The untold story of the first U.S.-based nuclear spy, and how he got away with it

This text was initially featured on MIT Press Reader. This text first appeared within the Fall 2023 challenge of the Journal of Cold War Studies.

Years earlier than something was publicly disclosed concerning the nuclear espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Theodore Corridor, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Military Intelligence recognized Clarence Hiskey, a Manhattan Mission scientist, as a Soviet spy serving to to offer extremely delicate nuclear weapons info. The 2 businesses stored watch on a Soviet intelligence officer, Arthur Adams, who was dwelling illegally in america and serving as Hiskey’s management officer. Regardless of an intensive investigation, neither Hiskey nor Adams was ever arrested. Though Adams was named in a sensational tabloid newspaper article shortly after the top of World Battle II and carefully shadowed by the FBI, he was capable of flee to the Soviet Union. Hiskey was by no means indicted for espionage. Based mostly on materials launched from declassified Russian archives and FBI recordsdata made obtainable underneath the Freedom of Data Act, the next article tells the story of the primary U.S.-based nuclear spy and the way he received away with it.

In U.S. widespread creativeness, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg are normally seen as a very powerful Soviet nuclear spies. Historians would give that doubtful honor to Klaus Fuchs or Theodore Corridor. The Rosenbergs and Fuchs have been arrested within the early Nineteen Fifties and convicted of turning over vital details about the Manhattan Mission to Soviet intelligence businesses. Corridor admitted his actions after the Venona decryptions figuring out him as a Soviet spy have been declassified and made public in 1995. However years earlier than any of their names have been public, the U.S. authorities had found one other Soviet nuclear spy and eliminated him from any labeled work. His Soviet controller was put underneath intense surveillance, their machinations have been publicly uncovered by a tabloid reporter, and congressional hearings gave the U.S. public a glimpse of Soviet efforts to infiltrate probably the most secret wartime program in america. However nobody was ever arrested or tried in court docket. The primary authorities try to carry nuclear spies accountable for their actions collapsed a number of years earlier than the Rosenbergs grew to become the one U.S. residents to be executed for serving to the united states construct its personal nuclear bomb.

The saga of Clarence Hiskey, a chemist employed by the Manhattan Mission, and Arthur Adams, a Soviet navy intelligence officer illegally in america, has largely fallen down a reminiscence gap. U.S. Military safety officers, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.S. Division of Justice have been involved that arrests would publicize the Manhattan Mission earlier than the nuclear bomb was utilized in fight. They have been additionally leery of disrupting relations with a wartime ally (the united states) and of mounting a profitable prosecution primarily based on covert break-ins and warrantless searches.

As soon as an anti-Communist reporter for the New York Journal-American broke the story in 1945, shortly after america had dropped two bombs on Japan, his mixture of factual materials and falsehoods ricocheted across the public sq., distorting any understanding of what had really occurred. When Hiskey relied on the Fifth Modification to refuse to testify or reply FBI questions and Adams escaped to the Soviet Union, the case collapsed. After 1991, Russian intelligence businesses continued to observe the Soviet follow of not naming sources who by no means admitted their spying, and thus even the discharge of archival data in latest many years has left Adams and Hiskey in obscurity.

Nonetheless, sufficient info is now obtainable to inform the story of the primary Soviet nuclear spy and the person who recruited him after which efficiently evaded the FBI. Some points of their actions stay obscure, and the exact nature of the data Hiskey handed to the Soviet Union is unclear, however a substantial amount of proof has emerged in recent times about his function as an vital spy.

Hiskey was an unlikely candidate for a top-secret authorities undertaking. Born in 1912 as Clarence Szczechowski in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Polish Catholic mother and father, he had attended La Crosse Academics’ Faculty earlier than receiving an undergraduate diploma from the College of Wisconsin in 1935 and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1939. Each he and his spouse, Marcia Sand Hiskey, have been lively in Communist organizations on campus. He first got here to the eye of the FBI in 1941 in reference to Communist actions on the College of Tennessee, the place he was then employed. A former instructor, upon studying that Hiskey was about to be employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, contacted the FBI to report that, though Hiskey was a superb chemist, he was a Communist. A cursory investigation established that Hiskey was extensively disliked by his colleagues at Tennessee. One recalled that he was “despicable to inferiors and at all times attempting to impress superiors.” One other stated he had a “disgusting character with a know-it-all perspective.” Later employed at Columbia College to work with Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize–profitable chemist, Hiskey skilled a setback in his instructing profession when a classroom experiment involving sulfuric acid went awry and triggered an explosion.

Military Counter-Intelligence personnel interviewed former professors who described Hiskey as “an out-and-out Crimson” and outspokenly pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist, however he was nonetheless dropped at work on the Substitute Alloy Supplies Laboratory at Columbia College to participate in delicate analysis. Not less than as soon as, Urey needed to warning him to cease discussing his work with unauthorized workers.

Unbeknownst to U.S. investigators, Hiskey was already discussing his labeled work with Communist mates related to Soviet intelligence. In March 1942 he had dinner at his New York house with an previous comrade from the College of Wisconsin, Zalmond Franklin. Franklin had fought in Spain with the Communist Worldwide Brigades and had been recruited to work as a courier by Soviet overseas intelligence officers after his return to america. Accompanying him to the subway after dinner, Hiskey swore Franklin to secrecy after which instructed him that he was engaged on a robust radioactive bomb. When Franklin stated he definitely hoped that Soviet officers knew about this weapon, Hiskey responded that he “hoped so too.”

When Franklin’s report reached Moscow, it stimulated a sustained however futile effort to recruit Hiskey, difficult by his switch to Chicago to work on the Manhattan Mission’s Metallurgical Laboratory. In the end, the recruitment effort failed as a result of, even earlier than his dialog with Franklin, Hiskey was already working for an additional Soviet intelligence company, the Most important Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Crimson Military’s Basic Workers.

Hiskey’s GRU contact was Arthur Adams. A number of years after being abruptly however quietly faraway from the Manhattan Mission, Hiskey admitted to the FBI that he had met Adams within the fall of 1941 at a report store in New York Metropolis owned by Eric Bernay. He insisted that the connection was solely harmless, claiming that the 2 had bonded over a shared enthusiasm for left-wing music, akin to Spanish Civil Battle and labor songs. The friendship continued in Chicago, the place they supposedly mentioned plastics, together with Hiskey’s thought of producing a seamless ping-pong ball and Adams’s profession within the Soviet Union. Hiskey adamantly denied that Adams ever requested him about his work. Each have been mendacity.

Adams was an vital Soviet spy-runner whose lengthy profession included a number of stints in america. He lived in a number of states each legally and illegally, with gainful employment and contrived jobs, as an official of the Soviet authorities and as an ostensible technical advisor to a number of U.S. firms. At occasions his actions have been carefully monitored by the FBI, however extra usually he operated completely underneath its radar.

A number of of his U.S. acquaintances had long-standing ties to Soviet intelligence businesses, however the FBI was by no means capable of develop sufficient proof to provoke authorized prosecutions in opposition to any of them. Not one of the folks with whom he had contact have been ever efficiently prosecuted, although the FBI discovered notes on the nuclear bomb throughout an unlawful search of Adams’s resort room in New York Metropolis. He was surveilled for a number of years by the FBI, however he nonetheless managed to flee the nation after eluding its brokers.

The story of Adams’s connections to Hiskey was a media sensation years earlier than Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg grew to become family names. Properly earlier than a number of Soviet brokers related to the Rosenbergs eluded the FBI, Adams managed to flee america and return to the Soviet Union. He was the primary Soviet intelligence officer linked to nuclear espionage and the one about whom the least is understood. To this present day, his background stays a muddle, with conflicting accounts of his private historical past and actions.

Military safety officers had belatedly begun to fret that Hiskey was a safety threat in 1944, after receiving a tip that he was a Communist. Investigators noticed him assembly with a person they later recognized as Adams. An unlawful entry into Adams’s New York resort room turned up books on atomic concept and notes indicating that Adams appeared to have information concerning the Manhattan Mission. Concluding that Hiskey was certainly a safety threat, the Military despatched him a discover that he was being referred to as to lively responsibility (he held a reserve fee).

The day after receiving his call-up, Hiskey met Adams in Chicago and flew to Cleveland after Adams made an airplane reservation for him. Throughout the flight, he engaged in a outstanding dialog together with his seat mate, an undercover Military investigator, to whom he declared that capitalism wanted to be abolished, that the maldistribution of wealth have to be ended, and that “some folks will lose their heads to perform it.” He spoke warmly concerning the Soviet Communist system. As soon as in Ohio, Hiskey met with John Hitchcock Chapin, one other chemist engaged on the Manhattan Mission and organized for him to satisfy with Adams sooner or later.

Just some days later, Hiskey left for his new project, a navy base in Canada close to the Arctic Circle. (The Military later despatched him to Hawaii, the place he labored on flame-throwing units.) Throughout the journey, yet one more Military investigator obtained entry to his baggage and located a pocket book with seven pages of top-secret written materials, “a concise and complete define of the DSM Mission [initial cover name for the Manhattan Project].” The Military quietly confiscated his baggage, and Hiskey by no means reported the loss. He wrote to his girlfriend and future spouse that, sadly, he had been unable to satisfy as deliberate with somebody in Nome, Alaska, however “issues occurred which triggered him to alter his plans,” a touch suggesting to the investigators that he had hoped to rendezvous with one other Soviet agent.

Having concluded that Hiskey could possibly be prosecuted or court-martialed for unauthorized possession of labeled info (when he left the Metallurgical Laboratory, Hiskey had been instructed to show in all notes associated to the undertaking), the Military was however reluctant to pursue authorized expenses for worry of calling consideration to the nonetheless top-secret Manhattan Mission. Glad that Hiskey had been neutralized and remoted within the wilds of Canada, Military safety determined to show the investigation of Adams over to the FBI, which put him underneath surveillance in late August 1944.

Adams, like most Soviet officers, was removed from the Hollywood model of a undercover agent. About 5 toes, 7 inches tall, weighing 150 kilos, with darkish brown eyes, he wore bifocal glasses and was allegedly blind in a single eye. His hair was brown, and he was bald on high. Adams wore orthopedic sneakers with built-up arches and had an extractable higher plate. He suffered from power respiratory sicknesses. He dressed conservatively, normally carrying a darkish enterprise go well with.

Adams had entered america from Canada in 1938, falsely swearing that he had by no means been in america earlier than and was planning to open a enterprise. Three days earlier than he arrived in New York, two businessmen, Philip Levy and Jacob Aronoff, opened a checking account for the newly created Technological Laboratories, an organization that was to focus on instrument design, with Adams listed as treasurer. Adams later claimed Technological Laboratories employed him via 1943, however, when it was dissolved, a notice in its company file indicated that it had apparently by no means achieved any enterprise, had no stock, and had by no means reported any revenue.

Because the FBI dug into Adams’s life, it concluded that he was an “unlawful,” that’s, a Soviet citizen infiltrated into america, working with out diplomatic cowl, to direct a gaggle of spies. In 1936 Arthur Ranto, claiming to be Adams’s uncle, had gone earlier than a notary public in Canada and sworn that Adams had been born on 4 Might 1890 in Toronto. Because of Ranto’s testimony, Adams acquired a delivery certificates and Canadian citizenship. However the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was by no means capable of find Ranto later or discover any data of Adams’s alleged mother and father. The notary public turned out to be a secret member of the Canadian Communist Celebration. The data from the city the place Adams claimed to have lived from 1909 to 1919 had been destroyed in a hearth.

Adams instructed a wide range of tales about his birthplace, mother and father, upbringing, schooling, and travels. Mates, acquaintances, and enterprise contacts whom the FBI interviewed from 1944 to 1950 provided differing accounts. Adams was sparing with particulars. In response to one relative of his second spouse, he would by no means inform “how lengthy he can be in a spot or the rest.” He was additionally “very chilly and unemotional.” He was additionally a great actor. In 1945, vacationing at a lake in New York State, he instructed the native postmaster that he had misplaced two sons in the course of the warfare, and he then broke down and sobbed. The truth is, he had no youngsters. He had deserted each his first spouse and her son (his stepson) and had no contact with them after 1922.

As finest the FBI might study, Adams was really born in Eskiltuna, Sweden, on October 25^th, 1885 to Alexander Adams and Regina Ranto, supposedly an American father (though Adams additionally later claimed on one visa software that his father was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in one other that he was of the “Scottish-Finnish race”) and Russian (or Scottish) mom, though no data of his delivery could possibly be positioned. One informant claimed Adams’s father was Swedish and his mom a Russian Jew. In a single model of his life story, Adams wrote that he graduated from a naval engineering college in Kronstadt in 1909. A recent Russian account of his background has him introduced up in a small village in Russia after his mother and father died, turning into a revolutionary in 1904, and going into exile after the 1905 Revolution.

Adams entered america round 1910 and labored as a instrument and die maker in New York in 1917 and 1918. An acquaintance from that point recalled that he “spoke good English” and was completely Americanized. A member of the American Socialist Celebration, he was appointed head of the technical division of the Martens Mission, the unofficial consultant of the brand new Soviet authorities to america in June 1919. Together with a lot of the different members of the Martens Mission, Adams returned to the united states in January 1921 when threatened with deportation.

For the subsequent seven years, Adams lived in the united states. In response to his personal account, he variously served as a manufacturing engineer and director for the first State Auto Works in Moscow, as chief engineer of an plane engine division in Leningrad, and as a member of the board of administrators of the Nationwide Plane Industries in Moscow.

Adams returned to america in November 1928 for 3 months as head of a Soviet commerce mission connected to Amtorg, the Soviet buying firm, to purchase equipment and plans for the development of a plant within the Soviet Union to make fuel masks. In December 1932, he returned for 10 months as a part of a delegation to review and buy a sure type of airplane motor on the Curtiss-Wright airplane manufacturing unit in Paterson, New Jersey. Official delegation paperwork listed Adams as being in control of instrument design and tools and indicated he was a Soviet citizen.

Adams was as soon as once more in america in late 1936 and early 1937, ostensibly to go to relations of his second spouse, Dorothy. Born in Boston in 1898, she had additionally labored for the Martens Mission and moved to Moscow, the place she had labored as a stenographer for high-ranking Soviet officers and as an assistant for the Moscow correspondent of The New York Instances. She returned to the Soviet Union in June 1937, however there isn’t a report of when Adams departed. The FBI later speculated that he went to Canada, on condition that September 1936 was when he confirmed up in Toronto and falsely claimed Canadian citizenship.

Because the FBI dug into Adams’s murky background in 1944 — he had been solely off its radar till then — it additionally undertook shut surveillance of his actions. However by that time it was too late. A Russian assortment of messages on Soviet nuclear espionage, printed in 2000, reproduces a letter from Adams, then code-named “Achilles,” to the pinnacle of the GRU. Adams had delivered it to Pavel Mikhailov, the performing Soviet consul in New York and the GRU station chief (rezident) in america, who presumably shipped it to Moscow through diplomatic courier. Obtained in Moscow on June 13^th, 1944, the letter reported that america was engaged on a bomb utilizing uranium and plutonium (one thing Soviet officers already knew), headed by six world-famous physicists, together with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, using hundreds of engineers and technicians, and utilizing three strategies of plutonium manufacturing at crops in New Mexico and Mississippi (an error). His supply was “a extremely certified specialist.” Along with sending some 1,000 pages of movie, Adams included samples of uranium and beryllium. In August, the pinnacle of the GRU, Basic Ivan Il’ichev, despatched one other 3,869 pages of fabric acquired from Adams to Mikhail Pervukhin, one of many primary figures overseeing improvement of the Soviet nuclear bomb.

In late September 1944, FBI brokers noticed Adams assembly with John Hitchcock Chapin, the Manhattan Mission chemist Hiskey had flown to Cleveland to see. They noticed one thing move between the 2 males (Chapin later instructed the FBI it was a key he had given Hiskey as an figuring out system). In early October, after Adams had returned to New York, the FBI did a black bag job (gaining surreptitious entry) in Adams’s room on the Peter Cooper Lodge. In a locked briefcase in a locked closet, brokers discovered a sheet of paper with notes containing references to the key Ok-25 uranium separation plant at Oak Ridge and “the progress of the experimentation and sources of uncooked supplies” used within the nuclear bomb.

A month later Adams left Aronoff’s New York house carrying a heavy suitcase. About 10 PM he entered a automobile registered to Mikhailov, and the bags was positioned within the trunk. Adams had delivered the ultimate cache of supplies he had collected on the nuclear bomb.

A bevy of Adams’s associates and contacts have been additionally carefully monitored. Not solely Levy and Aronoff however Eric Bernay, one-time writer of the Communist New Plenty and proprietor of the left-wing music enterprise the place he had initially met Hiskey; Samuel Novick, a rich businessman who had tried to facilitate Adams’s preliminary efforts to to migrate from Canada in 1937; Julius Heiman, a long-time conduit for the Soviet jewels that financed the American Communist motion; Irving Lerner, a documentary filmmaker suspected of attempting to take unauthorized pictures of the Radiation Laboratory on the College of California; and Victoria Stone, Adams’s mistress and proprietor of a jewellery retailer in Manhattan—all have been suspected of being a part of his equipment. Most had Communist backgrounds and connections to Soviet intelligence operations.

By January 1945, Adams had change into conscious of the FBI surveillance, evidently alerted by the break-in at his resort room. Detecting indicators that he was getting ready to depart the nation, the FBI consulted Manhattan Mission safety. The Military didn’t need him to depart america as a result of the bomb undertaking was nonetheless secret, but additionally didn’t need him prosecuted for espionage, for worry that it “would carry the undertaking out into the open.”

On February 25^th, 1945, Adams vanished. He had final been seen at 1:30 AM leaving Victoria Stone’s house. Showing to be ready for a bus, he all of the sudden jumped right into a taxi, and the FBI agent who was trailing him was left stranded when his official automobile was delayed in arriving. Brokers throughout the nation have been alerted to be looking out for Adams. Practice stations and airports have been checked, and border workplaces have been instructed to cease him. Frightened that he may be en path to the united states (he had lately bought a fur coat, collar, and hat), the FBI ordered protection of all airfields in Alaska utilized by Soviet plane. He was, nonetheless, quickly noticed on a prepare to Chicago and, trailed by FBI brokers, adopted to Portland, Oregon, the place, as soon as once more concluding that he had been found, Adams bought a ticket to return to New York.

To preclude having to arrest him for espionage, the FBI had filed a sealed criticism charging Adams with violating the Alien Registration legal guidelines and making false statements on his Selective Service registration. He was to not be arrested, nonetheless, except he really tried to depart the nation. The fees have been skinny gruel. As a result of Adams was 55 years previous, the Selective Service cost was unlikely to influence a jury. Likewise, the Justice Division apprehensive that the immigration cost may run afoul of the statute of limitations. Nonetheless, FBI headquarters instructed subject brokers that in no way ought to Adams be permitted to board a Soviet vessel of any description, nor ought to he be permitted to board a Soviet airplane. In occasion such is tried he must be taken into custody instantly and given a strip search. His baggage ought to likewise be rigorously searched with due regard for guidelines of proof.

The spring handed uneventfully. Adams, conscious he was being watched, caught to a boring and predictable routine. However after nuclear bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, the FBI started to press for motion in opposition to Adams. The Justice Division confirmed no sense of urgency, and, earlier than it might determine what to do, its hand was pressured. On December 3^rd, 1945, Howard Rushmore, a reporter for the New York Journal-American, referred to as two high-ranking FBI officers to inform them {that a} breaking story on Adams was about to hit the newsstands.

With the headline “Reds Search Jet Secrets and techniques, Spies Bribe US Engineers, FBI Retains Watch on Atom Agent,” Rushmore’s story printed on December 4^th, 1945 reported {that a} Soviet agent was “dwelling underneath an assumed title at a midtown resort.” The paper thinly disguised Adams as Alfred Adamson, selecting to maintain his actual title out of the story. It inaccurately asserted that the FBI had given the State Division “irrefutable proof that Adamson had in his possession secret plans of the atomic bomb given him by an American scientist in Chicago in 1943.” The FBI believed “Adamson handed on atomic bomb info to a Soviet vice-consul a yr in the past.” Interviewed by a reporter “at an obscure communist musical store [Bernay’s music store] the place he’s employed,” Adamson, “visibly nervous,” “denied being a Moscow agent.”

Rushmore, a one-time Communist expelled from the social gathering for writing a positive evaluate within the Every day Employee of “Gone with the Wind,” flogged the Adams story for the subsequent 4 years, providing a mixture of reality spiced with innuendo and wild fantasies. His main supply was a disgruntled former FBI particular agent, Larry Kerley. An enraged J. Edgar Hoover pushed for the Justice Division to indict Kerley however, by testifying earlier than a Home committee, Kerley ensured that any attempt to prosecute him would appear to be an act of petty vindictiveness.

Rushmore’s tales stored the difficulty of nuclear espionage within the public consciousness, sparking congressional calls for for investigations and penalties and intense hypothesis about how and why no arrests had taken place. The clamor was given an extra dollop of thriller insofar as Rushmore declined to call any of these underneath suspicion—aside from his thinly disguised Adams—for worry of a libel go well with. Though reporters knew the identities of everybody talked about within the articles, the general public was handled to tales about “distinguished scientists,” “rich businessmen,” and “well-connected attorneys.”

The State Division issued truthful denials that it had something to do with the Adams case, and the FBI remained silent. Out of public view, nonetheless, FBI officers conceded that “we now have no proof of espionage exercise which may be launched in court docket.” There was no proof that the fabric turned over to Mikhailov, who left the nation 10 days after the primary Journal-American story appeared, was espionage-related, though it nearly definitely was. Probably the most pertinent and damaging bodily proof—a listing of questions coping with the nuclear bomb undertaking—had been obtained via an unlawful break-in and couldn’t be launched into court docket. Chapin, the one conspirator who later willingly talked to the FBI, had initially claimed that he had not been straight approached to commit espionage. Not till 1946 did he admit that Adams and Hiskey had solicited him to take action. By then, the excellent indictments in opposition to Adams have been unlikely to carry up in court docket.

The blanket surveillance round Adams clearly rattled him, and the FBI hoped he may break down, confess, and ask for asylum. On January 12^th, 1946, he had an impromptu and memorable hour-and-a-half-long dialog with one surveilling agent. Insisting he was a Canadian citizen who wished to achieve U.S. citizenship, Adams denied ever dwelling within the Soviet Union or realizing what the scientists he met in Chicago have been engaged on. He appeared “very nervous and really emotional.” At one level he was “so despondent” that the agent requested whether or not he had any mates. Adams teared up, saying he had solely “that little woman you most likely find out about,” referring to Stone. He appeared “extraordinarily anxious to speak to somebody about his troubles.” The FBI was puzzled by this uncharacteristic habits and speculated that Adams, realizing that Mikhailov, his GRU superior, had been recalled to Moscow, additionally feared a recall and was signaling a need to talk to the FBI. Hoover approved an interview with him. Approval for the interview got here on January 23^rd, 1946, the identical day that Adams vanished once more.

An all-out search failed to show up any hint of Adams. For months the FBI pursued leads and interviewed his contacts, to no avail. Rushmore broke the story of his flight on February 16^th, 1946 with a front-page story, “Atom Spy Eludes FBI as Canada Nabs 22,” referring to the arrests of Canadians implicated by Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, who had been a GRU code clerk. As a result of a type of arrested in Canada had the surname Adams, preliminary studies erroneously said that Adams had been picked up by the RCMP.

In October 1946, the Justice Division once more concluded that the proof in opposition to Hiskey and Chapin was too skinny to warrant an indictment. Even so, the clamor across the case continued. Rushmore wrote within the anti-Communist Plain Discuss in January 1948 that at the very least seven unnamed members of Adams’s ring, “probably the most harmful spy ring within the historical past of america,” whose members had helped “Stalin’s ace agent try and steal the key of our atom bomb,” have been going about their every day lives, “unmolested within the every day pursuit of liberty and happiness.”

The political stress and rising anger prompted the Home Committee on Un-American Actions (HUAC) to carry hearings on nuclear espionage in 1948 throughout which Kerley testified in govt session that Adams had been allowed to flee by the Truman administration. Rushmore promptly wrote about Kerley’s secret testimony. Hiskey and Chapin testified in public, as did most of Adams’s different American contacts. For the primary time, Hiskey’s title grew to become public. He took the Fifth Modification in response to most questions. Chapin swore that Hiskey and Adams had pressed him to offer nuclear info however that he had refused. In a report issued in October 1948, HUAC advisable that Hiskey, his former spouse Marcia, Chapin, and Adams all be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit espionage.⁷

On October 28^th, 1948, Moscow Middle despatched an encrypted message to a high-ranking Soviet overseas intelligence officer in New York complaining that, even because the U.S. authorities had launched into an intensive program to enhance its nuclear capabilities, Soviet intelligence efforts had been “unsatisfactory.” Sources who had supplied important info throughout World Battle II—“Mlad,” “Caliber,” and “Godsend”—not labored at Los Alamos, and the identification of one other spy, “Kemp,” had been “utterly revealed,” making him ineffective.

This message was by no means decrypted and browse by U.S. counterintelligence. It was first disclosed in 2009 when the Vassiliev Notebooks (transcriptions of Soviet overseas intelligence paperwork compiled by Alexander Vassiliev) grew to become obtainable. Whereas Mlad (Theodore Corridor), Caliber (David Greenglass), and Godsend (Oscar Seborer) had been publicly recognized as Soviet spies within the Nineteen Nineties, the spy with the duvet title “Kemp” had not but been recognized. He was lauded in a e book printed in 2002 in Russia by Vladimir Lota, who credited Kemp with offering a small container of heavy water and samples of uranium and beryllium, together with hundreds of pages of paperwork from the Manhattan Mission to Adams, starting in 1944. Lota recognized “Kemp” as Martin Kemp, a U.S. scientist by no means beforehand recognized as a Soviet supply. Lota claimed that when Kemp failed to indicate up for a gathering in September 1944, Adams realized he was critically sick in a hospital and presumably dying. Saying nothing additional about “Kemp,” Lota implies by omission that after September 1944 he was useless or not concerned within the Manhattan Mission.

Lota, the nom de plume of retired GRU Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich Boiko, by no means anticipated that the October 1948 message admitting that “Kemp” had been uncovered would ever floor. Like most books written by former Soviet intelligence officers with the approval of their businesses, Lota’s account mixes correct info with a substantial amount of disinformation. The one nuclear spy who had dealt extensively with Adams till he was “uncovered” within the fall of 1944 was Hiskey.⁹

In late 1949, after the Soviet take a look at of a nuclear bomb, the Justice Division considered bringing the case to a federal grand jury, however the FBI was reluctant. For a number of years, the Justice Division remained concerned with submitting indictments, however the FBI was nonetheless unenthusiastic. Adams was in the united states. All of the principal figures in his ring had both refused to cooperate or denied any information of Adams’s actions. Chapin’s story alone was inadequate to maintain a conviction. He had no proof however his personal recollection, which had modified over time. Though the FBI didn’t doubt that Adams had been managing Soviet spies for the reason that early Nineteen Forties, or that he had solicited the help of a number of folks and obtained nuclear info from Hiskey and Chapin, legally admissible proof to assist these expenses was skinny. Information launched by the FBI give no indication that both Hiskey or Chapin was ever noticed passing materials to Adams. The FBI had by no means even seen Hiskey and Adams collectively as a result of that a part of the investigation had been performed by the Military. Materials produced in the course of the grand jury proceedings was both labeled or primarily based on problematic investigative strategies akin to unlawful searches. No indictments have been issued.

The FBI realized in 1948 from Anna Louise Sturdy, a distinguished pro-Soviet U.S. journalist expelled from the united states in 1949 on false expenses of being a U.S. spy, that Adams was within the Soviet Union. In 1956 a high-level FBI informant within the Communist Celebration USA reported that Tim Buck, the chief of the Canadian Communist Celebration, instructed him that he had lately met with Adams in Moscow. Adams had instructed Buck a outstanding story of escaping from america by climbing via home windows, smuggling himself aboard a ship certain for Europe, sneaking into Yugoslavia, and flying to Moscow on a airplane supplied by the Yugoslav chief Josip Broz Tito. After a prolonged investigation, the FBI concluded that Buck had certainly met with Adams, however that the account of his escape was hogwash. The FBI by no means realized how Adams eluded surveillance and fled the nation.

In response to info on a Russian web site, Adams labored from 1946 to 1948 for the GRU Basic Workers however was dismissed in 1948 because the purge of “rootless cosmopolitans” (Stalin’s derogatory time period for Jews) gathered steam. For a few years, in response to the web site, he labored as a political author for the TASS information company. He died on January 14^th, 1969. In 1999 Boris Yeltsin posthumously awarded him the title of Hero of the Russian Federation “for braveness and heroism proven in the course of the efficiency of particular assignments.”

Hiskey was referred to as earlier than a number of congressional committees over time however persistently pleaded the Fifth Modification. He had obtained a instructing job at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute earlier than his title grew to become public. The president of the institute was an anti-Communist, however he rebuffed calls for that Hiskey be fired, insisting that provided that Hiskey have been discovered responsible would he be let go. Though Hiskey was suspended after being indicted for contempt of Congress, he was reinstated after being acquitted. However, he was by no means promoted, and in 1952 he lastly resigned to change into an industrial advisor. He later labored for a chemical firm and as director of analytical analysis for Endo Laboratories. He died in 1998.

None of these investigated for ties to Adams ever confronted prosecution, though one, Samuel Novick, a rich businessman, moved to Mexico in 1951 and remained there for the remainder of his life. Hiskey’s most infamous acquaintance turned out to be his son, Nicholas Sand, additionally a chemist. Sand made headlines within the Sixties not for espionage however for producing the purest industrial model of the psychedelic drug LSD, labeled “Orange Sunshine.” Convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to fifteen years in jail, Sand jumped bail whereas his case was being appealed and fled to Canada, the place he lived underneath an alias for twenty years whereas producing psilocybin mushrooms and LSD. Arrested by the RCMP with sufficient LSD “to dose the entire of Canada two occasions over,” he was imprisoned and finally deported to america. Launched from jail in 2001, he remained an unrepentant drug producer till his dying in 2017, boasting that he had manufactured enough LSD for nearly 140 million doses.

Neither the FBI nor Military investigators ever decided precisely how a lot nuclear info Hiskey handed to Adams, though Russian archival paperwork declare that, starting in 1944, “Kemp” gave Adams samples of nuclear supplies and practically 4,000 pages of paperwork. Hiskey apparently cooperated with Adams starting in 1941, however precisely what info he supplied stays unknown. As a result of Hiskey went to his grave denying he had been a spy, the GRU by no means credited him. The Soviet follow—nonetheless noticed by the intelligence providers in post-Soviet Russia—was to not reveal the names of spies who had not admitted their actions. Hiskey was one in all solely two chemists employed by the Manhattan Mission who turned over nuclear info to the united states. Fuchs and Corridor have been physicists, Greenglass a machinist, and Seborer an engineer. George Koval was a chemist, however his info was largely about polonium initiators and plutonium manufacturing. The labeled info supplied by Hiskey regarding different chemical compounds could nicely have been distinctive.

Different Russian sources are removed from dependable. One web site asserts that Hiskey instructed Adams that his buddy “Kemp” had entry to labeled materials and that he photographed what Kemp gave him. However the website additionally erroneously says that Adams despatched greater than 5,000 pages of fabric and samples of plutonium from Los Alamos to Moscow—at occasions when Hiskey was in Canada, Adams was underneath suffocating surveillance, and nobody becoming Kemp’s description was at Los Alamos.

The FBI obtained data indicating that Adams stayed on the LaSalle Lodge in Chicago at the very least eight occasions from December 1942 to September 1943. Hiskey was not assigned to the Metallurgical Laboratory till October 1943, so it’s doable that Adams was assembly with another person related with the Manhattan Mission throughout this era, maybe somebody advised by Hiskey. Thus, a number of the materials Adams despatched to Moscow in 1944 might need come from somebody aside from Hiskey. The 1948 Soviet cable concerning the supply’s public publicity leaves little doubt that “Kemp” was a GRU code title for Hiskey, the one nuclear spy who had been uncovered by 1948, and that a number of the claims in Lota’s e book have been nothing greater than disinformation.

Clarence Hiskey, lionized as late as 1986 as an harmless sufferer of presidency intimidation in a e book on the ravages of McCarthyism, paid a small value for turning over a major quantity of top-secret info to Adams, a veteran Soviet intelligence agent who enlisted quite a few distinguished, well-connected businessmen to help him in purloining info. Though the harm Adams and his enablers did to U.S. safety was doubtless not as unhealthy as that achieved by Fuchs and Corridor, it little doubt contributed to the power of the united states to construct and take a look at a nuclear bomb years earlier than U.S. counterintelligence anticipated it.

Harvey Klehr is a professor of politics and historical past at Emory College.

John Earl Haynes is senior historian emeritus within the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Library of Congress.

Klehr and Haynes are co-authors of “The Secret World of American Communism” and “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,” each printed by Yale College Press. This text first appeared within the Fall 2023 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies.

For full footnotes, see the original publication.