Last of the Cold War Spies (34 page)

Through the year, Straight reduced
The New Republic
to a shell compared with the solid weeks of 1947. He had fired six more of the magazine’s staff because of the drop in circulation. The magazine had gone full circle since seven years ago when he and Helen Fuller were the only staff in Washington, D.C.

In October 1948, not too long after giving birth to a daughter, Susan, Bin Straight went on with her psychotherapy studies. Part of her training as a psychotherapist was to undergo analysis herself with Dr. Jennie Welderhall. Everything discussed in such treatment was confidential between doctor and patient, so this allowed Bin to vent her fears and feelings about Straight’s relationship with Guy Burgess. It had upset her since first learning about the espionage activity of Burgess and her husband in mid-1940. Despite her demanding that Straight finish his underground activity, he had gone on seeing his control, Michael Green. He had not given up contact with Burgess, Pierre Cot, Harry Pollitt, and many other KGB agents either. Bin told Welderhall that Straight’s relationship with Burgess had caused him to live in terror.
¹⁰

Straight later told the FBI that Bin “had furnished the names of Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess to her analyst . . . as two individuals engaged in underground Communist activity in order that the information could be passed on to Mr. Hall [Welderhall’s husband, an Australian at the British Embassy in Washington] and the British Government.”
¹¹

This was not accurate. According to both Welderhall and Bin, only Burgess was mentioned in the therapy sessions. In addition, Welderhall could not later recall Bin giving her permission to share this confidential information with her husband. Even if Bin had asked her to give the story to Hall, Welderhall said she would not have done it. Her professional work, she said, could not be shared with anyone.
¹²

The information Bin shared had been passed on in analysis and was therefore privileged. In any case, this would not have been an appropriate way of informing the chief of security or the head of chancellery about Burgess. If it had, no embassy official would act on such secondhand material without thorough interrogation of the primary source. It would have been useless to go via such a circuitous and tenuous route.

The FBI certainly was not convinced by this alleged attempt to inform on fellow spies and “come clean.” Fifteen years later when
interrogating him, its officers wanted to know why he had not contacted them in 1948.

Straight claimed he thought many times about owning up and betraying his Cambridge companions and others in the United States. The thing that stopped him, he said, was that he feared the publicity and the very public hearings, especially when they would be conducted by his direct ideological opponents. He knew that they would have uncontained delight in exposing him. There was also a thought for his family, and no doubt the ever-present fear that Stalin would take action to silence him if he turned against Stalin’s great sources of intelligence. But these claims of attempting to confess were simply not true. They appear hollow compared to his continued actions on behalf of the KGB.

By November 1948 the presidential election polling showed that half the electorate believed the Progressive Party to be communist-dominated, which happened to be correct. Accordingly, in a skeptical, wary, and ideologically unbound United States, Wallace scored a mere 1,157,140 votes or just 2.37 percent of the electorate. The much-maligned Truman, whom Straight told to quit in April and then endorsed as the Democratic candidate in July, surprised everyone and won the election against the more favored Thomas Dewey. Dreamtime was over for Stalin and his advisers. Truman’s victory ensured the Kremlin faced a hard-liner for another four years. The Cold War seemed permanent.

Straight flew his own plane, a Navion, to the third AVC convention in Cleveland in late November 1948. Meetings of its national planning committee had been split in the past year by disputes over the Marshall Plan and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia.

“With our [right-wing] majority,” Cord Meyer noted, “we committed the organization to full support of the Marshall Plan against the last-ditch opposition of the left-wing.”
¹³
Straight and his center (“Build AVC”) faction opposed the Truman Doctrine and therefore stood with the left-wing “progressive” faction, but they were defeated.
¹⁴

“When one of the leftist leaders attempted to argue that what had happened in Czechoslovakia was merely a routine change of cabinet,” Meyer noted, “he was greeted with derisive laughter.”

Cleveland was to be the showdown between the communists and the right-wingers. Meyer and the right-wing group had out-maneuvered the left. Those supporting Soviet positions began to reveal their true identity. The long struggle boiled down to whether a member could sign the AVC pledge to the U.S. Bill of Rights and also be a member of the communist party, which meant putting a signature to another, contradictory pledge. The right’s numbers led to an amendment of the AVC’s bylaws denying communists membership.
¹⁵

The AVC battle provided Meyer with a firsthand look at the “strength and weaknesses of communist organizational strategy.” Even in the microcosm of the AVC he found it “formidable.”

“My role in this small skirmish,” Meyer concluded, “made me realize how much was at stake on the larger stage. . . .”
¹⁶
(A few years later, Meyer joined the CIA. The pinnacle of his career was as station chief of the agency based in London in the early 1970s.) Meyer’s larger stage included Western Europe and China.

Late in 1948, the communists in China under Mao looked certain to take power. It caused mixed reaction in Washington. Most key administrators were stunned. Their policy of containment had failed to keep the biggest country in the world outside the Soviet orbit. Some, in the State Department particularly, were pleased and vindicated. They had won, with a lot of help from the liberal media, which castigated Chiang Kai-shek’s regime for its “arrogance, incompetence and corruption.”
¹⁷

The expected communist takeover would mean a victory for the KGB. It had insinuated agents into key administrative posts for fifteen years in order to sway the propaganda war through bodies, such as the Institute for Pacific Affairs, and to limit U.S. financial support for Chiang and his Nationalists.

There was much recrimination in U.S. government circles. The thinking was very much that China had been lost, as if the West owned it. Now in the minds of Washington’s leaders it was controlled by the Soviets.
Attitudes hardened; many felt besieged. Others, like Richard Nixon, saw opportunities. He would “fight” communism to make sure what was happening in China did not happen in the United States. He was the only member of the HUAC to doubt Hiss when he publicly rebutted Chambers’s accusations. Nixon’s public profile blossomed as he squeezed more out of Chambers about his relationship with Hiss. Chambers came up with sixty-five pages of State Department documents copied by Hiss on a Woodstock typewriter, including four pages in Hiss’s handwriting. Then came the photo opportunity of the decade for Nixon. Chambers “found” five rolls of microfilm, some containing confidential government dispatches, in a hollowed-out pumpkin in his Maryland garden. Nixon, with a very concentrated, concerned look, was pictured in U.S. papers and across the world holding a magnifying glass while poring over a strip of microfilm.

Days later, on December 15, 1948, Hiss was indicted for perjury. A few weeks later, worry, bordering on hysteria, increased about the communist menace, real and imagined.

Mao’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s retreating forces was confirmed.

V
ladimir Barkovsky was easy to pick out in the foyer of the Belgrade Hotel, Moscow. He walked with a forward slope, his hands thrust into the pockets of an off-white, knee-length trench coat to keep the early autumn winds of October at bay. Another telltale sign of the spy’s garb was his dark glasses. He seemed a little startled when I greeted him and took him up in an elevator to a room on the eleventh floor where British film director Jack Grossman was waiting to do a video interview. From that moment the 83-year-old, elfin Barkovsky never missed a beat. With a deadpan manner, punctuated by spots of dry humor, he delivered the minimum of information in response to questions. Although practiced at handling Western media, there was none of the easy style and joviality of Yuri Modin, or the machine-gun directness of Oleg Kalugan. Yet Barkovsky’s long record was impressive. Like Yuri Modin who followed him, Barkovsky was young when he took over the demanding task of running the leading British spies in England after Stalin’s purges had liquidated the older brigade of KGB intelligence officers. Among scores of others, Barkovsky had handled espionage agents Donald Maclean and Klaus Fuchs in England and had “known” Victor Rothschild, who, he said, was always popping into the Soviet embassy during the war. Barkovsky was a mechanical engineer who had to get himself up to speed on all matters nuclear as early as 1941 when he became the KGB’s case officer for technical intelligence, a job he held until 1947.

When I asked him about his main role there, he replied with a twinkle in his eye: “I was the resident photographer.”
¹
This was correct but a great understatement. He remembered microfilming Mark Oliphant’s magnetron—the basis of his war-winning radar invention—which Barkovsky had received from Anthony Blunt. Rothschild had “stolen” it from Oliphant’s Birmingham laboratory while on a visit in late 1942 as MI5’s security inspector and had given it to Blunt. Once Barkovsky had photographed the three-inch-diameter device, it was given back to Rothschild, who returned it to Oliphant with a note that told him to tighten up his security.
²

Barkovsky was part of the team that collected the Maud report (the initial British report on the feasibility of creating an atomic weapon) in the summer of 1941. His first big role was as Maclean’s case officer from 1941 to 1944, under Gorsky, the KGB operations control. In 1941 Maclean gave Barkovsky an analysis showing that the uranium bomb might be constructed within two years by Imperial Chemical Industries with U.K. government support.
³
Early in 1943, Barkovsky also microfilmed information and technical drawings about the plutonium route to the bomb, which had been stolen by Rothschild (and articulated with words and sketches by him and Blunt) from Professor G. P. Thompson’s laboratory at London’s Imperial College.

Rothschild was close to the agent codenamed ERIC—who was exposed in early 2003 as Sir Eric Rideal, a leading Cambridge chemist and a senior figure in the British team working on the A-bomb Manhattan Project. Barkovsky became his contact in 1942. After that, Rideal supplied 10,000 pages of spy material, much of it from the atomic research facilities in the United Kingdom. So prolific was ERIC that the code name may have referred to Rideal plus several other agents.

Barkovsky would not confirm this agent’s identity (because, he said, he was forbidden to do so under Article 19 of the Russian Secret Service Act). Yet he did admit that when he first met ERIC, he was intimidated by his knowledge of all the atomic physics that was needed to keep up with the information. Barkovsky wanted to be replaced with another KGB agent who had a background in physics. But the dictatorial ERIC would have none of it. He had begun with Barkovsky and wanted to stay with him.

“Get a copy of
Applied Nuclear Physics
by Pollard and Davidson and study it,” ERIC commanded. Barkovsky obeyed. The textbook was still in his library a half a century later.

Given Rothschild’s history of close contact with Russian spies, and his strong link to Rideal as a fellow scientist at Cambridge, it is likely that he fed him with as much as he could for passing on to Barkovsky. Another British scientist operating as a spy for the Russians, Allan Nunn May, made a deathbed confession in January 2003, which exposed Rideal as ERIC.

Barkovsky also came into contact with Melitta Norwood—code named HOLA and TINA. Living at Bexleyheath, London, she worked for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research. There she had access to vital technical data on atomic weapon construction.

Another coup for Barkovsky in the atomic espionage field was the successful running of Fuchs from 1944 to 1947.
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By the time Barkovsky had finished with him and returned to Moscow, Fuchs was set up to supply vital information on the so-called superbomb that would supersede the atomic bomb and be a thousand times more powerful. Barkovsky’s understudy, KGB agent Aleksandr S. Feklisov, met Fuchs in London on February 28, 1947, and asked him questions.
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Fuchs told him about the theoretical superbomb studies being directed by Hungarian-born Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. Fuchs described certain structural characteristics of the superbomb and its operating principles and maintained that Fermi and Teller had proved the “workability” of this new nuclear weapon. However, Feklisov was not a physicist or even an engineer like his boss Barkovsky. His report back to Moscow “could only very roughly reproduce” the structural details of the superbomb and its operations.
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According to German A. Goncharov, a Russian physicist who worked on the eventual Soviet thermonuclear (or super-bomb) project, “Fuchs did not know if practical efforts had begun in the US on construction of a superbomb or what their results were.”
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Consequently, the Soviets redoubled their efforts in the United States in the two-pronged strategy of delaying any future developments in new weaponry while stealing as much as they could and forging ahead with their own new bombs. The Fuchs material was a useful start but not enough. He was helpful in “planting the idea” that Fermi, Leo Szilard, and J. Robert Oppenheimer opposed the development of any hydrogen superbomb. The KGB, led by Department S Director Pavel Sudoplatov,
still regarded them as de facto agents and “political advocates of the Soviet Union.”
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Barkovsky and his fellow KGB scientists in Moscow were contacted by an excited Moscow Center in mid-March 1948 to be told about the results of a recent second meeting between Fuchs and Feklisov in London. Fuchs handed over material he had been sent from the United States. It included pertinent information about the theory of a superbomb that had advanced rapidly. The documents described the operating principle of the “initiator”—the technology to trigger the weapon—and several graphs about its performance. The data substantiated that the superbomb could be made.

A month later, a digestible analysis of the material was sent to Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lavrenty Beria, who were still skeptical about the chances of the Soviet Union detonating their first atomic bomb—an event at least a year away. Yet Stalin appreciated this new intelligence was direct evidence that the United States was going ahead with superbomb developments. He demanded drastic measures to speed through feasibility studies and imparted official status to the Soviet’s own attempts to make a new, much more powerful nuclear weapon.

It was the beginning of the race for the superbomb. The Russians were confident they had the scientists to develop their own this time rather than make a carbon copy of a U.S. design, which they had done with the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki—Fat Man. But they still needed to keep abreast of U.S. developments to give themselves the option of copying or incorporating any requirement. This meant a full-scale spying operation to keep the data flowing back to the Soviet version of Los Alamos at Dubna near Moscow.

Barkovsky became KGB station chief in New York early in 1949 in order to coordinate the flow of information. The FBI was intensifying its efforts to find communist agents inside and outside the administration, making it the toughest period ever for espionage. He had to reactivate some agents, give new directives to others, and always encourage division within the U.S. scientific ranks in efforts to stall progress. Officially the United States had not yet decided to produce a superbomb, although its theoretical physicists had already produced several alternative routes to this most terrible weapon. Teller remained the most enthusiastic; whereas Fermi, Szilard, and Oppenheimer were against further developments, he was obsessed with producing a thermonuclear explosive based on hydrogen fusion.

Barkovsky remarked in our interview that he was an avid reader of
The
New Republic
. He said he knew Straight and that he believed he “met him at some embassy functions.”
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Barkovsky’s subscription to
The New Republic
was understandable. Straight had focused the magazine in the late 1940s on everything to do with nuclear weapons and atomic energy, the key issue of the day. Straight hired specialist writers and ex-scientists. He tackled editorials on everything from disarmament to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the civilian body that had taken over and resuscitated the remnants of the Manhattan Project after the war. Straight used his great skill at making and charming contacts to glean everything he could. The magazine, despite being a pale imitation of former years, was still a useful vehicle for meeting everyone from David Lillienthal and other AEC directors to the best-placed scientists at key research centers. Straight maintained his links to the key players such as Szilard and Oppenheimer, offering them adequate space in
The New Republic
to air their views, which they took up. Szilard submitted his pacifist, disarmament views, while Oppenheimer used the magazine as a forum for arguing against the FBI screening of AEC employees to weed out communists.
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The early months of 1949 saw Straight helping his sister Beatrice extricate herself from a failed marriage to KGB agent Louis Dolivet, alias Ludovic Brecher. He had moved to a hotel in New York. Straight, with his attorney Milton Rose doing most of the negotiating, made him a divorce offer based on a separation agreement that he found impossible to refuse. He and Beatrice would share custody of their young son, Willard. The divorce was granted in May, about the time his paper,
United Nations
World
, went bankrupt. It lost the family interests at least $250,000, which was the amount Dorothy agreed to put into it. Dolivet failed to obtain $1 million from a new backer, Richard Mellon, then he left for
France. (Three years later, young Willard drowned in a boating accident. Dolivet had been exposed as a KGB agent and had difficulty securing a short-term visa to return to the United States for his son’s funeral. He went back to France and became a successful film producer.)