Stalin also had doubts about American resolve. He summoned Zarubin before his departure and told him that his main assignment in the United States was to watch out for attempts by Roosevelt and “US ruling circles” to negotiate with Hitler and sign a separate peace. As resident in New York, based in the Soviet consulate, Zarubin was also responsible for subresidencies in Washington, San Francisco, and Latin America. 34Though fragmentary, the evidence suggests that Stalin continued to take a direct personal interest in overseeing intelligence operations against his allies.

A brief official SVR biography portrays Zarubin’s wartime record in New York (and later in Washington) as one of unblemished brilliance. 35In reality, his abrasive personality and foul-mouthed behavior caused immediate uproar. Zarubin’s preference for the operations officers whom he brought with him (among them his wife, Yelizaveta Yulyevna Zarubina) 36and his unconcealed contempt for existing residency staff led to open rebellion. Two of the operations officers whom he insulted, Vasili Dmitryevich Mironov and Vasili Georgyevich Dorogov, went to the remarkable lengths of reporting “his crudeness, general lack of manners, use of street language and obscenities, carelessness in his work, and repugnant secretiveness” to the Centre, and asking for his recall along with his almost equally unpopular wife. Feuding within the residency continued throughout the Second World War. 37

Zarubin’s recruitment strategy was simple and straightforward. He demanded that the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) identify supporters and sympathizers in government establishments suitable for work as agents. 38When Zarubin arrived in New York, the CPUSA leader Earl Browder (codenamed RULEVOY—“Helmsman”) was serving a prison sentence for using a false passport during his frequent secret journeys to the Soviet Union. His first contact was therefore with Eugene Dennis (born Francis X. Waldron, codenamed RYAN), a Moscowtrained Comintern agent who later succeeded Browder as CPUSA general secretary. Dennis reported that a number of Communists (mostly secret Party members) were joining the first professional American foreign intelligence agency, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, reorganized in June 1942 as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Shortly before the foundation of OSS, Browder left prison to resume the Party leadership. He was, Dennis told Moscow, “in a splendid mood.” 39

Among the first Soviet agents to penetrate OSS was Duncan Chaplin Lee (codenamed KOCH), who became personal assistant to its head, General “Wild Bill” Donovan. Donovan had a relaxed attitude to the recruitment of Communists. “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll,” he once said, “if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler.” Throughout the Second World War the NKVD knew vastly more about OSS than OSS knew about the NKVD. 40

Browder’s recruitment leads also included foreign Communists and fellow travelers who had taken refuge in the United States. Among the most important was the French radical politician Pierre Cot, six times Minister of Air and twice Minister of Commerce in the short-lived governments of the prewar Third Republic. Cot had probably been recruited by the NKVD in the mid-1930s, but seems to have drifted out of touch during the chaotic period which followed the purge of much of Soviet foreign intelligence and had condemned the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Rebuffed by General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French after the fall of France in 1940, Cot spent the next few years in the United States. 41In November Browder reported to Moscow: “Cot wants the leaders of the Soviet Union to know of his willingness to perform whatever mission we might choose, for which purpose he is even prepared to break faith with his own position.” 42Probably a month or so after his arrival in New York, Zarubin approached Cot and, with his habitual brusqueness, pressed Cot to begin active work as a Soviet agent forthwith. Cot’s KGB file records that he was taken aback by the peremptory nature of Zarubin’s summons and insisted that one of the leaders of the French Communist Party exiled in Moscow give his approval. 43On July 1 Zarubin reported to the Centre “the signing on of Pierre Cot” as agent DAEDALUS. 44In 1944 Cot was to be sent on a three-month mission to Moscow on behalf of de Gaulle’s provisional government. He concluded the report on his mission: “Liberty declines unceasingly under capitalism and rises unceasingly under socialism.” 45