On this Day: Truman announces Stalin has the bomb

According to Spies, it is “reasonably certain” that these spies changed history, particularly because they gave atomic weapons to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin rather than “one of his less aggressive successors.” [Historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes] estimated that the stolen information allowed the Soviets to acquire atomic weapons 2-4 years sooner than they otherwise would have. Stalin died in October 1952, roughly two years after the first successful Soviet atomic bomb was detonated in August 1949.

On this day (September 23) in 1949 President Truman made a startling announcement to the American people and the world. A History Channel report summarized the president’s statement to the media:

“We have evidence,” the statement read, “within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” The president attempted to downplay the seriousness of the event by noting that “The eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.”

The InfluenceWatch report on the FBI has two extensive sections explaining the role of Soviet spies in the United States who helped Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin steal bomb building secrets and what that really meant for the history of humanity:

Atomic-Bomb Secrets

Soviet espionage agents used the code name “Enormous” to refer to their ultimately successful effort to steal American atomic bomb research. According to historians Klehr and Haynes, writing in Spies, the Soviets did not receive “definitive word” of the existence of the Manhattan Project until March 1942.

In a 2017 interview, historian John Earl Haynes said that until 1944, Soviet spies working for the KGB experienced “barren years” in their attempts to turn an American source with access to Manhattan Project secrets. During the same period, according to Haynes, the GRU had only slightly better success with modest sources in George Koval and Clarence Hiskey.

Koval, according to Klehr and Haynes, had been a GRU asset since the 1930s. Koval was never suspected to be a spy while he was working on the atomic-bomb project, and he left before the Soviets acquired their first bomb. Klehr and Haynes wrote that the available evidence shows Koval’s value as an atomic spy has been “inflated” by the post-Soviet GRU and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then repeated by a “credulous” American press.

Citing the research of their co-author, former KGB officer Vassiliev, Klehr and Haynes wrote that at the FBI’s “instigation” there were “several scientists” exposed as Manhattan Project security risks and removed from the program. They were often not prosecuted because the FBI acted quickly on reasonable suspicion and did not wait until it could prove a case in court. John Earl Haynes explained:

Counterintelligence people are not really interested in arresting and prosecuting people. I mean, they do that, but they’re chiefly interested in trying to stop secrets from being lost. Their highest priority is not waiting until they have enough evidence for a criminal case. As soon as they have serious suspicions, they get rid of the person, so that if we’re losing secrets, this will stop it.

Examples of these atomic bomb security investigations include the cases of scientists Joseph Weinberg and Clarence Hiskey, and that of KGB officer Grigory Kheifets.

Joseph Weinberg

The FBI’s first successful interdiction of a Manhattan Project security threat occurred before the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and most everyone else even knew the bomb project existed.

The Bureau’s de-emphasis on Soviet espionage did not prevent it from noticing Steve Nelson, a California Communist Party leader. The FBI placed Nelson under surveillance in 1940, and then added a wiretap on his phone in February 1942. In March 1943, Nelson’s wife picked up the phone and — along with the FBI — heard a fellow CPUSA member named Joseph Weinberg tell her that he had an urgent matter he needed to discuss with Nelson.

Weinberg was a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a student of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project. Weinberg was scheduled to take a new position at the secret atomic-bomb research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico. At the ensuing meeting between Nelson and Weinberg, the FBI agents heard a discussion about the bomb, the project to build it, Oppenheimer, and planning for future contact between Weinberg and Nelson regarding these matters. The following day, the FBI followed Nelson to a meeting with a Soviet diplomat later identified as a GRU military intelligence officer.

Hoover reported the Weinberg matter to the White House and soon learned of the existence of the Manhattan Project. The FBI created two new counterintelligence projects with 125 dedicated agents to counteract Soviet espionage. One was CINRAD (Communist Infiltration of Radiation Laboratory), and its priority was protecting secrets rather than gathering enough evidence to make arrests. Klehr and Haynes wrote: “Their goal was to prevent any unauthorized leak from occurring, not to catch a spy after the deed was done.”

Weinberg’s contact with Nelson was reported to Oppenheimer. Weinberg was neither arrested nor accused of espionage, but he never worked on the Manhattan Project.

Grigory Kheifets

Following the Weinberg incident in March 1943, FBI agents were conscious of the need for coverage in the San Francisco Bay area, due to the Manhattan Project researchers working in Berkeley, California.

Grigory Kheifets was a KGB agent working under legal cover as a diplomat at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. His status as a spy was discovered at some point in 1943 by the FBI and U.S. military security. Though his diplomatic immunity protected him from arrest and prosecution, Kheifets was placed under heavy surveillance. Kheifets never caught on to the redundant teams of American counterintelligence agents competing against each other to tail him closely. He was recalled to Moscow in August 1944 by frustrated superiors unhappy with this lack of progress in finding sources to pass him atomic-bomb secrets.

Kheifets believed he had found such a source in July 1944, shortly before his recall. With undercover FBI agents trying to secretly listen in from a nearby table, Kheifets and Grigory Kasparov, another KGB agent, met for lunch with Martin Kamen. Kamen was a scientist employed at the Manhattan Project facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and a member of the CPUSA. Kamen was also an associate of a woman (also a CPUSA member) with whom Kheifets was romantically involved. Through this mutual friend, Kamen passed word that he was willing to give “scientific” information to the Soviet Union.

Despite the noise in the restaurant obscuring the conversation, the FBI agents did discern a discussion regarding radiation and atomic research and witnessed Kamen passing documents to the KGB agents. In congressional testimony years later, Kamen claimed the documents pertained only to nuclear medicine advances and had nothing to do with his access to atomic bomb research.

Historians Klehr and Haynes wrote that the Soviet archives on the incident provide no evidence to contradict Kamen’s claim or establish an intent on his part to give up bomb secrets in the future. But from the KGB side of the relationship, it was clear they were hoping to cultivate Kamen as an atomic spy. In his debrief after returning to Moscow, Kheifets wrote a glowing report about the discovery of Kamen and the American scientist’s potential as a source. Kheifits also provided advice on how his KGB successor in San Francisco, Kasparov, could further the KGB relationship with Kamen.

Summarizing the incident, Klehr and Haynes wrote: “A scientist who met privately with Soviet diplomats, particularly KGB officers, and was motivated by pro-Soviet fervor to give them advanced technological information, even if it was unclassified, had acted in an irresponsible fashion and was a security risk.”

Kaman was fired from his work with the Manhattan Project ten days after the FBI listened in on his meeting with Kheifets and Kasparov.

Kasparov replaced Kheifets as the KGB officer in San Francisco charged with cultivating potential sources for atomic-bomb secrets. From at least the moment he sat down for lunch with Kaman, however, he was clearly known to the FBI as a KGB officer under diplomatic cover. Whether or not the exposure of Kasparov was known to the KGB, the Soviets soon transferred him to Mexico City. Soviet records show that he was replaced by a KGB agent who had less interest in stealing scientific secrets and more interest in political espionage.

Clarence Hiskey

In March 1942, Clarence Hiskey, a former CPUSA member working as a scientist at a Manhattan Project facility, met a former CPUSA associate for lunch. Possibly not realizing this friend was an American courier for the KGB, Hiskey shared detailed information about the atomic bomb and its potential. The KGB courier had never heard of atomic weapons and doubted what seemed at the time to be an outrageous story, but passed the information to his KGB handlers.

His report was one of two that arrived in the same week, giving Soviet intelligence its first warning that an atomic bomb was being jointly developed by the United States and the United Kingdom. The KGB began an aggressive, but unsuccessful two-year effort to recruit Hiskey as a source of atomic-bomb secrets.

The KGB failed because Hiskey was successfully recruited by Arthur Adams, a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) officer working undercover from Canada. As a matter of security and perhaps paranoia, the GRU and the KGB frequently refused to divulge their American assets to one another during this period. Klehr and Haynes wrote that Hiskey likely rebuffed the KGB approaches under orders to do so from his GRU handler.

By 1944, the FBI became aware of Adams’ activities and placed him under surveillance. In April 1944, the FBI witnessed a meeting between Adams and Hiskey, and it subsequently alerted military security overseeing the Manhattan Project. Army security arranged for Hiskey, then a reserve officer in the US Army not on active duty, to be called up to active duty and deployed to a remote base in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Hiskey remained unaware of the true reason for his sudden deployment, and he subsequently forwarded two other scientific colleagues to meet with Adams. His GRU handler was also heedless of the FBI tail or that Hiskey had been exposed. Both of Hiskey’s friends were turned over to Army security, questioned about Adams, and prevented from working on the atomic bomb research.

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Rosenberg Atomic Spy Ring

In August 1949, the FBI forwarded to British counterintelligence Venona decryptions identifying British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs as a Soviet spy. Fuchs had been sent by the British to assist directly on the Manhattan Project and returned to Britain in 1944. Considered a very gifted theoretical physicist, Fuchs was also a loyal communist. His knowledge of American atomic secrets extended to the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb.

British intelligence ultimately detained and interrogated Fuchs for weeks, leading to his confession in late January 1950. An FBI report on his confession summarized the damage he had done: “Fuchs knew as much about the hydrogen bomb as any American scientist; therefore Russia knows.”

On September 20, 1949, four months before Fuchs confessed, a CIA report predicted the Soviet atomic-bomb project would not succeed for another four years. The Soviets had already obtained an atomic bomb by this point, a development announced by President Truman three days after the faulty CIA report was issued. Six years later, in November 1955, the Soviets detonated their first hydrogen bomb.

FBI files on Fuchs extended back to the end of World War II and included evidence of his communist connections. The incriminating information had been ignored due to what J. Edgar Hoover criticized as “slip shod methods” by an FBI agent who had been dismissed. The agent, William K. Harvey, was a heavy drinker who subsequently joined the CIA and had a far more successful, yet still personally complicated, career.

The FBI interrogated Fuchs in May 1950. He divulged the name of Soviet agent Harry Gold, his direct contact while in the United States.

Gold had also previously been identified in the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and had been questioned by the FBI three years earlier. The Bureau detained Gold on the same day that he was identified by Fuchs. Under FBI interrogation, Gold revealed the name of Manhattan Project employee David Greenglass, a Communist and the younger brother of Ethel Rosenberg, another CPUSA member, and wife of Julius Rosenberg.

Julius Rosenberg was both a recruiter of atomic spies and a courier transferring their secrets to the Soviets. A report filed by his Soviet handler later revealed Rosenberg had provided important and sensitive atomic documents, including the design for the atomic bomb’s proximity fuse. Historians have questioned the degree to which Ethel Rosenberg participated in her husband’s espionage.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were subsequently questioned and then arrested by the FBI. Both were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. They were executed in June 1953.

Greenglass and Gold both served prison sentences for their roles in the Rosenberg spy ring and were released (respectively) in 1960 and 1965. Fuchs was incarcerated by the British for his offenses and moved to communist East Germany after serving a nine-year prison sentence.

According to historians Klehr and Haynes, writing in Spies, multiple rings of spies delivered approximately ten thousand pages of technical information, which led to a “huge savings in time and resources for the Soviet bomb program.”

According to Spies, it is “reasonably certain” that these spies changed history, particularly because they gave atomic weapons to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin rather than “one of his less aggressive successors.” The historians estimated that the stolen information allowed the Soviets to acquire atomic weapons 2-4 years sooner than they otherwise would have. Stalin died in October 1952, roughly two years after the first successful Soviet atomic bomb was detonated in August 1949.

In an interview, Haynes said:

All the different ways you could possibly do it, we did it first. The Soviets learned from espionage what worked and what didn’t work. All of the blind alleys that we went down, they didn’t have to go down. They were able to carry out their project at only a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the time, and a fraction of the manpower that ours had. If there had been no espionage, certainly, the Soviets would have developed a bomb in time. But because of espionage, they developed it much faster and much cheaper.

For further information on Soviet espionage within the USA, please see the InfluenceWatch profiles of the FBI and the Communist Party USA.