The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

In the face of Major Jordan’s evidence, Hopkins’ friends defended him, claiming he had not “the faintest understanding of the Manhattan Project, and didn’t know the difference between uranium and a geranium.”41 Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky reveal how he had attended a lecture at the Lubyanka given by Iskhak Akhmerov, the controller of Soviet intelligence in America during the war. To his KGB colleagues, Akhmerov identified the “most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” as Harry Hopkins.42 At Potsdam, when President Truman revealed to Stalin the secret of the atomic bomb, the Soviet dictator took what was surely intended as a surprise with the calm shrug of old news. Both Churchill and Truman suspected that Stalin had failed to understand the true significance of what he had just been told, since he expressed no curiosity and asked no further questions. It did not occur to either of them that the reason for this unnatural lack of inquisitiveness was simply that Stalin had no questions left to ask. The NKVD had successfully delivered the secrets of the Manhattan Project, with “atomic spies” from a number of sources passing a steady flow of scientific data from the United States back to Moscow.