|
ESPIONAGE AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
(1940-1945)
Events >
Bringing It All Together, 1942-1945
Security was a way of life for the Manhattan Project. The goal was
to keep the entire atomic bomb program secret from Germany and Japan.
In this, Manhattan Project security
officials succeeded. They also sought, however, to keep word
of the atomic bomb from reaching the Soviet Union. Although an ally of
Britain and the United States in the war against Germany, the Soviet Union
remained a repressive dictatorship and a potential future enemy.
Here, security officials were less successful. Soviet spies
penetrated the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and several other locations,
sending back to Russia critical information that helped speed the
development of the Soviet bomb.
The
theoretical possibility of developing an atomic bomb was not a
secret. Fission had
been discovered in Berlin, and word of the breakthrough had spread
quickly around the world. The scientific basis for a sustained, or
even explosive, chain reaction
was now clear to any well-versed research physicist. Most physicists
initially may have thought an explosive chain reaction unlikely, but the
possibility could not be entirely discounted.
With an atomic bomb program of its own,
Germany attempted to build a large spy network within the United
States. Most German spies were quickly caught, however, and none
penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project.
German physicists heard rumors and suspected an atomic bomb project was
underway in Britain, the United States, or both, but that was all.
Japan also had a modest atomic research
program. Rumors of the Manhattan Project reached Japan as
well, but, as with Germany, no Japanese spies penetrated the Manhattan
Project.
The
Soviet Union proved more adept at espionage, primarily because it was able
to play on the ideological sympathies of a significant number of Americans
and British as well as foreign émigrés. Soviet intelligence services
devoted a tremendous amount of resources into spying on the United States
and Britain. In the United States alone, hundreds of Americans
provided secret information to the Soviet Union, and the quality of Soviet
sources in Britain was even better. (In contrast, during the war
neither the American nor the British secret services had a single agent in
Moscow.) The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)
had thousands of members, a disproportionate number of whom were highly
educated and likely to work in sensitive wartime industries. Many
physicists were members of the CPUSA before the war. This does not
mean that every member of the CPUSA was willing to supply secret information
to the Soviet Union, but some were and some did.
Soviet
intelligence first learned of Anglo-American talk of an atomic bomb program
in September 1941, almost a year before the Manhattan
Engineer District (MED) was created. The information likely
came from John Cairncross, a member of the
infamous "Cambridge Five" spies in Britain. (Cairncross
served as a private secretary for a British government official, Lord Hankey, who was privy to some British discussions of
the MAUD Report.) Another
of the "Cambridge Five," Donald Maclean (left), also sent word of
the potential for an atomic bomb to his Soviet handlers around the same
time. (Maclean was a key Soviet agent. In 1947 and 1948, he
served as a British liaison with the MED's
successor, the Atomic Energy Commission.) At the same time, the
sudden drop in fission-related publications emerging from Britain and the
United States caught the attention of Georgii Flerov, a young Soviet physicist,
who in April 1942 wrote directly to Josef Stalin to warn him of the
danger.
Soviet intelligence soon recognized the importance of
the subject and gave it the appropriate codename: ENORMOZ
("enormous"). Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow
pressured their various American residencies to develop sources within the
Manhattan Project. Many of these early attempts at recruiting spies were
detected and foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
Manhattan Project counterintelligence officials. In February 1943,
they learned of Soviet attempts to contact physicists conducting related
work at the "Rad Lab" at the University of California, Berkeley.
The scientists in question were placed under surveillance and, when
possible, drafted into the military so that they could be assigned away
from sensitive subjects. Another scientist at the Rad
Lab caught passing information to the Soviet Union in 1944 was immediately
discharged. In early 1944, the FBI also learned of several "Met Lab" employees
suspected of divulging secret information to their Soviet handlers.
The employees were immediately dismissed. While these Soviet attempts
at espionage were discovered and thwarted, other Soviet spies went
undetected.
Of the Soviet spies not caught during the war, one of the most valuable
was the British physicist Klaus Fuchs.
Fuchs first offered his services to Soviet intelligence in late 1941. Soon
thereafter, he began passing information regarding British atomic
research. Soviet intelligence lost contact with him in early 1944 but
eventually found out that Fuchs had been reassigned to the bomb research and
development laboratory at Los Alamos as part of the newly-arrived
contingent of British scientists. Fuchs worked in the Theoretical
Division at Los Alamos, and from there he passed to his Soviet handlers detailed information regarding atomic weapons
design. Returning home to begin work on the British atomic program in
1946, he continued to pass secret information to the Soviet Union
intermittently until he was finally caught (largely due to VENONA), and in January 1950
he confessed everything.
For over four
decades, Klaus Fuchs was thought to be the only spy who was a physicist at
Los Alamos. In the mid-1990s, release of the VENONA intercepts
revealed an alleged second scientist-spy: Theodore Hall. Like Fuchs,
a long-time communist who volunteered his services, Hall made contact with
Soviet intelligence in November 1944 while at Los Alamos. Although
not as detailed or voluminous as that provided by Fuchs, the data supplied
by Hall on implosion
and other aspects of atomic weapons design served as an important
supplement and confirmation of Fuchs's material. The FBI learned of
Hall's espionage in the early 1950s. Unlike Fuchs, however, under
questioning Hall refused to admit anything. The American government was
unwilling to expose the VENONA secret in open court. Hall's espionage
activities had apparently ended by then, so the matter was quietly dropped.
The most famous "atomic
spies," Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (right), never worked for the
Manhattan Project. Julius Rosenberg was an American engineer who by
the end of the war had been heavily involved in industrial espionage for
years, both as a source himself and as the "ringleader" of a
network of like-minded engineers dispersed throughout the country.
Julius's wife, the former Ethel Greenglass, was
also a devoted communist, as was her brother David. David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of
1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a
few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion
as a member of the Special
Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding
the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it
over to Soviet intelligence. As Greenglass
later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good
Communist."
In
March 1946, Greenglass left the Army.
Soviet intelligence maintained contact with him, urging him to enroll at
the University of Chicago in order to re-enter atomic research. The NKGB
(the People's Commissary for State Security and the predecessor to the KGB)
offered to pay his tuition, but Greenglass's
application to Chicago was rejected. In 1950, the confession of Klaus
Fuchs led the FBI to his handler, Harry Gold, who in turn led the FBI to
David Greenglass. When confronted, Greenglass confessed, implicating his wife Ruth and his
brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. This was soon confirmed through
VENONA intercepts (Rosenberg was codenamed ANTENNA and LIBERAL, Ethel was
WASP, Greenglass was BUMBLEBEE and CALIBER, and
his wife Ruth was OSA). The "rolling up" of the espionage
ring stopped, however, with the Rosenbergs.
Julius and Ethel (who knew of her husband's activities and at times
assisted him) both maintained their innocence and refused to cooperate with
authorities in order to lessen their sentences. Because of his
cooperation, Greenglass received only 15 years,
and his wife, Ruth, was never formally charged. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. Authorities
apparently hoped to use the death sentences as leverage to get them to name
names, but the Rosenbergs maintained their
silence. Despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953.
At least two other scientists associated with the Manhattan Project also
served as spies for Soviet Union: Allan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo. Another British physicist who came
over with James
Chadwick in 1943, May, unlike his colleague Klaus Fuchs, was not
assigned to Los Alamos. Instead, he was chosen to assist in the
Canadian effort to construct a heavy water-moderated reactor
at Chalk River, Ontario. During 1944, May visited the Met Lab several
times. Once during these visits, he even met Leslie Groves.
In February 1945, May passed what he had learned to Soviet
intelligence. His colleague at Chalk River, Bruno Pontecorvo,
also served as a spy. Pontecorvo was a
former protégé of Enrico Fermi. In 1936, Pontecorvo, who was Jewish, fled fascist Italy for
France. When France fell to the invading Nazi armies in 1940, Pontecorvo was again forced to flee fascism. He
was invited to join British atomic research, and by 1943 he found himself
assigned to the Chalk River facility. Pontecorvo
established contact with Soviet intelligence and began passing them
information about the atomic activities there. He continued his dual
life as a physicist and a spy in Canada until 1949 when he was promoted and
moved back to Britain to join the atomic research being conducted
there. Following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo's
Soviet handlers became worried that he would be exposed, and in 1950 Pontecorvo defected with his family to the Soviet
Union. Pontecorvo continued his work as a
physicist in the Soviet Union, eventually receiving two Orders of Lenin for
his efforts, all the while continuing to deny that he had been a spy during
his years in Canada and Britain.
A number of spies within the Manhattan Project have
never been positively identified. Most are only known by their
codenames, as revealed in the VENONA decrypts. One source, an
engineer or scientist who was given the codename FOGEL (later changed to
PERSEUS), apparently worked on the fringes of the Manhattan Project for
several years, passing along what information he could. Soviet
documents state that he was offered employment at Los Alamos, but, to the
regret of his handlers, he turned it down for family reasons. Another
source, a physicist codenamed MAR, first began supplying information to the
Soviet Union in 1943. In October of that year, he was transferred to
the Hanford Engineer Works.
In another case, a stranger one day in the summer of 1944 showed up
unannounced at the Soviet Consulate in New York, dropped off a package, and
quickly left. The package was later found to contain numerous secret
documents relating to the Manhattan Project. Soviet intelligence
attempted to find out who the deliverer of the package was so that they
could recruit him. They never could, however, determine his
identity. An Englishman codenamed ERIC also provided details of
atomic research in 1943, as did an American source codenamed QUANTUM, who
provided secret information relating to gaseous
diffusion in the summer of 1943. Who QUANTUM was or what
became of him after the summer of 1943 remains a mystery.
Few aspects of the Manhattan Project
remained secret from the Soviet Union for long. Given the size of the
pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the
number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of
the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that
penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented. In
most cases, the individuals who chose to provide information to the Soviet
Union did so for ideological reasons, not for money. They were usually
volunteers who approached Soviet intelligence themselves. Further, in
most cases, they were not aware that anyone else had chosen to do the same
thing. (Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall were
all at Los Alamos at the same time, yet none of them knew of the espionage
activities of the other two.)
Soviet espionage directed at the Manhattan Project probably hastened by
at least 12-18 months the Soviet acquisition of an atomic bomb. When
the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949 (left),
the device they used was virtually identical in design to the one that had
been tested at Trinity four years
previously.
To view the next "event" of
the Manhattan Project, proceed to "1945:
Dawn of the Atomic Era."
Previous Next
Sources and notes for this page.
The text for this page is original to the
Department of Energy's Office
of History and Heritage Resources. The main sources for this
entry were:
- Christopher Andrew and Vasili
Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the
KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage
in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999);
- David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet
Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1994);
- Jeffrey T. Richelson, A
Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995); and
- Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev,
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage
in America -- the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).
For a summary of the failure of German
espionage in the United States (and in Britain), see Richelson,
Century of Spies, 139-144.
On the scope of Soviet espionage in the
United States in general, see Andrew and Mitrokhin,
Sword and Shield; Haynes and Klehr, Venona; and Weinstein and Vassiliev,
Haunted Wood.
On Cairncross as
the source of the first word on atomic energy to reach Moscow, see
Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 82-83; Andrew and Mitrokhin,
Sword and Shield, 114; and Weinstein and Vassiliev,
Haunted Wood, 172. Cairncross may
have passed word as early as October 1940; see Richelson,
Century of Spies, 136. In 1993, Cairncross
denied to the Schecters ever having passed this
information (Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred
Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History
(Washington: Brassey's, 2002), 348 (note
5)). On Maclean passing word of the atomic bomb program in the fall
of 1941, see Richelson, Century of Spies,
137. On Maclean in general, including his work with the AEC, see
Haynes and Klehr, Venona,
52-55. On the Flerov letter, see Holloway, Stalin
and the Bomb, 76-79.
On the name "ENORMOZ," see
Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield,
118. For those Soviet intelligence operations that were detected and
stopped, see Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb,
United States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military History,
United States Army, 1988), 263-266, and Haynes and Klehr,
Venona, 325-326.
For the sources consulted regarding Klaus Fuchs and Theodore
Hall, see the notes for their separate entries (Fuchs' notes; Hall's
notes).
The information on the Rosenbergs
and David Greenglass is from Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 128; Haynes and Klehr, Venona,
295-303, 307-311; and Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted
Wood, 198-202, 205-216, 221-222, 327-334.
The information on May is from Holloway, Stalin
and the Bomb, 105. On Pontecorvo, see
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB:
The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New
York: HarperCollins, 1990), 317-318, 379.
On FOGEL/PERSEUS, see Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, 190-195, and Haynes and
Klehr, Venona,
16, 313-314. Before Theodore Hall was identified, FOGEL/PERSEUS was
sometimes mistakenly thought to be the source that turned out to be
Hall. On MAR, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword
and Shield, 117. On the strange "walk-in" in New York,
see Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood,
193. On ERIC, see ibid., 181-182, and on
QUANTUM, see Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 311-313.
For estimates of how many years Soviet
espionage sped up their atomic weapons program, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 132, and Holloway, Stalin
and the Bomb, 222.
The Los Alamos ID Badge photograph
of Fuchs was taken in 1944; it is courtesy the Los
Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and is reprinted in Rachel Fermi and
Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb: Photographs
from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995), 106. The photograph of Werner
Heisenberg is courtesy the National
Archives (NARA); it is reprinted in Jeremy Bernstein, ed., Hitler's
Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, NY:
American Institute of Physics, 1996). The photograph of Hall and the
photograph of Donald Maclean are courtesy the National
Security Agency. The photographs of David and Ruth Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg, and Ethel Rosenberg, are
all courtesy the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (via
NARA). Click here for
more information on the photograph of Kasparov, Kamen,
and Kheifits. The
"Silence Means Security" propaganda poster is courtesy the Office
of Government Reports, United States Information Service, Division of
Public Inquiry, Bureau of Special Services, Office of War Information (via
NARA). The photograph of the first Soviet atomic test is courtesy the
Federation of American Scientists.
Home | History
Office | OpenNet | DOE | Privacy and Security Notices
About this Site | How to Navigate this Site | Note on Sources |
Site Map | Contact Us
|