The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (47 page)

 
 
IN 1995, IT was publicly disclosed that the FBI had secretly collected coded telegrams sent from the Soviet consulate in New York during the Second World War. The so-called Venona Project only began decoding these cables in 1946, when resources became available. The messages revealed not only the extent of the Soviet spies’ penetration of the Manhattan Project, but also the Soviet recruitment of American espionage agents from the very highest reaches of government. Less than half of the Soviet code names were ever discovered as named individuals, but among them, 349 American agents were revealed to be working for Stalin. Given that only a small percentage of the Soviet cables were ever decoded, the actual number of agents was likely to be higher. But because of the need to maintain the confidentiality of this source, the existence of the Venona Project was kept secret, and its evidence was never used in a courtroom prosecution. Had the decryptions been admissible, much of the legal and journalistic wrangling over the guilt or supposed innocence of controversial figures such as Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenberg would have been cut like the Gordian knot.
³¹

The Venona decryptions served as confirmation for what was already known at the time. As early as September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, a former American Communist Party member and Soviet military intelligence agent, gave a long interview to Adolf Berle, the assistant secretary of state, revealing the names of several Soviet agents working inside the State Department and other branches of the U.S. government, including Alger Hiss and his brother, Donald. According to Chambers’ account, Adolf Berle immediately passed this information on to Roosevelt’s secretary, but Berle had been unable to take seriously the notion that the “Hiss boys” were planning to “take over the United States’ government.”
³²
And no one prevented Alger Hiss from traveling to Yalta as the State Department leading strategist to President Roosevelt. Sitting five feet from Stalin, Hiss had passed handwritten notes to the ailing and increasingly forgetful American president. He was one of at least six confirmed Soviet sources working within the State Department.
³³

Also named by Chambers in 1939 was Henry Morgenthau’s assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White, whose career in government would continue for another decade. White’s influence over American foreign policy was considerable, including his recommendation of a ten-billion-dollar loan to Stalin, and his authorship of the “Morgenthau Plan,” advocating the partition and deindustrialization of Germany after the war. Eventually White was promoted to become the director of the International Monetary Fund. In August 1948, days after denying espionage in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Harry Dexter White suffered a heart attack and died.
³⁴

Four months later, White’s colleague at the State Department Lawrence Duggan, having been questioned by the FBI on charges of espionage, fell sixteen floors from a Manhattan skyscraper. The former acting secretary of state Sumner Welles had always maintained Duggan’s integrity as his protégé.
³⁵
While Welles praised Duggan in public, privately he wrote that “there was not the slightest motive for suicide in his case . . . He is certainly the last man on earth whom one could think to have wished to take his life.” Three days after attending Duggan’s funeral, Sumner Welles was himself discovered unconscious and frostbitten beside a stream on his private estate in Maryland. The author of the Atlantic Charter had lain there all night and was found the next day close to death. The American public had no knowledge of why Sumner Welles had been forced to resign in 1943—Roosevelt had attempted to keep secret the affidavits of the Pullman porters of the presidential train to whom Welles had drunkenly offered escalating sums of money for sex. But the scandal of Welles’ erratic behavior became widely known in Washington, and the Truman Committee reported rumors of “
various demands being made by Russia and that Russia had Welles sewed up . . . Russia knew about Welles having been caught in these acts.
”
³⁶

After he was pulled from the stream unconscious, Sumner Welles spent several months in the hospital recovering from tissue and nerve damage. Later he claimed not to remember the circumstances of the accident, but many remained unconvinced. The American reporter Jay Franklin wrote in his column of January 4, 1949:
“The death of Larry Duggan was followed shortly after by the discovery of his friend and sponsor, Sumner Welles, lying half-frozen in a Maryland field . . . It requires a heroic degree of self-control not to speculate as to whether—just as with Larry Duggan—there is not more to the tragic accident than the outward appearances.”
It seemed unlikely that Soviet intelligence would miss such a straightforward opportunity for blackmail. Alcohol addiction, suicide attempts, and depression would haunt Sumner Welles for the remainder of his life. Such was the fate of the former acting secretary of state, whose face had once graced the cover of
Time
magazine. On Welles’ shoulders had rested the slender hopes for rescue of all the American emigrants in Russia.
³⁷

 
 
DURING THE CONGRESSIONAL hearings of December 1949, Major Robert Jordan testified that in 1943 he had inspected a Soviet Lend-Lease plane at Great Falls airport, in Montana, that had been filled with black patent-leather suitcases sealed with white cord and red wax and marked “diplomatic.” Working at night with a flashlight in the hold of the aircraft, Major Jordan pulled detailed scientific information from the suitcases. From one case opened at random, his eye had been caught by a piece of stationery marked THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON. At the top of the second page of a letter addressed to Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet commissar of foreign trade, he copied the words “- - - - - had a hell of a time getting these away from Groves.” The letter was signed by Harry Hopkins and was attached to a thick map, which Jordan unfolded into a technical drawing larger than his extended arms in size. The drawing was stamped with the notice OAK RIDGE, MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT, and included documentation marked with the name HARRY HOPKINS. The top-secret scientific language of the report was unfamiliar to Major Jordan, but he carefully noted the words “cyclotron . . . proton . . . deutron,” and another unusual phrase: “uranium 92.”
³⁸
The Soviet plane was one of a regular series of flights carrying identical cargos of diplomatic suitcases out of Great Falls airport. The following month, according to Jordan’s testimony, Harry Hopkins had telephoned to authorize a shipment of uranium to the USSR “off the records” but sent through the channels of the Lend-Lease program.
³⁹

During the Second World War, neither Harry Hopkins’ loyalty nor his authority could be questioned. Who could doubt the integrity of the right hand of the president, who had an office and a bedroom at the White House, whom Roosevelt sent on his most confidential missions to the Soviet Union? Throughout the wartime alliance, Hopkins had never shied from expressing his wholehearted sympathy for the Soviet government. In a public speech at Madison Square Garden, he proclaimed:
“We are determined that nothing
shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have . . . Generations unborn will owe a great measure of their freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people.
” And privately he advised the vice president, Henry Wallace, “Henry, don’t let anybody tell you that the Russians are against their regime.”
⁴⁰

In the face of Major Jordan’s evidence, Hopkins’ friends defended him, claiming he had not “the faintest understanding of the Manhattan Project, and didn’t know the difference between uranium and a geranium.”
⁴¹
Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky reveal how he had attended a lecture at the Lubyanka given by Iskhak Akhmerov, the controller of Soviet intelligence in America during the war. To his KGB colleagues, Akhmerov identified the “most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” as Harry Hopkins.
⁴²

At Potsdam, when President Truman revealed to Stalin the secret of the atomic bomb, the Soviet dictator took what was surely intended as a surprise with the calm shrug of old news. Both Churchill and Truman suspected that Stalin had failed to understand the true significance of what he had just been told, since he expressed no curiosity and asked no further questions. It did not occur to either of them that the reason for this unnatural lack of inquisitiveness was simply that Stalin had no questions left to ask. The NKVD had successfully delivered the secrets of the Manhattan Project, with “atomic spies” from a number of sources passing a steady flow of scientific data from the United States back to Moscow.
⁴³

Even with the most detailed American technical plans and the resources of the entire Soviet state, it would take Stalin another four years to duplicate the atomic bomb. In the meantime, in anticipation of an imminent war with the “imperialist powers,” it soon became apparent that Stalin had taken some countermeasures of his own. And thus, a third generation of Americans was transferred into the Gulag camps.

23

“Citizen of the United States of
America, Allied Officer Dale”

 
 
 
The year 1949 was like any other in Magadan, with summary execu-tions continuing in the camps. In one scene, German prisoners of war looked on as the Russian prisoners were lined up and thirteen were ordered to step forward. A German survivor described what happened next: “Most of these Russians were immediately clubbed to death with crowbars, the rest finally shot with pistols. This took place in front of all men.” In December 1949, during an indoctrination session, a Soviet MVD officer told these German prisoners that many of them would be released
“to make room for American prisoners-of-war who soon would fill the camps.”
²

In the late 1990s, the United States government published a report that drew upon the evidence of a former Gulag prisoner initially identified as “Witness A.” Later the prisoner’s name was revealed to be Benjamin Dodon. In the summer of 1948, Dodon wrote that he had seen a group of American prisoners arrive at the Magadan transfer point in the Bay of Nagaev. Fourteen men were disembarked in the usual helpless condition of Dalstroi transportees: exhausted by the long sea crossing, hungry, cold, and disoriented. He could not remember any one face in particular, since they all appeared to be “uniformly lifeless.” There was little opportunity to communicate with them, since one night they were “taken off to the depths of Kolyma, into the abyss of its vastness.”
³
Elsewhere in the Gulag, another contemporary Russian witness reported having seen a similar column of prisoners, half-frozen in threadbare clothes, driven forward like cattle by their NKVD guards. Unable to speak Russian, these men could only repeat “American, American,” and “eat, eat.”
⁴

Three years later, in January 1951, Benjamin Dodon was flown out to the island of Dikson, in Siberia, approximately north of the Arctic Circle in the Kara Sea. An emergency had occurred at a mine next to the Rybak Gulag camp, and as a qualified engineer, Dodon was enlisted to repair the damage. In response to his request for an experienced “pyrotechnic and demolition specialist,” Dodon was brought a prisoner whom he described as
“tall, exhausted by hunger and the Arctic, with a very characteristic, slightly elongated artistic face with an unnatural protrusion of gray eyes in sockets sunken from emaciation.”
In a Russian accent “clearly that of an English-speaker” the prisoner identified himself as
“a citizen of the United States of America, Allied Officer Dale.”

Working in the mine under the surveillance of the guards, Dodon had been unable to talk freely with Officer Dale. Before entering this closed zone, he had been strictly forbidden to communicate with any prisoners he met there. Six days later, Dodon was flown back to Dikson and informed that he had been working in a uranium mine in an area used for the testing of nuclear weapons. Returned to Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, the engineer was required to sign a secrecy agreement covering all he had seen or heard at Rybak. Confidentially, a fellow camp survivor told him that many of the Americans “who had fallen into our hands in 1945 from the liberated Fascist camps” were being held there.
⁵

Nor did his sightings of American prisoners end there. After Dodon was transferred to work in a gold-prospecting brigade in the Krasnoyarsk region, he met a radio operator who had worked on a fishing trawler of the Far East fleet. The radio operator told him they had recently received a message ordering all ships in the area to search for a shot-down American plane. No survivors were found, and the following week it was announced that the plane’s crew had perished. Two months later, however, the trawler’s captain told the radio operator privately that the American crew had been picked up alive and was being held in pretrial solitary confinement in the city of Svobodnyi, near the Chinese border. When asked what would happen to them, the captain replied they would be squeezed for “what is required” and then “finished off.” Straight from the trains, the captain said, men had been killed in Svobodnyi “like nothing at all.”

After his release from his sentence, Benjamin Dodon gathered one final piece of news on the fate of the missing American aircrew. The information came from a former Dalstroi official who told him that although ten Americans had been captured alive,
“the guys from within worked them over so badly only eight were taken to Svobodnyi. Do you know what sort of arrogance they had? They were Americans! You understand!”
Later, from another former official, Dodon learned the names of two Americans from the plane’s crew, “Bush and Moore,” who would “remain forever in the soil of the Khabarovsk Region.”
⁶