But soon what Jordan called “the black suitcases” began to arrive, “the unusual number of black patent- leather suitcases, bound with white window-sash cord and sealed with red wax, which were coming through on the route to Moscow.” They raised Jordan's suspicions. The first six, in charge of a Russian officer, Jordan passed as personal luggage. “But the units mounted to ten, twenty and thirty and at last to standard batches of fifty, which weighed almost two tons and consumed the cargo allotment of an entire plane. The officers were replaced by armed couriers, traveling in pairs, and the excuse for avoiding inspection was changed from ‘personal luggage’ to ‘diplomatic immunity.’”
Jordan remonstrated with Kotikov that the black suitcases were not coming from the Soviet Embassy but from the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington. “Highest diplomatic character,” Kotikov insisted. “I am sure he knew,” Jordan writes, “that one of these days I would try to search the containers.”
One afternoon in March 1943, Kotikov flashed a brace of vodka bottles at Jordan and invited the American officer to dine with the Soviet contingent at a restaurant in Great Falls. Since the Soviets always dined separately and seldom picked up bar tabs, Jordan assumed that free vodka and a dinner invitation meant they wanted something from him. He took the precaution of arranging to travel to the dinner in his own staff car. Before he left, he asked his maintenance chief if the Soviets were planning any flights that night. The maintenance chief “answered yes, they had a C-47 staged on the line, preparing to go.” American pilots flew all Lend-Lease aircraft as far as Fairbanks, Alaska, where Soviet pilots took over for the trans-Siberian leg of the route; Jordan had authority to ground any plane at any time. He left word with the tower that no cargo plane should be cleared for the Soviet Union without his approval.
At the Carolina Pines restaurant in Great Falls, the five Soviets on hand for the occasion plied Jordan with vodka. They first toasted Stalin, then Red Army Air Forces commander-in-chief Novikov, then a Soviet ace named Pokryshkin with forty-eight German aircraft to his credit. Jordan proposed Franklin Roosevelt and then USAAF commander Hap Arnold. Thus warmed, the group sat down to dine.
Before Jordan had finished eating, a call came from the Gore Field tower. Jordan took the call at a pay phone downstairs from the second-floor restaurant. The C-47, reported the tower, was demanding clearance. The American officer threw on his coat and never looked back. It was twenty below zero outside. Jordan's driver raced the four miles to the field:
As we neared the Lend-Lease plane there loomed up, in its open door, the figure of a burly, barrel-chested Russian — I clambered up and he tried to stop me by pushing hard with his stomach. I pushed back, ducked under his arm, and stood inside the cabin.
It was dimly lighted by a solitary electric bulb in the dome. Faintly visible was an expanse of black suitcases, with white ropes and seals of crimson wax…
It had been no more than a guess that a fresh installment of suitcases might be due. My first thought was: “Another bunch of those damn things!” The second was that if I was ever going to open them up, now was as good a time as any.
The Soviet courier resisted. Jordan called in an armed GI. One of the couriers jumped off the plane and ran for a telephone.
Jordan carried a razorblade-loaded packing knife in his pocket. In the dim light of the C-47's cargo hold, he began cutting ropes and prying open suitcases, making notes on the backs of two envelopes of what he discovered. “Always just 50 black suitcases each load with 2 or 3 Couriers — usually 3 weeks apart,” he noted to remind himself. In the suitcases he found tables listing railroad mileages between American cities, a load of road maps marked with American industrial plants, a full load of documents from Amtorg, a collection of Panama Canal maps, folders of naval and shipping intelligence, hundreds of commercial catalogues and scientific journals. Folders from the State Department included one labeled “From Hiss.” “I had never heard of Alger Hiss,” Jordan wrote in 1952, after Whittaker Chambers had accused the former special assistant to the US Secretary of State of spying for the Soviets and Hiss had been convicted of perjury and was serving a prison term, “and made the entry because the folder bearing his name happened to be second in the pile. It contained hundreds of photostats of what seemed to be military reports.”[12]
Jordan continued opening black suitcases while his hands went numb with cold. He found voluminous copies of secret reports sent back to the State Department from American attaches in Moscow. He found other State Department documents with their edges trimmed, either to conserve space or, he suspected, to cut away classification stamps. He found a large map which bore a legend he recorded as “Oak Ridge — Manhattan Engineer Dept. or District I think it was,” a place he had never heard of before. He wrote down words he did not recognize from other documents he skimmed: “Uranium 92 — neutron — proton and deuteron — isotope — energy produced by fission or splitting — look up cyclotron… Heavy-water hydrogen or deuterons.”
It was eleven o'clock before Colonel Kotikov arrived; by then Jordan was nearly finished. He opened a few more suitcases in Kotikov's presence to underscore his authority and cleared the C-47 for departure. He fully expected to be transferred even farther out into the boondocks for his temerity in bucking the Soviets. But the suitcases were on their way to Moscow and apparently Kotikov chose not to lodge a complaint.
In later shipments of black suitcases Jordan claimed he found blueprints of American factories, including the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, where aircraft turbochargers were manufactured and the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, which built submarines. Entire planeloads of copies of US patents went through Great Falls. A congressional committee determined after the war that the number of patents the Soviets thus legally acquired “runs into the hundreds of thousands.”
“Another ‘diplomatic’ cargo which arrived at Great Falls,” Jordan discovered, “was a planeload of films — A letter from the State Department [authorized the Soviets] to visit any restricted plant, and to make motion pictures of intricate machinery and manufacturing processes. I looked over a half dozen of the hundreds of cans of films. That one plane carried a tremendous amount of America's technical know-how to Russia.”
During his two years with the Alsib Pipeline, Jordan observed other Soviet Lend-Lease operations as well:
I began to realize an important fact: while we were a pipeline to Russia, Russia was also a pipeline to us… The entry of Soviet personnel into the United States was completely uncontrolled. Planes were arriving regularly from Moscow with unidentified Russians aboard. I would see them jump off planes, hop over fences, and run for taxicabs. They seemed to know in advance exactly where they were headed, and how to get there.
From the beginning Jordan kept a record of every Soviet with whom he came in contact during the war, including in particular those who passed through Gore Field; by the end of the war he had a list of 418 names.
Jordan acquired copies of the Soviets’ own itemized lists of Lend-Lease shipments and confirmed what he had recorded at Gore Field: that the Roosevelt administration shipped quantities of what he called “atomic materials” to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease. From the Soviet lists he extracted the relevant totals, including materials useful in constructing and controlling a nuclear reactor and a small quantity of heavy water (about 1.2 quarts):
The Soviet Purchasing Commission placed orders for uranium oxide and uranium nitrate in March 1943, just as Igor Kurchatov and his team were preparing their plan for atomic-bomb research and development. Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the head of the Manhattan Engineer District, authorized the shipments — under pressure from the Lend-Lease Administration, he testified later. “Where that influence came from,” Groves told a congressional committee after the war, “you can guess as well as I can. It was certainly prevalent in Washington, and it was prevalent throughout the country, and the only spot I know of that was distinctly anti-Russian at an early period was the Manhattan Project… There was never any doubt about [our attitude] from sometime along about October 1942.”
The small amount of uranium metal on Racey Jordan's itemized list, one kilogram (2.2 pounds), represented Groves's grudging response to a Soviet Purchasing Commission request on January 29,1943, for twenty-five pounds, which he authorized to be prepared only after the Soviets called the Lend-Lease Administration in March and threatened to arrange a black-market transaction. The kilogram of metal was not delivered until February 16, 1945, and Groves made sure it was an impure sample. According to Jordan, Lawrence C. Burman, the Manhattan Project expert on rare metals, “urged the [uranium metal production] firm to make sure that its product was of ‘poor quality.’ He did not explain why. But the metal, of which 4.5 pounds was made, turned out to be 87.5 per cent pure
