Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

Back in Berlin, Soviet troops dismantled the laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, next door to the Institute for Chemistry where nuclear fission was discovered, and shipped the equipment to Moscow. In Vienna on May 5, a Soviet colonel wrote out a receipt for four hundred kilograms of uranium metal and a quantity of heavy water confiscated from the Institut fur Radiumforschung. All the first-rank German scientists involved in atomic research — Nobel laureate theoretician Werner Heisenberg and Nobel laureate radiochemist Otto Hahn, among others — had fled into southwestern Germany in the closing days of the war to avoid being captured by the Soviets. Zavenyagin's team drafted a number of lesser German scientists to work in the Soviet Union, however, and others volunteered. They joined what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would call the First Circle of the Soviet gulag — scientific research centers staffed with political prisoners, in this case laboratories for developing uranium processing and isotope separation technologies at Sinop, near Sukhumi on the Black Sea, and at nearby Agudzeri (both laboratories in Beria country, where security staff personally loyal to the Georgia-born NKVD chief could keep an eye on them). One of the Germans, Nikolaus Riehl, who called his Soviet experience “ten years in a gilded cage,” was seized along with his complete Auer Gesellschaft laboratory; with his capture, the Soviets acquired crucial knowledge of how to purify uranium metal.

The war in Europe ended in a schoolroom in Rheims early on the morning of May 7, 1945, when Colonel General Alfried Jodl signed the act of military surrender. “The world now sees the shining face of victory,” Ilya Ehrenberg had written proudly a few days before, “but let the world remember how this victory was born: in Russian blood, on Russian soil… ” May 9, Alexander Werth records, “was an unforgettable day in Moscow:

The spontaneous joy of the two or three million people who thronged the Red Square that evening — and the Moscow River embankments, and Gorki Street, all the way up to the Belorussian Station — was of a quality and a depth I had never yet seen in Moscow before. They danced and sang in the streets; every soldier and officer was hugged and kissed; outside the US Embassy the crowds shouted “Hurray for Roosevelt!” (even though he had died a month before); they were so happy they did not even have to get drunk, and under the tolerant gaze of the militia, young men even urinated against the walls of the Moskva Hotel, flooding the wide pavement. Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow before. For once, Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The fireworks display that evening was the most spectacular I have ever seen.

But Americans at least hardly knew the Russian tragedy, and would not long remember it, though there was still an afterglow of popular goodwill for brave Ivan and steadfast Uncle Joe. In Washington the mood was already darkening; the new administration of Harry Truman was concerned immediately with Soviet determination to impose a puppet government on Poland, and there was mounting opposition in the US Congress to contributing further to Soviet support even though the US military believed it needed the Red Army's help in Manchuria to finish the war with Japan. It had always been intended to end Lend-Lease once the war was over, but on May 11, through a combination of miscommunication and zealous overreaction, Lend-Lease officials abruptly cut off ship loadings to the USSR and even called back ships at sea. Though the order was modified within days, the Soviets were outraged. Stalin told Harry Hopkins later that month that he thought the high-handed cutoff had been “unfortunate and even brutal.”

With the end of the war in Europe, the men who directed the Soviet bomb program sought to improve the program's priority and accelerate the pace of the work. In the autumn of 1944, after he reviewed the three thousand pages of new espionage material the NKVD had collected, Kurchatov had written Lavrenti Beria complaining of the “completely unsatisfactory” Soviet program. “The situation with raw materials and questions of [isotope] separation is particularly bad,” he told Beria. He was critical of Molotov's management. “The research at Laboratory No. 2 lacks an adequate material-technical base. Research at many organizations that are cooperating with us is not developing as it should because of the lack of unified leadership.” He asked Beria “to give instructions for the work to be organized in a way that corresponds to [its] possibilities and significance.” In May 1945, Pervukhin and Kurchatov carried their complaint directly to Stalin, writing that Molotov had not given the program the support it deserved.

Neither Beria nor Stalin chose to respond. As the historian David Holloway points out, Beria distrusted the atomic-bomb information his rezidents were collecting and distrusted the Soviet scientists as well. “From the very beginning,” Yatzkov would recall, “he suspected disinformation in these materials and thought that our adversaries were trying to drag us into tremendous expenditures of resources and effort on work which led nowhere… Beria was suspicious about the espionage information even when the work in the Soviet Union had achieved large scale. [An NKVD official] recalls that once, when he was reporting to Beria on the latest [atomic] intelligence, Beria threatened him: ‘If this is disinformation I'll throw you all into the cellar.’”

Though the collection of atomic espionage documents filed at the Lub-yanka approached ten thousand pages, Stalin, Beria and Molotov evidently did not yet believe in the atomic bomb. Untested, it was still an abstraction to them; where espionage was concerned, they valued only the tried and true.

9 ‘Provide the Bomb’

Harry Gold met “John” — the name by which he knew Anatoli Yatzkov/ Yakovlev — in Volk's Bar at Third Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan late on the Saturday afternoon of May 26, 1945, “so that he might verify that I was going to see Fuchs in Santa Fe.” Yakovlev was concerned to confirm the trip because Gold had been having trouble getting time off from work; the chemist had finally arranged to take part of his vacation early. They also needed to schedule their contacts after the Santa Fe trip, Gold testified, “one meeting at which I would transfer information which I was supposed to receive from Fuchs; then there would be a second meeting some time later, at which I would give Yakovlev a detailed report as well as a verbal account of exactly what would have transpired at this meeting with Fuchs.” The two men had a drink standing at the bar. Gold suggested they take a walk, but walking exposed them to surveillance and Yakovlev had a lot of business to transact. He steered them instead to the back of the bar, to “a circular place with some tables in it, fairly secluded — We sat down there and the waiter brought us a drink.”

The two conspirators talked for most of an hour. Yakovlev told Gold he wanted him to go on to Albuquerque after he saw Fuchs and make a second rendezvous. Gold immediately protested such a flagrant violation of espionage protocol. “I told Yakovlev that it was highly inadvisable to endanger the very important trip to see Dr. Fuchs with this additional task.” It rankled the Soviet professional to be lectured by an amateur. He told Gold “that the matter was very vital and that I had to do it. He said that a woman was supposed to go in place of me” — a reference, presumably, to Ann Sidoro-vich; that very day Ruth and David Greenglass were waiting for her in vain outside an Albuquerque Safeway store — “but that she was unable to make the trip.” Then Yakovlev erupted. “I have been guiding you idiots through every step,” he berated Gold. “You don't realize how important this mission to Albuquerque is.” He bluntly ordered Gold to go to Albuquerque. “And that was all,” Gold testified. “I agreed to go.”

The mission was sufficiently important that Yatzkov/Yakovlev gave Gold his instructions typed on a sheet of paper, only the second time in fourteen years of espionage work that Gold remembered being briefed other than orally (the first time having been the summer of 1944, when Yatzkov had given him the typewritten pages of garbled questions about the US atomic-bomb program at which Fuchs had taken offense). Gold would variously recall the information on the paper. The name “Greenglass” was typed on it, he testified. “Then a number [on] ‘High Street'… and then underneath that was ‘Albuquerque, New Mexico.’ The last thing that was on the paper was ‘Recognition signal. I come from Julius.’” In other testimony, Gold had recalled the recognition name as “Frank Kessler” or “Frank Martin,” aliases he had used previously, and as “Ben from Brooklyn.” Rosenberg supporters would make much of Gold's inconsistency, but his testimony followed the events by five years, long enough to have forgotten what would have been a minor detail at the time. Nor was it normal Soviet practice to compromise security by using a spy's real name — witness Elizabeth Bentley's assumption that Julius was not the real name of the engineer who lived in Knickerbocker Place who woke her with his post-midnight calls.

Gold received verbal instructions from Yatzkov as well: