Word: sudoplatov
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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...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...
...direct documentation -- well, says Anatoli Sudoplatov, many of the papers that might substantiate his father's story, including the record of atomic-espionage work in the so-called Enormous File, are missing or have been tampered with or destroyed. So, he says, the elder Sudoplatov's report "is based on oral witnesses . . . reconstructed from memory" of what his father learned from spies he worked with...
Maybe, but those 50-year-old memories seem to have led Sudoplatov into some serious errors and inconsistencies...
...taped interview, Sudoplatov asserts (more flatly than in the book) that "in 1944 we received from Szilard material about his work at Los Alamos. This was very important." But Szilard did not work at Los Alamos in 1944 -- or ever...