Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

By the beginning of 1943, aware of American plans to build the first atomic bomb, the Centre was even more anxious to collect atomic intelligence in the United States than in Britain. One certain indication of the importance attached by the Centre to monitoring the MANHATTAN project was the dispatch of its head of scientific and technological intelligence, Leonid Romanovich Kvasnikov (ANTON), to New York where he became deputy resident for ST in January 1943. 97Igor Vasiliyevich Kurchatov, the newly appointed scientific head of the Soviet atomic project, wrote to Beria on March 7:

My examination of the [intelligence] material has shown that their receipt is of enormous and invaluable significance to our nation and our science. On the one hand, the material has demonstrated the seriousness and intensity of the scientific research being conducted on uranium in Britain, and on the other hand, it has made it possible to obtain important guidelines for our own scientific research, by-passing many extremely difficult phases in the development of this problem, learning new scientific and technical routes for its development, establishing three new areas for Soviet physics, and learning about the possibilities for using not only uranium-235 but also uranium-238. 98

While Beria was reading the report, a new top-secret laboratory was starting work at Los Alamos in New Mexico to build the first atomic bomb. Los Alamos contained probably the most remarkable collection of youthful talent ever assembled in a single laboratory. A majority of the scientists who worked on the bomb were still in their twenties; the oldest, Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the laboratory, was thirtynine. Los Alamos eventually included twelve Nobel Laureates.

In April 1943, a month after the opening of Los Alamos, the New York residency reported an important source on the MANHATTAN project. An unknown woman had turned up at the Soviet consulate-general and delivered a letter containing classified information on the atomic weapons program. A month later the same woman, who again declined to give her name, brought another letter with details of research on the plutonium route to the atomic bomb. Investigations by the New York residency revealed that the woman was an Italian nurse, whose first name was Lucia, the daughter of an anti-fascist Italian union leader, “D.” At a meeting arranged by the residency through the leaders of the Friends of the USSR Society, Lucia said that she was acting only as an intermediary. The letters came from her brother-in-law, an American scientist working on plutonium research for the Du Pont company in Newport while completing a degree course in New York, who had asked his wife Regina to pass his correspondence to the Soviet consulate via her sister Lucia. The scientist—apparently the first of the American atom spies—was recruited under the codename MAR; Regina became MONA and Lucia OLIVIA. 99

In June the New York residency forwarded intelligence on uranium isotope separation through gaseous diffusion from an unidentified agent codenamed KVANT (“Quantum”) working for the MANHATTAN project. KVANT demanded payment and was given 300 dollars. 100On July 3, after examining the latest atomic intelligence from the United States, Kurchatov wrote to the NKVD (probably to Beria in person):

I have examined the attached list of American projects on uranium. Almost every one of them is of great interest to us… These materials are of enormous interest and great value… The receipt of further information of this type is extremely desirable. 101

As yet, however, atomic intelligence from the United States was less detailed than that obtained from Britain in 1941-2. 102Among those who supplied some of the further intelligence requested by Kurchatov was MAR, who in October 1943 was transferred to the Du Pont plant in Hanford, Washington State, which produced plutonium for the MANHATTAN project. He told his controller that his aim was to defeat the “criminal” attempt of the US military to conceal the construction of an atomic bomb from the USSR. 103Other sources of atomic intelligence included a “progressive professor” in the radiation laboratory at Berkeley, California, 104and—probably—a scientist in the MANHATTAN project’s metallurgical laboratory at Chicago University. 105The mercenary KVANT seems to have faded away, but by early 1944 another agent, a Communist construction engineer codenamed FOGEL (later PERS), was providing intelligence on the plant and equipment being used in the MANHATTAN project. 106There is, however, no reliable evidence that Soviet intelligence yet had an agent inside Los Alamos. 107

The penetration of the MANHATTAN project was only the most spectacular part of a vast wartime expansion of Soviet scientific and technological espionage. ST from the United States and Britain made a major contribution to the development of Soviet radar, radio technology, submarines, jet engines, aircraft and synthetic rubber, as well as nuclear weapons. 108Atomic intelligence was codenamed ENORMOZ (“Enormous”), jet propulsion VOZDUKH (“Air”), radar RADUGA (“Rainbow”). 109A. S. Yakovlev, the aircraft designer and Deputy Commissar of the Aviation Industry, paid handsome, though private, tribute to the contribution of ST to the Soviet aircraft which bore his name. 110Political and military intelligence from inside all the main branches of the Roosevelt administration also continued to expand, thanks chiefly to the increasing activity of Akhmerov’s Washington networks. The rolls of film of classified documents sent by his illegal residency to Moscow via New York increased from 211 in 1943 to 600 in 1944. 111

THE QUALITY OF political intelligence from Britain probably exceeded even that from the United States, partly as a result of the greater coordination of British government and intelligence assessment through the War Cabinet and the Joint Intelligence Committee (of which there were no real equivalents in the United States, despite the existence of bodies with similar names). The wartime files of the London residency contain what Mitrokhin’s summary describes as “many secrets of the British War Cabinet,” correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, telegrams exchanged between the Foreign Office, the embassies in Moscow, Washington, Stockholm, Ankara and Tehran, and the minister-resident in Cairo, and intelligence reports. 113From the summer of 1942 to the summer of 1943, the intelligence reports included ULTRA decrypts direct from Bletchley Park, the main wartime home of the British SIGINT agency, where John Cairncross spent a year as a Soviet agent. His controller, Anatoli Gorsky, whom, like the rest of the Five, he knew as “Henry,” gave him the money to buy a second-hand car to bring ULTRA to London on his days off. 113Because of the unprecedented wartime collaboration of the Anglo-American intelligence communities, the London residency was also able to provide American as well as British intelligence. 114

The problem for the professionally suspicious minds in the Centre was that it all seemed too good to be true. Taking their cue from the master conspiracy theorist in the Kremlin, they eventually concluded that what appeared to be the best intelligence ever obtained from Britain by any intelligence service was at root a British plot. The Five, later acknowledged as the ablest group of agents in KGB history, were discredited in the eyes of the Centre leadership by their failure to provide evidence of a massive, non-existent British conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Of the reality of that conspiracy, Stalin, and therefore his chief intelligence advisers, had no doubt. In October 1942 Stalin wrote to the Soviet ambassador in Britain, Ivan Maisky:

All of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or Brüning at the expense of our country. 115