Mortal Crimes: The Greatest Theft in History—The Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project (review)

One of the biggest blows to the U.S. sense of security in the early Cold War period was the Soviet Union's detonation of a nuclear bomb in August 1949. The U.S. scientific community had predicted that the Soviet Union would be unable to construct a nuclear bomb before 1951, but that proved not to be the case. The USSR's ability to beat the clock surprised many Americans at the time. Nowadays, however, it is common knowledge that Soviet scientists were able to cut corners in the development of nuclear weapons because Soviet spies stole crucial secrets from the United States and Britain in the 1940s.

Nigel West, in Mortal Crimes: The Greatest Theft in History—The Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project, joins the ranks of those who have written about Soviet espionage operations in the United States during World War II and the early Cold War. Several recent books that discuss intelligence or that focus strictly on Soviet intelligence-gathering have described the Soviet Union's efforts to steal information about the Manhattan Project from the Americans, British, and Canadians. These include Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999), and Ernest Volkman, Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the 20th Century (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995). Other books have dealt with U.S. efforts to thwart Soviet attempts to penetrate the Manhattan Project. In The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (New York: Random House, 1986), Robert Lamphere describes his role as a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in tracking down Soviet spies who operated in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s. Lamphere was personally involved in the investigation that identified several enemy agents, including Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs, who supplied technical secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet government. Because Lamphere published his account in 1986, he did not have access to Soviet archival documents and relied instead primarily on American sources and his own recollections.

Nigel West is able to draw on recently released Soviet source materials, in particular the Venona texts (declassified by the United States in 1995–1996), to revise and expand his previous account of the Soviet Union's penetration of the nuclear bomb project. According to West, Enormoz, which was the codeword used by Soviet intelligence officials for the operation designed to acquire information about the U.S. nuclear bomb project, resulted in the early detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb, the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the questioning of J. Robert Oppenheimer's loyalty, and suspicions within the Anglo-American scientific community.

As West notes, Soviet spies thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Although the results of Soviet espionage efforts are commonly known, few people realize the extent of the "hostile penetration of the Manhattan Project, at virtually every level" (p. 241). West provides an extensive examination of this Soviet espionage operation as well as of the investigations conducted primarily by the British Security Service (MI5) and the FBI to expose the covert Soviet activities. Although West touches on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigations into Soviet spies, he focuses more on MI5 and the FBI.

In some respects, West provides an excellent account of the Soviet espionage and of the investigations "aided by information from defectors, interrogation reports from suspects, physical surveillance which occasionally included clandestine searches of sensitive premises, and a highly secret source code named BRIDE" (p. xviii–xix), otherwise known as Venona, that exposed the Soviet operations. West packs a great deal of information into a relatively slim monograph. At times, however, he includes so much information that it is difficult...