On the benefits of an agent network, or What technologies appeared in the USSR thanks to intelligence officers

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Back in the early 1920s, the young state of the USSR was in dire need of technology upgrades, especially in the context of unfolding industrialization. However, exhausted by the First World War and the Civil War, the power simply could not provide itself with such developments on its own.

And then a developing agent network came to the rescue, among the areas of which was scientific and technical intelligence - it was she who became the solution to the problem of obtaining the necessary information quickly and completely free of charge.

From the very beginning of the existence of the Soviet Union, its reconnaissance units were actively developing and quite successfully coping with their tasks. One of the most important areas of its activity was scientific and technical intelligence (STI), which is designed to obtain information for the USSR about foreign developments, as well as supply information about the projects necessary for the Soviet government in order to "reproduce" these technologies. This need arose especially acutely when the Party announced the beginning of industrialization.

Industrialization required new technologies, which the USSR did not have.

Soviet intelligence had several features that distinguished it from the intelligence network of the Russian Empire. So, for example, in the USSR, the scientific and technological revolution tried to use human and financial resources as efficiently as possible: employees worked exclusively "at the request" of the government, without scattering attention to other developments. In tsarist Russia, the process of "borrowing" technologies abroad was rather chaotic.

However, such selectivity did not affect the variety of "ordered" information. The fact is that the range of borrowings went far beyond the information about the secret development of weapons or technologies for the military industry. The “orders” even included the production of faux fur.

And yet, the priority direction of the scientific and technological revolution was the extraction of information about the secret developments of foreign countries. In the 1920s, the main "acquisition" was the technology for the production of tungsten. Prior to that, tungsten filaments had to be bought abroad, which cost a pretty penny, so the decision to establish their production in the USSR was quite relevant.

This task was set in 1922 to the communist Y. Hoffman, who at that time was an employee of the German concern "Osram", engaged in, among other things, the processing of tungsten. For two years, the newly minted agent transmitted to the USSR data on the technologies that were practiced at the plant. After Hoffman fled to the Soviet Union in 1924 as a result of a failed revolution, the spy network had to be rebuilt, but this did not amount to much effort.

But these difficulties did not affect the favorable outcome of the case: the USSR received not only information about the production of tungsten itself, but also information about the technologies for manufacturing new at that time super-strong materials - cermets and hard alloys - which turned out to be even more valuable.

Of particular importance was the "borrowing" of knowledge about working with alloys of tungsten carbide with cobalt vidia based on the method of powder metallurgy. In the course of experiments by Soviet scientists with the proportions of materials in 1929, a new alloy was developed, which was named victorious and was used mainly in the manufacture of cutting tools.

After the victory with tungsten, the spy network of scientific and technical intelligence was only gaining momentum. And, perhaps, the crown of her activity is the brilliant performance of the operation, code-named "Enormoz". The most legendary "borrowing" - of secret American developments to create an atomic bomb is connected with the activity of this operation.

Interesting fact:One curious episode speaks about the degree of awareness of the Soviet government about the plans of the Americans with regard to the atomic program. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, US President Harry Truman told Joseph Stalin: “We have a new weapon of extraordinary destructive power” - and began to observe the reaction of the Soviet Generalissimo. The secretary general, in response, only said indifferently: "I hope you can use it well against the Japanese." The thing is that Stalin had known about the Americans' atomic program for a long time.

In the early 1940s, the United States launched two secret projects at once related to the development of atomic weapons - "Manhattan" and "Tube Elois" ("Pipe fusion"). Only in the Soviet Union they knew about this already since 1941, when the German communist Klaus Fuchs, who, after escaping from Nazi Germany, worked in Britain, turned to them. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked in the framework of the Tube Elois project, one of the tasks of which was the construction of a uranium bomb factory by the British.

In conjunction with the Soviet intelligence officer Ruth Kuchinski, they obtained information about the development. At the same time in America, the Soviet spy network was recruiting scientists who worked on the Manhattan project. In 1944, Fuchs handed over to the Soviet Union, among many documents, one of the original blueprints for the hydrogen bomb.

Of course, there were tragic episodes on the way to the execution of Operation Enormosis. So, the fate of two Americans - a married couple of Rosenbergs - who, being ideological communists, worked for Soviet intelligence, developed very sadly. They were exposed by the Americans and sentenced to death, despite the backlash from the international community.

The history of the receipt by the Soviet Union of the drawings of the atomic bomb has become, to some extent, a textbook. And the activities of the scientific and technical intelligence of the USSR did not end there. An already non-existent state is often and not unreasonably accused of plagiarism, however, in fairness, it is worth noting that it had a lot of its own luminaries of science. After all, even the same atomic bomb was only in the first copy a "carbon copy" of the American version - the rest were developed on the basis of their own research and development.

Another, no less noticeable and memorable, example of robots of scientific and technical intelligence was the operation to extract information about the American space shuttle. When the shuttles began to launch into space in the United States, the USSR became seriously worried, believing that their ideological opponents were either creating orbital weapons that would launch rockets at ground targets, or with the help of the shuttles themselves, they were going to steal Soviet satellites from orbit. Having understood the true reasons, the CPSU Central Committee decided that such an opportunity should not be missed - they need this technology.

Then the agents of scientific and technical intelligence got down to business again. They were able to obtain the information necessary for the creation of the shuttle for the Motherland, and the work began. The only Soviet reusable orbital transport ship called "Buran", and then several of its prototypes were outwardly almost identical to the American shuttle. Moreover, according to Novate.ru, the leadership of the Party insisted on maximum copying.

Although, in fairness, it should be noted that some of the technological developments that Soviet specialists applied were unique and even advanced for their time, such as, for example, the control system that allows the shuttle to be autopilotized during flight.

But the Soviet Union could not use the brainchild of this project. After the only launch in the country, the money for such an expensive development simply ran out, and with the collapse of the USSR, it was not needed at all. The ships and prototypes were sent to an eternal stop, but the one that flew into space, the copy did not survive until our time - at the beginning of the new century it was completely destroyed under the rubble of the hangar roof that fell on it.