Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (31 page)

Moscow was outraged at the possibility that so valuable a source
might have been compromised. It lamented "the complete inadequacy of
Aleksey's [Yatskov's] work with the agents on cultivating Enormous."
Moscow Center warned of the "impossibility" of setting up meetings between Hall and a professional Soviet officer due to the danger of exposure. It approved Cohen's use as a courier, however: she was an American and a non-professional agent of the KGB, and her meeting with Hall
was much less of a risk.135

Despite Moscow's concern, Hall's judgment was right: Glauber never
reported the conversation. A very truncated version of "the Grauber
incident"-so called because the deciphered cable in which it was
mentioned misspelled his name-became available to American code
breakers and the FBI. Whatever Glauber, who became a Nobel Prizewinning physicist at Harvard, told the FBI, he professed ignorance to
journalists once the Venona documents became public; claimed to have
no memory of what could have prompted the KGB's worry; and denied
he had any idea that Hall might have been a Spy. 136

Lona Cohen made only one trip to New Mexico to meet with Hall.
She was chosen in part because as a young woman, she would be less
conspicuous than Sax, and Hall himself had suggested such a tactic. Originally scheduled for July, the meeting had been pushed back to August at Hall's request, and she had lingered in Las Vegas, taking the long bus trip
to Albuquerque to meet Hall at the University of New Mexico campus on
18 August. The delay meant that the station was unable to give Moscow
any advance warning about the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan (Hiroshima-6 August, Nagasaki-9 August). While Harry Gold had met
Greenglass and Fuchs in June, that was prior to the Trinity test of the
plutonium bomb on 16 July, before its use against Japan had been decided, and Gold was not scheduled for another meeting until mid-Sep-
tember.137

Moscow Center was not pleased that it first learned about the use of
the atom bomb from reading the American press. It sent an angry missive to New York reproaching the station for its long delay in understanding "`the significance that the echelon [high Soviet leadership] attaches to our work"' on the atomic bomb and complaining that "`an event
as important as the announcement by the Amer. govt of the creation of
an atomic bomb went unnoticed by the station, and our inquiries went
unanswered, at the same time as we were receiving very interesting info.
in this regard from elsewhere.' 11138

Theodore Hall was supposed to visit New York in October on leave;
the KGB scheduled a meeting with him. There is nothing in Alexander
Vassiliev's notebooks to indicate that the meeting took place. On 27 October 1945 Moscow cabled New York that intensified FBI surveillance required a temporary cessation of contact with the "most valuable agents"
on "Enormous," including Hall. Hall remained at Los Alamos until he
was discharged from the Army in June 1946.139

After years of frustration and dead ends in trying to penetrate the Manhattan Project, the KGB's American station in New York had struck pay
dirt in 1944. Through Julius Rosenberg it had recruited Russell McNutt
and David Greenglass, via GRU it had gained access to Klaus Fuchs, and
Ted Hall had simply presented himself as a spy. For two years Fuchs and
Hall, supplemented by McNutt, Greenglass, and Allan Nunn May (along
with Broda and Norwood in Britain), allowed the KGB to produce a cornucopia of information on the Manhattan Project. But in 1946 these productive sources began to dry up. Klaus Fuchs remained an active agent,
but he returned to Great Britain in June 1946. Theodore Hall left Los
Alamos to pursue an advanced degree in physics at the University of
Chicago. Once demobilized, David Greenglass had no access to atomic related material. Russell McNutt's usefulness had ended after he refused
requests to move to Oak Ridge. Clarence Hiskey, Joseph Weinberg, and
other young scientists at Berkeley whom the KGB had cultivated were
under FBI scrutiny and effectively neutralized.

The agency had anticipated the need to find new recruits shortly after
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and expressed high hopes for continued success. In a message to Leonid Kvasnikov, the Center reminded him, "`We
are faced with the absolutely urgent task of intensifying and expanding
our work on `E.' ["Enormous"], which is of great national importance to
our country.," It stressed, "`We think that the agent situation in this regard is exceptionally favorable,"' citing "`reports about the fact that
among the workers who are actively participating in the work, there are
people who have openly stated their goodwill toward us and expressed the
opinion that our country should be informed about the results achieved
in work on `E."" Among the top priorities for Soviet intelligence were
"`obtaining new leads"' and setting up several safe houses in the Midwest and West to reduce the need for "`group handlers and couriers"' to
travel cross country.140

That same month Fitin sent Merkulov a report concluding more was
involved than military parity with the United States in the KGB's atomic
intelligence program: "`The actual use of an atomic bomb by the Americans signifies that they have completed the first stage in an enormous
research project on the problem of releasing intra-atomic energy. This
event inaugurates a new era in science and technology and will undoubtedly lead to the speedy development of the entire problem of Enormous-using inter-atomic energy not only for military purposes, but also
throughout all of modern economics."' It was, Fitin argued, incumbent
on the USSR to stay abreast of American progress in every area of atomic
research. This effort was hindered, however, by the need to freeze contacts with many agents in late 1945 and 1946 due to defections that identified KGB officers and put numerous sources at risk.141

In 1947 and 1948 the KGB began to reestablish ties and reactivate old
sources. Several cryptic messages recorded in Vassiliev's notebooks deal
with a new group of agents with some connection to atomic research. At
the end of January 1947 one message gave instructions that when he had
completed his work at the "Seminary," "Godsend" should return to Los
Alamos and that "Intermediary" was also available. "Seminary" was prob ably the University of Chicago. "Intermediary" worked at Amtorg in New
York. His group included "Relative," "Godsend," "Godfather," and
"Nata," all unidentified. Four months later Moscow indicated that "Rel-
ative's" group had been created in 1945, "had hardly been used for work,
and has not been compromised in any way." A KGB officer had met once
with "Relative" and "Godsend" but they were put aside in September
1945, although contact was retained through "Intermediary." The group
had "a workshop in NY, set up with our money," and the message noted
that "Relative," "Godsend," and "Godfather" were brothers. Moscow
Center instructed the KGB Washington station (which had replaced the
New York station as the center of the KGB's American work toward the
end of World War II) to remove "Intermediary" from contact with "Relative" and his brothers because of some evidence of FBI interest in "Intermediary" and substitute KGB officer Nikolay Statskevich. Nothing
more, however, appeared regarding this group.142

Moscow Center also ordered a second initiative. A June 1948 Moscow
Center cable discussed assignments for reviving the American stations,
including this note: "Instructions were given to renew ties with `Nick's'
group: Pony, Sandy, and Tunic." "Nick" was Amadeo Sabatini, an American Communist and International Brigades veteran who became a KGB
agent and courier in the late 1930s, servicing technical sources during
World War II (see chapter 7). On hearing that KGB officer Nikolay
Statskevich had revived contact with "Nick"/Sabatini in October 1948
and that he had "agreed to begin working with us again," Moscow Center stated that his assignment was "to create a group on `Enormous."'
"Pony," "Sandy," and "Tunic" are unidentified cover names, appear only
this single time in Vassiliev's notebooks, and nothing is known of their
identity or their connection with the American atomic program.143

When the KGB renewed contact with Julius Rosenberg in 1948, he was still
in touch with the two atomic spies he had recruited, Russell McNutt and
David Greenglass. But by that time neither had any connection with the
American atomic program. However, Rosenberg was also still in contact
with Alfred Sarant. During World War II Sarant had been a productive
source of military electronic intelligence, but in 1946 he resigned from Bell Labs, married, and moved to Ithaca, New York, where he planned to enter
Cornell University and get an advanced degree. He got a support job working with Cornell's cyclotron and hoped that Cornell faculty and former Manhattan Project physicists Hans Bettie, Richard Feynman, and Philip Morrison (a Communist) would help him enter the graduate program in physics.
Possibly this old technical source could become a new atomic source, and
Julius Rosenberg might be able to recruit a third atomic Spy. 144

By October 1948 Moscow Center was concerned that its attempt to revive atomic espionage in the United States was faltering. Moscow Center lectured Boris Krotov, the senior KGB officer in New York at the time:

"The policies adopted by the alpinists [Americans] in this matter are clearly indicative of their firm intention to maintain a complete monopoly on "Enormous"
and to use the balloon [atomic bomb] for the purposes of aggression against us.
According to our information, the alpinists are implementing an extensive program of research work and theoretical investigations on "E." and frantically working to improve models of balloons they already have and to create new models.
However, we did not properly cover this important branch of work during the period of deactivation, and it is still not being covered to this day. Moreover, our opportunities for receiving information about `E.' were significantly cut down by the
fact that certain athletes [sources] who had previously worked in that field (Mlad
[Theodore Hall], Caliber [Greenglass], Godsend [unidentified]) switched to different jobs for reasons beyond their control, and some of them (Kemp [unidentified] and oth.) had their identities completely revealed.

As a result, we don't have essential information at present about the actual
status of work on "E." in the alpinists' country, and consequently, our work in
that field must be deemed unsatisfactory. This appraisal forces us to carefully
analyze the situation that has arisen in our network and to eliminate this serious flaw in our work as quickly as possible. It is completely obvious that we
need to start by creating a network of new athletes, b/c without such a network, we will be unable to carry out the tasks that have been put before us by
the leadership." Use Caliber, Yakov [William Perl], Volunteer [Morris Cohen],
and Liberal [Julius Rosenberg]. + Mlad. We need leads.145

But it does not appear that the leads came.

Hopes that Amadeo Sabatini/"Nick" might organize a group of agents
devoted to "Enormous" came to nothing. In 1949 Sabatini developed
throat cancer, and, in addition, that same year Venona decryptions allowed the FBI to identify him as a longtime KGB courier. Confronted by the FBI, he gave a partial account of his earlier activities. While he disclosed nothing about his new assignment to pursue atomic intelligence,
his identification by the FBI put an end to that venture. He died in 1952.
Possibly the unidentified "Godsend," who had once worked at Los
Alamos, was able to reenter the American atomic program, but considering the disarray into which KGB espionage fell, this seems unlikely.
Whatever hope the KGB harbored that Alfred Sarant might be able to approach some of the nuclear physicists at Cornell University evaporated in
1950, when the FBI identified him as a member of Julius Rosenberg's
World War II espionage network. Sarant escaped FBI surveillance and
fled to Mexico, from where the KGB covertly moved him to Communist
Czechoslovakia and finally to the Soviet Union. But if the KGB's hopes
for new atomic sources came to nothing, what of the old?

During World War II, the FBI and military security had neutralized any
prospects the KGB or GRU had of using Robert Oppenheimer's young
Communist proteges by excluding them from the Manhattan Project. But
the government wasn't finished with them. By August 1945 the FBI considered bringing an espionage case against Joseph Weinberg, but the effort was complicated by the Army's reluctance to embarrass either Oppenheimer or Ernest Lawrence, his former bosses at the Radiation
Laboratory, and its difficulty in using in court the most damming evidence, which had been gathered by warrantless wiretaps and bugs. The
FBI questioned Weinberg in September 1946, and he denied meeting
with or even knowing Steve Nelson, a declaration that only confirmed his
guilt in the eyes of FBI agents who had listened to their conversation
through concealed listening devices. The Justice Department, however,
opposed prosecution because of evidentiary problems under America's
judicial rules of what evidence could be presented in court.

Two years later, in late August 1948, the U.S. House Committee on
Un-American Activities began taking testimony about wartime espionage
at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory. Steve Nelson, at that point a senior
CPUSA official, took the Fifth Amendment, while Joseph Weinberg again
denied ever meeting or talking to Steve Nelson. During another round of
hearings, brought face-to-face with Nelson, Weinberg repeated his lies,
but since those who knew about his Communist ties refused to testify, he
continued to escape prosecution. Identified only as "Scientist X" when
the House Committee on Un-American Activities released a report on atomic espionage, Weinberg remained in limbo, teaching at the University of Minnesota while the FBI tried to find admissible evidence to prove
that he had committed perjury. One grand jury refused to indict him in
1950; two years later, buttressed by testimony from ex-Communists Paul
and Sylvia Crouch that put him at a party meeting in California, a case
was prepared through which Weinberg was indicted in May. In the ensuing trial the judge dealt a fatal blow to the prosecution by refusing to
allow the transcript of his conversation with Nelson to be entered into
evidence. In March 1953, Weinberg was acquitted. His academic career,
however, was over. Having been fired from the university, he took a job
with an optics company.146