The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets. Svetlana Lokhova

between the countries was so wide, there was a vast amount of useful information available in US publications.

      Valuable intelligence was often received on an unsolicited basis.US firms would sometimes include commercially sensitive information in the marketing material they sent to AMTORG, which would forward anything useful on to Moscow; some of it would end up on Stalin’s desk. One explosives manufacturer, the Trojan Powder Company of Allentown, Pennsylvania, disclosed the chemical formulae for its solid explosives hoping for a lucrative deal. Stalin personally annotated the document.⁹ The company even offered to provide the Soviet Union with an unlimited quantity of poison gas munitions. Soviet experts were unimpressed with the Trojan Company’s proposal.

      Accurate political intelligence proved harder to acquire than S&T. Without reliable sources, information was either biased or in some cases downright false. An early large-scale NKVD operation in the 1930s, based in New York and Washington, turned out after many years and a detailed investigation to have relied on a completely fake source. An enterprising New York Post journalist, Ludwig Lore, had created a family industry producing political information for the NKVD and employing his son and wife in the enterprise. The NKVD were entirely taken in.

      Lore claimed that his intelligence reports came directly from a network of well-placed agents in the State Department in Washington, even insisting that the State Department’s Head of Research, David A. Salmon, was his principal agent. In reality, none of Lore’s agents existed. He had plucked names from the internal phone directory of the State Department. Lore was nevertheless able to charge the NKVD exorbitantly for several years for the information he provided, which consisted either of old news stories reheated or pure invention.¹⁰ Without checking, the NKVD had already put some of the fake material on Stalin’s desk, describing it as ‘must read’.¹¹ Stalin believed he was reading the very words of America’s ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew, in private meetings with the Emperor’s top officials. It was nothing of the sort; Lore had made up the entire conversation. Shumovsky’s operation at a stroke transformed the quality of Soviet intelligence gathering.

      America was conflicted in its dealings with Stalin; on the one hand, they wanted his business, but on the other, they feared Communism. Despite the countries’ polar opposite ideologies, however, AMTORG officials briefed the student party that the Soviet Union had become the USA’s primary export market, uniquely expanding its economy as the rest of the world contracted.

      AMTORG’s role was to coordinate all commercial visits by Russian experts to the US, and vice versa. It gave each group of students a list of approved contacts in their university city, and letters of introduction.¹² AMTORG maintained an extensive library of information on the major US manufacturing companies and their suppliers that the students would visit or be assigned work at during their stay. Besides his course at MIT, Shumovsky would be working for AMTORG’s aviation department, producing reports and articles on the dynamic US aircraft industry. In 1933, he was to write an article published in American Engineering and Technology – an AMTORG magazine filled with US advertising sent to 1,700 key Soviet officials – describing the features of a special plane the Americans had built to fly in the harsh conditions of Antarctica.¹³

      AMTORG also controlled immigration to the USSR from the USA. With 25 per cent unemployment, the US was suffering a net outflow of migrants. For several years, more people left the country than arrived. In 1931 AMTORG was receiving 12,500 applications per month from Americans to migrate to the land of Lenin.¹⁴ No wonder to the Soviets capitalism appeared to be teetering on the brink.

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      In trading with the US, the Soviets were very careful with their money, committing only to buying the very best products on the most advantageous terms. Experts such as Shumovsky would prove to be invaluable in ensuring that those conditions included the transfer to the USSR of all technical knowledge. And, as a planned economy, they had clear goals with their purchases.