Word: pontecorvo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Russians still had one major gap in their knowledge: they did not know how to make plutonium. That gap, the committee suggested, was filled by Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian-born British physicist who quietly took his wife and three children on a trip to Finland last fall, then vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Pontecorvo was an expert on nuclear reactors, the devices which are needed to make plutonium...
...Canada's Chalk River atomic center, Pontecorvo helped design the heavy-water pile, still the "reactor of most advanced design and performance." He knew the secrets of the plutonium-producing piles at Hanford. After the war, he was a senior officer at Harwell, the British atomic research center. Pontecorvo, whose brother and sister were lifelong Communists, might have been betraying reactor data from 1943 on, the committee guessed. He was rated by some colleagues as an even abler scientist than Fuchs. After Fuchs, said the committee, "Pontecorvo may be plausibly rated as the second deadliest betrayer . . . Certain...
Instead, the Pontecorvos bought tickets via Scandinavian Airlines to Stockholm. From Stockholm, without calling Mrs. Pontecorvo's mother, who lives in a suburb of the Swedish capital, they quickly flew on to Helsinki. During the trip, one of their little sons prattled to a fellow passenger, "We're going to Russia." When the youngster saw land below after crossing the Baltic, he asked, "Is that Russia...
...Helsinki's Malmi Airport, Mrs. Pontecorvo looked haggard and distraught. Her husband seemed quite normal. But his passport was not in order; he had no Finnish visa, so the authorities politely told him he must surrender it for correction. He could pick it up in three days at the Ministry of Interior's Bureau for Foreigners...
...this delayed the airline bus into the Finnish capital. Finally the five Pontecorvos piled in, along with half a dozen large suitcases. As the bus entered the city, the Pontecorvo boy asked again, "Are we now in Russia?" Just outside the Finnish Airways office in the Esplanade, the bus stopped. The Pontecorvos picked up a taxicab and sped off. After that, no trace...