Chronology of Soviet Espionage

Chronology of Soviet Espionage

Espionage Chronology

This chronology was prepared by T. M. Sanders (sanders@umich.edu).

Sources

This is an area about which it is very difficult to obtain thoroughly reliable information. Some of the figures signed confessions or other official statements, which may be the most reliable sources. In other cases, considerable doubt about accuracy has persisted.

There are a number of general works, beginning with Alan Moorehead's (old but excellent) The Traitors[1], Oliver Pilat's The atom spies[2], H. Montgomery Hyde's The atom bomb spies[3], and a number of more specialized works, cited below. Some are by defectors and others whose reliability is difficult to gauge.

Several recent works make use of material which became available only after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Notable among these are Stalin and the Bomb,[4] Dark sun,[5] and (in quite a different category) Special tasks.[6]

I (tms) have filed unsuccessful FOIA applications to both CIA and FBI.

Before German attack on USSR (June, 1941)

1933 Klaus Fuchs emigrates to England from Germany, where he was already a Communist.
1935 Harry Gold (American chemist) begins espionage for USSR.
1940 Fuchs sent to internment camp in Canada as and Enemy Alien.
June 1940 Bruno Pontecorvo escapes from Paris as Germans enter, emigrates to Tulsa, Oklahoma to work on oil-well prospecting.

Wartime (1941 to 1945)

1941 Fuchs recruited into the `Tube Alloys' (nuclear) project, begins passing information to the USSR.
May 1942 Allan Nunn May joins ``Tube Alloys'' project in England.
January 1943 Nunn May to Montreal with British mission, GRU (military intelligence) agent.
1942 Fuchs becomes a British citizen.
1942 Julius Rosenberg allegedly spy for NKVD.
April 1943 David Greenglass drafted into US Army.
Spring 1943(?) Oppenheimer approached by Haakon Chevalier in ambiguous ``Chevalier Incident.''
August, 1943 Oppenheimer discusses ``Chevalier Incident'' with Army Intelligence for the first time.
Late 1943 Fuchs posted to US.
May 1944 Donald Maclean (NKVD agent) to US as diplomat.
1944 Fuchs meets Harry Gold, Soviet courier, is posted to Los Alamos Theoretical Physics Division in August.
July 1944 David Greenglass assigned first to Oak Ridge, then to Los Alamos in August as SED machinist, shaping explosives for implosion.
1944 Nunn May visits Chicago Met Lab, Argonne, works on possible bomb material uranium-233, reestablishes contact with GRU agent.
March 1945 Kurchatov reads implosion material, probably from Nunn May.
February 1945 Fuchs meets Gold in Boston, Santa Fe, passes details of implosion, bomb design.
1945 David Greenglass, Los Alamos machinist passes drawings of implosion lens to Harry Gold.

End of WWII (August, 1945) to ``Joe I'' (August, 1949)

September, 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa defects.
March 4, 1946 Physicist Allan Nunn May arrested
May, 1946 Nunn May pleads guilty to a charge of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act, sentenced to ten years in prison, a term reduced for good behavior.
1946 Fuchs to England as head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the new British atomic energy centre at Harwell.
1947 Fuchs reestablishes contact with Soviet agents.
1949 Fuchs under suspicion, as FBI passes information to British.

After ``Joe I'' (August, 1949)

1950 January Fuchs confesses; February 2 arrested; March 2 tried, sentenced to 14 years.
May 23, 1950 Harry Gold confesses.
June 15, 1950 David Greenglass confesses.
July 17, 1950 Julius Rosenberg arrested.
August 11, 1950 Ethel Rosenberg arrested.
September 2, 1950 Bruno Pontecorvo disappears into USSR.
December 9, 1950 Harry Gold sentenced to 30 years.
March, 1951 Rosenberg trial.
April 5, 1951 Rosenbergs sentenced to death.
June 19, 1953 Rosenbergs executed, after many appeals for clemency.

Biographical Sketches

Klaus Fuchs

Klaus Fuchs was born in Germany into a Quaker family, and lived through the rise of Nazism. His anti-Nazi politics evolved into communism. He emigrated to England in 1933, and received his professional education there. He was recruited into the `Tube Alloys' (nuclear) project in 1941 by Rudolf Peierls, and became a British citizen in 1942. He was, according to his own statements, passing information to the USSR as early as 1941. He was sent to the US in late 1943, part of the group of British scientists who joined the Manhattan project. He first met his American contact, Harry Gold, in New York in early 1944. Posted to Los Alamos in 1944, Fuchs was out of contact with Gold until 1945, when they met: first in Boston, then in Santa Fe. Gold was also in contact with David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos who provided crude drawings of the implosion lens. Fuchs passed a great deal of extremely important technical information. He was present at the Trinity test, and had been involved in important theoretical work-from gaseous diffusion to bomb design.

Fuchs returned to England in 1946 as head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the new British atomic energy centre at Harwell. He remained at Harwell until his arrest, having reestablished contact with Soviet agents in 1947.

In 1949, the FBI passed on to British Intelligence some evidence that a British scientist had provided information to the Soviets from Los Alamos. Fuchs came under suspicion because of his prewar communist background. His brother was still a communist; his father accepted a position (teaching theology) at Leipzig, in East Germany.

Fuchs began a series of ambiguous conversations with British security officials, culminating in January, 1950, in a confession. He was arrested February 2, tried on March 2, and sentenced to 14 years in prison. His crime was not treason, because the USSR was not an enemy. Released in June, 1959, he emigrated to Dresden, East Germany, where he was employed as a physicist until his death.

Allan Nunn May

The event which unraveled the spy network in Canada was the defection of Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, in early September, 1945. This led directly to a physicist-spy, code-named ``Alek'' engaged in wartime nuclear research in Canada. Gouzenko's Soviet documents revealed him to be an Englishman named Allan Nunn May, a person who had had many leftist connections in prewar years. Nunn May, never at Los Alamos himself, nonetheless obtained information of interest to the USSR. He informed them of the nature of the Trinity and Hiroshima bombs, the U-235 output of the plant at Oak Ridge, and of Pu-249 at Hanford, and passed a small sample of U-233 to Soviet agents.

May was arrested March 4, 1946. He made a written statement, which included these words:

... I gave and had given very careful consideration to correctness of making sure that development of atomic energy was not confined to the USA. I took the very painful decision that it was necessary to convey general information on atomic energy and make sure it was taken seriously. For this reason I decided to entertain a proposition made to me by the individual who called on me...

Nunn May was tried in May, 1946, pleading Guilty to a charge of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act. (Passing information to an ally does not constitute treason under English law.) He was sentenced to ten years in prison, a term which was reduced for good behavior. Subsequent to his 1952 release he worked in Cambridge, then emigrated to Ghana, where he taught physics. He died in Cambridge January 12th, 2003.

Bruno Pontecorvo

Bruno Pontecorvo was born in Pisa, Italy 22 August, 1913 to a prominent Jewish family in the textile business. He obtained his undergraduate education in Pisa, and his doctorate with Fermi, in Rome, in 1934. He was one of the discoverers of the effectiveness of slow neutrons in producing nuclear reactions.

In 1936, He was awarded a fellowship to the Collège de France, where he worked with the Joliot-Curies, remaining in France until the German attack in 1940. In France, he married Marianne, a Swedish woman, and was active in anti-fascist, anti-nazi, and pro-communist activity, particularly in connection with the Spanish civil war. He also did significant nuclear physics research, for which he received a prestigious prize.

He emigrated to the United States in 1940, first finding employment with an oil-well surveying company. In 1943, he obtained a position with a British/Canadian Atomic Research group in Montreal, moving with them to Chalk River, Ontario, where a large heavy-water-moderated reactor was built. After the war, in 1949, he moved to the Harwell Atomic Research centre in England. He discussed, but never carried out, efforts to obtain citizenship in the various countries where he worked, finally becoming a naturalized British citizen. By 1950, he had decided to leave Harwell for academia, and accepted a position at University of Liverpool, to begin January, 1951. In early 1950, after the Harwell physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to spying for the USSR within the Anglo-American atomic bomb project, Pontecorvo admitted his communist connections to the English security forces.

In the summer of 1950, Bruno, Marianne, and their three children departed Harwell for a vacation on the Continent. They drove through France to Italy, spent time with various Pontecorvo family members, then flew to Stockholm on 1 September, abandoning a beloved sports car in a Roman garage. In Stockholm, they made no attempt to reach Marianne's family, and departed the next day for Helsinki. There they disappeared from Western view, presumably into the Soviet Union.

At the time, Pontecorvo was widely considered an ``atomic spy'', lumped with the physicists Nunn May and Fuchs, and others such as Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs. Alan Moorehead[1] considers him in this class, although he was not involved in weapons work, showed no trace of contact with Soviet agents, and did not appear to have planned a permanent departure from Harwell.

His first public appearance within the USSR occurred in 1955. He held a press conference, and wrote an article in Pravda, in which he stated, ``In 1950, the atmosphere was such that I could no longer breathe.'' He prospered professionally in the USSR. He died at Dubna, Russia September 24, 1993. A version of the years after 1950 appears in Miriam Mafai's biography Il lungo freddo.[7]

Specific allegations of espionage appear, for example in references [8] and [6].

The Rosenbergs and Greenglasses

The FBI identified Harry Gold as Fuchs's American contact. His statement led to David Greenglass, and then to Julius and Ethel (Greenglass) Rosenberg. Gold and Greenglass confessed, testified against the Rosenbergs, and served jail sentences. The Rosenbergs, whose connection with spying was certainly more distant than that of the others, were convicted and executed after many appeals for clemency.

Harry Gold

References

[1]
Alan Moorehead. The traitors. Harper, New York, 1963. HD 9698 .A23 M82 1963.

[2]
Oliver Ramsay Pilat. The atom spies. Putnam, New York, 1952. HD 9698 .A23 P64 (GRAD).

[3]
H. Montgomery Hyde. The atom bomb spies. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1980. UB271.R9 H992 (UGLI).

[4]
David Holloway. Stalin and the bomb : the Soviet Union and atomic energy, 1939-56. Yale, New Haven, CT, 1994. UA 770 .H6321 1994 (GRAD).

[5]
Richard Rhodes. Dark sun : The making of the hydrogen bomb. Simon & Schuster, New Yok, 1995. UG 1282 .A8 R461 1995.

[6]
Pavel Sudoplatov, J. L. Schecter, and L. P. Schecter. Special tasks : the memoirs of an unwanted witness, a Soviet spymaster. Little, Brown, Boston, 1994. JN 6529 .I6 S831 1994 (GRAD).

[7]
Miriam Mafai. Il lungo freddo : storia di Bruno Pontecorvo, lo scienziato che scelse l'URSS. Mondadori, Milano, 1992. QC 16 .P77 M34 1992 (SCIENCE).

[8]
Christopher M. Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB : the inside story of its foreign operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1990. HV 8224 .A66 1990 (GRAD).



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