The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In his review of Special Tasks by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov [NYR, June 9] Thomas Powers assumes that Sudoplatov’s story cannot be true. Mr. Powers does not want to believe that Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Bohr were manipulated and used by Soviet intelligence.

Niels Bohr’s encounters with Soviet intelligence officer and physicist, Yakov Terletsky, in 1945 are a source of major controversy, but they shouldn’t be. Terletsky met with Sudoplatov before his death in 1993 and told Sudoplatov of his interview with the Discovery channel, which has yet to be released. On May 10, 1994 the Moscow Independent Television Channel Five (NTV) program, Documents and Fate, revealed materials from the Russian Archives showing that Bohr and Terletsky had not one, but three meetings. The first brief meeting was at the Russian Embassy in Copenhagen, the second and third at Bohr’s institute on November 14 and November 16, 1945. Terletsky raised 22 questions which had been prepared by Soviet atomic scientists and which Bohr answered providing insight into questions troubling Soviet scientists working on the atomic bomb. The documents from the Russian State Archive, including the questions and answers, reveal that Kurchatov, head of the Soviet atomic program, considered the material valuable. Sudoplatov is identified as the officer in charge in Beria’s report of this mission to Stalin. Finally Beria reported all this in a letter to Stalin and the intelligence officer who accompanied Terletsky was rewarded. These newly released documents confirm Sudoplatov’s account.

Who were the spies? Mr. Powers recounts Klaus Fuchs’ role. The late Anatoli Yatskov, who worked in New York on Sudoplatov’s team, said in an interview with Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post in October 1992 that the FBI had succeeded in uncovering “only half, perhaps less than half” of his network of agents in the United States. In a recent article in Izvestia the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service claims there were ten major agents whose names have never been disclosed, six in the United States and four in Great Britain. Sudoplatov refused to name people who still might be alive, but in 1982 in his secret letter to the Central Committee requesting rehabilitation Sudoplatov names Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Fuchs and describes the mission to meet with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.

Mr. Powers says the charges against Oppenheimer “tend to evaporate on scrutiny.” Let us examine them:

1. Powers asserts it was impossible that Oppenheimer deliberately recruited Fuchs to Los Alamos. But Fuchs’ former case officer in London, Aleksandr Feklisov, who is still alive, wrote in Voyenni Istorischeski Zhurnal (Journal of Military History) December 1990, p. 25, that Oppenheimer “asked to include Fuchs as part of the British scientific mission coming to the USA to assist the project.” Feklisov’s article is footnoted in the book but Mr. Powers ignores his account. Powers himself describes a conversation when Hans Bethe offered Rudolph Peierls a job at Los Alamos; Peierls asked if he might bring Tony Skyrme and Klaus Fuchs. This contradicts the claim that there were no previous discussions about Fuchs or who would be included in the British team.

2. Mr. Powers denies that Oppenheimer could have allowed Fuchs to persuade him to oppose the building of the hydrogen bomb, because the question did not come up until three years later.

In 1946 Beria instructed that Fuchs be told to plant the idea of opposition to the hydrogen bomb. This was based on Fuchs’ report that there was disagreement among the leading physicists over whether to build a hydrogen bomb. Nowhere does Sudoplatov claim that Fuchs was successful in this effort. That is Mr. Powers’ own conjecture and interpretation.

1. Mr. Powers contests Elizabeth Zarubin’s influence over Kitty Oppenheimer because “there is no evidence Mrs. Zarubin left Washington until she left for good in 1944.” The present unavailability of FBI surveillance records on Mrs. Zarubin proves nothing. Sudoplatov, who was a close friend of Mrs. Zarubin, was very specific about Mrs. Zarubin being introduced to Mrs. Oppenheimer in San Francisco by Kheifetz and getting her to influence her husband. Mrs. Zarubin also activated illegals in place in California since the 1930s.

2. Mr. Powers demands evidence to support Sudoplatov’s statement that Oppenheimer made documents available to a mole in the Los Alamos laboratory.

Does Mr. Powers expect to find dated and signed receipts with fingerprints to prove it? Sudoplatov described the method used to obtain material. The proof is a total of 690 documents and reports that were received by Soviet intelligence.

Sudoplatov does not give December 1941 as the date of Kheifetz’s report that Oppenheimer and his colleagues were planning to move from Berkeley to a new site. That is Mr. Powers’ misreading of the text.

As to the “even more troubling claim concerning Bruno Pontecorvo,” the text of Special Tasks reads: “A few hours after the pile of graphite went critical, Semyonov had received a prearranged telephone call saying, ‘The Italian sailor reached the new world.”’ Mr. Powers identifies Pontecorvo as the source of the call, another careless misreading. Mr. Powers quotes Arthur Compton’s book on the origin of the phrase and the same story is also recounted by James Hershberg in his biography of James Conant. Sudoplatov never read these accounts, nor did we until after we had interviewed him and heard him explain how word of the first nuclear chain reaction was reported to Moscow. The story is well known within the Russian intelligence service and is included in KGB textbooks. It appears in The Bomb for Stalin, by V.A. Andrianov and A.V. Gogol, Resurrection Publishers, Moscow, 1992. Is it so difficult to conceive of more than one person in the Chicago group being delighted after hearing the same phrase and using it that day?

Powers thinks he knows better than Sudoplatov and Soviet intelligence who supplied the Tube Alloys information and the cabinet minutes on the first British atomic bomb efforts in 1941. The documents prepared by the KGB which appeared in the Academy of Science Journal, Questions of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology, identified the source as Donald Maclean, code named Leaf. That is a KGB written footnote, not ours. In a telephone conversation John Cairncross, who readily acknowledged passing decoded Engima traffic, denied he reported the Tube Alloys information to Soviet intelligence and provided a written denial.^*

Mr. Powers’ questioning of who wrote Special Tasks demonstrates his lack of understanding of oral history and the use of recorded testimony. As with Nikita Khrushchev, Sudoplatov’s stories were told and retold with varying particulars. The final Russian language Chapter Seven was checked by Sudoplatov and signed by him. He added a few details about the Russian scientists which are not in the English text and clarified some terms of tradecraft but otherwise they correspond fully. These will appear in the Russian language edition to be published by Ogonyok Publishers in Moscow, first in serial form and then as a book.

Mr. Powers says we should have consulted historians and laid out the book’s textual problems with an injunction to the reader to proceed with care. The book does both, first in Robert Conquest’s Foreword and then in our Introduction. Conquest notes that “individual reminiscences must, indeed, be treated critically—but so must documents. Both are simply historical evidence, none of which is perfect and none of which is complete.”

We have acknowledged that Szilard did not work at Los Alamos and that Sudoplatov’s reference to Szilard at Los Alamos was a generic reference to the work of the Manhattan Project and should have been so stated.

In his rush to judgment Mr. Powers makes a mistake when he says that the defection of Nikolai Khokhlov in 1954 “may partly explain” why Sudoplatov was arrested. Lieutenant General Sudoplatov was arrested in August 1953, charged with plotting with Beria. Sudoplatov was already in jail when Khokhlov defected.

Mr. Powers chooses to believe those who knew the scientists in question. Expertise in physics or the American documents does not make them knowledgeable about Soviet intelligence practices, which Sudoplatov reveals for the first time.

Since Mr. Powers’ whole purpose was to refute Chapter Seven it is unfortunate that a publication as important as the NYR ends up discussing only one of the book’s thirteen chapters and none of the other revelations. We would have thought that the NYR would have welcomed the disclosure of information by participants in the cold war. It is odd for the NYR to be put in the position of saying that the oral history of the most successful intelligence operation in history should be presented only when there is clear documentary evidence for each and every assertion.

Special Tasks, as a whole, has been hailed in Europe and by other American critics. Le Monde reviewer Alexandre Adler (May 6, 1994) wrote: “Pavel Sudoplatov’s work is until this day the most important historical testimony to appear since the death of Stalin.” Oxford University historian Norman Stone, writing in the Spectator (May 14, 1994), said, “In any event, here is a book that, including the Khrushchev memoirs, is the most revealing document that we have had from inside the Soviet Union.”

Sudoplatov’s memoirs are an oral history which by definition mean they are recounted from the perspective of the witness. They should be evaluated and amplified from records and further interviews with participants still living. This process is already actively underway in Russia, stimulated by the publication of Special Tasks.

Jerrold L. Schecter
Leona P. Schecter

Washington, DC

Thomas Powers replies:

The reader should be cautioned that the Schecters’ letter and the details of my reply below inevitably will look very much like the give-and-take of a genuine scholarly debate. This is unfortunate, because misleading. The Schecters’ book, based on conversations with the retired Russian intelligence officer Pavel Sudoplatov, claims that four leading scientists associated with the American Manhattan Project—J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Niels Bohr—were atomic spies for the Russians. Two months of vigorous public debate of these claims have refuted them in substance and detail, and I do not know of a single historian who now takes them seriously.

The reader may be suspicious of this unanimity, perhaps thinking it is only a closing of the ranks of orthodoxy against painful truths. But in this case the charges have been dismissed because crucial details are demonstrably in error, because the charges lack supporting detail and are contradicted by the known record of the Soviet atomic bomb program, and above all because it is unclear that the charges have in fact been coherently offered by their purported source—the aging, rambling, self-important but forgetful old spy-runner, Sudoplatov himself.

The Schecters claim their book is oral history, based on twenty hours of taped conversations, but we have been offered no Russian original, no transcript we can check to ensure that Sudoplatov really made all the claims published in the book. The Schecters admit that they have supported Sudoplatov’s reminiscences with factual datas gleaned from other published sources:How then are we to distinguish which words are his and which the Schecters’? Only a handful of sentences actually embody the sensational charges that Oppenheimer and the others were atomic spies—whom shall we credit as author of those?