Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (78 page)

Black admitted involvement in industrial espionage from the early
1930s through the mid-194os and also to having infiltrated the American
Trotskyist movement on KGB orders. He confirmed that he had recruited
Harry Gold. Industrial espionage was not clearly a federal crime until
passage of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, nor was spying on a private political movement such as the Trotskyists. In view of his cooperation and because there was no evidence that he had transmitted military
or government secrets, he was never prosecuted. The government, however, did force him to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Black had a checkered career as a chemist. Under pressure from the
KGB and distressed and nervous about a marriage proposal from one of
the Trotskyists on whom he was spying, he inadvertently caused an ether
explosion at his laboratory in 1938 and was severely burned, spending
twenty weeks in the hospital. In November 1954 an explosion at a chemical storage tank at the Berg plant in Philadelphia, where Black worked,
killed ten firemen and injured twenty-three. The district attorney and police questioned Black, the consulting chemist for the company, and discovered that he did not have a college degree. He had begun work there
in 1946 and was never asked to show any credentials. For a while, local
authorities considered arresting him for negligence. Called before the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1956, he told a sanitized version of his activities and then disappeared from public view. While generally accurate, his statements to the FBI tended to minimize the extent of his long service for the KGB, during which he supervised several other
minor agents about whom he kept silent.70

In addition to Black, Harry Gold led the FBI to another technical spy, Alfred Slack, whose confession enabled the Bureau to unearth still another
ring of agents, most of them minor sources. The ringleader of the group,
a brilliant but twisted alcoholic named Richard Briggs, was already dead
by the time his circle was discovered. To the FBI's surprise, it learned
that he had come into its sights years before, although not for espionage.

Richard Briggs, born in 1902, attended McGill University and the
University of Rochester and then went to work in 1924 at Eastman Kodak
in Rochester, New York, as a chemist. A frequent candidate for pubic office on the Socialist Party ticket, he was recalled by fellow employees as
a "screwball" and drunkard. In 1936, while inebriated, he set fire to a
laundry at a Catholic seminary. Fired from his job, he approached Amtorg about obtaining a position in the Soviet Union and met Ovakimyan.
Just like with Thomas Black, Ovakimyan soon converted the job seeker
into an industrial spy' 1

For the next three years Briggs recruited a small stable of sources
while he worked for short periods at various chemical companies. In 1938
a KGB New York station message stated: "The source "Film" [Briggs]
works at the `Eastman Kodak Co.' and obtained the following through
his sub-source, "El" [variant of "Ell"/Slack]: 1. the company's secret materials on the production of motion picture film. z. minutes of technical
production conferences. "El's" father-a qualified chemical engineer,
who worked for over 30 years at the `Allied Chemical Co."' Briggs's initial recruits were also usually family or friends. Although not married, he
lived with a woman named Sara Weber, whose sister was married to Alfred Slack, a chemist. At first Slack thought Briggs was using the information he furnished to further his own career, but when he discovered
that it was going to the Soviets, he rationalized that he was helping a
struggling country. 72

In addition to his drinking, Briggs was also an inveterate womanizer.
Before taking up with Sara Weber, he had an affair with her niece, fifteenyear-old Libby Volpi. Family objections canceled their engagement, but
Briggs provided the money to enable her to attend college in West Virginia. There she met and married a left-wing laborer with little formal
education named Stanley Glass. During family visits to New York, Briggs befriended Stanley and introduced him to Ovakimyan. In West Virginia
Glass worked at the Belle plant of DuPont, which produced nylon. Although he denied taking part in any espionage, he did admit to the FBI
that he might have obtained weekly internal DuPont reports and sent
them to Briggs. He also introduced Briggs to one of his contacts at the
plant, a young chemist's assistant named Howard Gochenour. Gochenour,
a German-Irish medical school dropout anxious to earn extra money to finance his dental school education, began supplying Briggs information on
the manufacture of nylon.

Even before Briggs's death in 1939, brought on by acute alcoholism
-he was downing two to five quarts of whiskey a day-Ovakimyan had
met with Slack to solidify their relationship, and after Briggs died, Slack
began to supply him directly with material he stole from his employer. A
1942 evaluation stated: "Work with "El" [Slack] was running smoothly.
"Goose" [Harry Gold] met with him once every 3-4 weeks, and "Twain"
[Semenov] met with him during his trips to NY. He is conscientious toward work and takes it seriously and gives materials at almost every meeting." Slack not only became a reliable industrial source, but he also took
over Briggs's role as agent handler and recruiter. Slack arranged to have
Glass introduce him to Gochenour, and Briggs's arrangement with the
latter continued, with Slack paying him several hundred dollars for his
reports. Later, when Gochenour decided to attend dental school, Slack
offered him $ioo a month to remain at DuPont, but Gochenour was by
now suspicious about what he was involved in and declined.73

Interviewed by the FBI many years later, both Glass and Gochenour
denied being aware they were involved in Soviet espionage. Even though
by 1950 Glass was a union leader in the fervently anti-Communist International Union of Electrical Workers, the FBI suspected that he might
have been more knowledgeable than he let on, and his former wife described him as an opportunist. Gochenour insisted that he thought Briggs
and Slack were stealing industrial secrets for other American compa-
nies.74

According to KGB documents Slack did mislead Gochenour and used
what in intelligence jargon is known as a "false-flag" recruitment. These
are approaches where the source thinks he has been recruited to provide
material to "X" country, but he has been misled by his recruiter and the
material actually goes to "Y" country (thus the "false flag"). The variation
in KGB technical intelligence work was to recruit American sources
working for private companies who thought they were selling their employer's secrets to a commercial rival, when actually the information went to the USSR. A 1942 KGB report noted Slack's use of a false-flag deception with Gochenour:

"Ell [Slack] willingly accepted the assignment to reestablish contact with Yang
[Gochenour] and got down to work at once. At the first meeting, Yang acted
very cautious and El had to work hard to gain his trust. After several meetings,
Yang agreed to carry out the assignment on nylon. He asked for $1,5oo for this
work. `Ell' notes that Yang is a big coward who only works because of the compensation. Yang's cowardliness became especially obvious after the start of the
war with Japan. Ell's explanation for this is that Yang is of German descent. According to the cover story these materials go to South America. Although in
conversation the probationer [source] did not reveal hostility toward us, considering his heritage, we thought it would be a good idea to make the `buyer' a
neutral country. `Ell' thinks that Yang is a fine expert who currently works in
the nylon industry and will be able to give us very valuable material. We explained to Ell the importance of these mater-als and assigned him to check Y's
work and submit his conclusions about the value of the mater-als."75

Slack used a false-flag recruitment with another chemical source as
well. Medes Grineff was a neighbor and also a chemist at Eastman Kodak.
Born in Russia, he was anti-Soviet, an adherent of an anti-Bolshevik emigre group. Grineff denied to the FBI that he had ever given Slack any material and Slack insisted that he had been rebuffed the only time he asked,
but the KGB reported in 1942 that Grineff had fallen for another Slack
false-flag approach: ""El" [Slack] receives materials from "Grineff"(here-
inafter "Em"), supposedly for South America." Harry Gold, who was
Slack's courier for a time, recalled writing up a report on Grineff for his
KGB superiors but remembered nothing of the nature of Slack's relationship with him. Grineff continued to be cited as a XY line source until
October 1943 and disappeared thereafter, likely because Slack had
moved, and the KGB lost its contact with Grineff.76

Slack had one brush with the FBI during World War II. While living
in Florida in 1938, Briggs had been arrested and charged with child molestation by his landlady. He later told Slack that he had only been responding to her daughter's questions about "the birds and the bees," but
considering his relationship with the fifteen-year-old niece, that is suspect. A few years later the FBI became interested in him because his address book, seized during his earlier arrest, had contained the name
"Levine," coincidentally the name of a child victim of a highly publicized
1938 kidnapping-murder that had taken place not far from Briggs's home
town of Rochester. Briggs was dead, but in 1943, attempting to close the still unsolved Peter Levine case, Bureau agents tracked down Al Slack,
then living in Cincinnati, who assured the agents that Briggs had been too
gentle to have been involved in such violence and drank too heavily to
have been capable of carrying out a carefully planned kidnapping. Years
later, when the FBI learned that Briggs had been a KGB agent, it tried
assiduously to locate the address book (possibly containing the names of
Briggs's espionage contacts), but it had long since vanished. In a remarkable coincidence, one of the FBI officers who followed up on Briggs in
1943 was Robert Lamphere, later one of the bureau's lead counterespionage investigators, who was part of the FBI team that investigated
Slack's espionage and from him heard of Briggs's involvement in industrial spying.77
- - - - - - - - - - --- -

When Slack got a job at the Oak Ridge atomic facility in the fall of
1944, he ceased to cooperate with the KGB for reasons that remain unclear. After Gold was arrested in 1950, he identified Slack as one of his
sources. FBI agents confronted him, and he quickly confessed that he
had provided Gold with technical information from 1940 to 1944, receiving payments of $200 per report, but denied supplying anything
atomic-related. He was tried and convicted in September 1950 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.78

Ideological sympathy for the Soviet Union and simple greed were the
major motives for espionage for most XY agents. But occasionally bitterness and revenge played a role as well. For example, a 1945 entry describes one source with such motives: "Karl ("Ray")-a chemical engineer at the Hercules Powder Company. With us since '34. Recruited
"Electric Pole," from the DuPont Company, to work with us, which he
did until 41. However, "Electric Pole" was exposed to Hut [FBI]. The
connection with Karl was interrupted. Resumed in Oct. 4z."79

"Electric Pole," the source at DuPont, received only one other mention, a note that he became too frightened to continue assisting the KGB,
and he was not identified. The real name of "Ray" (later "Karl") was also
not provided, but the details supplied about him make it easy to identify
him as William Stapler. Thomas Black also dealt with Stapler when working as an XY line courier and in the 1950s provided the FBI with considerable information about him. Black didn't know Stapler's cover name,
but the details he provided match the description of "Ray"/"Karl" in KGB
documents. Stapler received his BS in Chemical Engineering at the Uni versity of Illinois in 1915 and immediately went to work for DuPont. Laid
off in 1920 during the recession following World War I, he was unable to
obtain a good job until 1933, when Hercules Powder Company, a DuPont
subsidiary, hired him. He had no discernible interest in or concern with
communism, but he had become embittered by his economic travails in
the 1920s and blamed DuPont. He contacted the Soviets in 1934 and
began supplying Hercules Powder and DuPont technical secrets for
money and revenge. He appears as an active XY line source through the
rest of the 1930s until May 1941, when the KGB cut contact in the aftermath of Ovakimyan's arrest.

It was a sensible decision because Ovakimyan's arrest was sparked by
information from Armand Labis Feldman, who knew that Ovakimyan
had a source at DuPont. Born losif Volodarsky in the Ukraine in 1903,
Feldman was educated as an engineer and in the 1920S went to work for
Soyuzneft, the All-Union Association of the Oil and Gas Industry, which
managed the Soviet petroleum industry. London was then a world center for the oil market, and Soyuzneft sent him there in 1930. The KGB
London station, however, co-opted him for various technical intelligence
tasks. Scotland Yard arrested Volodarsky for industrial espionage in 1932;
he was fined and forced to return to the USSR. He then entered the KGB
ranks as a professional officer and was sent to the United States as an illegal in 1933, using a fraudulent Canadian passport in the name of Armand Labis Feldman. A 1934 memo, "On the tasks of the USA station,"
indicated, "Brit [Feldman] was supposed to have worked on economic
espionage. His task had been to establish a network to shed light on oil
concerns." As it worked out, Feldman's work in the United States expanded beyond oil to include other industries and also overseeing a
source, Abraham Glasser, in the U.S. Justice Department (discussed in
chapter 4),80

In 1938 Feldman faced twin threats. In January British counterintelligence broke up a Soviet espionage ring seeking information from the
Woolwich Arsenal. One of the Soviet operatives involved in the attempted
infiltration had a Canadian passport as Willy Brandes. His real name was
Mikhail Borovoy, and British and Canadian investigation of the false
Brandes passport pointed toward Feldman, who had helped procure the
fake document, and the FBI began a search for Feldman. The KGB considered recalling Feldman, but he prudently thought it unwise to return
to Moscow at the height of the Terror. The KGB New York station chief
told Moscow what happened next: "On 22 Apr. Nikolay [Gutzeit] informed Brit [Feldman] that he was heading for Mexico to arrange the tapping of Old Man's [Leon Trotsky's] phones. Brit didn't come to the
next meeting on z6 Apr." A later KGB memo noted: "On 25 Apr. 1938
Brit disappeared after cashing checks from his business at the bank. A
search yielded no positive results." The KGB didn't know it, but Feldman had moved secretly to a home in New Jersey and later quietly moved
to Canada.sr