“No one had any decent record players or tape recorders,” Zukerman reminisces. He had his family piano shipped out from Moscow, the first musical instrument at Sarov. “I would sit down at the piano and play foxtrots, tangos, waltzes… Sometimes while I was playing… we would look out the windows and see couples dancing on the asphalt lane outside.” Another Sarov physicist, Boris I. Smagin, recalls that “there was no respect for rank in our small town; Academicians as equals participated in the life of our young and fun-seeking neighborhood.” Like many of his Los Alamos counterparts, Smagin remembers those times as “the best days of our lives.” They were not the best days for Altshuler, who mentions the
They were plagued with shortages. Even two years after the end of the war, coming north from Yugoslavia in the winter snow, Milovan Djilas found “limitless desolation and poverty” in the workers’ paradise: “The Ukraine and Russia, buried in snow up to the eaves, still bore the marks of the devastation and horrors of war — burned- down stations, barracks, and the sight of women, on the subsistence of hot water… and a piece of rye bread, wrapped in shawls, clearing tracks… We stopped in Kiev only briefly, to be switched to the train for Moscow… Soon we were on our way into a night white with snow and dark with sorrow.”
But Khariton had trained at Cambridge in the string-and-sealing-wax tradition of British physics; the Sarov experimenters made do. Electricity at the forest test site came from an American Lend-Lease five-hundred-kilowatt generator. Exposure to salt water on the sea route to Vladivostok had damaged its windings; Zukerman and a young protege, Arkadi Admovich Brish, personally repaired it. Brish, twenty-nine in 1946, “blond, with gray eyes nearly the color of steel” in Zukerman's recollection, later the director of a leading institute, was a man so vigorous that the Sarovians cooked up a unit of productive activity — the Brish — in his honor and measured their own contributions comparatively in milli- and micro-Brishes.
“Physicists in the Soviet Union were still snipping flat rubber gaskets for their vacuum instruments out of auto-tire inner tubes, of all things,” Zuker-man notes. “Getting vacuum hosing was a problem. For a small section of Leibold red vacuum tubing people would offer up anything — from rare liquors to a precision galvanometer. Ramsay's oil, as a rule, would be ‘homebrewed’ as required out of rubber, wax, and vaseline.” Zukerman's first rotating-disk camera for photographing explosions at Sarov depended on a motor cannibalized from a home vacuum cleaner bought in a Moscow second-hand store. To compensate, Zernov roamed the compound cutting through red tape. When Zukerman needed 150 kilos of castor oil, Zernov delivered a two-hundred-kilo barrel in two days from Bulgaria. When Zukerman worked out a way to destroy cheap mirrors rather than expensive camera lenses photographing explosions, the Sarov director commandeered a handsome specimen that had just been hung in the installation barbershop. Zukerman soon replaced the mirror from a shipment he had ordered from Moscow, but he was persona non grata at the barbershop for months and had to shave himself with an old safety razor — blind, as by then he was almost totally.
“The summer of 1947 was a hot one,” Zukerman concludes, “both literally and figuratively. Our scientific divisions quickly grew and came up to full strength.”
The summer of 1947 was a hot one for spies as well. Elizabeth Bentley had stunned the FBI two years previously by walking in off the street and confessing her extensive activities as a Soviet courier. Among many others, she had identified Abe Brothman. In the spring of 1947, she began testifying secretly before a federal grand jury. When the grand jury investigated Abe Brothman, he implicated Harry Gold. [28]
Before that, on December 26, 1946, when Gold had been out of touch with Yatzkov for ten months, the chemist took a call in Brothman's office. An attempt to contact Gold by mailing him tickets to a boxing event earlier that month had failed because the ticket envelope had been misaddressed and had arrived too late. But Gold had given Yatzkov the phone number for emergency use if they lost contact, and now he found Yatzkov at the other end of the line. The Soviet agent asked if Gold had been all right. Gold would testify that the question meant: Was he under surveillance? Gold answered that he had been fine. Yatzkov told Gold to meet him that night in the men's room of the Earl Theater, a movie house in the Bronx. Gold agreed to the rendezvous. It occurred to him later that Yatzkov/Yakovlev must not have known that he was calling Abe Brothman's office; Gold had not identified the location of the phone.
Dutifully Gold trudged out to the Earl Theater. The FBI paraphrases his account of the meeting:
He was… approached by an unknown Russian, who had a torn slip of paper, which Gold had… given to Yakovlev with the understanding that this paper would be used for identification in the event Yakovlev could not make a meeting with Gold… The unknown Russian came out of the men's room and walked directly up to him and showed him a portion of this [paper], saying in broken English, “You Harry, you have material from the doctor [i.e., Fuchs].” Gold answered no, and he was then told by the unknown Russian to go to the Third Avenue Bar [on 42nd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan] to meet Yakovlev…
Gold never explained why the Soviet courier — he was in fact Yatzkov/Yakovlev's boss Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov — expected him to have a package from Klaus Fuchs, just as he never explained why he had gone to Cambridge to look up Fuchs after Yatzkov failed to appear at an earlier Earl Theater rendezvous the previous February. Fedosimov and Yatzkov probably ran Harry all the way out to the Bronx to separate any handoff of material from the Yatzkov meeting; Igor Gouzenko had blown Yatzkov's cover and the FBI was watching him. The Soviets probably also wanted Gold to meet Fedosimov so that the two men would be able to recognize each other in future contacts.
Yatzkov met Gold at the bar, apologized for the ten-month interruption in their work “but said it was unavoidable, that he had to lie low during that period,” told Harry “that he was very glad that I was now working in New York” because “it would put much less of a strain upon me as regards to meeting my Soviet contact.” Yatzkov paid Gold several hundred dollars for past expenses and told him to begin planning for a mission to Paris in March to meet a physicist. He gave Gold “a sheet of onionskin paper,” listing the hotel where Gold was supposed to stay and presumably identifying the physicist Gold was supposed to meet. They would meet in the Paris Metro, the physicist would pass Gold some documents and he would carry them to England and pass them along.
Sitting in the bar, sharing drinks, the Soviet agent and the American courier began inventing strategies Gold could use to get off work to travel to Paris. Maybe he could write a number of French chemists expressing interest in their research; if he got a response, he could use it as an excuse to make the trip. Gold innocently mentioned a timing problem and all hell broke loose:
I told Yakovlev that once the pressure of work at Abe Brothman and Associates had eased up a bit — and then Yakovlev almost went through the roof of the saloon. He said, “You fool!” He said, “You spoiled eleven years of work.” He told me that I didn't realize what I had done, and he told me that I should have remembered that some time in the summer of ‘45 he had told me that Brothman was under suspicion by the United States government authorities of having engaged in espionage… Yakovlev threw down on the table where we were sitting, the bar, an amount of money which was about two or three times the actual cost of the drinks which we had had, and he dashed out of that place. I walked along with him for awhile, and he kept mumbling that I had created terrible damage and that he didn't know whether it could be repaired or not. Yakovlev then told me that he would not see me in the United States again, and he left me.
Yatzkov/Yakovlev left the United States the next day on the S.S.
