Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Bentley appealed to Browder for support as she struggled to remain the courier for the Washington networks. “Night after night, after battling with [Akhmerov],” wrote Bentley later, “I would crawl home to bed, sometimes too weary to undress.” Eventually, Bentley agreed to arrange a meeting between Akhmerov and Silvermaster (PAL). Soon afterwards, according to Bentley, Akhmerov told her, “almost drooling with arrogance:” “Earl [Browder] has agreed to turn Greg [Silvermaster] over to me… Go and ask him.” “Don’t be naive,” Browder told Bentley the next day. “You know that when the cards are down, I have to take my orders from them.” 54Akhmerov reported to the Centre that Bentley had taken her removal from the Silvermaster group “very much to heart… evidently supposing that we do not trust her. She is offended at RULEVOY [Browder] for having consented to our liaison with PAL.” 55

Bentley was also removed from contact with the Perlo/Kramer group. Gorsky tried to placate her by inviting her to dinner at a waterfront restaurant in Washington. He made a bad start. “I hope the food is good,” he said. “Americans are such stupid people that even when it comes to a simple matter like cooking a meal, they do it very badly.” “Ah, yes,” he added, seeing Bentley’s expression change. “I had forgotten for the moment that you, too, are an American.” Gorsky went on to tell her that she had been awarded the Order of the Red Star (“one of the highest—reserved for all our best fighters”) and showed her a facsimile: “We all think you’ve done splendidly and have a great future before you.” GOOD GIRL was not to be placated. 56A year later she secretly began telling her story to the FBI.

The Centre was also worried by increased FBI surveillance of the New York Soviet consulate, which housed the legal residency, and by a warning from Duncan Lee (KOCH) in September 1944 that the OSS Security Division was compiling a list of Communists and Communist sympathizers in OSS. 57The Centre’s nervousness was shared by some of its best agents. Bentley found Lee himself “on the verge of cracking up… so hypercautious that he had taken to crawling around the floor of his apartment on hands and knees examining the telephone wires to see if they had been tampered with.” 58Another highly placed Soviet agent, the senior Treasury official Harry Dexter White (JURIST), told his controller that, though he was unconcerned for his own personal security and his wife had prepared herself “for any self-sacrifice,” he would have to be very cautious because of the damage to the “new course” (the Soviet cause) which would occur if he were exposed as a spy. He therefore proposed that in the future they have relatively infrequent meetings, each lasting about half an hour, while driving around in his car. 59

There was a further alarm in November which, according to Bentley, followed an urgent warning from an agent in the White House, Roosevelt’s administrative assistant Lauchlin Currie. Currie reported that “the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.” 60The alarm appears to have subsided when it was discovered that Currie had wrongly concluded that a fire-damaged NKGB codebook obtained by OSS from the Finns would enable Soviet communications (which went through a further, theoretically impenetrable, encipherment by “one-time pad”) to be decrypted. 61(Given the phenomenal success of Anglo-American codebreakers in breaking the highest grade German and Japanese ciphers, Currie’s mistake is understandable.) At Roosevelt’s insistence, Donovan returned the NKGB codebook to the Soviet embassy. A doubtless bemused Fitin sent Donovan his “sincere thanks.” 62

DESPITE ALL THE Centre’s anxiety that Soviet espionage was about to be exposed, and despite all the confusion in the residencies, the NKGB’s eager American and British agents continued to provide intelligence remarkable for both its quantity and quality. The NKGB proudly calculated after the war that the grand total of its wartime agents and informers (“confidential contacts”) around the world had been 1,240, who had provided 41,718 items of intelligence. Approximately 3,000 foreign intelligence reports and documents had been judged important enough to be sent to the State Defense Committee and the Central Committee. Eighty-seven foreign intelligence officers were decorated for their wartime work. 63

Moscow made far better use of ST than of its political intelligence, which was always likely to be ignored or regarded with suspicion when it disagreed with Stalin’s conspiracy theories—or with those of the Centre, which were closely modeled on his. ST from the West, by contrast, was welcomed with open and unsuspicious arms by Soviet scientists and technologists. A. F. Ioffe, the director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Leningrad Physics and Technological Institute, wrote of wartime ST:

The information always turns out to be accurate and for the most part very complete… I have not encountered a single false finding. Verification of all the formulae and experiments invariably confirms the data contained in the materials. 64

The most valuable ST concerned the atomic program. Kurchatov reported to Beria on September 29, 1944 that intelligence revealed the creation for the MANHATTAN project of “a concentration of scientific and engineering-technical power on a scale never before seen in the history of world science, which has already achieved the most priceless results.” 65According to NKGB calculations, up to November 1944 it had acquired 1,167 documents on nuclear research, of which 88 from the United States and 79 from Britain were judged of particular importance. 66The most important, however, were yet to come.

On February 28, 1945 the NKGB submitted to Beria its first comprehensive report on atomic intelligence for two years—also the first to be based on reports from inside Los Alamos. Five months before the successful test of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in southern New Mexico, the Centre was informed of all the main elements in its construction. The information which Fuchs had passed to Gold on the east coast in mid-February arrived too late to be included in the Centre’s assessment. The report passed to Beria was, almost certainly, based chiefly on intelligence from the nineteen-year-old Theodore Hall and technical sergeant David Greenglass. There can be little doubt that Hall’s intelligence, delivered to the New York residency by his friend, Saville Sax, was the more important. It was probably Hall who first revealed the implosion method of detonating the bomb, though a more detailed report on implosion by Fuchs reached Kurchatov on April 6. 67

In the spring of 1945 Sax was replaced as courier between Hall and the New York residency by Leontina (“Lona”) Cohen, codenamed LESLIE. “Lona” had been recruited in 1941 by her husband Morris (codenamed LUIS), who had become a Soviet agent during the Spanish Civil War while serving in the International Brigades. The couple, later to figure among the heroes of Soviet intelligence, were collectively codenamed the DACHNIKI (“Vacationers”), but their careers as agents were interrupted by Morris’s conscription in 1942. “Lona” was reactivated early in 1945 to act as a courier to both Los Alamos and the Anglo-Canadian atomic research center at Chalk River, near Ottawa, which was also penetrated by Soviet agents. While she made contact with Hall, Gold acted as courier for Fuchs and Greenglass. Each of the three Soviet agents was completely ignorant of the espionage conducted by the other two. 68

It is probable that both Fuchs and Hall independently furnished the plans of the first atomic bomb, each of which the Centre was able to crosscheck against the other. 69Fuchs and Hall also independently reported that the test of the first atomic bomb had been fixed for July 10, 1945, 70though in the end weather conditions caused it to be postponed for six days. A month later the Pacific War was at an end. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, Japan surrendered.