(This three-part entry is
a significantly abridged version of the eponymous chapter in my unpublished
book Stalin, and Other Family.)
My father used to tell
me: “Never trust a smoking gun because it can
always be planted. You can only trust your common sense.” There
is a way, however, to defeat even this wise rule of thumb. The most successful
deception appeals directly to common sense, and overpowers the mind by
easily digestible stereotypes that seem to make perfect sense until and unless
their well-hidden flaws have been convincingly exposed.
The story I am about to
tell in this entry is in sharp contradiction with established “fact,” the latter ‘reliably’ buttressed
by comparatively recent “revelations” from the treasuries of
declassified secrets in several countries. The only excuse for my audacity in
presenting this version of events is that am I trusting the reader to keep an
open mind, and benefit from it, as a result. Therefore, here it is.
Before their names had
come up in the American press, no one in Moscow had had any idea who Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg were. They would be written into the Soviet
disinformation script post factum. When the hapless couple was sentenced to the
electric chair in 1951, Stalin quipped: “They owe
me. I have given them a place in history.”
The historic atomic
espionage story started as a deliberate Soviet fabrication, using standard disinformation
techniques: tainted communications, groomed defections and planting of bogus documentary
evidence. The idea originated with the previously mentioned General Milstein, and he
was assigned by Stalin to play a leading role in staging this hoax.
There was a very strong
motive behind Stalin’s campaign of deception, which explains the elaborate
effort invested into it. The story begins before World War II, when all nuclear
research was international public property, and incredibly sensitive data, by
today’s standards, was openly published and candidly discussed at international
conferences by scientists from the United States, Great Britain, France,
Germany, and the Soviet Union, not to mention the smaller fry.
The first concern about
having atomic research classified was expressed long before the war by none
other than Stalin himself, after he was briefed about a breakthrough discovery
in nuclear chain reaction, made by Georgi Fleurov. Stalin was then told that
the process was so much in the open already, that any attempt at secrecy would
be absurd and counterproductive. Quite the contrary, publicity about Soviet
achievements in this highly prestigious scientific field was enhancing Russia’s
image around the world, as a leading global power. One of the strongest
champions of secrecy in history, Stalin was not completely satisfied. He set up
a panel of experts to decide, which scientific discoveries could be allowed to
be made public, and which of them must be classified, and this is how the
matter was settled.
It is a well-known fact
that the suggestion of blanket secrecy over the Manhattan Project was made by
the atomic scientists and engineers gathered in the United States not so much
to protect the technology (which would be the rationale of the military staff),
as merely to conceal from Hitler the fact that such a project was underway.
(The fact that the United States was actually at work on the atomic weapons was
easily established by the Soviet scientists, when suddenly the previously open
scientific discussion coming out of the US had come to an abrupt stop. I am pretty
sure that the Nazi scientists had come to the same conclusion from that same evidence.)
Ironically, at that stage there was no longer any need even for that kind of
secrecy. After June 22, 1941, locked in a debilitating war with each other,
neither Russia nor Germany could afford a similar undertaking. In fact, the
only country in the world which was physically capable of pulling it off was
the United States...
(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be
posted tomorrow.)
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