car, and I don't tell anyone. It means that I've somehow or other to get from the Kremlin to Oktyabrskoye Polye, and that's at least 12 kilometers and perhaps 15.” If he couldn't get a taxi, he had to walk it.
In Vannikov's office with Tamm, early in 1949, Sakharov received an offer from the leadership he could not refuse. Vannikov proposed to transfer Sakharov permanently to Sarov to work with Yuli Khariton. Tamm resisted — he wanted to save Sakharov for pure science and not limit him to weapons research. “The direct Kremlin line rang. Vannikov answered and then tensed up. ‘Yes, they're here with me now,’ he said. ‘What are they doing? Talking, arguing.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, I understand.’ Another pause. ‘Yes sir, I'll tell them.’ Vannikov hung up and said: ‘I have just been talking with Lavrenti Pavlovich [Beria]. He is
“There was nothing left to say,” Sakharov concludes.
A tall, smart, methodical twenty-nine-year-old FBI agent from the Coeur d'Alene mining district of Idaho, Robert Lamphere, took up cryptanalysis work at Bureau headquarters in Washington late in 1947. The wartime cables from the Soviet Consulate in New York to Moscow Center that the Army Security Agency had copied during the war still awaited decoding. Working on them at ASA was a brilliant cryptanalyst and linguist named Meredith Gardner, whom Lamphere soon befriended.
Gardner had made a little progress, a few words here and there. The cables had been coded using one-time pads, a system which was usually unbreakable, but Gardner had a copy of a partly burned NKVD codebook. The Finns had recovered it from a battlefield in 1944 and had sold some 1,500 pages to the OSS. Shocked that the US might be spying on its wartime ally, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had insisted that the OSS return the cipher material to the Soviet government. The agency did so, but not before it had clandestinely copied the codebook. The NKVD had assumed the OSS was shrewder than the Secretary of State and immediately in May 1945 had changed its codes. The codebook was therefore a window into NKVD cable traffic that opened in 1944 and closed in 1945. Gardner and Lamphere had no way yet of knowing that those were crucial years for Soviet atomic espionage.
Early in 1948, Gardner asked Lamphere if he could supply him with the plain text of some of the cable traffic. Lamphere forwarded the request doubtfully to the New York field office. But New York had pulled a bag job on the Soviets in 1944, burglarizing their offices; back came a stack of documents. “This, then,” Lamphere exults, “was the beginning of an important new phase in our breakthrough, for in a short while Meredith began to give me some completely deciphered messages…”
Among the messages Gardner deciphered were exact copies of telegrams from Winston Churchill to Harry Truman and a report “that someone (designated by a code name) had approached a man named Max Elitcher and had requested that Elitcher provide information to him on his current work at the Navy's Department of Ordnance.” The Elitcher contact was dated June 1944 (which, as Elitcher would eventually independently corroborate, was when Julius Rosenberg had traveled to Washington and pitched espionage to him with the argument that the Soviet Union was being denied technical information vital to its war effort). Lamphere had Elitcher checked out and found that he still worked for the Navy's ordnance organization, now called the Bureau of Ordnance, in 1948. Further checking uncovered a connection between Elitcher and a fellow Navy employee named Morton Sobell, both of whom had been suspected at one time of Communist connections. “Background checks revealed that Elitcher had attended the City College of New York from 1934 to 1938, and had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.” (So had Rosenberg, although Lamphere was not yet aware of him.) Sobell had been one of Elitcher's classmates and a roommate in their bachelor days.
Another message fragment concerned two possible espionage contacts or agents. One was Joel Barr, Julius Rosenberg's fellow Communist cell member who had moved to Europe in 1947 at the time of the Elizabeth Bentley grand jury investigation. Lamphere went looking for Barr and discovered that the electronics specialist had been a project engineer at Sperry Gyroscope in 1946 but was now living in Finland, playing the piano to support himself. “He'd been in the same CCNY undergraduate electrical engineering department as Sobell and Elitcher,” Lamphere also learned, “and at the same time, graduating in 1938.”
The other possible contact was a woman. Based on the fragmentary information Gardner had decoded, Lamphere in June 1948 was able to conclude that either Barr or the woman might have “acted as an intermediary between [a] person or persons who were working on wartime nuclear fission research and for MGB agents (1944).” What Lamphere knew about the woman went into a profile he circulated on June 4:
Christian name, ETHEL, used her husband's last name; had been married for five years (at this time) [i.e., 1944]; 29 years of age; member of the Communist Party, USA, possibly joining in 1938; probably knew about her husband's work with the Soviets.
Barr was a bachelor, but Lamphere checked out his girlfriends. None fit the profile. “We came to a dead end on the investigation into ‘Christian name, ETHEL,’ in 1948,” the FBI agent recalls.
Max Elitcher, whose marriage was failing and who may have become aware that he was under FBI surveillance, had decided to leave the Bureau of Ordnance that summer and find civilian work. He visited Sobell, who told him not to give up his BuOrd job until he talked to Julius Rosenberg. He met Rosenberg in New York — “on the street,” the FBI paraphrases his testimony — and “Rosenberg told Elitcher that it was too bad Elitcher had decided to leave because he, Rosenberg, needed someone to work at the Bureau of Ordnance for espionage purposes. Sobell was present at this meeting.” Elitcher and Rosenberg went on to dinner at Manny Wolfe's Restaurant, “where they continued to talk about Elitcher's desire to leave his job.” That was when Elitcher had asked Rosenberg how he had become a Soviet agent.
Driving from Washington to New York with his wife in July to stay with the Sobells and look for a house, Elitcher had noticed that he was being followed. (“On the trip from Manhattan to the Sobells’ home,” the FBI agents following the Elitchers subsequently reported, “it was confirmed without a doubt that the Elitchers were ‘tail conscious’ and, therefore, the surveillance was discontinued.”) Sobell was furious that the Elitchers might have led the FBI to his house. That evening, worried about a raid, he took Elitcher with him to deliver a can of 35 millimeter film to Rosenberg in Knickerbocker Village. Elizabeth Bentley had recently testified publicly and sensationally before the House Un-American Activities Committee; on the way back to Queens, Elitcher asked Sobell if Rosenberg had known Bentley. Sobell, Elitcher recalled, said Rosenberg “once talked to Elizabeth Bentley on the phone but he was pretty sure she didn't know who he was and therefore everything was all right.” Elitcher moved to Queens in October, to a house adjoining Sobell's, and joined Sobell working at the Reeves Instrument Company.
Harry Gold was in love. He was no longer working for Abe Brothman. Sometime in 1947, Brothman had stopped paying him. He had tried unsuccessfully to borrow five hundred dollars from his former boss at Pennsylvania Sugar, telling the man that Brothman was nearly bankrupt — not the best collateral. On June 5, 1948, he gave up on Brothman and quit. Brothman was still worried about the grand jury testimony that the two men had concocted, Gold recalled. “On the occasion when I finally left A. Brothman and Associates… Abe told me that he wanted to go over my story one more time, but I told him there was no point in it because I was well acquainted with the story. One of Abe's final remarks was, ‘Remember when the Rover Boys come around, you'll want to tell the same story you did before.’ [Brothman]… appeared to imply a threat… ”
Word that Gold was looking for work eventually reached Beatrice Schied, a woman he had known and tried several times to date at Pennsylvania Sugar during the war. In 1948, Schied, a lab technician, was employed at the Philadelphia General Hospital Heart Station, a laboratory devoted to cardiology research. The laboratory had received a grant from the US Public Health Service to add a biochemist to its staff. Schied recommended Gold. He got the job in August and started work the next month. That was when he encountered the love of his life:
I fell in love with Mary Lanning when I first met her in Dr. Samuel Beliefs laboratory at P.G.H., on Wednesday, September 10,1948. It really happened so simply: just like that; I knew that here was the girl I had been searching for all my life — as banal as this sounds. And, as we started to go out together and I got to know her well, this feeling only increased — and the wish to make her my wife became an overpowering drive in my life. Her unassuming manner, forthright honesty and complete lack of artificiality, and her snub nose — completely captivated me. I could go on for hours.
Yosef, Gold's brother, probably listened to Harry going on for hours; he told his supervisor at the Naval
