Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Lona Cohen spent the final dramatic weeks of the Pacific War in New Mexico, waiting for Hall to deliver the results of the Alamogordo test. After missing rendezvous in Albuquerque on three consecutive Sundays, Hall finally handed a set of highly classified papers to his courier, probably soon after the Japanese surrender. 71On catching the train back to New York, Lona Cohen was horrified to see military police on board searching passengers’ luggage. With remarkable presence of mind she thrust Hall’s documents inside a newspaper and gave it to a policeman to hold while she opened her purse and suitcase for inspection. The policeman handed the newspaper back, inspected her purse and suitcase, and Mrs. Cohen returned safely to New York. 72

Thanks chiefly to Hall and Fuchs, the first Soviet atomic bomb, successfully tested just over four years later, was to be an exact copy of the Alamogordo bomb. At the time, however, the Centre found it difficult to believe that the theft of two copies of perhaps the most important secret plans in American history could possibly escape detection. The sheer scale of its success made the NKGB fear that the penetration of the MANHATTAN project would soon be uncovered by the Americans.

The NKGB officer in charge of intelligence collected from Los Alamos in 1945 was Anatoli Antonovich Yatskov (alias “Yakovlev,” codenamed ALEKSEI), an engineer recruited by the NKVD in 1939 who succeeded Kvasnikov as ST resident in the United States. 73He is nowadays remembered as one of the heroes of Russian foreign intelligence. 74At the time, however, the Centre was bitterly critical of him. In July 1945 it concluded that his carelessness had probably compromised MLAD, and denounced his “completely unsatisfactory work with the agents on ENORMOZ [the MANHATTAN project].” 75At the very moment of Soviet intelligence’s greatest ever triumph in the United States, the acquisition of the plans of the first atomic bomb, the Centre wrongly feared that the whole ENORMOZ operation was in jeopardy.

The GRU, as well as the NKGB, had some striking successes in the wartime United States. Though Soviet military intelligence had been forced to surrender both Fuchs and the majority of its more important pre-war American agents to the more powerful NKGB, it had succeeded in retaining at least one of whom the Centre was envious in 1945. Gorsky reported to the Centre a conversation between Akhmerov and ALES (Alger Hiss), who had been working for the GRU for the past ten years. 76Though Hiss was a senior diplomat, Akhmerov said that the GRU had generally appeared little interested in State Department documents, and had asked Hiss and a small group of agents, “for the most part consisting of his relations,” to concentrate on military intelligence. 77Late in 1944, however, Hiss’s role as a Soviet agent took on a new significance when he became actively engaged in preparations for the final meeting of the wartime Big Three at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945.

Yalta was to prove an even bigger success for Soviet intelligence than Tehran. This time both the British and the American delegations, housed respectively in the ornate Vorontsov and Livadia Palaces, were successfully bugged. The mostly female personnel used to record and transcribe their private conversations were selected and transported to the Crimea in great secrecy. Not till they arrived at Yalta did they discover the jobs that had been assigned to them. 78The NKGB sought, with some success, to distract both delegations from its surveillance of them by lavish and attentive hospitality, personally supervised by a massive NKGB general, Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov. When Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, casually mentioned that lemon went well with caviar, a lemon tree appeared, as if by magic, in the Vorontsov orangery. At the next Allied conference, in Potsdam, General Kruglov was rewarded with a KBE, thus becoming the only Soviet intelligence officer to receive an honorary knighthood.

Stalin was even better informed about his allies at Yalta than he had been at Tehran. All of the Cambridge Five, no longer suspected of being double agents, provided a regular flow of classified intelligence or Foreign Office documents in the runup to the conference, though it is not possible to identify which of these documents were communicated to Stalin personally. Alger Hiss actually succeeded in becoming a member of the American delegation. The problem which occupied most of the time at Yalta was the future of Poland. Having already conceded Soviet dominance of Poland at Tehran, Roosevelt and Churchill made a belated attempt to secure the restoration of Polish parliamentary democracy and a guarantee of free elections. Both were outnegotiated by Stalin, assisted once again by a detailed knowledge of the cards in their hands. He knew, for example, what importance his allies attached to allowing some “democratic” politicians into the puppet Polish provisional government already established by the Russians. On this point, after initial resistance, Stalin graciously conceded, knowing that the “democrats” could subsequently be excluded. After first playing for time, Stalin gave way on other secondary issues, having first underlined their importance, in order to preserve his allies’ consent to the reality of a Soviet-dominated Poland. Watching Stalin in action at Yalta, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, thought him in a different league as a negotiator to Churchill and Roosevelt: “He is a great man, and shows up very impressively against the background of the other two aging statesmen.” Roosevelt, in rapidly failing health and with only two months to live, struck Cadogan, by contrast, as “very woolly and wobbly.” 79

Roosevelt and Churchill left Yalta with no sense that they had been deceived about Stalin’s true intentions. Even Churchill, hitherto more skeptical than Roosevelt, wrote confidently, “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” 80Some sense of how Moscow felt that good intelligence had contributed to Stalin’s success at Yalta is conveyed by Moscow’s congratulations to Hiss. Gorsky reported to the Centre in March 1945, after a meeting between Akhmerov and Hiss:

Recently ALES [Hiss] and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. After the Yalta conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (ALES gave to understand that it was Comrade Vyshinsky [Deputy Foreign Minister]) allegedly got in touch with ALES and at the behest of the military NEIGHBOURS [GRU] passed on to him their gratitude and so on. 81

The NKGB’s regret at failing to wrest Hiss from the NEIGHBOURS must surely have intensified in April when he was appointed acting Secretary-General of the United Nations “organizing conference” at San Francisco. 82

BEHIND THE VICTORIOUS Red Army as it swept into central Europe during the final months of the war came detachments of Smersh (short for Smert Shpionam, “Death to Spies!”), a military counter-intelligence agency detached from the NKVD in 1943 and placed directly under the control of Stalin as Chairman of the State Defense Committee and Defense Commissar. 83Smersh’s main mission was to hunt for traitors and Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the enemy. On Stalin’s instructions, it cast its net remarkably wide, screening well over five million people. The million or more Soviet POWs who had survived the horrors of German prison camps were treated as presumed deserters and transported to the gulag, where many died.

In their anxiety to honor obligations to their ally, both the British and American governments collaborated in a sometimes barbarous repatriation. So far as Britain was concerned, the most controversial part of the forced repatriation was the hand-over of Cossacks and “dissident” Yugoslavs from south Austria to the Red Army and Tito’s forces respectively in May and June 1945. Most had collaborated with the enemy, though sometimes only to a nominal degree. On June 1 battle-hardened soldiers of the 8th Argylls, some of them in tears, were ordered to break up a Cossack religious service and drive several thousands of unarmed men, women and children into cattle trucks with rifle butts and pick handles. There were similar horrors on succeeding days. Some of the Cossacks killed themselves and their families to save them from torture, execution or the gulag. Most of the 45,000 repatriated Cossacks were Soviet citizens, whom Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta to return to the Soviet Union. But a minority, variously estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000 were so-called “old émigrés” who had left Russia after the civil war, had never been citizens of the Soviet Union, and were not covered by the Yalta agreement. They too were repatriated against their will. 84