Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

as against the stipulated 99 per cent.”[13]

Racey Jordan's story of Soviet espionage shipments through Great Falls has never been corroborated in its entirety, but enough pieces of it have found independent confirmation to establish its general credibility. Air Force Major General Follette Bradley, who pioneered the Alsib Pipeline, would tell the New York Times:

Of my own personal knowledge I know that beginning early in 1942 Russian civilian and military agents were in our country in huge numbers. They were free to move about without restraint or check and, in order to visit our arsenals, depots, factories and proving grounds, they had only to make known their desires. Their authorized visits to military establishments numbered in the thousands.

I also personally know that scores of Russians were permitted to enter American territory in 1942 without visa. I believe that over the war years this number was augmented at least by hundreds.

In 1950, Victor Kravchenko, who had served as economic attache of the Soviet Purchasing Commission from August 1943 to April 1944, described preparing a shipment of black suitcases during the war:

On the seventh floor of the Soviet Purchasing Commission, behind an iron door at 3355 Sixteenth Street, Washington, D.C… there was a special department of the NKVD… One day in February 1944,1 don't remember the date, [Semen] Vasilenko, myself, and Vdovin got ready to fly to the Soviet Union six large bags, and Vasilenko took the six bags to the Soviet Union. I saw that material. Some of this material was about the production of planes and the new technological processes; some was about artillery; some was about new technological processes in metallurgy; some was about the possibilities of industrial development… All departments of the Soviet Purchasing Commission — aviation, transportation, all of them — were working for this purpose [of gathering material]. We transferred to the Soviet Union not just this one package; we transferred to the Soviet Union dozens of tons of material, and not just by airplane. We also were using Soviet ships that came from Lend-Lease for the Soviet Union, and they called this material Super Lend-Lease…

Jordan's wartime diary confirmed that Semen Vasilenko passed through Great Falls on February 17, 1944, en route to Moscow with what a postwar investigator called “diplomatic mail.”

Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet cipher clerk who visited Moscow during the October 16 panic, characterized the Soviet espionage system from personal experience as “mass production.” “There were thousands, yes thousands, of agents in the United States,” he estimated; “thousands in Great Britain, and many other thousands spread elsewhere throughout the world.” America and England were particularly well covered, Gouzenko reported. “When I worked in the Special Communications branch [in Moscow] the vast majority of the telegrams came from England and the United States. Telegrams from other countries were lost in the flood.” The military attache at the Soviet Embassy in Washington had five cipher clerks working for him, added Gouzenko, “which gives some indication of the amount of information he alone sent.”

The persistence and patience of the [Soviet Intelligence] experts seldom failed to get the wanted information… Often we would send out the same telegram to twenty or more addresses in various parts of the world. One “urgent” query of this nature asked for an item of information about some alleged scientific innovation in the United States… Neither of two agents in the United States could enlighten the experts, but complete and identical information on the American development was received from agents in Canada and England.

In 1943, Gouzenko was posted to Canada. His superior there told him that with a population of fewer than thirteen million people, “This one country… has nine separate intelligence networks operating in direct contact with Moscow.”

Elizabeth Bentley, the American Communist courier who handled Abe Brothman before passing him along to Harry Gold, independently confirmed the wholesale character of Soviet espionage:

What the Russians wanted to know [from US agents] was practically limitless. They asked for information on Communists they were considering taking on as agents, on anti-Soviet elements in Washington, on the attitudes of high-up government officials in a position to help or hinder the Soviet Union… They sought military data: production figures, performance tests on airplanes, troop strength and allocation, and new experimental developments such as RDX and the B-29. They were avid for so-called political information: secret deals between the Americans and the various governments in exile, secret negotiations between the United States and Great Britain, contemplated loans to foreign countries, and other similar material.

Bentley reported personally moving some forty rolls of microfilm, thirty-five exposures to the roll, from Washington to New York every two weeks, as well as knitting bags full of documents.

Racey Jordan's superior officer at Gore Field, Colonel Roy B. Gardner, summed up Soviet activity there simply and bluntly in a radio interview after the war. “I know nothing first-hand about the shipment of atomic materials,” Gardner said. “I do know that, while I was in command at Great Falls and in charge of this operation, the Russians could and did move anything they wanted to without divulging what was in the consignment.”

6 Rendezvous

Klaus Fuchs arrived at Newport News, Virginia, aboard the passenger ship Andes on December 3, 1943. He had accepted assignment among a group of fifteen British scientists, including Rudolf Peierls, Franz Simon and Otto Robert Frisch, to participate in gaseous-diffusion development in the United States with engineers of the Kellex Corporation and a team of physicists and chemists at Columbia University led by Harold Urey.

The Andes had zigzagged west across the Atlantic, unconvoyed. Its sparse company of scientists rattled around in its spacious staterooms, gaining weight after British rationing on hearty American breakfasts of bacon and eggs. The train from Newport News up to Washington stopped in Richmond, Virginia, where the unaccustomed luxury of bright lights at night shining on fruit stalls piled with oranges sent Otto Frisch into “hysterical laughter.” In Washington, General Groves, having accepted British intelligence's warranty that the new arrivals were not security risks, lectured them on security. The British team traveled on from Washington, then to Manhattan, and lodged at the Taft Hotel. Fuchs disliked the Taft or wanted cover; within a few days he moved to less collegial lodging at the Barbizon Plaza off Central Park. On December 22, he and the other members of the British team attended an important meeting initiating a review of American progress on developing a suitable barrier material for filtering U235 from U238.

Fuchs's younger sister Kristel and her family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the barrier meeting in New York, Fuchs caught a train to Boston to spend Christmas there, arriving in Cambridge on December 23. When Fuchs's father Emil had been arrested in Germany in the spring of 1933, Kristel, then twenty years old, had fled to Zurich and begun her university studies. She had returned to Berlin in 1934, by which time Emil was free from Gestapo custody awaiting trial and had set up a car rental agency in Berlin as a cover for the Fuchs family's dangerous work of smuggling Jews and anti-Nazi Christians out of Germany. In 1936, Emil had arranged through American Quakers to enroll Kristel at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, safe harbor. There Fuchs's sister had met Robert Heineman, a student from Wisconsin four years her junior who was a member of the American Communist Party active in the Swarthmore Young Communist League. A year later Kristel had dropped out of college; she and Heineman married in October 1938. Heineman had graduated from Swarthmore the following June and the couple had moved to Cambridge, where Robert had taken up graduate study at Harvard. A son had been born in 1940, a daughter in 1942. The marriage was troubled and intermittent; Robert had moved away to Philadelphia for a year beginning in 1942. By 1944 he was back in Cambridge working at the General Electric plant in Lynn.