Throughout the hot summer of 1931, after more than a year of careful planning, seventy-five determined Russians arrived in the US to enrol as students at its elite universities.1 Disembarking at the Port of New York, shaky after a week at sea, the first of the generation of Soviet ‘super spies’ set foot in America when Stanislav Shumovsky, one of the final fifty-four, landed in late September. He travelled on the SS Europa, arriving just in time for the start of the new academic term. The group included architects, town planners, mining experts, transport gurus, metallurgists, ship designers, aeronautics experts, chemists, electrical and mechanical engineers. A few were professional intelligence officers, the rest willing helpers. They had all been sent by Stalin to find out first hand how America had met and surmounted the engineering challenges of industrialisation.
It would be wrong to say Soviet intelligence invented industrial espionage. As early as June 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston businessman and Harvard alumnus, had embarked on an industrial espionage mission for the US. He set off on a two-year visit with his family to Scotland and England as war clouds darkened in North America, using as his cover story ‘poor health’. The mill towns of the north of England were not known for their curative delights and Lowell’s interests lay in stealing the secrets of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The textile industry based in the growing towns of Lancashire and Scotland was at the heart of that revolution, one fuelled by new water-or steam-powered spinning and weaving machines. The flint-hearted capitalists of Britain were never going to allow anyone – and certainly not an American – to buy drawings or a model of a powered loom. So Lowell secretly studied the machines on his visits to the mills, although their desperate working conditions must surely have played havoc with his failing health. In a quite prodigious feat, Lowell memorised the workings of the British power looms without committing anything to paper.
By the time he departed Britain’s shores in 1812, the country was at war with the United States, and Lowell was carefully searched on his departure. Back in Boston, he built his textile factories, funding his enterprises with a pioneering public stock offering, and was awarded the patent for the powered loom, a stolen copy of the British version, in 1815. There was no end to Lowell’s claims; he even suggested that the technology was all his original work adapted to local conditions rather than the fruits of industrial espionage. In recognition of his imaginative schemes, he was inducted into the US Business Hall of Fame in 2013.2
In 1931 the intelligence mastermind Artur Artuzov, Shumovsky’s recruiter, had unleashed a new type of Soviet intelligence operation, one which would do to the Americans what they had done to the British. It was the start of a process of stealing industrial secrets that was to last for almost eighty years. From late 1931 until 2010fn1 a trail of agents would penetrate the US by enrolling as students in elite universities following the textbook rules written by Shumovsky.
• • •
Some of Shumovsky’s travelling companions were enrolled in undergraduate programmes; others, already qualified engineers, were on shorter specialist courses perhaps lasting a year or more to gain valuable experience. Soviet intelligence targeted American universities for two main reasons. First, America’s position as the most competitive modern industrialised society was based on its ability to produce from its universities a steady stream of fresh graduate engineers and scientists who could transfer ideas from university-based research centres to America’s factory floors and production lines. Such constant innovation maintained the position of the US as the world’s leading economy.
Stalin wanted to emulate and surpass the US economy, but he first needed to learn and then adapt this education system to the peculiarities of Soviet conditions. Engineers were to be his new society’s leaders. He termed them ‘cadres who decide everything’.3 But such individuals simply did not exist in the numbers or quality required; hence they needed to be mass produced – and in a hurry. Unlike those in Russia, US universities had a significant number of highly qualified and experienced professors. Stalin planned that on their return to the Soviet Union the newly trained engineers, including Shumovsky, were to become professors themselves. They were to spend their lives transferring to the many the benefits of what they had learned in their time in the US.
Stalin’s second reason for choosing this route is that a university is an unprotected repository of engineering and scientific knowledge. Elsewhere, the same information was either closely guarded in military bases or scattered among dozens of individual factories, and to gather that intelligence the Soviets would have had to deploy hundreds of agents on risky missions. In contrast, the universities happily transmitted that same knowledge by means of their lecture halls, laboratories and libraries – and, in the case of MIT, by factory placements. Each Soviet student, while educating himself to the highest level, would at the same time identify and arrange to have copied every technological treasure he could find. Books, articles, equipment and other material could wend their way back to the Soviet Union as a resource for Stalin’s ambitious industrialisation programme.
The Soviet Union had assembled a remarkable group for the task, its brightest and best talent. They appeared, on the face of it, the ideal team to perform the mission assigned to them: Communist Party loyalists, motivated, intelligent and focused, many went on to be leaders in their chosen fields. Some however disgraced themselves. One was to put the entire mission at risk.
The students, including Shumovsky, travelled to America under their real names,4 but covers were routinely used by Soviet intelligence when the stakes were high. Two years before, Pyotr Baranov, head of the Red air force, the VVS, had travelled incognito to the US with aircraft designer Andrey Tupolev to visit American factories and trade fairs.5 His cover was blown when his photograph appeared in a book published while he was in America naming him as a leading figure of the Communist Revolution. At the time Russians travelled abroad in fear of attacks both by exiled White Guard organisations and those they saw as heretical Communists; intercepted telegram traffic shows that the NKVD believed the White Guards could replicate the Soviets’ own fearsome counter-intelligence capability.fn2
After their defeat in the Civil War the White exiles had managed a campaign of assassinations and bombings against Soviet targets, but now generally they were men of intemperate words after dinner rather than of deeds. Everyone in the party heading to America was nevertheless warned about avoiding interactions with the White Guards, as well as with ‘Trotskyists’, now a catch-all description for heretical Communists.
• • •
A strong sense of camaraderie had developed on the long journey from Moscow and Leningrad and the shared months of intensive language training. Shumovsky was an excellent field agent. Now they were approaching New York the time had come for the party to go their separate ways
Some universities had chosen to welcome just one student, or a few at most, but MIT embraced the programme wholeheartedly. In their trawl for America’s secrets, the Soviets had spread their net far and wide: six went to Harvard, ten to Cornell in Ithaca, New York; five to the University of Wisconsin in Madison; five to Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; three to the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado; one to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and one to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.fn3 6 The remaining twenty-five headed for MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At some universities the new arrivals went unnoticed. At MIT, there would be a fanfare welcome, and this was replicated at some colleges with articles in newspapers welcoming their foreign visitors,
MIT were ecstatic to receive the twenty-five Russian students. The Institute was not at the time financially well endowed. The fees were most welcome for the struggling university, arriving mid-Great Depression and during a time of collapsing student enrolments. Catering as it did, unlike Ivy League schools, largely to middle-class families, MIT’s vulnerability to the Depression was due to its dependence for funding on tuition fees rather than endowments or grants. The Russian fees were therefore gratefully received as MIT was drawing down on its savings. So welcoming indeed was the Institute that it would become the Soviet intelligence services’ favourite US university.
The manifest of SS Europa