Arthur Adams (spy)
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Arthur Aleksandrovich Adams (October 25, 1885, Eskilstuna, Sweden – January 14, 1969), was a Soviet spy, and Hero of the Russian Federation, who passed critical information to the Soviet Union about the American Manhattan Project.
Early life
Adams was born in the city of
Political activities and exile
While in college, Adams joined the
In 1919 Adams was included in the Martens' mission (a de facto Soviet trade mission in the United States).
An acute lack of qualified personnel (a situation partially created by the Bolsheviks themselves) meant that Adams, with his strong engineering background, immediately became a top bureaucrat.
In 1925 Adams became deputy head of the
Adams, an educated engineer, established personal relationships with other scientists during his frequent trips abroad. He often visited enterprises in Europe and America. Adams collected technical and industrial information which he shared with the Soviet military. As Adams was successful in completing tasks of the surveillance agency, it was decided to accept him as staff intelligence worker. In 1935, at the age of 50, Adams was enlisted to serve in the chief intelligence service of the Red Army.
Adams was sent to the U.S. for illegal work. He quickly managed to get a legal position, and established his own firm and his own agent network involving over 20 experts from the American military industrial enterprises.
In 1938 Adams was summoned to Moscow, having been falsely denounced. Luckily enough, the falsified case against Adams was closed and in 1939 he moved back to the U.S., creating his intelligence network anew.
Atomic espionage
Arthur Adams was one of the first Soviet spies to receive information about the American
It is known that, in 1943, U.S. Military Intelligence received information from confidential sources linking Adams to scientists working at the Met Lab. In the spring of 1944 they observed clandestine meetings between Adams and Met Lab scientist
Another Adams operation to penetrate the Manhattan Project occurred in the winter of 1944. A counterintelligence officer caught one of Adams' agents,
Early in 1945 Adams eluded FBI surveillance while taking his dog for a walk. The FBI picked up his trail in Chicago where he was seen boarding a train for the west coast accompanied by
After retirement from the
On June 17, 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin posthumously awarded him the title Hero of the Russian Federation "for courage and heroism shown during the performance of special assignments".
Public exposure
Information about Adams started to come to light about a year after his defection.
In 1947,
In 1952, Whittaker Chambers mentions Adams in a footnote in his memoirs (and Chambers had known Levine at least since his defection in 1938, as Levine had introduced Chambers to fellow defected Soviet spy Walter Krivitsky):
I did not know that there existed a sealed indictment of the Soviet agent, Arthur Adams. This fact, I am told, has never before been published. I am also informed that it was the intervention of the State Department that prevented the justice Department from prosecuting that case.[3]
See also
- Atomic spies
- List of Heroes of the Russian Federation
- Nuclear espionage
- Soviet espionage in the United States
References
- ^ Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, 2016
- ^ Levine, Isaac Don (1947). "Adams: Ace A-Bomb Spy". Plain Talk (Volume 2). p. 13.
- ^
Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. New York: Random House. p. 534. LCCN 52005149.
External sources
- Venona 1276 GRU New York to Moscow, 2 August 1943 [1]
- "The Atomic Spy Hunt". Time. October 4, 1948. Archived from the original on February 1, 2011. Retrieved 2009-01-14.
- Arthur Aleksandrovich Adams, WarHeroes.Ru (in Russian)
- US House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Report on Soviet Espionage Activities in Connection with the Atom Bomb, September 28, 1948 (US Gov. Printing Office).
- Testimony of James Sterling Murray and Edward Tiers Manning, 14 August and 5 October 1949, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, 81st Cong., 1st sess., 877–899.
- The Shameful Years: Thirty Years of Soviet Espionage in the United States, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, 30 December 1951.
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999).