Svetlana Lokhova - The Spy Who Changed History

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Svetlana Lokhova 2018

Cover images © Shutterstock

Stalin photography & planes © Alamy Images

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Svetlana Lokhova asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Maps by Martin Brown

All photographs are from the author’s private collection or are in the public domain, except for: here, hereand here, RGASPI; here, G. I. Kasabova, O vremeni, o Noril’ske, o sebe … [Of the Times, Of Norilsk, Of Myself …], Moscow: PoliMedia, 2001; here, Belorussian State Archive; here, Krasnaya kniga VChK [Red Book of the VChK]; here, courtesy Bennett Family Archive; here, in N. S. Babayev and Yu. S. Ustinov, Kavalery Zolotykh zvozd: Voyenachal’niki. Uchonyye. Konstruktory. Lidery, Moscow: Patriot, 2001; here, mil.ru (CC BY 4.0); here, Sputnik Images. While every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

Source ISBN: 9780008238117

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008238124

Version: 2019-05-02

To my father for his unending love, help and support.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Preface

Introduction

1 ‘Son of the Working People’

2 ‘We Catch Up or They Will Crush Us’

3 ‘What the Country Needs is a Real Big Laugh’

4 ‘Agent 001’

5 ‘A Nice Fellow to Talk To’

6 ‘Is This Really My Motherland?’

7 ‘Questionable from Conception’

8 ‘The Wily Armenian’

9 Whistle Stop Inspections

10 Glory to Stalin’s Falcons

11 Back in the USSR

12 Project ‘AIR’

13 ENORMOZ

14 Mission Accomplished

Post-scriptum

Appendix I: Biography of Stanislav Shumovsky

Appendix II: NKVD and FBI Reports on Stanislav Shumovsky

Footnotes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

In 1931, Joseph Stalin announced, ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us’. 1 These words began a race to close the yawning technology gap between the Soviet Union and the leading capitalist countries. The prize at stake was nothing less than the survival of the USSR. Believing that fleets of enemy bombers spraying poison gas would soon appear in the undefended skies over Russia’s cities, and amid predictions that millions would die from inhaling the deadly toxins, Stalin sent two intelligence officers – an aviation expert and a chemical weapons specialist – on a mission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He ordered them to gather the secrets of this centre of aeronautics and chemical weapon research and bring them back to the Soviet Union, along with the means to defend his population against the new terror weapons of modern warfare.

The results of this mission would change the tide of history and lead the KGB to acknowledge that after this first operation ‘the West was a constant and irreplaceable source of acquiring new technologies’ for the USSR. 2After 1931, the Soviets would use scientific and technological intelligence, particularly in the field of aviation, to protect itself against its enemies, culminating in the defeat of Nazi Germany and, thanks to later espionage, helping tilt the global balance of power into an uneasy equilibrium. While both sides possessed weapons of equally massive destructive power, the Cold War did not become a hot war.

Ironically, America was the source of both sides’ nuclear armouries. US agencies later termed the haemorrhage of sophisticated technology to the USSR as ‘piracy’ and tried unsuccessfully to staunch the flow of secrets. In the Soviet Union, the savings resulting from this technical espionage would eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars and be included in official state defence and economic planning.

The experts in the 1930s were half right in their predictions about the future of warfare. By 1945 a nation’s power was determined by the strength of its strategic bombing capability. But the invulnerable high-altitude aircraft were not armed with poison gas. They carried a weapon of far greater destructive power: the atomic bomb. Undreamed of in 1931, this terrifying new device would prove devastatingly more potent a killer than poison gas. In 1945 a single bomb dropped from one plane killed over a hundred thousand people, and one country held a monopoly on this power: the United States.

Yet within four years the Soviets had built their own bomb, joining the US as one of the world’s two superpowers. This pre-eminence would have been unimaginable a quarter of a century previously, when Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky sat down to plan the reconstruction of a fragile, illiterate nation reeling from war and successive revolutions. It would be achieved through the sacrifice of millions of lives, lost during the terrible famines that attended collectivisation and on the blood-soaked battlefields of the Eastern Front.