Word: beria
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...carried out one murder with his own hands, planned at least one more, speaks with repellent offhandedness about still other assassinations. He is capable of warmth, though -- for his old boss, Lavrenti Beria, and for Beria's boss, Joseph Stalin; he still admires both even while acknowledging their "criminal activities." None of which by itself discredits Pavel Sudoplatov's sensational tales of Soviet espionage; in fact his closeness to Beria, Stalin's last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov's most stunning charge -- that world...
...Moscow the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service -- a successor to the agency that Beria once headed and Sudoplatov worked for -- put out a rare public disclaimer. Sudoplatov's "allegations ((about)) Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer," it said, "do not correspond to reality." Oleg Tsarev of the same agency, an in-house expert on atomic spying, says, "Having seen the summary file ((on nuclear espionage)), I can tell you there are no such names as Sudoplatov mentions in it." He makes one tiny exception: "One of our sources had a discussion with someone who knew Oppenheimer in 1945." But the report...
...Schecters argue that simply presenting Sudoplatov's account -- not corroborating it -- was all they set out to do. "One of the reasons we left it in the first person and let him say some outrageous things was that this is his story," says Leona Schecter. After his boss Beria was purged and shot in 1953, Sudoplatov was accused of mass murders by the victorious Nikita Khrushchev and jailed for 15 years. He was eventually rehabilitated after addressing a 1982 plea to the Communist Party Central Committee mentioning his exploits in obtaining atomic information from Oppenheimer, Fermi and Bohr, among others...
...police had consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago, Rasputin and Stalin's secret-police chief, Lavrenti Beria. In spite of the book's rather breathless style, the analogies seem...
Andrei Sakharov, first revered in the U.S.S.R. as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then reviled as a traitor for his tireless defense of human rights, recounts his tumultuous life. -- A look at Lavrenti Beria, a "terrifying human being." -- The Oppenheimer-Teller feud. -- The man who poisoned Soviet science. -- Why Sakharov ranks as a world-class scientist...