Note that Stalin brought guys with machine guns—just in case.
Three events early in 1946 formalized the conflict.
- Stalin gave the ‘Bolshoi speech’ on February 9th, in which he blamed World War II on western capitalism and said it would cause more wars, while victory over Germany was due entirely to the Soviet social and economic model.
- George Kennan sent his famous ‘Long Telegram’ on February 22nd, in which he explained that Stalin needed the west as an enemy to justify his own totalitarian rule and was ‘impervious to logic of reason … and highly sensitive to logic of force,’ leading ultimately to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
- Winston Churchill gave his ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech in Fulton Missouri on March 5th and declared that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’
It is hard to underestimate the contrast between the devastation of Europe and Russia and Japan on the one hand, and the relatively unharmed condition of the United States on the other. The US enjoyed a per capita GDP that was double Europe’s, three times Russia’s, and five times the global average.
It is remarkable how quickly the great wartime alliance of the United States, Britain and its empire, France, China and Russia fell apart. Britain and France were exhausted and would soon lose their empires, their delusions of grandeur, and whatever remained of their hard and soft powers. China would shortly disappear into an endlessly self-destructive civil war and Russia into snarling paranoia.
Overshadowing all else was the new reality of the atomic bomb, first dropped on Japan a week after the Potsdam Conference ended. America alone possessed it; everyone else was secretly, frantically, trying to build their own.
The long-awaited world peace, as my fictional protagonist Eleanor Shaux would have said, turned out to be a continuation of the war by other means.
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Stalin had an acute understanding of his country’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as all successful dictators must do. He understood that Russia could never catch up with the United States with its own resources and therefore adopted a highly successful strategy of catching up by stealing American and other western technology. Thus began a golden age of industrial and military espionage.
As we have seen in recent blogs, in 1946 the British gave Russia what was then the world’s most advanced jet engine, the Rolls Royce Nene, with the verbal promise that it would not be used in military aircraft. Russia promptly reengineered it into the highly successful VK 1 which powered the Mig 15, the best air superiority fighter in the Korean War. Stalin could not believe the British had been so stupid. According to Alexander Yakovlev’s memoires Stalin said, ‘What fool will sell us his secrets?’
In other reengineering feats, Russia reengineered the B29, then the world’s most advanced bomber, into the Tupolev Tu-4, which first flew in 1947; and, most notably, duplicated the design of the ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki into the 22-kiloton ‘Joe 1’ bomb tested on August 29th, 1949, exactly four years after Nagasaki. The blueprints had been stolen by the British Soviet spy Karl Fuchs who worked in Los Alamos.
On a less ominous scale, Stalin rode in a ZIS-110, an exact replica of the Packard Super Eight that President Roosevelt gave him as a present in 1942. He also began construction of seven monumental buildings in Moscow, the ‘seven sisters,’ to rival American skyscrapers. This explains the bizarre design of the new Moscow State University, which resembles not an academic institution but a vast, sprawling version of the Empire State Building in New York.
Many years ago I was in Hong Kong and offered a brand-new gold Rolex for $10. “Is it genuine?” I asked. “It’s original,” the man said.
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The degree of espionage and signals counterintelligence in this post war period is remarkable. Everyone knows the story of the British team led by Alan Turing who successfully broke the Enigma code during the war, as portrayed in the movie The Imitation Game. In 1946, in a feat of parallel importance, in the Venona Project the American cryptanalyst Meredith Gardner successfully decrypted parts of intercepted Soviet communications, beginning a process that would reveal the full extent of Soviet spying in the United States, including the theft of atomic bomb designs by Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
After years of deciphering archived messages, the Venona team was able to identify the spy codenamed ‘Charles’ as Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized British German who had fled Germany before the war. He had worked on the atomic bomb from its inception, first in the British ‘Tube Alloys’ project and then directly on the ‘Fat Man’ design used against Nagasaki. Stalin had known about the Manhattan Project all along.
Fuchs confessed that he had given his information to a carrier named Harry Gold, who confessed and identified another spy working inside Los Alamos, a machinist named David Greenglass, who confessed and identified his sister and brother-in-law, the Rosenbergs, as the leaders of the spy ring.
Fuchs (top left) confessed and fingered his courier Harry Gold, who identified the machinist David Greenglass, who nailed his sister and brother-in-law, the Rosenbergs, who ran the spy ring.
It is an irony of historic proportions that of the three men shaking hands at Potsdam, Churchill and Stalin had known about the atomic project for years, but Truman had been kept out of the loop and only told shortly before he arrived at Potsdam. The Trinity test took place as the conference was opening.
In another hard-to-believe irony, Gardner’s original deciphering breakthrough was observed by Bill Weisband, another member of the Venona team, who just happened to be—you guessed it—a Soviet spy.
So, while the Germans never knew that Enigma had been broken, the Russians knew their codes had been deciphered and could use that information to their advantage.
In yet another similar irony, after the war the British MI6 organization set up Section IX to manage all their counterintelligence operations. Within Section IX was Department R5, which focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc. Department R5 was headed by—drumroll please—Kim Philby, one of the famous Cambridge Five Soviet spies who were unmasked in the 1950s.
Let’s save that irony for the next blog.
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The famous question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” meaning ‘who will guard the guardians?’ first posed by the Roman writer Juvenal in the second century, is one of the enduring debates about how to hold government accountable in a just society.
Looking at the layers of spies in the spiderweb of the postwar counterintelligence world we could come up with our own Latin adage: “Quis speculatur ipsos speculatores?” meaning ‘who will spy on the spies?’
