Spying for the Bomb

[Jenny Lake]

CSR made a post in theVIP section that I'm carrying out front for discussion. S'okay CSR?
I think very little of what has ever gone on in relation to nuclear weapons development and the Cold War can be learned from documents.
It's becoming very plausible to me that the U.S. "superpower" status, measured by Atomic Bomb hegemony, was always a fiction. This is a theory, of course, but after this repost, I'll explain.

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Re: Dr. Mary's Flunky
by CrackSmokeRepublican » Thu Jul 15, 2010 2:46 am

Interesting. Have you ever looked at your list in regards to being Soviet Agents (or handled by Soviet Agents)? I keep having the impression of a "Fake" Cold-War/Intelligence war between the Soviet Union and the West. It is almost as if the Cold War was meant to turn out the way it did with Rothschild building up Israel behind the scenes and empowering the capabilities of Israel via theft of technology built in the West. The Vaccine-Nukes-Wonder Weapons of WWII had Zio-Jewish fingerprints all over the patents and top secret documents and equipment after WWII in England, Occupied Germany, USA and the Soviet Union along with the propaganda systems and theories -- Robert Maxwell's and Kissinger's vetting of German Scientists comes to mind. Basically the US/UK Govt. officials and duped people would shell out the "money" for the Nuke research so that is where the Jews first built the bombs since it was easier...  

Pavel Sudoplatov, 89, Dies; Top Soviet Spy Who Accused Oppenheimer
By DAVID STOUT
Published: September 28, 1996
Correction Appended

Lieut. Gen. Pavel A. Sudoplatov, a legendary Soviet spymaster who plotted and carried out assassinations with cold-blooded efficiency and claimed to have engineered the theft of atomic secrets from the United States with the aid of four eminent scientists, died Tuesday at his home in Moscow. He was 89.

General Sudoplatov had been suffering from vascular disease and recently had a stroke, Moscow newspapers reported.

General Sudoplatov began his rise in the state-security system in the 1930's and attained the rank of lieutenant general in the K.G.B. But in 1953, after Stalin's death, he was arrested along with Lavrenti Beria, the much-feared head of the secret police, and spent 15 years in the gulag. He was not officially ''rehabilitated'' until 1969.

General Sudoplatov left a remarkable legacy. He was a master of the art of ''silent'' elimination of enemies of the Soviet state -- silent in the sense of untraceable but not necessarily noiseless. In his memoirs, he recalled killing a luncheon companion with a bomb in 1938.

The general also wrote of organizing a unit to hunt down and kill Leon Trotsky, one of the architects of the Russian Revolution with whom Stalin had grown deeply disenchanted because they disagreed about the future of Communism. Trotsky was killed in a suburb of Mexico City on Aug. 20, 1940.

General Sudoplatov told of those and other deeds in ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- a Soviet Spymaster,'' written with his son, Anatoli, and Jerrold and Leona Schecter. Mr. Schecter is a former Moscow bureau chief for Time magazine.

Published by Little, Brown & Company in 1994, ''Special Tasks'' caused a sensation because of the general's detailed assertions that the Soviet Union had obtained atomic secrets with the aid of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., and Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, three other physicists with central roles in the development of the atomic bomb.

General Sudoplatov said that Oppenheimer and the other scientists passed the secrets to people they knew to be Soviet agents and that they did so both because they wanted to help the Soviet Union defeat Hitler and because they believed that spreading knowledge of the secrets of making nuclear bombs would promote world peace.

The general's assertions outraged many American scientists, some of whom cited examples of what they said were unambiguous and provable errors of fact. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said after a 1995 investigation that it had found no ''credible evidence'' to back up the general's claims. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service agreed, stating that General Sudoplatov's allegations ''do not correspond to reality.'' The Schecters stood by their work, however.

But the events in General Sudoplatov's career about which there is little or no dispute make a fascinating, if sometimes chilling, story.

Born in the town of Melitopol, Ukraine, in 1907, Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov joined the Red Army at the age of 12, when it was battling not only the pro-czarist, anti-revolutionary White Army but also Ukrainian nationalist forces.

When he was 14, his Red Army unit was depleted by losses and needed a telephone operator and decoding clerk in its intelligence division, ''and that is how my career in the security service began,'' the general wrote in his memoirs.

As a young agent in 1938, he was summoned by Stalin, who wanted to get rid of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist leader with whom Pavel Sudoplatov was well acquainted.

Stalin asked the young agent, ''What are the personal tastes of Konovalets?'' who was then in exile in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

''Konovalets is overly fond of chocolate candies,'' Pavel Sudoplatov replied.

Stalin suggested he think about that. The agent did, and supervised the design of a box of chocolates rigged with a bomb set to go off half an hour after the box was changed from a vertical to a horizontal position. He met the Ukrainian nationalist for lunch, set the chocolates on the table as a gift and said good-bye, stopping long enough to buy a light raincoat and hat and to hear the bomb go off.

General Sudoplatov told of arranging the killing of Trotsky by cultivating Communist sympathizers in Mexico, including some who had fought against Francisco Franco's fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. ''For us, enemies of the state were personal enemies,'' he wrote.

The general said he personally selected Ramon Mercader, a civil war veteran, to do the killing. Mercader drove a pick-ax into Trotsky's head. The assassin spent two decades in a Mexican prison and was honored in Moscow upon his release.

General Sudoplatov directed Communist underground activities against Nazi Germany in World War II. In his memoir, he speculated that Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who has been credited with rescuing many Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, may have been killed in a Soviet prison in 1947.

The general's wife, Emma, died in 1988. He is survived by his son, an economist in Moscow.

''Despite my rehabilitation, my medals have not been returned to me,'' the general complained at the end of his book. ''Let no one forget that I, too, have been a victim of political repression.''

Photo: Lieut. Gen. Pavel A. Sudoplatov. (Associated Press, 1994)
Correction: September 30, 1996, Monday An obituary on Saturday about Pavel A. Sudoplatov, a former Soviet intelligence official, misstated the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project to make an atomic bomb. He was the scientific director of the Los Alamos laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was made, not the head of the Manhattan Project.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/28/world ... eimer.html

Also this PBS list has the Soviet Agents listed including Fermi.

http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/kg ... detail.htm


8-26-02
Books: Jerrold and Leona Schecter's Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History
By Harvey Klehr

Mr. Klehr is Andrew Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University.

Since the end of the Cold War a flood of revelations about Soviet espionage in America has discomfited old leftists and startled many Americans. Easy assumptions about how Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs had been framed or Harry Dexter White and Larry Duggan hounded into their graves by false charges have given way to documentary evidence that all of them were guilty of providing confidential information to Soviet intelligence agencies. Reflexive mantras about American overreaction to nonexistent internal security threats have been tempered by revelations that hundreds of Americans cooperated with the KGB and the GRU, turning over secrets from nearly every agency of the federal government.

The sources of this information have been varied and mutually reinforcing. Former Soviet intelligence officers like Aleksandr Feklisov, Oleg Kalugin, Yuri Modin, and Pavel Sudoplatov have written memoirs. Access to Russian archives, first available after 1991, has been uneven and subject to various kinds of restrictions. Still, Comintern files open to scholars have produced evidence of espionage confirmed by KGB records made available to selected academics. The massive Mitrokhin archive, smuggled out of Russia by a disaffected intelligence officer, dovetailed with other intelligence material. In the mid-1990s, the National Security Agency released the Venona decryptions, which amplified and reinforced the Russian material.

Not all of the revelations have been received with the same confidence or respect. In the "wilderness of mirrors" that characterizes the secret world of espionage, private and public agendas, missing data, bureaucratic inertia, and bad memories can easily lead readers astray. Partial and piecemeal accounts of Soviet espionage have sometimes confused rather than clarified what actually took place. Some material comes with limitations: Access might be restricted to one or two people, information might be based on memories of events taking place half a century ago or distorted by selective leaks designed to advance a particular interpretation of the past. Still, each piece of information brings us closer to an accurate understanding of the most contentious era in recent American history.

The latest entry into this minefield is Jerrold and Leona Schecter's Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History. The Schecters are not newcomers to the controversies about Soviet intelligence operations and their impact on American life. He was Time magazine's bureau chief in Moscow from 1968 to 1972. In addition to serving as diplomatic editor of Time, Schecter was on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. Together with his wife, he persuaded General Pavel Sudoplatov to tell the rather unsavory story of his life. "Special Tasks" generated headlines and outrage after its 1994 publication. Sudoplatov was a self-confessed assassin, a nasty piece of Stalinist work who had fallen from Soviet grace after Lavrenty Beria's arrest and execution. Jailed from 1953 to 1968, he was "rehabilitated" in 1992. The most spectacular and controversial part of his memoir was his assertion that a number of prominent Western scientists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, had provided the KGB with vital information about the atomic bomb being developed at Los Alamos. Outraged American scientists defended their old colleagues and noted that the only evidence supplied for the claims was Sudoplatov's own memory of the files he had read or the operations he had overseen. They charged the book was a shoddy, inaccurate, and sensationalist effort to cash in on the public's fascination with conspiracy theories. The Schecters ardently defended the accuracy and reliability of Sudoplatov's charges.

Their new book will reopen many of the same wounds and inaugurate several new debates. Sacred Secrets is an exasperating work. A significant segment has very little to do with the ostensible topic. Filled with fascinating and important new data about Soviet espionage and some Americans who engaged in it, at the same time it is seriously flawed by the use of confidential sources whose motivations and reliability are unknown. While the Schecters have unearthed new material, they sometimes fail to integrate it successfully with what has previously been published, including some of Sudoplatov's own claims. And there are numerous small errors that cumulatively cast doubt either on their grasp of material or the care with which the book has been written and edited.

Portions of Sacred Secrets bear only the flimsiest connection to the major theme--how Soviet intelligence affected American history. The longest single chapter deals with how Jerrold Schecter negotiated with Victor Louis, a shadowy Soviet figure linked to the KGB, to arrange for the publication of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs in the West. Interesting and significant as this coup was, the episode has very little to do with the rest of the book. Similarly, another long chapter detailing how American advances in reconnaissance technology helped end the Cold War is more properly the subject of a book on how American intelligence worked. The final substantive chapter very briefly deals with the Soviet perception that Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was far more advanced than it really was and how this contributed to the collapse of the USSR. None of this material is particularly pertinent to the central theme of the book.

The Schecters claim to have unearthed new information about several prominent American figures, Harry Dexter White, Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, and Alger Hiss, who all illustrate a Soviet method of espionage tradecraft: "to surround a star source, usually a top policy maker, scientist or political insider, with a ring of satellite figures who did the actual spying and handing over of material to their Soviet handlers." They also claim that Soviet intelligence tried to surround both Franklin Roosevelt and his wife with a similar coterie of agents, although the Roosevelts were unaware of it. They insist that White, Oppenheimer, and Hiss were all cognizant of how they were being used, but leave Einstein's status unclear. And, they argue, Harry Truman was told of the Venona decryptions but out of political expediency chose not to act on them.

There is, however, less to their claims than meets the eye. Their own evidence casts doubt on the validity of the notion of a "star system." Both White and Hiss were, by the Schecters' account, actual spies who handed over material to Soviet controllers. They present no evidence that Einstein was ever a source, either consciously or inadvertently, of information. Only in the case of Oppenheimer is there evidence that he facilitated Soviet espionage by surrounding himself with people willing and able to turn over information.

Outside the ranks of Nation readers and a dwindling coterie of academic leftists, there are few people still willing to claim that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were not Soviet agents. In both cases, the only interesting controversy remaining is whether or not they attempted to use their positions to promote Soviet policies. Although he never became as prominent a symbol of Communist infiltration of the government as Hiss, White, who died of a heart attack just days after denying to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a spy, was, arguably, far more influential. As assistant secretary of the treasury, he was Henry Morgenthau's closest aide. During the 1930s he had been a source from whom Whittaker Chambers collected information. Venona decryptions confirmed Elizabeth Bentley's charges that he turned over information to the KGB during World War II. One message shows White briefing Soviet intelligence about American negotiating strategy at the first United Nations conference.

The Schecters accuse White of attempting to tilt American policy in favor of the USSR on at least three different occasions. In 1941 a KGB agent was dispatched from Moscow on "Operation Snow." Fearful of having to fight a two-front war, the Soviets were anxious to deflect Japanese attention and hostility in the Pacific southwards towards American and British interests. Urging White to take a tough stand against the Japanese, Vitaly Pavlov, according to a KGB document quoted by the Schecters, persuaded him to support actions bound to increase American-Japanese tensions and hence focus Japan's military plans towards war with the capitalists.

The second occasion involved the plans for the printing of occupation currency for Germany. White pushed strongly to give the USSR the currency plates to allow them to print occupation money, an action that cost the United States government hundreds of millions of dollars when the Soviets flooded the country with notes that were used to purchase American goods. A heretofore unknown memo from Gaik Ovakimian, head of the KGB's American desk, notes that "following our instructions," White "attained the positive decision of the Treasury Department to provide the Soviet side with the plates for engraving German occupation marks."

The third specific allegation concerns the Morgenthau Plan, a proposal to deindustrialize Germany after the war. Although they do not claim that White consulted with the Soviets about the plan, there is, they insist, evidence that White provided them with an early copy and information about the policy debate it sparked within the American government.

Provided the material the Schecters cite is accurate, a point discussed below, this new information demonstrates that White did more than merely turn over information; he attempted to, and sometimes did, influence policy decisions on behalf of the Soviet Union. Significant as this information is, however, the Schecters provide a confusing and not entirely persuasive account of just what he was doing by overstating White's influence on diplomatic and military policy as a Soviet agent and understating his responsibility for his actions. They claim that "lack of action from the War Department and the Department of State" in 1941 meant that "much of the thinking that prepared for war with Germany or tried to avoid war with Japan fell to" the Treasury Department, a gross overstatement of fact. Whatever his personal opinions and actions, White hardly was the decisive figure in preventing an American-Japanese agreement that might have averted Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the Schecters' claim that White "might not have understood" that the Soviet suggestions "were in contradiction to the peace-loving idealism for which he was known" and that "his cooperation led to results that were the opposite of his best intentions" suggests a naivet that is belied by everything else about his career. At one point the Schecters seem to accept Pavlov's argument that White was not a controlled source and the Soviets had no need to recruit him since members of the Silvermaster ring surrounded him. Yet, they also document his direct meetings with KGB officers and his willingness to hand over documents.

The new information about Alger Hiss is less explosive. Citing confidential GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) sources, the Schecters plausibly claim that during the Yalta conference, Hiss gave daily briefings to General Mikhail Milshtein, a military adviser to Stalin and the deputy director of the GRU, revealing not only the American negotiating strategy but insights into the attitudes of the American negotiators. Milshtein's success enabled the GRU to retain Hiss as a source despite efforts by the KGB to muscle aside its junior competitor. Curiously, the Schecters never attempt to reconcile this information with Pavel Sudoplatov's denial that Hiss was an agent in 1945. Sudoplatov had admitted that Hiss had worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. Why didn't he know about Hiss's role in 1945? Is the new information based on documents or the recollections of veteran Soviet agents? Is it firsthand--Milshtein's reminiscences--or "as told to"? We never learn.

The new information about Einstein is likewise interesting but hardly earth-shattering. The famed physicist's lover, Margarita Konenkova, wife of a prominent Russian sculptor, was clearly a KGB asset who reported on his friends. But her efforts did not have any discernible effect on Einstein's willingness to help the USSR. The Schecters admit that there is no evidence she learned anything significant about atomic weapons, and her one triumph, persuading Einstein to meet with the Soviet consul in New York, ended, they agree, with Einstein's refusal to follow the Soviet propaganda line.

The most startling new information deals with Robert Oppenheimer, the head of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. To security officials, Oppenheimer was a worrisome figure from the moment he was selected to direct the building of an atomic bomb. He had been a financial supporter of Communist causes in the 1930s and had social ties not only to party members but also to senior Communist operatives on the West Coast. Several members of his family--his brother, sister-in-law, and his wife--were Communists. His wife's first husband had been a Communist organizer killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and she was close to Steve Nelson, a party official with disturbingly close ties to Soviet intelligence. A number of Oppenheimer's graduate students and several of the people he hired to work on the Manhattan Project were known party members. In 1943 Oppenheimer had reluctantly told security officials a bizarre story about being approached to spy for the Russians. Even when the United States government withdrew his security clearance in 1954, however, it didn't claim that he was a Soviet agent, only that his behavior made him a security risk. FBI wiretaps declassified a few years ago revealed that Oppenheimer was himself a secret member of the Communist party.

In the book the Schecters wrote with Pavel Sudoplatov, the former Soviet spymaster claimed that Gregory Kheifitz, the KGB's resident in San Francisco, had met with Oppenheimer in December 1941, at which time the physicist had worried that the Nazis might build an atomic bomb before the Americans. Kheifitz allegedly introduced Elizabeth Zarubina, a KGB officer, to Oppenheimer's wife, through whom the Los Alamos director could stay in touch with the Russians; through this contact, Sudoplatov claimed, Oppenheimer facilitated Klaus Fuchs's arrival at Los Alamos. Sudoplatov also mentioned another point of entry Soviet intelligence used to get access to Oppenheimer: a Soviet mole, a Polish-born Jewish dentist, planted in California in the 1930s but long since out of touch and reactivated by Zarubina because of his close ties to Oppenheimer.

Several years ago, a book published in Russia revealed that it was another KGB operative living underground in the United States, Kitty Harris, who was actually sent to reactivate the Jewish dentist. In Sacred Secrets the Schecters use both stories, apparently not recognizing that they are contradictory. On page 51 they explain, "Kheifitz introduced [Zarubina] to the Oppenheimer family." On page 62 they note that the dentist and his wife "were friends of the Oppenheimers and introduced Elizabeth to them." The Schecters make no effort to reconcile these stories. Why would the Soviets have to work so hard to establish ties with Oppenheimer if Kheifitz had recruited him as a source in 1941? If the Russians were in contact with Kitty Oppenheimer, why would they have to search high and low to locate an old source, a dentist, with whom they had lost touch?

Obscured by their confusing account of the Oppenheimer story is a significant document the Schecters claim to have received from a confidential source. If not a smoking gun about the Oppenheimer case, it is at the least a very strong piece of evidence that Robert Oppenheimer betrayed secrets of the atomic bomb to Soviet intelligence. The Schecters reprint a 1944 memo from Vsevelod Merkulov to Lavrenty Beria. It notes that Soviet agents obtained important atomic information through Comintern contacts in the United States with Kheifitz and Zarubina. The memo goes on: "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer, while being an unlisted member of the apparatus of Comrade Browder, informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade Kheifitz, confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder."

While it would be better to have Kheifitz's original report of his contacts with Oppenheimer, this document is telling. It strongly supports the argument that Oppenheimer facilitated Soviet penetration of Los Alamos. He may well have known or suspected that espionage was taking place without having to dirty his own hands. And the memo suggests a tantalizing clue to another, heretofore-unknown source, that relative of Earl Browder (although one possibility is that it is a reference to Helen Lowry, Browder's niece, who was married to Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB's chief underground officer in the United States).

While this document is most likely genuine, the frequent use of confidential sources and confidential documents is a serious problem the authors do not surmount. When using documents they somehow obtained from Russian intelligence files, the Schecters do not cite specific collections, much less identification numbers. They say that all the documents they obtained have been deposited in the Hoover Library and will be available to researchers in ten years. Even if the documents are currently unavailable, some indication of where they come from would have enhanced confidence in their authenticity.

The use of confidential sources is more of a problem. The Schecters note: "The names of confidential sources listed in the footnotes have been withheld at the request of the sources." Given the legal dangers to those who provided them with source material or classified information, the Schecters' reticence is understandable, but it nevertheless undercuts the arguments they make. Sudoplatov made a number of false assertions, including misidentifying the Soviet atomic source MLAD as Bruno Pontecorvo instead of Theodore Hall. Did he want to prevent identification of Hall, at that time still unknown in the West? Was his memory faulty? Similar questions can be asked of the Schecters' sources. Are their assertions based on memory? A review of documents? Stories told by retired KGB agents? What axes do they have to grind?

If there are problems with the Schecters' hidden sources, there is at least as significant a problem with one of their cited sources. Everyone who has written on Venona has argued that President Truman was never told of the project and so couldn't have known that proof of Harry White's espionage was derived from it. Since he was suspicious of J. Edgar Hoover, Truman was never fully convinced that people like White and Hiss were agents. His long hesitation in tackling internal security, it has been argued, gave fuel to demagogues like Joe McCarthy. The Schecters, however, argue that Harry Truman was told at a June 1945 meeting "that U.S. Army code breakers were reading secret Soviet messages." Their source is former NSA analyst Oliver Kirby, who recalled Carter Clarke, head of Army Intelligence, telling him the story.

From Kirby's recollection many decades afterwards, the Schecters spin an intricate web to account for Truman's behavior. He still needed the USSR to help defeat Japan, they speculate, and hence was reluctant to weaken the wartime alliance "with embarrassing revelations; that the U.S. was intercepting and reading the internal messages of an ally, or that the Soviets had made the U.S. a prime target for their espionage activities." But, in June 1945, when Clarke allegedly told the president, the Army's cryptanalysts had not yet begun to read Soviet messages and had no inkling they concerned espionage.

By the Schecters' account, Truman's unerring political instincts "told him that knowing about Soviet espionage on American soil, especially with the cooperation of American agents, would be a huge liability for the Democrats in the coming year's congressional elections." But this assumes that Truman or American intelligence planned to make Venona public in 1945 or 1946, long before any significant Soviet traffic had been broken. Even if Truman knew about Venona in 1945, he would not have known anything about what it said of Soviet espionage, so that cannot explain Truman's actions.

Explaining Truman's decision to nominate White for the Board of the International Monetary Fund despite an FBI warning that he was a spy suspect, the Schecters suggest that withdrawing his name would have cost the Democrats votes in New York in the 1946 congressional elections. Apart from the fact that White was hardly a household name and had no political clout in New York--he was from Boston--the issue of Soviet espionage would only have become an issue if Truman had made Venona public. But there is no evidence that anyone in the intelligence community was prepared to go public in 1946. The only claims of Soviet espionage that the FBI was then pursuing involved Elizabeth Bentley, and there was no hard evidence to justify an indictment, much less a conviction of any of the Soviet spies Bentley named. Truman clearly did not take Soviet espionage seriously enough, but despite Kirby's claim, there is no indication that he knew about Venona and what it demonstrated about Soviet espionage.

Unfortunately, Sacred Secrets is marred by a number of errors and contradictory stories. Trivial as some are, they dilute one's confidence in the authors' command of their material. Thus, the FBI was not listening in on a call between KGB resident Vasily Zarubin and CPUSA organizer Steve Nelson but had bugged Nelson's apartment and overheard the two meeting together. (The incorrect story is told on one page and the correct one elsewhere. Moreover, Nelson was not running a Communist party espionage ring but a Comintern operation.) During World War II Arlington Hall cryptanalysts did not help "expose the hidden relationship between Soviet intelligence and American bureaucrats at the highest levels of the government" because they did not begin to break into the Soviet traffic until 1946. Moreover, it was not true that "in 1945 four major counterintelligence breakthroughs helped the FBI make sense of the fragments" of messages. The FBI was not brought into Venona until 1946 and did not begin formal cooperation until 1947. The Venona material corroborated Elizabeth Bentley's revelations, not the other way around. Whittaker Chambers could not have "described White's participation in the Silvermaster cell" because that ring did not exist when Chambers defected (it was the Ware cell). And Chambers was not a "converted Catholic" and hence a "hero to Irish Catholic longshoremen."

Scholarship on espionage can be frustrating because it often must rely on leaks and may not have access to full case files or complete documentation. Sometimes key sources cannot be identified because of legal or personal consequences. Some of the secret material in Sacred Secrets sounds plausible and appears to fit with what we already know about Soviet espionage. But, since no sources and no archives are identified, and there are so many small errors, even those of us disposed to believe many of the Schecters' claims will remain unsatisfied.

This article first appeared in the July 1st 2002 issue of The Weekly Standard and is reprinted with permission.

http://hnn.us/articles/816.html



In Sweden our intelligence officer, Zoya Ribkina, received the cooperation of Niels Bohr. Back in Moscow she told Zoya Zarubina, who translated atomic documents, that "this is a very important enterprise we're doing together with the biggest scientists in America and the world. We are trying to be as strong as any other country would be. I am happy I am instrumental in putting this together with Europe, with Niels Bohr." Ribkina spoke freely with Zoya because she is the stepdaughter of Liza Zarubina, the intelligence officer who performed so well for us in America working with Oppenheimer's wife. Zoya met in her office a number of times with Academician Kurchatov to clarify the meaning of the new vocabulary of atomic physics. Kurchatov urged her to probe the possible variants of meaning in the documents; he barely controlled his excitement over the new information. "Come on girl," Kurchatov told Zoya, then 25, "try that sentence another way. Remember your physics. Is there any other meaning we missed?"
The information that Enrico Fermi had put into operation the first nuclear reactor in December 1942 was initially provided in a very general form to Kurchatov in January 1943. Fermi's success was at first not fully understood by our scientists. Therefore it triggered Kurchatov's letter of March 22, 1943 to deputy prime minister Pervukhin asking him "to instruct intelligence bodies to find out about what has been done in America in regard to the direction in question," and naming seven American laboratories as targets. Several months later, in July 1943, Kurchatov again asked for clarification of the data in his memorandum.
Our scientists were at first skeptical of Fermi's accomplishment, and until February 1945, when full mobilization was ordered, only a few in influential scientific and government circles believed that the creation of a new super weapon was realistic.
The progress of the atomic project was retarded by the lack of resources during the early war years. In 1941 it was the intelligence reports from Donald Maclean of progress in the British program, recently confirmed by Vladimir Barkovsky, that pushed us to initiate our efforts in 1942.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?t ... c_id=14324

[Jenny Lake]

The most spectacular and controversial part of his memoir was his assertion that a number of prominent Western scientists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, had provided the KGB with vital information about the atomic bomb being developed at Los Alamos...

...The final substantive chapter very briefly deals with the Soviet perception that Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was far more advanced than it really was and how this contributed to the collapse of the USSR. None of this material is particularly pertinent to the the central theme of this book.

...They insist that White, Oppenheimer, and Hiss were all cognizant of how they were being used, but leave Einstein's status unclear....
..There is..less to their claims than meets the eye...

First, consider that the United States is and has been the only true enemy of the World Communitarians. America is the "enemy" of the world powers that needed "building up" so that its construction and destruction has been completely orchestrated from within. The historic American spirit was to stay out of foreign wars.

During the massive "rescue" out of Europe beginning 1933, competent "teams" of physicists, chemists and engineers were farmed out to the world powers as desperate refugees. The U.S. admitted by far the greatest number that flooded into the academic system, but the real 'specialists' were comparatively few. "Jewish culture" was the primary import at this time.

The U.S. response to building the Bomb was considered so lackadaisical that British emissaries, "letters from Einstein", and a host of pressures including a false "race for the Bomb" with Germany were exerted to get the U.S. moving. In late 1943, frustration at Los Alamos prompted Fermi to suggest to Oppenheimer that the Project consider 'dirty' bombs with more conventional know-how. Shouldn't we consider that the actual turn of events in nuclear spying was to bring the "secrets" INTO the U.S.?
The USSR was never hamstrung by its obligatory 'processes' of state. They were well ahead in weapons and SPACE technologies.
...think about the Cold War as finishing off the corruption of the US Constitutional republic, now swirling in the mire of misdirected self-analysis, "circling the drain". The miracle of compartmentalization and 'pride' is that we are not supposed to figure this out.

[Jenny Lake]

In the mid-1920s, the mega-energy projects like Hoover, Grand Coulee, TVA and a refurbished Niagra had made it to paper --all essential to the future Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, Prohibition spawned an international underworld that opened up channels for business and technology. I'm convinced that nuclear 'chain reaction' was suppressed through the 20s and 30s to allow for this development. The economic crash of '29 and the Depression softened the US for socialism and shifted resources to the first real generation of globalists.
   The migration of 1933 was a deployment because the US was always going to make the Bomb, and to be sure, every scientist necessary to its creation secured a place. Niels Bohr (not a Danish Lutheran) came at last in 1943 to bring assurances of one-word idealogy to the American project. His influence also helped bolster the beliefs of the scientists that they, and not the US military, were in control. The way was being ahead for the Cold War.
   It stikes me that the ingenious ideas and creations that fluorished under US-style capitalism were drained from the US before WWII --I'm thinking here of Tesla. Perhaps in this time period the focus of int'l technology development was moved in secret to the Soviets while a war alliance still allowed this tolerance. I've read that the USSR had the H-bomb years ahead of the Americans, but not heard how or when it was made.
   Using the Bomb on the Japanese seems by design to have scarred the American psyche into desiring its own submission to the global police. And then we irradiated ourselves for a decade before our spokesmen called out for restraint. Atom bombs, missile warheads and nuclear power plants are dirty technologies as doomed as the dinosaurs. Owning them is genocide.
   The 'secrets' are too easily obtained from skilled nuclear engineers in any competent science program, so how could this be the basis of Cold War spying?

[Jenny Lake]

CSR wrote

I keep having the impression of a "Fake" Cold-War/Intelligence war between the Soviet Union and the West. It is almost as if the Cold War was meant to turn out the way it did with Rothschild building up Israel behind the scenes and empowering the capabilities of Israel via theft of technology built in the West...

I think your instincts are right on target.

[Jenny Lake]

This is basically what I think of when I think about Cold War spying , and how it's been 'midwifed' by the British, who did the same for the Bomb:

psych-war
chemical-biological

..."To pursue these shadowy endeavors, the government enlisted the elite of the American psychological establishment, either as conduits, consultants, or researchers. According to a later agency review, these helpers included at least ninety-three universities and other governmental or nonprofit organizations, including Harvard, Cornell, the University of Minnesota, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Lexington, Kentucky, Narcotics Farm, several prisons and penitentiaries, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institutes of Health."

..."the Chinese had found new and formidable brainwashing techniques that could transform American servicemen into "Manchurian candidates" programmed to do Communist bidding. America faced a brainwash gap!"

..."in April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Gottlieb was the ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. And he immediately put his talents to work, this time against Americans."
...money started pouring through CIA-linked conduits." Among these conduits was the Josiah J. Macy Foundation, whose director was an ex-OSS officer named Frank Fremont-Smith. And among the beneficiaries of this covert funding would be Harold Abramson, an acquaintance of Gregory Bateson's, who was an allergist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital and a CIA consultant to Edgewood Arsenal's Paperclip scientists"...
 
.. "In 1949 and 1950, [Dr. Frank Olson] worked briefly on "Operation Harness," a joint US-British effort to spray virulent organisms -- so-called BW antipersonnel agents -- around the Caribbean, decimating untold thousands of plants and animals. At the time of his death, Olson was developing a new, portable, and more lethal form of anthrax that could be put into a small spray can."
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Chase.html  

[Jenny Lake]

Isn't this what the ColdWar was really about?

In a speech before the National Alumni Conference at Princeton University on April 10, 1953, newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles lectured his audience on "how sinister the battle for men's minds had become in Soviet hands." The human mind, Dulles warned, was a "malleable tool," and the Red Menace had secretly developed "brain perversion techniques." Some of these methods were "so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them." Dulles continued, "The minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment ... are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts. Parrot-like, the individuals so conditioned can merely repeat the thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside. In effect the brain ... becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control." http://www.naderlibrary.com/aciddreams. ... climax.htm

 
The Macy Foundation

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation was created in New York City in 1930 to ``support scientific investigations of the fundamental aspects of health.'' This Macy family is not connected to the famous department store family, but is an old Nantucket whaling and clipper ship clan that made early investments in the oil industry. In 1872, the Macys' Long Island Oil Company became part of the growing Standard Oil empire of John D. Rockefeller.

When the Macys set up their foundation, they were actually creating an arm's-length proprietary for the Rockefeller Foundation. The new foundation's security clearance was established by its first executive secretary, Brig. Gen. Marlborough Churchill. A distant relation of Winston Churchill's family, the general had commanded the military intelligence division of the U.S. Army during the last year of World War|I, and on into the immediate postwar period. In this assignment, Churchill worked with ``The Enquiry,'' the extra-legal intelligence entity created by Col. Edwin House, President Woodrow Wilson's notorious aide...

 
At the end of World War II, the Macy Foundation set up a project to create a theoretical model of extreme stress, especially taking into account the psychosomatic ``feedback overload'' which appeared to cause many shell shock cases. To that end, the foundation organized a conference group on ``Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,'' putting clinicians together with mathematicians, sociologists, and economists. From the very first meeting in 1946, it was clear that the group was designed to accomplish great things: If one could create a model of a physiological system through which information is received from the environment, processed, and then fed back to change that environment, then, perhaps, it were possible to model the human mind itself--especially if one used the computational machines then being developed. The group became devoted to the premise, later stated by one of the founding members, John von Neumann, that the human nervous system is really just ``an efficiently organized, large natural automaton,'' which is therefore subject to deterministic, linear mathematical modelling.

Here Macy and Tavistock saw the possibility of social control on a gigantic scale! The ability to make machines act like humans, and the ability to treat humans as machines--the final accomplishment of H.G. Wells's old Fabian goal of a ``scientific world order'' where everything is as neat as a differential equation, and unpredictable things such as human creativity never mess things up. With this new and much broader mission, the Macy group changed its name; founder Norbert Wiener coined a new word, ``cybernetics,'' from the Greek word for ``helmsman,'' and they became the Conference on Cybernetics.

Incidentally, today's overused prefix ``cyber-,'' as in cyber-sex, cyber-banking, etc. all comes from this original Macy Foundation usage. Literally all of what we now know as ``information theory'' has its roots in these Macy researches.

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/macy.htm

 

Sidney Gottlieb (aka Joseph Scheider)

...with Gottlieb's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought...

...Gottlieb was a man of darkness. He sponsored research by the infamous Dr Ewen Cameron, a world famous shrink who had clinic in Montreal at McGill where he dosed unwitting subjects (who had entered voluntarily for psychiatric treatment) with huge jolts of electricity through their brains, plus drugs plus lobotomies. Many people had their lives thus destroyed in Cameron's research, financed by Gottlieb and also by the Rockefeller Foundation. Cameron invented a particularly ghastly process called "psychic driving" whereby drugged and shocked patients, whom Cameron believed he had wiped clean of their previous personalities, would have tapes played sixteen hours a day, dictating their new personalities.

...Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell's center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell's patients.

...Gottlieb saw himself as part of the operational wing of the CIA. Even the forays into LSD research, Gottlieb saw a testing for a potential chemical warfare weapon. He arranged a contract with Eli Lily to produce synthetic LSD "in tonnage quantities." The aim was to have enough acid to incapacitate large populations and armies.

http://www.counterpunch.org/gottlieb.html  

[Jenny Lake]

...and the Bomb?  ---still scary after all these years

July 16, 2010

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro took his warning of impending nuclear war to Cuba's Foreign Ministry on Friday, where he explained the reasons for his dire prediction in his fifth public appearance in 10 days.
Castro's sudden re-emergence after four years in seclusion has raised questions about what it all means. But his message has been consistent -- a devastating war is at hand if the United States, in alliance with Israel, tries to enforce international sanctions against Iran for its nuclear activities.
He also has predicted the United States will attack North Korea.
...Castro disappeared from public view following emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and ceded power to his younger brother, now President Raul Castro.
He resurfaced on July 7 at a scientific research center in Havana and has since made several appearances in person and in a videotaped television interview.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100716/ts_ ... stro_fidel

[Jenny Lake]

Bohr and Frankfurter

"Bohr lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1921 (now known as the Niels Bohr Institute). For many years he had been one of the most respected physicists in the world, and he had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 for his work on the structure of the atom (Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity, pg. 171, 214-215).

In Jan. 1939 Bohr embarked on a four month stay in the United States as a visiting professor. Shortly before sailing for the U.S. he learned of the successful uranium fission experiment that had been conducted in Germany in Dec. 1938. Bohr brought the exciting news to the U.S., and in 1939 the physics world revolved around nuclear fission.

Bohr became one of the key fission researchers, determining in 1939 that the rare U-235 isotope was the isotope that made uranium fissionable and which made a chain reaction theoretically possible. But because U-235 comprised less than 1% of uranium and was so difficult to separate from the rest of the uranium, he felt an atomic bomb could not be made in the near future. "It would take the entire efforts of a country to make a bomb", Bohr explained to his colleagues (quoted by Barton Bernstein in Helen Hawkins, G. Allen Greg, and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, editors, Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control, pg. xxix). Even Bohr could not have known that something like that would soon occur. (For an excellent account of how Bohr spread the news of fission to the U.S., see Roger Stuewer, Bringing the News of Fission to America, Physics Today, Oct. 1985).

In April of 1940 the Nazis occupied Denmark. This put Bohr at great risk, for altho he was not a religious man, his mother was Jewish.." http://www.doug-long.com/bohr.htm

Bohr's mother was named Adler --daughter of (British/Danish banker)D.B. Adler and J. Raphael of the international banking Raphaels. His maternal uncle Marcus Rubin, as a national bank chairman, stowed the funds of the World Zionist Organization in Denmark before WWI.

 

Bohr traveled to the US after winning his 1922 Nobel and was befriended by Felix Frankfurter at Harvard. Frankfurter was a Harvard Law professor from 1914-1939 and became a Supreme Court Justice from 1939 to 1962, and while F.D.Roosevelt was alive, F.F. was a close friend and advisor.

...Bohr laid out in some detail the need for sharing the atomic secret with the Soviet Union before making use of it...Thus Bohr seems to have considered the existence of the atomic bomb a welcome instrument by which "to enforce the understanding of the unity of mankind" as he had expressed it...

Churchill wrote, "Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes...[because of] Bohr's sharing of the secret of the atomic bomb with Frankfurter, who was not formally cleared for this information...considered a treacherous act."

Roosevelt thus stated that he and Churchill saw the atom bomb as a means for policing the world when the war was over...   http://mmf.ruc.dk/~booss/mathwar/BookFi ... 99-311.pdf  

Bohr and his son joined the Manhattan Project in 1943.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Very interesting material on Bohr Jenny.  Especially Churchill's quote on Frankfurter...