It was not until September 1942 that Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister and a member of the State Defense Committee, sent Mikhail Pervukhin, people’s commissar of the chemical industry, the NKVD reports along with a request for advice on how to interpret them. Pervukhin, too, urged an independent assessment. The Soviet Academy of Sciences recommended thirty-nine-year-old Igor Kurchatov—a tall, barrel-chested physicist born in the Urals—to lead the review.
Energetic as well as tenacious, Kurchatov had been nicknamed “the General” by his academy colleagues. In the early 1930s, after he and another scientist at Leningrad’s Institute for Physics and Technology had drawn up plans for a cyclotron, Kurchatov was invited to Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory by Lawrence. Kurchatov did not make the trip, but the Leningrad cyclotron was built in any event.41
Shortly after the Nazi invasion, Kurchatov, adopting the custom of Roman emperors in time of war, announced that he would refuse to shave until the enemy was vanquished. Predictably, “the General” became “the Beard.”42
In the work he was assigned, Kurchatov benefited from the scientific publications that had appeared in the West prior to the secrecy embargo. These included the June 1940 Physical Review article by McMillan and Abelson, which the British had feared would tip the Germans off to the discovery of neptunium.43 Kurchatov learned about neutron cross sections from a “Letter to the Editor,” written by Alvarez, appearing in a 1941 issue of the Review. Like other Soviet physicists, Kurchatov correctly surmised that his American counterparts had gone underground when they abruptly stopped publishing their research.44
Kurchatov began by putting information from the pre-embargo journals together with the fragments of intelligence gathered by the NKVD. The result was a comprehensive report on atomic research in the West, which Kurchatov submitted to Pervukhin in two handwritten memos during early March 1943.45 “The Beard” underlined in blue pencil information he considered of special interest “that it would be desirable to obtain from abroad.”46
As in the West, the Russians’ initial focus was upon isotope separation. Kurchatov’s summary reflected considerable interest in gaseous diffusion—the method favored in the M.A.U.D. report, and the one that Fuchs was most familiar with. The summary likewise showed that the Soviet Union had learned of the success of Fermi’s Chicago pile within six weeks of the event.47
But Kurchatov’s report also revealed some surprising gaps in the Russians’ knowledge. Among these was his conclusion that “the mass spectrography method … is … considered inapplicable to uranium.” His report to Pervukhin showed, too, that the Soviets were still ignorant of, and thus eager to learn, the critical mass of U-235.48
Kurchatov was most excited about the realization, arrived at through espionage, of “a new direction in tackling the entire uranium problem”—the fact that plutonium could also be used for a bomb—and stressed in his report that “prospects of this direction are unusually captivating.… In this connection I am asking you to instruct Intelligence Bodies to find out about what has been done in America in regard to the direction in question.”49
To help in identifying the next targets for Russia’s spies, Kurchatov listed for Pervukhin a number of laboratories in the United States where work on plutonium might be taking place. Berkeley’s Rad Lab was at the top of his list.
* * *
Fortunately for the Soviets, Kurchatov’s seed fell upon fertile soil. The FBI considered the San Francisco Bay area, and particularly Berkeley, a recruiting ground for subversives going back to the West Coast waterfront strike of 1934.50
In November 1941, Fitin had established a secret residentura at the Soviets’ consulate in San Francisco, a beaux-arts mansion overlooking the Bay on Divisidero Street. The NKVD rezident was the forty-two-year-old vice consul, Gregori Kheifets. Before his posting in California, Kheifets had reportedly served as secretary to Lenin’s wife, later becoming a high-ranking official in the Moscow offices of the Comintern. The small, dark, and rather sinister-looking Russian had also served as an “illegal”—a spy without diplomatic cover—while a student in Italy and Germany. Returning to Moscow, Kheifets beat the odds and survived Stalin’s notorious “blood” purges.51 To Americans, Kheifets introduced himself as “Mr. Brown.”52 But to Fitin at Moscow Center, he was known as Kharon (Charon), after the boatman who ferried damned souls across the River Styx into Hell.53
Joined by the consulate’s third secretary, Pyotr Ivanov, Kheifets set out almost immediately to recruit so-called talent spotters: sympathetic Americans, usually Communists, who agreed to identify prospective candidates for the Soviets’ espionage effort.54 One of Kharon’s early recruits was FAECT organizer George Eltenton, the Shell employee who had spoken for the union at Oppie’s house.55
Eltenton was a British-born chemical engineer who had first visited Russia in summer 1931, with a group of fellow scientists, on a three-week tour. When he returned to England at the start of the depression, the only job the Cambridge-educated Eltenton could find was at the British Cotton Industry Research Association in grimy Manchester. Not surprisingly, George and his wife, Dorothea, eagerly accepted, in 1937, an invitation to Leningrad’s prestigious Institute of Chemical Physics from Soviet physicist Yuri Khariton, whom Eltenton had met on his Russian tour. In Leningrad, George worked with another famed physicist, Nicholai Semenov, while “Dolly” served as personal secretary to a visiting American geneticist at the nearby Vavilov Institute.56
Despite the Stalinist purges already under way, the Eltentons became fervent believers in the Communist cause, as Dolly documented in a private journal. (Iconographic of her faith is Dolly’s description of the December 1937 “election” of people’s deputies: “The enthusiasm of the people was very genuine. To those of us there at the time the results were no surprise. There was not a candidate who received less than ninety per cent of the votes. In some cases almost one hundred per cent
