was to be “work of so critical a nature that I was to think twice and three times before I ever spoke a word concerning it to anyone, or before I made a move… ” Sam told Gold to drop completely his association with Abe Brothman and never to see him again. Following standard espionage practice, Semenov was disconnecting Gold to avoid cross-linking contacts, which could compromise them if either was exposed.
“Sam then told me that the mission was far more important than anything that I had ever done before, and concerned matters of not only immediate necessity but of world-shaking importance.” The Soviet agent “didn't elaborate on what the nature of the work actually was” but simply gave Gold the details of an arrangement to meet a man.
Gold could not remember afterward if Sam told him the man's name. “In any event,” he testified, he and his new contact met for the first time “… in, I believe, late February or early March of 1944 [at the Henry Street Settlement on the East Side of New York]. I introduced myself to him as Raymond. He never used the name. He knew it was a phony. He introduced himself to me as Klaus Fuchs.”
Klaus Fuchs had come to America.
5
‘Super Lend-Lease’
Great Falls, Montana, is located about two hundred miles due north of Yellowstone National Park at the confluence of the Sun and Missouri Rivers. Gore Field, its airport during the Second World War, extended its ten- thousand-foot runway on a mesa of tableland three hundred feet above the city at 3,674 feet elevation. Montana weather in the winter is extremely cold and dry, and as a result Gore Field offered more than three hundred clear flying days a year.
In 1942, when German submarines made Allied efforts to ship aircraft to the Soviet Union through the North Sea hazardous and windblown sand damaged aircraft flown to Soviet Georgia across Africa, the United States proposed and the Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to open a trans-Alaskan route across Siberia. The staging point within the US for this air ferry route — the Alsib Pipeline, it came to be called — would be Gore Field in Great Falls.
The pipeline was one conduit of the program of Lend-Lease that Franklin Roosevelt proposed in January 1941 to help cash-strapped Britain and other allies defend themselves against Germany while the US maintained at least the appearance of neutrality. Roosevelt's proposal frightened isolationist senators such as Republican Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who correctly foresaw that it would carry the United States a long stride closer to war; when the Lend-Lease bill passed the Senate in March, Vandenberg wrote in his diary:
I believe we
In the course of the war, under the Lend-Lease Act, the United States delivered some $46 billion worth of equipment, supplies and services to Britain, China and other allies — the preponderance of it by sea, but the most urgent of it by air. Twenty-five percent of that total, $11 billion, went to the Soviet Union after the German invasion of the USSR, of which $1.5 billion paid for services. Of the remaining $9.5 billion, munitions accounted for about half the value of Soviet shipments, including thousands of B-25 bombers and other aircraft, more than 400,000 trucks (“Just imagine,” Nikita Khrushchev would say later, “how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without [American trucks]”), $814 million worth of ordnance and ammunition, thousands of tanks, a merchant fleet and 581 naval vessels. The other half, nonmunitions, included thirteen million pairs of winter boots, five million tons of food, two thousand locomotives, eleven thousand boxcars, 540,000 tons of rails and $111 million worth of petroleum products. Nonmunitions also, pointedly, included entire factories: “complete alcohol, synthetic rubber, and petroleum cracking plants,” in the words of a postwar congressional report, “together with the requisite engineering drawings, operating and maintenance manuals, spare parts lists, and other pertinent documents.” Harry Gold's collections from Abe Brothman gave the Soviet Union an early start; but by 1943 the United States was supplying directly the plans for synthetic rubber and other factories that Gold had shivered in the cold in 1942 to accumulate by espionage.
None of this largesse was contraband. It was tangible support. Until the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union fought Germany essentially alone on the European continent except for the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign; had the USSR lost that fight, hundreds of German divisions bulwarked with Soviet resources would have been freed to turn west and challenge Britain and the United States. Averell Harriman, back from a mission to Moscow for Franklin Roosevelt in October 1941, made the point in a radio speech to the American people; “to put it bluntly,” he said, “whatever it costs to keep this war away from our shores, that will be a small price to pay.” The United States agreed to furnish Lend-Lease and the Soviets did not doubt that they had earned it — at Leningrad, at Stalingrad, in the monstrous enclosures in the western USSR where the Germans, as they advanced, confined Soviet prisoners of war completely exposed without water or food. At least 4.5 million Soviet civilians and combatants had been killed by 1943; at least three million combatants died in enclosures and camps throughout the war; at least 25 million Soviet civilians and combatants died before the eventual Allied victory. From the Soviet point of view, Lend-Lease was the least America could do when the Russian people were dying; anything the Soviets could grab, legally or illegally, must still have seemed less than a fair exchange. “We've lost millions of people,” a Russian told Alexander Werth after the US ambassador, Admiral William H. Standley, complained at a Moscow press conference in March 1943 of the “ungracious” Soviet attitude toward Lend-Lease, “and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam.” The point was to win the war. “One can bear anything,” novelist and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg incited the men and women of the Red Army in August 1942: “the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear the Germans… Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. Then we can go to sleep. Then we can think again of life, and books, and girls, and happiness.”
But more than Lend-Lease aircraft loaded with urgent supplies staged from Gore Field. If the cold, windswept airport high and flat under the vast Montana sky was a pipeline for war materiel, it was also a tunnel under the border that directly connected the US to the USSR.
The American in charge of expediting deliveries through the Gore Field end of the Alsib Pipeline was a tall, rugged USAAF officer named George Racey Jordan who had served with Eddie Rickenbacker's First Pursuit Group during the First World War. Jordan, an older officer who was a businessman in peacetime, had begun working with the pipeline when it was based at Newark Airport and had learned there firsthand that it was sacrosanct. A taxiing American Airlines DC-3 had bumped a medium bomber consigned to the Soviets, a minor mishap in Racey Jordan's book. The Soviet head of mission, Colonel Anatoli N. Kotikov, taking offense, had called someone in Washington, and shortly afterward the Civil Aeronautics Board had suspended
Jordan got to know Kotikov better after the pipeline moved to Great Falls in November 1942. Kotikov was a Soviet hero, Jordan records, who “made the first seaplane flight from Moscow to Seattle along the Polar cap; Soviet newspapers of that time called him ‘the Russian Lindbergh.’” Jordan liked him and the two officers worked well together. Kotikov noticed that Jordan was outranked by many of the other American officers assigned at Great Falls and arranged to improve his standing. “Capt. Jordan work any day here is always with the same people,” Kotikov wrote Jordan's superior in his newly acquired English: “… Major Boaz… Major Lawrence… Major Taylor… Major O'Neill… He is much hindered in his good work by under rank with these officers who he asks for things all time. I ask you to recommend him for equal rank to help Russian movement here.” Jordan was promoted promptly from captain to major; at his promotion ceremony, Kotikov pinned on his new gold oak leaves.
