Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (26 page)

From the point of view of security personnel, whether Kamen had or
had not delivered classified information when meeting with two Soviet officials at the Fish Grotto was irrelevant. Their goal was to prevent any
unauthorized leak from occurring, not to catch a spy after the deed was
done. A scientist who met privately with Soviet diplomats, particularly
KGB officers, and was motivated by pro-Soviet fervor to give them advanced technological information, even if it was unclassified, had acted in
an irresponsible fashion and was a security risk. Martin Kamen, the
prospect Kheifets proudly described to Moscow Center in his September
report, was fired from the Manhattan Project on iz July, ten days after
lunching with Kheifets and Kasparov.

In February 1945 a KGB New York station report on its agent network
included a new source at the Manhattan Project facility at Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, from whom it had every reason to expect considerable productivity:

"Bir"-Al Slack. Chemical engineer. At camp No. 1 [Oak Ridge] since Dec.
44. Before that-at an explosives factory, and before that-at the Eastman
Kodak film factory in Rochester, NY. With us since '38. Valuable materials. Married. Bir uses his wife's aunt to deliver urgent summonses and confidential
reports to Arno [Harry Gold]. The aunt does not know the true nature of this
correspondence (she lives in Brooklyn). The cover story of Arno and Bir's connection-a wish to jointly open a private business after the war. Bir used to be
in the CP but later left. Before "Bir" joined camp No. i, Arno would go see
him once every month and a half to two months.93

Alfred Dean Slack had been a highly productive industrial spy for Soviet intelligence since the late 1930s (see chapter 6). He had assisted in
recruiting other engineers and technicians into industrial espionage, and
the KGB had found his material of considerable value and given him generous cash bonuses for his work. His productivity had continued to the fall
of 1944, when he was employed at the Holston Ordnance Works in
Kingsport, Tennessee, and he supplied Harry Gold, his KGB contact,
with samples of RDX, a powerful new explosive. But after he got a job in
late 1944 at the Clinton Engineering Works, the chief employer at the
Oak Ridge complex, he appeared to have ceased supplying material to
Gold. Exactly why is not clear.

After Gold was arrested in 1950, he identified Slack as one of his
sources. FBI agents confronted Slack, and he quickly confessed that he
had provided Gold with technical information from 1940 to 1944, receiving a payment of $200 per report, but denied supplying anything
atomic-related. By his account, at their last meeting, when he was still
employed at Holston Ordnance, he had told Gold that he had obtained
a new job at a very secret government facility at Oak Ridge (Slack said
he thought at that point that the facility was involved with poison gas)
and was severing his links to the KGB. Gold had a slightly different version. Slack did not break the contact; instead, Gold had later received
instructions from Semen Semenov to cease his connection with Slack.
Gold said that he had no contact with Slack after he went to Oak Ridge
and no knowledge if Slack had supplied any information on Oak Ridge
to another KGB courier. Lacking any evidence to challenge Slack's account, the government decided to charge him only with his admitted
espionage prior to his job at Oak Ridge. He was convicted in September 1950. Federal prosecutors, in light of Slack's quick confession, asked
for a ten-year sentence. But Judge Robert L. Taylor, noting that American soldiers in Korea were then fighting and dying in combat with Communist troops, rejected leniency and sentenced Slack to fifteen years in
prison .94

Slack's claim that he did not supply information on Oak Ridge was probably true. It is unlikely that the February 1945 KGB report of Slack
supplying "valuable materials" could be a reference to him providing
atomic-related material because he had only very recently started work
at Oak Ridge. It almost certainly reflected his much longer career as a
productive but non-atomic industrial spy. Alfred Slack was yet another
frustration for KGB hopes for atomic intelligence.

The year 1944 was one of transition for the KGB's "Enormous" project.
Despite significant success in Great Britain, the KGB had been unable to
recruit any important sources in the United States in 1942 or 1943. Its
chief targets on the Manhattan Project continued to elude it in 1944. But
several unexpected sources suddenly gave it entree to key atomic facilities. Russell McNutt, handed over by Julius Rosenberg in February 1944,
was the first unexpected gift out of the blue. That same year, the KGB received information from a mysterious source mentioned in an August
1944 Moscow Center message chastising its New York station:

"The fact that you received material on `En-s' ["Enormous"] from a source unknown to us shows first and foremost that your work in that area is unsatisfactory and that you are not discovering or using available resources, instead leaving the unraveling of this problem to chance. We find the nonchalance, or
indifference, with which you informed us of this material and the circumstances in which it was obtained (only a few lines, not even in the letter itself
but in the list of supplements to it) quite shocking. If someone chose to take a
step as risky as bringing this top secret document to the factory [Amtorg], how
could you disregard this person and not take every possible step to identify the
unknown individual? We attach a great deal of importance to this whole affair;
the anonymous person's material is extremely interesting, and information we
received from oth. sources corroborates its content. Therefore, take all possible steps to identify the person in question. Report your results immedi-
ately."95

Neither the original report that raised Moscow Center ire nor any
follow-up appears in Vassiliev's notebooks. What was this all about? In
Andrew and Mitrokhin's The Sword and the Shield, also based on KGB
archival material, there is the following passage:

In April 1943, a month after the opening of Los Alamos, the New York residency reported an important source on the MANHATTAN project. An unknown
woman had turned up at the Soviet consulate-general and delivered a letter containing classified information on the atomic weapons program. A month
later the same woman, who again declined to give her name, brought another
letter with details of research on the plutonium route to the atomic bomb. Investigations by the New York residency revealed that the woman was an Italian
nurse, whose first name was Lucia, the daughter of an anti-fascist Italian union
leader, "D." At a meeting arranged by the residency through the leaders of the
Friends of the USSR society, Lucia said that she was acting only as an intermediary. The letters came from her brother-in-law, an American scientist working
on plutonium research for the DuPont company in Newport while completing
a degree course in New York, who had asked his wife Regina to pass his correspondence to the Soviet consulate via her sister Lucia. The scientist-apparently the first of the American atom spies-was recruited under the codename
MAR; Regina became MONA and Lucia OLIVIA.

According to Andrew and Mitrokhin, "Mar" became by the end of 1943
a Soviet source at the DuPont laboratory at the Manhattan Project facility at Hanford, Washington.96

While there are certain overlaps between the story in The Sword and
the Shield and the passage on the anonymous walk-in discussed in Vassiliev's notebooks, there are major differences as well. Chiefly, in The
Sword and the Shield the walk-in resulted in the recruitment of a scientist in the Manhattan Project by the end of 1943, but the walk-in in the
Moscow Center message transcribed in Vassiliev's notebooks remains
unidentified and unrecruited in August 1944. Nor is there any mention
or even hints of the existence of "Mar," "Mona," or "Olivia" in Vassiliev's
notebooks. This remains one of the mysteries of "Enormous."

The third 1944 source on American atomic research came to the KGB via
its "neighbors," Soviet military intelligence. Klaus Fuchs had joined the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD) while a student at Kiel University
in 1932. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he fled to France and
then to Great Britain, where he earned advanced degrees in physics at the
University of Bristol and the University of Edinburgh. He remained a
steadfast Communist, although generally avoiding open political activity.
Under threat of a German invasion in 1940, British authorities briefly interned German nationals as enemy aliens, and Fuchs was sent to Canada.
On review British authorities judged him not to be a security threat; he
was released and returned to Britain. He applied for British citizenship,
and and it was granted in 1942.

In mid-1941 Rudolf Peierls, also a refugee from Germany, a senior
physicist, and one of the driving figures behind the creation of the British
atomic bomb program, recruited Fuchs to join Tube Alloys. Shortly after
learning what work he was doing, Fuchs contacted Jurgen Kuczynski, a
fellow refugee from Germany and a leader of the exiled KPD in Britain
and asked to be put in touch with the Soviets. Kuczynski delivered
Fuchs's request and vouched for his Communist loyalties to the KPD's
contact at the Soviet Embassy in London. A GRU report sent to the KGB
summarized what happened next:

"F. [Fuchs] was recruited for intelligence work in England in Aug. 1941 by our
operative, former military attache secretary Cde. Kremer, on a lead from Jurgen Kuczynski (brother of our illegal station chief in England, `Sonya' [Ursula
Kuczynski]). The latter was living in London at the time and was one of the
senior workers of the German Comparty in England; Kremer knew him
through offic-al connections. F. agreed to work on an ideological basis and
did not accept payment.

While working for us, F. passed us a number of valuable materials containing theor-cal calculations for splitting the uranium atom and creating an
atomic bomb. In July 1942, the connection with F. was temporarily interrupted due to Kremer's departure for the USSR. On 22.10.1942, `Sonya' informed our worker that her brother, J. Kuczynski, had told her that in July
1942, a physicist by the name of F. had lost contact with a representative of the
Sov. Emb-ssy's milit-ry department who called himself Johnson. `Sonya' also
reported that at Kuczynski's suggestion, she already established contact with
F., received materials from him, and asks us to indicate whether she should
continue to maintain contact with him and accept mater-als from him. On our
instructions, Sonya continued to maintain contact with F.... F. has shown
himself to be a hardworking and conscientious agent who worked solely for
ideological reasons."

Ursula Kuczynski Beurton, Jurgen's sister, was an experienced intelligence agent who had worked on GRU operations in China and Switzerland before moving to London on the basis of her marriage to Len Beur-
ton, a British veteran of the Communist International Brigades.98

Fuchs supplied information from the British bomb project to GRU
until late 1943, when he was sent to the United States with other key
British scientists to assist the Manhattan Project. Initially Fuchs worked
on gaseous diffusion uranium separation at a Kellex facility in New York
City. In August 1944 he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked
in the Theoretical Physics Division as part of a team assigned to the problem of how implosion could be used to trigger a plutonium bomb.

Once in the United States, Fuchs's contact with Soviet intelligence
shifted from GRU to the KGB. Fuchs first came to the attention of the
KGB in November 1943, when Engelbert Broda, the Austrian physicist
and KGB source, identified Fuchs as a secret Communist who was working on the British atomic bomb project. Since Fuchs was German, KGB
London officers queried Jurgen Kuczynski about him but reported that
Kuczynski was surprisingly uncommunicative "and acted so strangely as
to automatically suggest" to the KGB officers that Fuchs was already
working for another branch of Soviet intelligence. The KGB checked
with GRU, and GRU chief General Ivan Ilichev informed the KGB's
Fitin in late November:

K. Fuchs-physicist, German emigre, German CP member, currently lives in
Birmingham, England, where he works on uranium problems at a phys. laboratory at the U. of Birmingham.

K. F. has been a source of ours since Aug. 1941, when he was recruited on
the recommendation of Jurgen Kuczynski. In connection with the laboratory's
relocation to America, it is expected that F. will go there as well. Be informed
that we have taken steps to set up a connection with F. in America. More detailed information will be reported when Fuchs is handed over to you.

This was a time when the KGB was pressing GRU very strongly to hand
over its atomic intelligence sources.99

Not until January 1944 did Soviet military intelligence get around to
providing a report on Fuchs:

"Over the course of working with us, F. [Fuchs] has passed us a number of
theor. calculations for splitting the atom and creating a uranium bomb. We
sent the mater-als to the Representative of the State Committee of Defense
USSR, Cde. Kaftanov, and later to the Vice-Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars USSR, Cde. Pervukhin. The mater-Is received a high assessment. [Shipment dates: 22.9.41, 30.9.41, 26.5.43, 17.6.43, 12.7.43, 16.9.43,
z8.10.43].... F. did not receive regular remuneration from us. He was occasionally given individual gifts. When he was given a gift of money, F. did not
turn it down. Because a group of Eng. scientists working on creating a uranium bomb were transferred to the USA, F. went there as well at the start of
November 1943."

In an amusing coincidence, GRU also wrote: "'In April 1943, F. [Fuchs]
gave a lead for recruiting an Austrian scientist in England named
Broda .... a physical chemist by specialization. Broda is an active member of the Austrian Comparty. He works on fast neutrons at Cambridge, and before that he worked on slow neutrons with a scientist named Halban.... When he gave the lead, F. expressed a desire not to take part in
this recruitment himself and to remain incognito for Broda. We have
not recruited Broda."' Broda, as noted above, had suggested that the
KGB recruit Fuchs. GRU also provided the KGB with arrangements it
had made for a rendezvous with him in New York, as well as contact information for his sister, Kristel Heineman, who lived in Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts.ioo