Word: sudoplatov
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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Even after the last Russian and American intelligence archives are opened, if that ever happens, it may be impossible to prove or disprove Sudoplatov's allegations conclusively. His recounting of his career is, after all, the oral history of an old and hardly admirable man, a product of the intrigues and maneuvers of the Stalinist era. As the eminent historian Robert Conquest says in his introduction to Sudoplatov's book: "Individual reminiscences must, indeed, be treated critically -- but so must most documents. Both are simply historical evidence, none of which is perfect, and none of which is complete. Even...
...January 1943, says Sudoplatov, the Soviets received a full report on the secret experiment conducted the month before by Fermi in Chicago, in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was produced for the first time. But in a memo dated July 3, 1943, and reprinted in an appendix to the book, physicist Igor Kurchatov says he thinks the Americans might conduct such a successful experiment "in the near future"; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed...
...Sudoplatov reports a conversation between Bohr and Yakov Terletsky, a Soviet physicist and intelligence agent, in Denmark in 1945. Terletsky supposedly told Bohr that a nuclear reactor built in the U.S.S.R. would not work, and Bohr gave precise advice on what went wrong and how to fix it. The conversation did occur, but Bohr's son Aage, who was present, insists his father gave away no technical secrets. His account was backed up by Terletsky -- at least according to Roald Sagdeev, a former Soviet physicist now teaching at the University of Maryland, and other scholars who have read...
Oppenheimer, says Sudoplatov, suggested that Klaus Fuchs be included in a group of British scientists sent to Los Alamos to work with Oppenheimer's American team on developing an atom bomb. That claim was based on a report by a Soviet agent named Alexander Feklisov. But the documentary record indicates the team members were selected by British authorities. The point is of more than passing importance: Fuchs was later found to have provided the Soviets with actual drawings of the American atom bomb...
Four weeks ago, we printed an excerpt from Special Tasks, the memoir of a Soviet spymaster published by Little, Brown. In it the principal author, Pavel Sudoplatov, charged that prominent scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, had knowingly made atomic secrets available to Soviet agents. Since publication of the book, many nuclear physicists and historians have raised serious questions about Sudoplatov's account. Our story on the controversy begins on page...