The Sword and the Shield

^EIGHT VICTORY

Given the closeness of the British-American “special relationship,” the Centre inevitably suspected that some of the President’s advisers sympathized with Churchill’s supposed anti-Soviet plots.¹ Suspicions of Roosevelt himself, however, were never as intense as those of Churchill. Nor did the Centre form conspiracy theories about its American agents as preposterous as those about the Cambridge Five. Perhaps because the NKVD had penetrated the OSS from the moment of its foundation, it was less inclined to believe that United States intelligence was running a system of deception which compared with the supposed use of the Five by the British.The CPUSA’s assistance in the operation to assassinate Trotsky, combined with the enthusiasm with which it “exposed and weeded out spies and traitors,”² appeared to make its underground section a reliable recruiting ground. Vasili Zarubin’s regular contacts with the CPUSA leader, Earl Browder, plainly convinced him of the reliability of those covert Party members who agreed to provide secret intelligence.

By the spring of 1943, however, the Centre was worried about the security of its large and expanding American agent network. Zarubin became increasingly incautious both in his meetings with Party leaders and in arranging for the payment to them of secret subsidies from Moscow. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records censoriously, “Without the approval of the Central Committee, Zarubin crudely violated the rules of clandestinity.” On one occasion Browder asked Zarubin to deliver Soviet money personally to the Communist underground organization in Chicago; the implication in the KGB file is that he agreed. On another occasion, in April 1943, Zarubin traveled to California for a secret meeting with Steve Nelson, who ran a secret control commission to seek out informants and spies in the Californian branch of the Communist Party, but failed to find Nelson’s home. Only on a second visit did he succeed in delivering the money. On this occasion, however, the meeting was bugged by the FBI which had placed listening devices in Nelson’s home.³ The Soviet ambassador in Washington was told confidentially by none other than Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry Hopkins, that a member of his embassy had been detected passing money to a Communist in California.⁴

Though Zarubin became somewhat more discreet after this “friendly warning,” his cover had been blown. Worse was yet to come. Four months later Zarubin was secretly denounced to the FBI by Vasili Mironov, a senior officer in the New York residency who had earlier appealed unsuccessfully to the Centre for Zarubin’s recall.⁵ In an extraordinary anonymous letter to Hoover on August 7, 1943, Mironov identified Zarubin and ten other leading members of residencies operating under diplomatic cover in the United States, himself included, as Soviet intelligence officers. He also revealed that Browder was closely involved with Soviet espionage and identified the Hollywood producer Boris Morros (FROST) as a Soviet agent. Mironov’s motives derived partly from personal loathing for Zarubin himself. He told Hoover, speaking of himself in the third person, that Zarubin and Mironov “both hate each other.” Mironov also appears to have been tortured by a sense of guilt for his part in the NKVD’s massacre of the Polish officer corps in 1940. Zarubin, he told Hoover, “interrogated and shot Poles in Kozelsk, Mironov in Starobelsk.” (In reality, though Zarubin did interrogate some of the Polish officers, he does not appear to have been directly involved in their execution.) But there are also clear signs in Mironov’s letter, if not of mental illness, at least of the paranoid mindset generated by the Terror. He accused Zarubin of being a Japanese agent and his wife of working for Germany, and concluded bizarrely: “If you prove to Mironov that Z is working for the Germans and Japanese, he will immediately shoot him without a trial, as he too holds a very high post in the NKVD.”⁶

By the time Mironov’s extraordinary denunciation reached the FBI, Zarubin had moved from New York to Washington—a move probably prompted by the steady growth in intelligence of all kinds from within the Roosevelt administration. As the senior NKVD officer in the United States, Zarubin retained overall control in Washington of the New York and San Francisco residencies; responsibility for liaison with the head of the CPUSA, Browder, and with the head of the illegal residency, Akhmerov; and direct control of some of his favorite agents, among them the French politician Pierre Cot and the British intelligence officer Cedric Belfrage, whom he took over from Golos.⁷

With his cover blown, however, Zarubin found life in Washington difficult. One of his most humiliating moments came at a dinner for members of the Soviet embassy given early in 1944 by the governor of Louisiana, Sam Houston Jones.⁸ After dinner, as guests wandered round the governor’s house in small groups, a lady who appeared to know that Zarubin was a senior NKGB officer, turned to him and said, “Have a seat, General!” Zarubin, whose fuse and sense of humor were both somewhat short, took the seat but replied stiffly, “I am not a general!” Another guest, who identified himself as an officer in military intelligence, complimented the lady on her inside knowledge. He then caused Zarubin further embarrassment by asking for his views on the massacre of 16,000 Polish officers, some of whose bodies had been exhumed in the Katyn woods. Zarubin replied that German allegations that the officers had been shot by the NKVD (as indeed they had) were a provocation intended to sow dissension within the Grand Alliance which would deceive only the naive.⁹

Zarubin subsequently sought to persuade the Centre that his humiliating loss of cover was due not to his own indiscretion but to the fact that the Americans had somehow discovered that he had interrogated imprisoned Polish officers in Kozelsk. The Centre was unimpressed. In a letter to the Central Committee, the NKGB Personnel Directorate reported that his period as resident in the United States had been marked by a series of blunders.¹⁰ Mironov not long before had informed on Zarubin to Hoover, now appears to have written to Stalin, accusing Zarubin of being in contact with the FBI.¹¹ In the summer of 1944, both Zarubin and Mironov were recalled to Moscow. Anatoli Gorsky, who until a few months earlier had been resident in London, succeeded Zarubin in Washington.¹²

Once back in Moscow, Zarubin quickly succeeded in reestablishing his position at the expense of Mironov and was appointed deputy chief of foreign intelligence. By the time he retired three years later, allegedly on grounds of ill health, he had succeeded in taking much of the credit for the remarkable wartime intelligence obtained from the United States, and was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, one Order of the Red Star, and numerous medals.¹³ Mironov, by contrast, was sentenced soon after his return to Moscow to five years in a labor camp, probably for making false accusations against Zarubin. In 1945 he tried to smuggle out of prison to the US embassy in Moscow information about the NKVD massacre of Polish officers similar to that which, unknown to the Centre, he had sent to the FBI two years earlier. On this occasion Mironov was caught in the act, given a second trial and shot.¹⁴

Even after the recall of Zarubin and Mironov, feuding and denunciations continued within the American residencies. As with Mironov’s bizarre accusations, some of the feuds had an almost surreal quality about them. In August 1944 the newly appointed resident in San Francisco, Grigori Pavlovich Kasparov, telegraphed to the Centre a bitter denunciation of the resident in Mexico City, Lev Tarasov, who, he claimed, had bungled attempts to liberate Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and had adopted a “grand lifestyle.” As well as renting a house with grounds and employing two servants in addition to the staff allocated to him, Tarasov was alleged to be spending too much time breeding parrots, poultry and other birds.¹⁵ The fate of Tarasov’s denounced parrots is not recorded.

There was dissension too in New York, where the inexperienced 28-year-old Stepan Apresyan (MAY) had been appointed resident early in 1944, despite the fact that he had never previously been outside the Soviet Union. His appointment was bitterly resented by his much more experienced deputy, Roland Abbiate (alias “Vladimir Pravdin,” codenamed SERGEI), whose previous assignments had included the liquidation of the defector Ignace Poretsky. Operating under cover as the Tass bureau chief in New York, Abbiate had a grasp of American conditions which greatly exceeded Apresyan’s, but his career continued to be held back by the fact that, although he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1902, his parents were French and had returned to France in 1920. Abbiate had returned with them, living in France until his recruitment by the OGPU as an illegal in 1932.¹⁶

As a stop-gap measure to compensate for Apresyan’s now visible incompetence, the Centre gave Abbiate virtually equal status with Apresyan in the autumn of 1944 in running the residency. Abbiate responded by telegraphing to Moscow a scathing attack on Apresyan, whom he condemned as “incapable of dealing with the tasks which are set him” or of gaining the respect of his staff:

The real responsibility, Abbiate clearly implied, rested with the Centre for appointing such an obviously unsuitable and unqualified resident.¹⁷ The civil war between the resident and his deputy continued for just over a year before ending in victory for Abbiate. In March 1945 Apresyan was transferred to San Francisco, leaving Abbiate as resident in New York.¹⁸

WHILE THE WASHINGTON and New York residencies were both in some turmoil in the summer of 1944, sanity was returning to London. The Magnificent Five were officially absolved of all suspicion of being double agents controlled by the British. On June 29 the Centre informed the London residency, then headed by Konstantin Mikhailovich Kukin (codenamed IGOR),¹⁹ that recent important SIS documents provided by Philby had been largely corroborated by material from “other sources” (some probably in the American OSS, with whom SIS exchanged many highly classified reports):²⁰ “This is a serious confirmation of S[ÖHNCHEN]’s honesty in his work with us, which obliges us to review our attitude toward him and the entire group.” It was now clear, the Centre acknowledged, that intelligence from the Five was “of great value,” and contact with them must be maintained at all costs:

After six years in which his phenomenal work as a penetration agent had been frequently undervalued, ignored or suspected by the Centre, Philby was almost pathetically grateful for the long overdue recognition of his achievements. “During this decade of work,” he told Moscow, “I have never been so deeply touched as now with your gift and no less deeply excited by your communication [of thanks].”²¹

High among the intelligence which restored the Centre’s faith in Philby were his reports, beginning early in 1944, on the founding by SIS of a new Section IX “to study past records of Soviet and Communist activity.” Urged on by his new controller, Boris Krötenschield (alias Krotov, codenamed KRECHIN), Philby succeeded at the end of the year in becoming head of an expanded Section IX, with a remit for “the collection and interpretation of information concerning Soviet and Communist espionage and subversion in all parts of the world outside British territory.” As one of his SIS colleagues, Robert Cecil, wrote later, “Philby at one stroke had… ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter Communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage records few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.”²²

At about the same time that Philby was given his present, Cairncross was belatedly rewarded for his contribution to the epic Soviet victory at Kursk. Krötenschield informed him that he had been awarded one of the highest Soviet decorations, the Order of the Red Banner. He opened a velvet-lined box, took out the decoration and placed it in Cairncross’s hands. Krötenschield reported to the Centre that Cairncross was visibly elated by the award, though he was told to hand it back for safekeeping in Moscow.²³ The award came too late, however, to achieve its full effect. In the summer of 1943, exhausted by the strain of his regular car journeys to London to deliver ULTRA decrypts to Gorsky, and probably discouraged by Gorsky’s lack of appreciation, Cairncross had left Bletchley Park. Though he succeeded in obtaining a job in SIS, first in Section V (Counterintelligence), then in Section I (Political Intelligence), his importance in the Centre’s eyes now ranked clearly below that of Philby.²⁴ Unlike Philby, Cairncross did not get on well with his SIS colleagues. The head of Section I, David Footman, found him “an odd person, with a chip on his shoulder.”²⁵

Encouraged by the Centre’s new appreciation of their talents, the other members of the Five—Maclean, Burgess and Blunt—became even more productive than before. In the spring of 1944 Maclean was posted to the Washington embassy, where he was soon promoted to first secretary. His zeal was quickly apparent. According to one of his colleagues, “No task was too hard for him; no hours were too long. He gained the reputation of one who would always take over a tangled skein from a colleague who was sick, or going on leave, or simply less zealous.” The most sensitive, and in the NKGB’s view probably the most important, area of policy in which Maclean succeeded in becoming involved by early 1945 was Anglo-American collaboration in the building of the atomic bomb.²⁶

Burgess increased his usefulness to the NKGB by gaining a job in the Foreign Office press department soon after Maclean was posted to Washington. Claiming no doubt that he required access to a wide range of material to be adequately informed for press briefings, Burgess regularly filled a large holdall with Foreign Office documents, some of them highly classified, and took them to be photographed by the NKGB. The holdall, however, was almost his undoing. At a meeting with Krötenschield, Burgess was approached by a police patrol, who suspected that the bag contained stolen goods. Once reassured that the two men had no housebreaking equipment and that the holdall contained only papers, the patrol apologized and proceeded on its way. Though Burgess may subsequently have used a bag which less resembled that of a housebreaker, his productivity was unaffected. According to one of the files examined by Mitrokhin, of the Foreign Office documents provided by Burgess in the first six months of 1945, 389 were classified “top secret.”²⁷

Blunt’s productivity was prodigious too. In addition to providing intelligence from MI5, he continued to run Leo Long in military intelligence, and in the crucial months before D-Day gained access to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), not far from MI5 headquarters.²⁸ Part of Blunt’s contribution to NKGB operations in London was to keep the residency informed of the nature and extent of MI5 surveillance. Intelligence which he provided in 1945 revealed that MI5 had discovered that his Cambridge contemporary, James Klugmann, was a Communist spy. In 1942 Klugmann had joined the Yugoslav section of SOE Cairo, where his intellect, charm and fluent Serbo-Croat gave him an influence entirely disproportionate to his relatively junior rank (which eventually rose to major). As well as briefing Allied officers about to be dropped into Yugoslavia, he also briefed the NKGB on British policy and secret operations. In both sets of briefings he sought to advance the interests of Tito’s Communist partisans over those of Mihailovich’s royalist Chetniks. For four months in 1945 he served in Yugoslavia with the British military mission to Tito’s forces. Blunt was able to warn Krötenschield that MI5 listening devices in the British Communist Party headquarters in King Street, London, had recorded a conversation in which Klugmann boasted of secretly passing classified information to the Yugoslav Communists.²⁹

WITH THE EXCEPTION of the Five, potentially the most important Soviet spy in Britain was the nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, recruited by the GRU late in 1941.³⁰ When Fuchs left for the United States late in 1943 as part of the British team chosen to take part in the MANHATTAN project, he was—though he did not realize it—transferred from GRU to NKGB control and given the codename REST (later changed to CHARLES).³¹ Earlier in 1943, the Centre had instructed its residencies in Britain and the United States that “[t]he brain centers [scientific research establishments] must come within our jurisdiction.” Not for the first time, the GRU was forced to give way to the demands of its more powerful “neighbor.”³² In 1944 Melita Norwood, the long-serving Soviet agent in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, ceased contact with SONYA of the GRU and was given an NKGB controller. ³³ In March 1945, after her employer won a contract from the TUBE ALLOYS project, Norwood gained access to documents of atomic intelligence ³⁴ which the Centre described as “of great interest and a valuable contribution to the development of work in this field.” She was instructed to say nothing about her espionage work to her husband, and in particular to give no hint of her involvement in atomic intelligence.³⁵ Atomic intelligence from London and the American residencies was complementary as well as overlapping. According to Vladimir Barkovsky, head of ST at the London residency, “In the USA we obtained information on how the bomb was made and in Britain of what it was made, so that together [intelligence from the two countries] covered the whole problem.”³⁶

On February 5, 1944 Fuchs had his first meeting in New York’s East Side with his NKGB controller, Harry Gold (codenamed successively GOOSE and ARNO), an industrial chemist born in Switzerland of Russian parents.³⁷ Fuchs was told to identify himself by carrying a tennis ball in his hand and to look for a man wearing one pair of gloves and carrying another.³⁸ Gold, who introduced himself as “Raymond,” reported to Leonid Kvasnikov, head of ST at the New York residency (later known as Line X), that Fuchs had “greeted him pleasantly but was rather cautious at first.”³⁹ Fuchs later claimed, after his arrest in 1949, that during their meetings “the attitude of ‘Raymond’ was at all times that of an inferior.” Gold admitted, after his own arrest by the FBI, that he was overawed by the extraordinary intelligence which Fuchs provided and had found the idea of an atomic bomb “so frightening that the only thing I could do was shove it away as far back in my mind as I could and simply not think on the matter at all.”⁴⁰

On July 25, 1944 the New York residency telegraphed the Centre: “Almost half a year of contact established with REST [Fuchs] has demonstrated the value of his work for us.” It asked permission to pay him a “reward” of 500 dollars. The Centre agreed, but, before the money could be handed over, Fuchs had disappeared.⁴¹ It was over three months before Gold discovered that Fuchs had been posted to Los Alamos, and he did not renew contact with him until Fuchs returned to the east coast on leave in February 1945.⁴²

During 1944 Kvasnikov’s responsibilities were extended: he was given the new post of ST resident for the whole of the United States—a certain indication of the increasing priority of atomic espionage.⁴³ Late in 1944 Kvasnikov was able to inform the Centre that, in addition to Fuchs, there were now two more prospective spies at Los Alamos.

The first, David Greenglass, was recruited through a group of ST agents run by Julius Rosenberg (codenamed successively ANTENNA and LIBERAL), a 26-year-old New York Communist with a degree in electrical engineering. Like Fuchs, the members of the Rosenberg ring, who included his wife Ethel, had been rewarded with cash bonuses in the summer. The ring was producing so many classified documents to be photographed in Kvasnikov’s apartment that the New York residency was running dangerously short of film. The residency reported that Rosenberg was receiving so much intelligence from his agents that he was finding it difficult to cope: “We are afraid of putting LIBERAL out of action with overwork.”⁴⁴

In November 1944 Kvasnikov informed the Centre that Ethel Rosenberg’s sister, Ruth Greenglass (codenamed WASP), had agreed to approach her husband, who worked as a machinist at Los Alamos.⁴⁵ “I was young, stupid and immature,” said David Greenglass (codenamed BUMBLEBEE and CALIBRE) later, “but I was a good Communist.” Stalin and the Soviet leadership, he believed, were “really geniuses, every one of them:” “More power to the Soviet Union and abundant life for their peoples!” “My darling,” Greenglass wrote to his wife, “I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project [espionage] that Julius and his friends [the Russians] have in mind.”⁴⁶

The New York residency also reported in November 1944 that the precociously brilliant nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist Theodore Alvin (“Ted”) Hall, then working at Los Alamos, had indicated his willingness to collaborate. As well as being inspired by the myth-image of the Soviet worker-peasant state, which was an article of faith for most ideological Soviet agents, Hall convinced himself that an American nuclear monopoly would threaten the peace of the post-war world. Passing the secrets of the MANHATTAN project to Moscow was thus a way “to help the world,” as well as the Soviet Union. As the youngest of the atom spies, Hall was given the appropriate, if transparent, codename MLAD (“Young”). Though only one year older, the fellow Harvard student who first brought Hall into contact with the NKGB, Saville Savoy Sax, was codenamed STAR (“Old”).⁴⁷ Hall himself went on to become probably the youngest major spy of the twentieth century.

THE PENETRATION OF Los Alamos was part of a more general surge in Soviet intelligence collection in the United States during the last two years of the war, as the NKGB’s agents, buoyed up by the remorseless advance of the Red Army towards Berlin and the opening of a second front, looked forward to a glorious victory over fascism. The number of rolls of microfilm sent by Akhmerov’s illegal residency to Moscow via New York grew from 211 in 1943 to 600 in 1944 and 1,896 in 1945.⁴⁸ The Centre, however, found it difficult to believe that espionage in the United States could really be as straightforward as it seemed. During 1944-5 the NKGB grew increasingly concerned about the security of its American operations and sought to bring them under more direct control.⁴⁹ Among its chief anxieties was Elizabeth Bentley’s habit of socializing with the agents for whom she acted as courier. When Bentley’s controller and lover, Jacob Golos, died from a sudden heart attack on Thanksgiving Day 1943, Akhmerov decided to dispense with a cut-out and act as her new controller. Bentley’s first impressions were of a smartly dressed “jaunty-looking man in his mid-thirties” with an expansive manner. (Akhmerov was actually fortytwo). She soon realized, however, that “despite the superficial appearance of a boulevardier, he was a tough character.”⁵⁰ For the next six months, though Bentley continued to act as courier for the Silvermaster group in Washington, she felt herself under increasing pressure.

In March 1944 Earl Browder passed on to her another group of Washington bureaucrats who had been sending him intelligence which he had previously passed on to Golos.⁵¹ Bentley regarded Victor Perlo (RAIDER), a government statistician who provided intelligence on aircraft production, as the leader of the group—probably because he acted as spokesman during her first meeting with them.⁵² Akhmerov, however, believed that the real organizer was Charles Kramer (LOT), a government economist, and was furious that the Perlo/Kramer network had been handed over by Browder not to him but to Bentley. For over a year, he told the Centre, Zarubin and he had wanted to make direct contact with the group, but Browder had failed to arrange it. “If we work with this group,” Akhmerov added, “it will be necessary to remove [Bentley].”⁵³

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.”⁵⁴ Akhmerov 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.⁵⁶ A 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.⁵⁷ The 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.”⁵⁸ Another 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.”⁶⁰ The 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 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.”⁶⁵ According 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.⁶⁶ The 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.⁶⁹ Fuchs and Hall also independently reported that the test of the first atomic bomb had been fixed for July 10, 1945,⁷⁰ though 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.

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.⁷¹ On 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.⁷³ He is nowadays remembered as one of the heroes of Russian foreign intelligence.⁷⁴ At 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].”⁷⁵ At 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.⁷⁶ Though 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.⁷⁷ Late 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.⁷⁸ The 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.”⁸⁰ Some 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:

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.⁸³ Smersh’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

Among the “old émigrés” were a group of White generals—chief among them Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro and Sultan Kelech Ghirey⁸⁵—whom the NKGB and its predecessors had been pursuing for a quarter of a century. A Smersh detachment was sent to Austria with orders to track them down. Its initial inquiries to the British about their whereabouts met with no response other than the claim that no information was available. After heavy drinking at a dinner for Anglo-Russian troops, however, a British soldier blurted out that, until recently, the generals had been at a camp in the village of Gleisdorf.⁸⁶ A group of Smersh officers drove immediately to Gleisdorf where they discovered that, though the generals had left, Shkuro’s mistress Yelena (surname unknown) was still there. Yelena was lured out of the camp on the pretense that she had a visitor. As she approached the Smersh car, she suddenly saw the Russian officers inside and froze with fear. She was quickly bundled into the car and revealed, under no doubt brutal interrogation, that the White generals had appealed for the Supreme Allied Commander, Field Marshal Alexander, for protection. Yelena also disclosed that the generals had with them fourteen kilograms of gold.⁸⁷ What happened next is of such importance that Mitrokhin’s note on it deserves to be quoted as fully as possible:

No corroboration is available from any other source for the claim in a KGB file that a British army officer (and perhaps two of his colleagues) had been bribed into handing over the White generals. Given the failure on the ground to distinguish the minority of non-Soviet Cossacks from the rest, they might well have been surrendered to Smersh in any case. The generals would probably have survived, however, if their petitions had reached Field Marshal Alexander, who might well have granted them. But the petitions mysteriously disappeared en route.⁸⁹

The speed and injustice of the “repatriation” derived chiefly from the desire of military commanders on the spot to be rid of an unwelcome problem as soon as possible, combined with the belief that individual screening to determine which Cossacks were not of Soviet nationality would be a complex, long drawn out, and in some cases impossible task. On May 21 Brigadier Toby Low of 5 Corps, which was in charge of the “repatriation,” issued an order defining who were to be regarded as Soviet citizens. The one White Russian group which could be collectively identified as non-Soviet, the Schutzkorps, commanded by Colonel Anatol Rogozhin, was, he instructed, not to be repatriated. But those to be “treated as Soviet Nationals” included the “Ataman Group” (of which General Krasnov was a leading member) and the “Units of Lt.-Gen. Shkuro.” Low added that “[i]ndividual cases [appeals] will NOT be considered unless particularly pressed,” and that “[i]n all cases of doubt, the individual will be treated as a Soviet National.”⁹⁰

When all allowance is made for the difficulties of combining loyalty to allies with respect for the human rights of the Cossacks, the brutality with which the repatriation was conducted remains perhaps the most ignominious episode in twentieth-century British military history. “I reproach myself for just one thing,” the 76-year-old White general Krasnov later told the NKGB. “Why did I trust the British?” On May 27, just before 3 A.M., a time of day much favored by Soviet Security, General Shkuro was awakened by an unidentified British officer, who told him he was under arrest and took him to be held under close guard well away from the Cossack camp. Another, or perhaps the same, British officer later delivered an “urgent,” though bogus, invitation to General Krasnov to a conference with Field Marshal Alexander, his former comrade-in-arms during the Russian civil war. Smersh photographers were waiting to record the historic moment when the NKGB’s oldest enemies were turned over to it.⁹¹ For the British army it was a shameful moment. For Stalin, Smersh and the NKGB, it was a famous victory.