Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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. 81The 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. 83At 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. 85On 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. 86By the end of the year, Stalin had decided to begin work on the construction of a Soviet atomic bomb. 87In 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 reported 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), 91who 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:”

Klaus and I never spent more than half an hour together when we met. Two minutes would have been enough but, apart from the pleasure of the meeting, it would arouse less suspicion if we took a little walk together rather than parting immediately. Nobody who did not live in such isolation can guess how precious these meetings with another German comrade were. 92

SONYA later became the only woman ever to be made an honorary colonel of the Red Army, in recognition of her remarkable achievements in the GRU 93But though it has been publicly acknowledged that she ran other agents besides Fuchs during her time in Britain, both the SVR and the GRU have gone to some pains to conceal the existence of the most important of them: Melita Stedman Norwood, née Sernis (codenamed HOLA). Norwood’s file in the Centre shows her to have been, in all probability, both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain. 94

HOLA was born in 1912 to a Latvian father and British mother, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), married another Party member employed as a mathematics teacher in a secondary school, and from the age of twenty onwards worked as a secretary in the research department of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association. Talent-spotted in 1935 by one of the CPGB’s founders, Andrew Rothstein, she was recommended to the NKVD by the Party leadership and recruited two years later. Like the Magnificent Five, Norwood was a committed ideological agent inspired by a myth-image of the Soviet Union which bore little relationship to the brutal reality of Stalinist rule. Her forty-year career as a Soviet agent, however, nearly ended almost as soon as it began. She was involved with a spy ring operating inside the Woolwich Arsenal, whose three leading members were arrested in January 1938, tried and imprisoned three months later. MI5 failed, however, to detect clues to her identity contained in a notebook taken from the ringleader, Percy Glading (codenamed GOT), and after a few months “on ice” she was reactivated in May 1938. It is a sign of the Centre’s high opinion of Norwood that contact with her was maintained at a time when it was broken with many other agents, including some of the Five, because of the recall or liquidation of most foreign intelligence officers. 95

Contact with Norwood was suspended, however, after the temporary closure of the London residency early in 1940. When reactivated in 1941, she was for unexplained reasons handed over to SONYA of the GRU rather than to an NKVD controller. Her job at the Non-Ferrous Metals Association gave her access to extensive ST documents which she passed on to SONYA and subsequent controllers. By the final months of the war Norwood was providing intelligence on the TUBE ALLOYS project. According to Mitrokhin’s notes on her file, she was assessed throughout her career as a “committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance.” 96