The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets
‘A superbly researched and groundbreaking account of Soviet espionage in the Thirties … remarkable’ 5* review, TelegraphOn the trail of Soviet infiltrator Agent Blériot, in this bestseller, Svetlana Lokhova takes the reader on a thrilling journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation.On a sunny September day in 1931, a Soviet spy walked down the gangplank of the luxury transatlantic liner SS Europa and into New York. Attracting no attention, Stanislav Shumovsky had completed his journey from Moscow to enrol at a top American university. He was concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students heading to prestigious academic institutions. But he was after far more than an excellent education.Recognising Russia was 100 years behind the encircling capitalist powers, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sent Shumovsky on a mission to acquire America’s vital secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. The road to victory began in the classrooms and laboratories of MIT – Shumovsky’s destination soon became the unwitting finishing school for elite Russian spies. The USSR first transformed itself into a military powerhouse able to confront and defeat Nazi Germany. Then in an extraordinary feat that astonished the West, in 1947 American ingenuity and innovation exfiltrated by Shumovsky made it possible to build and unveil the most advanced strategic bomber in the world.Following his lead, other MIT-trained Soviet spies helped acquire the secrets of the Manhattan Project. By 1949, Stalin’s fleet of TU-4s, now equipped with atomic bombs could devastate the US on his command. Appropriately codenamed BLÉRIOT, Shumovsky was an aviation spy. Shumovsky’s espionage was so successful that the USSR acquired every US aviation secret from his network of agents in factories and at top secret military research institutes.In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the reader on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation. She pieces together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives, exposing how even Shirley Temple and Franklin D. Roosevelt unwittingly advanced his schemes.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Svetlana Lokhova 2018
Cover images © Shutterstock
Stalin photography & planes © Alamy Images
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Svetlana Lokhova asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Maps by Martin Brown
All photographs are from the author’s private collection or are in the public domain, except for: here, here and here, RGASPI; here, G. I. Kasabova, O vremeni, o Noril’ske, o sebe … [Of the Times, Of Norilsk, Of Myself …], Moscow: PoliMedia, 2001; here, Belorussian State Archive; here, Krasnaya kniga VChK [Red Book of the VChK]; here, courtesy Bennett Family Archive; here, in N. S. Babayev and Yu. S. Ustinov, Kavalery Zolotykh zvozd: Voyenachal’niki. Uchonyye. Konstruktory. Lidery, Moscow: Patriot, 2001; here, mil.ru (CC BY 4.0); here, Sputnik Images. While every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.
Source ISBN: 9780008238117
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008238124
Version: 2018-07-02
To my father for his unending love, help and support.
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Preface
1 ‘Son of the Working People’
2 ‘We Catch Up or They Will Crush Us’
3 ‘What the Country Needs is a Real Big Laugh’
4 ‘Agent 001’
5 ‘A Nice Fellow to Talk To’
6 ‘Is This Really My Motherland?’
7 ‘Questionable from Conception’
8 ‘The Wily Armenian’
9 Whistle Stop Inspections
10 Glory to Stalin’s Falcons
11 Back in the USSR
12 Project ‘AIR’
13 ENORMOZ
14 Mission Accomplished
Post-scriptum
Appendix I: Biography of Stanislav Shumovsky
Appendix II: NKVD and FBI Reports on Stanislav Shumovsky
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
In 1931, Joseph Stalin announced, ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us’.>1These words began a race to close the yawning technology gap between the Soviet Union and the leading capitalist countries. The prize at stake was nothing less than the survival of the USSR. Believing that fleets of enemy bombers spraying poison gas would soon appear in the undefended skies over Russia’s cities, and amid predictions that millions would die from inhaling the deadly toxins, Stalin sent two intelligence officers – an aviation expert and a chemical weapons specialist – on a mission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He ordered them to gather the secrets of this centre of aeronautics and chemical weapon research and bring them back to the Soviet Union, along with the means to defend his population against the new terror weapons of modern warfare.
The results of this mission would change the tide of history and lead the KGB to acknowledge that after this first operation ‘the West was a constant and irreplaceable source of acquiring new technologies’ for the USSR.>2 After 1931, the Soviets would use scientific and technological intelligence, particularly in the field of aviation, to protect itself against its enemies, culminating in the defeat of Nazi Germany and, thanks to later espionage, helping tilt the global balance of power into an uneasy equilibrium. While both sides possessed weapons of equally massive destructive power, the Cold War did not become a hot war.
Ironically, America was the source of both sides’ nuclear armouries. US agencies later termed the haemorrhage of sophisticated technology to the USSR as ‘piracy’ and tried unsuccessfully to staunch the flow of secrets. In the Soviet Union, the savings resulting from this technical espionage would eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars and be included in official state defence and economic planning.
The experts in the 1930s were half right in their predictions about the future of warfare. By 1945 a nation’s power was determined by the strength of its strategic bombing capability. But the invulnerable high-altitude aircraft were not armed with poison gas. They carried a weapon of far greater destructive power: the atomic bomb. Undreamed of in 1931, this terrifying new device would prove devastatingly more potent a killer than poison gas. In 1945 a single bomb dropped from one plane killed over a hundred thousand people, and one country held a monopoly on this power: the United States.
