Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (80 page)

The KGB cut contact with Cooke after learning he had cooperated
with the FBI. Seemingly not realizing that he had burned his bridges,
however, Cooke attempted to get in touch with Semenov at Amtorg in
May 1943. And in mid-1945 the KGB New York station reported: ""Octane" [Cooke] went into the "Factory" [Amtorg] building twice and asked
about Gennady [Ovakimyan]. He was told that they did not know of such
a person. Apparently, he had wanted to get a consulting position, b/c he
is currently unemployed." After that, Cooke dropped out of sight.02

The KGB also sought to use the American Communist Party's networks
for its technical intelligence operations. Anatoly Gorsky, the Washington
station chief, informed Moscow in 1945:

"In the process of working with "Vendor," the latter reported that for a number of years, he had been "Sound's" [Golos's] group leader and had handled a
group of people for us on his behalf. In particular, "Vendor'' indicated that his
next meeting with "Sound" was to have taken place on the day of the latter's
death." "Vendor's" contacts:

"i. Leon Josephson, 47 year-old lawyer, NY, owns a cafe, member of the
CPUSA. Assistant group leader, handled "Sound's" people. Went to Europe
several times, supposedly on our business. He failed in Copenhagen in '36
along with George Mink; he was convicted and extradited to the USA.

z. Hyman Colodny, 5o-5z years old, pharmacy in Washington, a fellowcountryman. "Sound" used him for a rendezvous apartment. In '34-'36, he was
in Shanghai on our business.

3. Rinis. A talent spotter.

4. Louis Tuchman, 55 years old, CP member, small-time building contractor.
Rinis's partner. A talent spotter. He was secretary for an illegal group of
Communists working in gov't agencies in Washington.

Marcel Scherer, 43-44 years old, CP member, an organizer for a trade
union of chemistry workers. A talent spotter.

6. Paul Scherer (Marcel's brother). 46-47 years old, CP member, a chemist, a
New York native, a trade union worker. 11 "30-'32 he and Marcel were
handled by Josephson. Their handler on our line was a certain "Harry" In
,35-36, Paul was connected with G. Mink, collecting tech. information and
obtaining books. Prior to "Sounds" death, both Scherer brothers were handled by Josephson."93

A strong candidate for "Vendor" is Harry Kagan, who worked for the
Soviet Government Purchasing Commission and whom Elizabeth Bentley identified as one of Jacob Golos's agents. The reference to Leon
Josephson having "failed in Copenhagen" (that is, been exposed to hostile security services) was to a 1935 incident in which Danish police
charged a traveling party of three Americans with espionage. The three
were George Mink (a former trade union organizer for the CPUSA then
working for the Comintern), Leon Josephson (a CPUSA lawyer), and
Nicholas Sherman. In Josephson's case, after four months in jail a Danish court decided there was insufficient evidence to proceed to a trial,
and he was released. Mink and Sherman, however, were convicted of espionage, spent eighteen months in prison, and were then deported to the
Soviet Union. Despite carrying an American passport, Sherman was not
an American. He was Alexander Petrovich Ulanovsky, a GRU officer.
Danish police found in his possession correspondence with Harry Kagan,
and among the four passports Mink had in his possession one was that of Harry Kagan. The American Communist Party ran a false passport operation (the "books" referred to in Gorsky's cable were passports), and GRU
was a major recipient of its work. Likely the four passports carried by
Mink were for delivery to GRU. (Kagan claimed his passport had been
stolen. The real Nicholas Sherman had died in 1926. The CPUSAs false
passport apparatus had used the dead man's naturalization papers along
with a false witness to allow Ulanovsky to obtain an American passport as
Nicholas Sherman. )94

"Rinis" was Joseph Rinis, a graduate of the Comintern's International
Lenin School and a CPUSA activist in the FAECT. Marcel Scherer, who
had been the founder of FAECT, was, like Rinis, described as "a talent
spotter"-that is, someone who identifies likely sources to be recruited
by Soviet intelligence. He had been born in Rumania in 1899 and was a
founding member of the American Communist movement. Known as
"the Bolshevik chemist" while a student at CCNY, he studied at the
Lenin School in 1930-31, before returning to be the leader of the
FAECT chapter in New York. He spent more time in the mid-1930s
working in the Anglo-American Secretariat of the Comintern. As the
president of FAECT, he was instrumental in its organizing efforts in the
late 193os and early 19405, personally overseeing the attempt to organize
a chapter at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley in 1942, the site of
much atomic bomb research. FAECT halted its campaign after President Roosevelt personally appealed to Philip Murray, chief of the CIO,
to end the effort on grounds of national security. Many of the scientists
and engineers implicated in Soviet espionage were FAECT members,
including Julius Rosenberg, Russell McNutt, and Joseph Weinberg.
With easy access to thousands of radically inclined scientific and technical personnel and knowledge of the projects on which they were working, Marcel Scherer was in an ideal position to assist Soviet intelligence
and steal American secrets, but there is no further mention of him or
his activities in the notebooks. He remained a steadfast member of the
CPUSA until his death.95

Scores of other technical sources, many identified with real names and
others with only cover names, appear in KGB reports. Some are described in detail, while most have only walk-on appearances. Some had
previously appeared in FBI investigations or congressional investigations,
but others, even when identified by their real names, are obscure and will require additional research to determine their contribution to Soviet
technical and scientific intelligence. What is clear is that the KGB invested a substantial amount of resources and personnel in its efforts to
steal American scientific, technological, and industrial secrets and harvested a rich return.

A 1950 KGB report on William Weisband, a one-time KGB courier who became a Soviet spy within the
super-secret National Security Agency and revealed to the USSR that the United States had broken its military codes. Courtesy of Alexander Vassiliev.

oviet espionage networks in the United States would not have
been able to function without the assistance of a number of dedicated support personnel whose role was as essential as that of
the sources who actually took documents from the government
offices in which they worked or communicated secrets to which they were
privy. Once the latter had obtained their information, they had to transmit it to the Soviets. Few of those who obtained government or technical secrets could easily meet with someone readily identified as a Soviet
national without exciting suspicion or triggering surveillance. In order to
avoid alerting American counterintelligence, a chain of clandestine contacts had to get the material from the original source and transmit it to either a "legal" KGB officer working in an official capacity in a consulate or
embassy with a cover job or an "illegal" officer living in the United States
under a false name and pretending to be an American or an immigrant.
Such illegals, once they obtained material from their sources, still had to covertly transmit it to a legal officer for final passage to the USSR by protected diplomatic pouch. These networks required couriers who could
meet the sources without arousing suspicion, pick up the material, and
then hand it on to the next person in the chain. Jacob Golos, for example,
used Elizabeth Bentley as his courier to the Silvermaster group because
he himself was in poor health and unable to travel frequently to Washington and because he believed himself under FBI surveillance. The
KGB needed a corps of such discreet, dedicated Americans willing to undertake unglamorous jobs that required regular travel and a low profile.

These courier chains, moreover, were sometimes intricate and complex. While this protected both the original source and the KGB officer
ultimately receiving the material by insulating them from each other, it
could cause delays in the Soviets' receipt of information, delays in the
passage of instructions from the Soviets to the source, and an inability to
control the source's behavior. For example, George Silverman, one of the
sources of the Silvermaster network, was civilian chief of analysis and
plans of the Army Air Force, a position of obvious interest for Soviet intelligence. But Moscow Center felt it wasn't receiving what it should from
him and in 1943 complained to its New York station: "`You communicate
with him through a highly elaborate system: "Aileron" [Silverman]-"Pal"
[Silvermaster] -"Clever Girl" [Bentley]-"Sound" [Golos]-"Vardo"
[Elizabeth Zarubin]. Clearly, with this kind of communication it is inconceivable to exert any kind of serious influence on a probationer's
[source's] work, not to mention his education.... Think over the question
of improving the line of communications with "Aileron" (primarily by, so
to speak, `shortening' it)."' Moscow had a point. Silverman, the original
source, was a hidden Communist, but he was an economist, not a trained
intelligence operative. He turned his material over to and got his guidance from Gregory Silvermaster, another economist with no more training in espionage than Silverman. He, in turn, handed the material over
to Elizabeth Bentley, Golos's assistant and lover. While she had experience in covert party work, Bentley was not an intelligence professional either. Such instruction as Bentley got was from Golos, a senior CPUSA
official whose techniques came from the Communist political underground, not the world of intelligence. It was not until the material
reached the fifth person in the chain, Elizabeth Zarubin, that it got to a
KGB professional. Moscow's complaint that Silverman lacked proper
guidance about what it needed or appropriate conspiratorial techniques
when there were three intermediaries was not misplaced.'

In some cases, American couriers also provided a psychological cover for the source. Since the person to whom he or she gave information was
not a Russian but an American, the source could pretend or rationalize
that he or she was not turning over material to a foreign power but to the
CPUSA. Bentley used that argument to resist turning members of the
Silvermaster network over to the direct supervision of the Soviets. On
the other hand, some sources thrilled to direct contact with Soviets. Silvermaster believed that Iskhak Akhmerov, an illegal officer with whom he
met frequently, was an American Communist; when he finally met with
Vladimir Pravdin, a legal officer operating under TASS cover, in September 1945, he gushed that he "`was sincerely pleased to meet with a
Soviet representative"' at last, saying "`that he had long hoped that they
would meet him, since all these years he had been connected `only to
local fellowcountiymen' [American Communists].' "2