The Oppenheimer file: there is a rush to dismiss the Sudoplatov book, lest it convince people that the 'witch-hunters' were right.

IT'S HARD to recall any other recent memoir generating the kind of outrage that has greeted Special Tasks, an autobiography by retired KGB Lieutenant General Pavel A. Sudoplatov. Historians have labeled the book "a disgrace." The council of the 43,000-member American Physical Society, the world's largest group of physicists, has denounced it for (believe it or not) eroding "public trust" in science. Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe deems Special Tasks a "web of lies." A special Wilson Center colloquium was convened largely to discredit the book.

Why all the excitement?

Sudoplatov, who has long been known to students in the field as one of the most powerful personalities in the Stalin-Beria KGB, asserts, among many other things, that key physicists who worked on the American atomic bomb--J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi included--were knowing sources of information for Soviet operatives at Los Alamos and elsewhere.

The book, moreover, bears a stamp of respectability that distresses its critics. It has been excerpted in Time magazine and has been featured on MacNeil-Lehrer. Indeed, Robert Conquest, the leading living authority on the Stalin era, has described Special Tasks as "the most sensational, the most devastating, and ... the most informative autobiography to emerge from the Stalinist milieu." This isn't to suggest that Conquest endorses every claim in the memoir. He recognizes that this is a highly problematic piece of work; Sudoplatov makes mistakes, some of them serious.

But the book, which Sudoplatov wrote with the help of his son, Anatoly, and Jerrold and Leona Schecter, can't be dismissed out of hand. (Interestingly, Jerrold Schecter, formerly Time's Moscow bureau chief, played a key role in facilitating the 1970 publication of another Soviet autobiography initially decried as either fraudulent or inaccurate: the Khrushchev memoirs, the authenticity of which is no longer in question.)

The primary difficulty with Sudoplatov's claims about Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Leo Szilard turns on the fact that they are unsupported by documents from Soviet archives. Not that this invalidates the book. Oral history is an altogether legitimate form. Actual documentation may or may not still exist--if it ever did. And the Russian Intelligence Service, which controls access to most of the relevant archival material, remains highly active in conducting espionage abroad. (Indeed, the Aldrich Ames case makes it plain that the KGB-to-RIS transition was relatively smooth.) Spy services don't like to reveal the names of undiscovered agents, even if they've long since died. To do so has an unfortunate impact on current recruitment efforts.

Still, it would be unwise not to be wary of serious charges leveled against men who made outstanding contributions to the U.S. war effort, especially when they're no longer here to defend themselves. Taking the word of a retired KGB general who may be looking to sell a few books would be folly.

Sifting the Evidence

FOR STARTERS, it seems wise to try to evaluate the book as a whole in order to assess its most controversial claims. If the author turns out to be credible on one subject, the likelihood that he's telling the truth on others increases.

The case of Willy Fischer (better known as Rudolf Abel) illustrates this potential approach. I mention the case because Sudoplatov provides a wealth of information on what Abel was actually doing in America during the nine years prior to his arrest in 1957. While the FBI knew that Abel was exceedingly important, it's not clear the U.S. ever learned much about the nature of his activities here. Certainly, little has been made public about the Soviet spy, who was swapped for downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962. Sudoplatov's detailed discussion of Abel's work should enable the bureau itself--or researchers with access to FBI files--to "walk back the cat" and verify at least some of the KGB general's claims.

A second method of evaluating Sudoplatov is to examine the tone in which he discusses other episodes of likely interest to Western readers; the Alger Hiss affair is a case in point. It becomes apparent from his analysis of Hiss that Sudoplatov has a decidedly cautious approach to history. The general confesses to a lack of direct knowledge that Hiss was either "a paid or controlled agent" during the war years. He adds, moreover, that he would have known if this were in fact the case. Sudoplatov reports only that Hiss was described in wartime Soviet intelligence documents as "highly sympathetic to the interests of the Soviet Union."

The general explains that, through conversations he has had recently with a friend who served as a "rezident" for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) in London and New York, he has learned that Hiss was an actual "source of agent information" for a Soviet spy cell in Washington during the 1930s. The GRU cells in America, however, fell apart in the late 1930s, during Stalin's purges; and Hiss, according to Sudoplatov, resisted wartime Soviet reenlistment efforts. Still, Whittaker Chambers's emergence in 1948 as a public witness against Hiss and others was, Sudoplatov reports, regarded in Moscow as a setback for the GRU's activities in the United States. None of this is consolation for those who thought Hiss innocent.

Sudoplatov is far more careful than he would need to be in view of the fact that Hiss actually went to prison for perjury. Moreover, insofar as Hiss's guilt has been established beyond doubt by serious scholars, Sudoplatov might easily have feigned greater direct knowledge of the case. Instead, he engages in some bizarre--and totally unnecessary--speculation.

Sudoplatov suggests that Hiss's pro-Soviet sympathies were indulged by President Roosevelt and by Harry Hopkins; he guesses that Hiss was used to make contacts with Soviet intelligence agents during the war years precisely because his pro-Soviet orientation was known to his superiors. Sudoplatov believes that the Truman Administration knew a good deal more about Hiss than it let on in 1948. He thinks the decision merely to try Hiss on perjury charges was the result of a deal between the Truman White House and J. Edgar Hoover.

This, of course, is at variance with virtually everything we know about the Hiss case. It's true that FDR was alerted to Chambers's charges in 1939 by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle and, apparently, laughed them off--but there's no evidence whatever of any 1948 "deal." Hiss was charged with perjury because the statute of limitations on espionage had lapsed. The FBI tried its best to collect every piece of evidence it could find in the effort to convict Hiss.

But just because so much has been published on this subject, Sudoplatov's conjectures, fanciful though they may be, make his larger work more rather than less credible. The easy path would have been to rehearse what's already known and to embroider the tale with some added, unverifiable detail. Instead, Sudoplatov endeavors to reconcile the public record with his own knowledge, providing a bit of new information, admitting where he's in doubt, and then positing an altogether unlikely scenario.

Not the mark of an author bent on deception.

In the end, however, the most compelling reason to take Sudoplatov's claims about Oppenheimer & Co. seriously stems from the fact that he first advanced them well prior to his current effort to publish in the West.

Sudoplatov was purged by Nikita Khrushchev shortly after Stalin's death and spent 15 years in various prisons. In his original 1982 appeal for rehabilitation--which was directed to then-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov--Sudoplatov, in listing his "achievements," notes his work in collecting information provided by Oppenheimer and Fermi as well as his role in the murder of Trotsky.

The appeal, needless to say, was not intended for Western consumption. Indeed, back in 1982, neither he nor Andropov could possibly have envisioned a circumstance in which, 12 years hence, Sudoplatov would publicize the document in question.

It doesn't seem likely that someone seeking rehabilitation would make utterly false claims to the head of the KGB; Andropov was in a position to verify Sudoplatov's "achievements."

In this context, Sudoplatov's report on Soviet atomic espionage seems far more credible. He dismisses Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as minor players, even as he confirms that they were spies. (Bad news for the dwindling, never-say-die Rosenberg lobby.)

Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Klaus Fuchs, he argues, provided information that speeded up the Soviet Abomb program. According to Sudoplatov, Fuchs--who confessed his crimes and served time in a British prison--was the only one actually to meet with Soviet couriers. The others--while working at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Berkeley, and Chicago--deliberately left important information in places where it could be discovered by agents Sudoplatov had insinuated into the laboratories.

Oppenheimer's pro-Soviet orientation is no secret. His wife, mistress, brother, and sister-in-law were all CP members, and some scholars have concluded that Oppenheimer himself almost certainly joined the Party in the mid 1930s. Szilard and Fermi believed in sharing information on the atombomb project with the Soviets in order to hasten Hitler's defeat. Niels Bohr, the legendary Danish physicist, also supported the notion of sharing data with Moscow; Sudoplatov asserts that Bohr knowingly provided technical assistance to a Soviet physicist/secret agent, one Yakov Terletsky.

Espionage, needless to say, is an exceedingly serious charge--an entirely different matter from ideological orientation. But it is well to remember that the FBI and U.S. military intelligence were profoundly concerned about Oppenheimer throughout the war years. The decision to appoint him to head the Manhattan Project was made by General Leslie Groves in the face of staunch opposition from U.S. intelligence authorities. Some years after the war, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance. At the time, Diana Trilling argued that the circus-like atmosphere in which Oppenheimer's clearance was lifted seemed indefensible; the real point, she suggested, was that the clearance should never have been granted in the first place.

Sudoplatov provides a great deal of detail about the effort to recruit and work with Oppenheimer, who--he says--was instructed to sever his ties with pro-Soviet groups prior to his departure from Berkeley for Los Alamos. Oppenheimer's Soviet intelligence contact--Gregory Kheifetz, ostensibly a wartime diplomat based in Moscow's San Francisco consulate--is described in admiring terms by Sudoplatov. There's no question that Kheifetz was an important Soviet agent, nor is there any question that he and Oppenheimer knew each other well.

A Piece of the Puzzle

IN THE last analysis, this book must be taken as a piece of evidence, rather than as the final word. This applies not just to Sudoplatov's claims about Oppenheimer and other atomic physicists, but also to his report on Trotsky's murder and his account of Raoul Wallenberg's fate (He says Wallenberg was originally taken from Budapest to Moscow because top Soviet officials hoped the heroic Swede could be turned into a Soviet agent.)

Some of Sudoplatov's errors and/or misapprehensions need to be noted. It's profoundly unlikely that "through Fuchs we planted the idea that Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard opposed the hydrogen bomb." Oppenheimer, initially, was an H-bomb proponent. Fuchs was long since back in England when the debate on the "Super" (the H-bomb) heated up. In any event, Fuchs lacked the moral and intellectual standing to persuade men like Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard to take particular, political positions. It's also doubtful that Oppenheimer intervened, at the behest to Moscow, to bring Fuchs to Los Alamos. U.S. documents indicate that the British team came as a virtual package. As for Niels Bohr, he reported his encounter with Terletsky to Western intelligence. Unfortunately, there are other questionable claims sprinkled throughout the account. Still, much of what's in Special Tasks fits with unpublished findings by Western researchers. And one begins to see a line emerging in the more thoughtful critiques of Sudoplatov: A number of historians have indicated that they're willing to believe Sudoplatov--except on the subject of Oppenheimer, et al.

Such a position seems hard to defend. Other controversies treated in Special Tasks may seem less threatening to the American academic establishment. But it's difficult to argue that Sudoplatov's analyses of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges, Trotsky's murder, the Wallenberg affair, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and many other key episodes are all better documented than his treatment of the physicists.

In the end, it seems well to hope that U.S. authorities are responsive to the American Physical Society's call for the relevant U.S. archives to be opened. While the group's manifest purpose is to discredit Special Tasks, it's hard not to wonder whether its members won't be in for unhappy surprises of the sort that greeted Hiss and Rosenberg partisans when they demanded access to the FBI's archives.