Brussels gives CIA the power to search UK bank records

The CIA is to be given broad access to the bank records of millions of Britons under a European Union plan to fight terrorism.

The Brussels agreement, which will come into force in two months’ time, requires the 27 EU member states to grant requests for banking information made by the United States under its terrorist finance tracking programme.

In a little noticed information note released last week, the EU said it had agreed that Europeans would be compelled to release the information to the CIA “as a matter of urgency”. The records will be kept in a US database for five years before being deleted.

Critics say the system is “lopsided” because there is no reciprocal arrangement under which the UK authorities can easily access the bank accounts of US citizens in America.

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Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 15)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

If the United States hoped to keep its warfare state essenitally in tack, once the USSR actually collapsed, it would have to create a suitable replacement - what only seemed possible by stirring up the various Muslims in the Middle East. There was still a possibility as late as 1990 that the Soviets would still, somehow hang on, and just the right mixture of American force - laser beams from satellites, military action on the ground, and inaction elsewhere - could be used in Iraq, Iran, and Syria to do the trick. At least, Washington got off on the right foot by apparently causing the massive earthquake in northwestern Iran on June 20, 1990 - the damage of which guaranteed that the mullahs in Iran would not be helping Saddam in any way, once the shooting started in Iraq. Then the 'green light' that American Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie gave the Iraqi dictator in Baghdad a month later assured that he would bite off more than he could chew, once other Muslim leaders learned that he was retaking all of Kuwatt, not just its oil fields. Of course, the besting of Saddam could not include his acutal disappearance as that would open the floodgate to Iran's Shiites, explaining why the Iraqi dictator was able to give them a bloody nose after he had gotten his.

To stoke up panic in Washington against any serious reduction of its war-making capacity, Danny B. Stillman, Director of Los Alamos' Technical Intelligence Division, made a second trip to China in the autumn to report on the state of its nuclear weapons facilities. A trip could also determine Chinese reaction to what had happened in Iran. America's ambassador to Tehran had been former DCI Richard Helms who had been given the position as some kind of consolation for being one of the scapegoats in Watergate. While Helms was thought to be a trusted supporter of officials he served, especially the Shah, and China's moderates, more and more was coming out about his betrayals, especially of JFK. While in Tehran, William Shawcross wrote in the recently published The Shah's Last Ride, "...Helms was an enthusiastic supporter of the Shah's plans for rapid development and radical transformation of Iran." (p. 266) Then Helms had been connected to assassinations, attempted and successful, of Presidents Saddam Hussein, Kennedy, Castro and others. All of this became most relevant when the Tabas eathquake acted as the catalyst which triggered the Shah's downfall.

What could have especially concerned Beijing now were the cables that Jack Anderson, the controverisal Washington columnist, had published in 1979 from Ambassador Helms about the operations of Iran's feared secret police aka SAVAK at home and abroad. On November 7, 1976, Helms wired Henry Kissinger, President Ford's Secretary of State and NSA, that any American action against its agents in the States would be retaliated by Iranian officials against American ones in Iran. Soon after Jimmy Carter had been elected President, Helms cabled Washington that Tehran was most anxious to maintain its special relationship with the USA, and that no SAVAK agents were operating there. In early January 1977, the Shah warned Carter through Helms that any action against his agents in America would be reciprocated in kind by his agents in Iran. Under the circumstances, Carter decided to keep the risky relationship with SAVAK, explaining that "the intelligence which we received, particularly from our listening stations focused on the Soviet Union, was of such importance that we should continue the collaboration." (Quoted from ibid., p. 273)

Then, of course, the question would have been: why were there no warings of the Tabes earthquake and its probable consequences? Had the Carter administration consciously colluded in what the Soviets were doing to rid the Middle East of the Shah's Great Civilization? The U.S. State Department had remained complacent about even KGB warnings by Victor Kazakhov in the spring of 1978 during the Qom riots that there would be an uprising in Iran, and once it occurred with the capture of the bloated staff at its embassy in Tehran, the Carter administration was committed to simply washing its hands of any traces of the Shah. It all seemed to give support to suspicions of American betrayal when the President gave that too fulsome and most unexpected praise of the Shah during that New Year's Eve banquet for 1978 in Tehran. (For more, see Shawcross, p. 129ff.)

Little wonder Stillman described his second visit to China in the most alarming terms. About his meeting with Yu Min, the "father of the Chinese H-bomb", while acknowledging that he was an extremely talented scientist who did design its first thermonuclear bomb, Stillman still maintained that Yu just used the ideas of others, most from the West, concluding thus: "However, we believe he (Yu) did so with the assistance of key ideas from Fuchs, an incredible domestic computational capability, indicators from other nations' tests, access to an enormous library of Western publications, and the support of a vast array of intellectual talent, much of it trained in the West." (Reed and Stillman, The Nuclear Express, p. 128) This was certainly a tribute to China's ability to vacuum clean up all kinds of intelligence from others rather than of Yu himself.

When in 1999 the Chinese finally learned of how they had been spied upon by Stillman et al., and bitterly complained, Reed replied: "That is more bunk. During his ten visits to China, Stillman encourtered a vast vacuum cleaner, sucking up American technology and spying on its citizens to a degree that boggles the mind." (p. 233) During the trips to various sites, Chinese authorities allegedly spied on Stillman and his associates constantly and to the nth degreee. "While Stillman and his deputy were in Beijing," Reed recounted, "the Chinese made efforts to separate them from one of their traveling companions (Los Alamos Assocaite Director John C. Hopkins). It was a blatant attempt to discuss weapon design in private with a knowledgeable American. It is not likely those efforts succeeded." (p. 229) The Chinese, it seems, were so consumed with spying on the American visitors that they threw all social niceties to the winds. And if the Chinese were only such great thieves, especially of American technology, how were they so far ahead of America?

As for what Beijing had allegedly achieved through its spying, it was simply mind boggling. Stillman's party had only agreed to return to China a second time, it seems, if it was allowed to see the crown jewels of its nuclear achievements - its nuclear test site, the nuclear test diagnostics facility, and the prompt-burst reactor. When it visited Xian's Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology, noted for its Stalinist architecture and condition, Reed recalled, "...all of these inconveniences were forgotten upon the visitors' arrival at the most sophisticated flash X-ray equipment they had ever seen: instrumentation to support implosion diagnostics and/or radiation-hardening tests."(p. 225) After seeing the FBR-2 reactor - what had allegedly superceded the FBR-l reactor fourteen years previously, and could blow up the whole lab if if left to its own devices - "the Americans were given a complete tour; at the end of the day, older and wiser, they moved on, over the same nearly impassabe roads, to their accomodations at Science City." (p. 227) China was a third world country when it came to its infrastructure, but the world's showcase when it came to its nuclear capability.

Thanks to alleged Chinese spying on the Americans' conversations in their hotel rooms aka wall talk - contending "no test site tour, no remaining in China" (p. 226) -
the party was finally taken to the nuclear test site at Lop Nur and Malan. Reed contended that the Chinese hosts worked around the clock, setting up meetings at night to gain intelligence bits from their American guests while working by day to translate U.S. scientific publications into Mandarin so that the new information could be used by scientists at the site. They, unlike other nuclear proliferants, pushed having gigantic test sites because they knew the need of conducting giant experiments to become a first-rate nuclear power. "In contrast," Reed concluded, "the instrumentation of even the first Chinese nuclear test was sophisticated in the extreme. (p. 109) The whole time, Chinese counterintelligence, it seems, had been following them everywhere, and going over everything they had touched in the hope of finding intelligence-related drops to contacts in China. For good measure, the Chinese Ministry of State Security just happened to publish a new handbook for professional spying, Sources and Techniques of Obtaining National Defense Science and Technology Intelligence, and the American party were the "first lab rats..." (p. 232)

In explaining this most fullsome disclosure of Chinese nuclear secrets, Reed advanced all kind of ideas about why except the real one - i. e., their naiveté - why Beijing was not most suspicious about what was going on, especially the source of the recent Iranian earthquake. Certainly, Gorbachev's crumbling USSR was in no position to have done it despite the appearance that it served Moscow's interests. In February 1990, the Central Committee of the CPSU had announced the end of one party rule, and counterparts in the Baltics soon followed suit. Gorbachev, instead of ordering KGB Director Vladimir Kryuchkov to suppress the dissent, directed that it cooperate with Anglo-American agencies, and seek ways of boosting his foreign policy ambitions. Instead of the USSR seeking to oust the mullahs, it seemed much more likely that the Red Army marshals were going to overthrow their leader.

The Chinese communists had always underestimated American hostility to their regime's very existence, going all the way back to the Korean War. When Truman prevented a nuclear war by removing General MacArthur from command in Korea, and JFK allowed Beijing to settle its border disputes with India by force during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Chinese got the impression that Washington was becoming resigned to its existence, and even the recovery of Taiwan only seemed a matter of time - what was only strengthened by Washington's refusal to attack China in any way during the Vietnam War. Nixon's opening to Beijing was hopefully just a temporary expedient to help isolate the USSR by Chinese support of countries like Iran and Cambodia until the communist regime in Moscow was gone. With the end of the Cold War, China was now in the hot seat, as the devastating earthquake in Iran's northwest in June 1990 demonstrated. Instead of seeing this for what it was, China saw the period's benign neglect by Washington as signs of acceptance rather than just postponement of its fate.

Reed explained China's vast disclosure of its national security secrets to Stillman's party as the result of pride, deterence, an intelligence trick, and/or international confidence. Like Soviet scientists, according to Reed, Chinese ones felt underappreciated for their efforts, and wanted to show them off to the visiting Americans: "In their lives behind the iron or the bamboo curtains, those scientists recieved no recognition from their countrymen or from the international scientific community. (p. 221)
Then it could have been just to deter Americans from doing anything provocative - what a nuclear-armed Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan could exploit, thanks to Beijing's assistance, "...so long as that calamity was not directly attributable to Beijing." (p. 4) It could also have been to provoke American reaction to what they were shown in the hope of determining what it meant: "A raised eyebrow or a sudden scowl could confirm or discount a year's work." (p. 221) Reed concluded menacingly. "Maybe Chinese nuclear technology was no longer top secret," implying that Beijing was well-advanced in its replacement, especially space weapons, particularly lasers.

Stillman's reports about his two visits to China had the desired effect upon American policy-makers, especially President George H. W. Bush. He, as Reagan's Vice President, had been cranking up Washington's bureaucracies for this moment. Shortly after Reagan was re-elected, Bush was appointed chairman of the cabinet-level Task Force on Combating Terrorism. Its mandate was to make covert operations against America's enemies at home and abroad as secret as possible by preventing Congress, the media, whistleblowers, and interested citizens from learning much about them while appearing to be behaving as transparently as possible. It was an effort to re-establish covert operations to where they had been before Nixon's Plumbers ruined conditions with Watergate, especially the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which put it on a collision course with the National Security Act. According to Angus Mackenzie in Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, the task force was to use alleged domestic terrorism - what was virtually non-existent - to justify essentially muzzling the whole country.

As Mackenzie explained, this required making it harder to get serious information from the government, getting the Bureau to pursue wholesale spying on peace groups like the Physicians for Social Responsibility, having the FBI largely exempted from disclosing secret counterintelligence and international terrorist files to public scrutiny and judicial review, tightening up secrecy contracts of government employees by having them sign various government forms and swearing to some secrecy oath, instructing federal employees to ignore laws that Congress had passed to the contrary, exempting agencies like the National Security Council (NSC) and the National Security Agency (NSA) from the purview of the FOIA, and the like. The prosecution of Samuel Loring Morison - what I discussed in the first article as essential for setting up Moscow for the non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War, what the Palme assassination was intended to trigger - "...laid the foundation for successful prosecution of U.S. journalists who have, in the opinion of the government, gone too far." (Quoted from Michael Pillsbury, former Reagan Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, p. 180.)

More important, Mackenzie made it quite clear that CIA's Robert M. Gates, the Deputy Director for Counter Intelligence, was the leading light in this whole hypocritical process. Of course, this was when all kinds of agencies - e.g., the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the national labs at Los Alamos and Livermore - were dreading serious cutbacks in their budgets. In May 1991, Gates was nominated to replace Judge William Webster as DCI. Gates had already failed to become DCI after William Casey fell ill back in 1987 because of the questions raised about his knowledge of the covert network that the NSC's Oliver North had developed for providing the catalyst, Palme's assassination, to the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets. To still critics like Mel Goodman, the former division head of Soviet foreign policy, this time, Gates put on the hair shirt, as they say, for past failures, promising to do better this time, if confirmed. Gates was like former DCI Richard Helms, Mark Riebling explained in Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA, a "chameleon", willing to adapt to whatever his bosses required, whether they be hawks or pragmatic decision-makers. (pp. 411-2) This time a pragmatic hawk was required, given the growing uncertainly of the world situation, and how to proceed forward.

Gates's first serious act as DCI was to appoint a CIA Openness Task Force, headed by Joseph DeTrani, the Agency's Director of Public Affairs. "DeTrani was ordered to explore how the CIA could improve 'openness' and 'accessibility' through the use of the news media and by expanding relations with unviersities." (p. 184) The real purpose was to entice and/or entrap key players at the universties, in Congress, and in the news business from doing their jobs under the false impression that by taking them into its confidence, they were really helping in the war against terror - what would improve both their budgets and those of the American intelligence community. To help them in disinforming the public, the Agency would declassify information, especially for filmmakers seeking "accuracy" and "authenticity", to help inform the public about its successes, and to put failure in a better light. All of this was intended to make intelligence gathering more "...visible and understandable rather than strive for openness on specific substantive issues."(ibid.)

While this was going on, Stillman and Nerses Krikorian, a physicist at Los Alamos interested in stopping nuclear proliferation, paid a surprise visit to Russia in December 1991 - after the coup against Gorbachev had been successfully crushed the previous August, thanks particularly to NSA help about where the plotters, led by sidelined KBG Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, were, and what they were doing - to discover alleged substance to kick start DeTrani's campaign. To set the Moscow scene properly for the disinformation-seeking Stillman, President Boris Yeltsin had Soviet Yuliy Khariton, the alleged unrecognized father of the Soviet atomic bomb, send for Stillman's services. Of course, Russia was flat on its back at the time, and Moscow was willing to say anything to gain Western support for its massive privatization program. Washington explained the trip as essential for Russia sorting out its nuclear legacy, and filling the niche left by the Soviet collapse with a new security framework that the West could live with. (Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition, p.21)

Instead of achieving any kind of reasonable outcome with his Russian host, Stillman threw the book at him about its alleged ongoing spying - what certainly constituted a continuing threat to the West. Before Reed even recounted Stillman unloading on Khariton, he raised the existent of this phantom Soviet spy, PERSEUS aka Arthur Fielding, who was apparently still providing Moscow with American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos and beyond. Not only did Fielding and others supply Moscow with atomic secrets but also with everything regarding the "...new frontier of thermonuclear physics." (Op. cit., p. 39) While PERSEUS, as I stated earlier, is an vastly exaggerated American composite of what MI5's Peter Wright essentially did for the Soviets, it reduced the contribution of Soviets scientists, especially Igor Kurchatov and Andrei Sakarov, into essentially little more than Soviet cooks in laboratories. "We have to further conclude," Reed wrote, "that Khariton's 1991 invitation to Stillman and Krikorian was part of a campaign to mask the very extensive and continuing role of techmnical intelligence in the Soviet nuclear weapons program. The Soviet nuclear veteran wished to build a bogus wall a half-century in the past." (pp. 42-3)

Of course, this was manna from heaven for all the American scientists, media people and intelligence agencies, fearing cuts because of the end of the Cold War, as the trips showed that the cold wars had, it seems, only grown with the numbers participating, and the weapons involved. Of course, by this time SoD Gates had already put in place all of DeTrani's recommendations, except the one about him personally selling all the Agency's virtues to the public. Gates particularly wanted agency checks on key reporters and members of America's professoriate to make sure that they got out the good news without any embarrassing leaks or blowback. " 'Openness'," Mackenzie explained, "meant adopting a well-crafted publuc relations scheme aimed at the most important opinion makers in the nation." (p. 187) And Gates was certainly not disappointed when Andy Rooney, the doyen of CBS's Sixty Minutes, and exploiting Senator Daniel Moynihan's call for abolishing the CIA, wrote in an article, "A Lack of Intelligence:Fire the Spies," that its spies should be terminated, and it budget of $30 billion should be cut by 75% - what it was just trying to do, given especially input from Stillman.

Stillman's information, and that of others, had a dramatic impact upon congressional funding, so much so that it started to rise again in 1992, and has pretty much continued to do so ever since. The figure that Rooney used was highly deceptive as that amount was for essentially the whole intelligence community. The Agency only received about $3.1 billion, while the NRO received twice as much, and the NSA got $3.7 billion. The NRO had built up over $3 billion of appropriated but unspent funds, so much that it even built a huge new facility, costing $310 million out of its own pocket. More important, the NRO had the largest number of employees under Special Access Programs (SAPs) - "...supersecret program designed to minimize oversight and provide for an exotic level of secrecy." (p 196) The General Accounting Office estimated in 1985 that there were "about 5,000 to 6,000" federal employees having such contracts with private industry. If there were any Russian and Chinese spies still operating in the States, they would most likely be NRO employees.

On a much more somber note, Maczenie himself, who had been investigating such covert operations for fifteen years, came down with brain cancer about this time, dying on May 13, 1994. While it could have been naturally caused, especially given all his cell phone calls - a much suspected cause of such cancersm - in doing the research, it is also possible that it was the result of foul play. The Agency's Special Operations Group, what Helms started in 1967, and was first headed by Richard Ober, was still in business, and Gates's new program required something like this to get rid of persistent troublemakers. Mackenzie had even made the connection with its pursuit of Victor Marchetti, its campaign against Ramparts, and MHCHAOS, the domestic program for domestic spying of the highest order. "Ober confided," Mackenzie recounted, "that MHCHAOS files were going directly to John Dean at the White House, as even Dean was involved in the Watergate cover-up." (p. 55) And the Plumbers - led by 'Executive Action's William King Harvey - were connected to Dean, and all their operations, especially Arthur Bremer's assassination of former Alabama Governor George Wallace.

For more on this, see my article about Al 'Deep Throat' Haig on codshit.com

In sum, the glimpses of the series are now becoming more like views, and what is seen looks more and more like a most complicated set of covert operations, as shall be seen even more clearly in due course.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 14)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Washington's attempt to trigger a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War in March 1986 did not fail because of a want of trying but because of Soviet countermeasures, thanks to the spying for Moscow by the Agency's Rick Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, and others. Their information alerted Moscow to the surprise. Alexander Litvinenko's railway security squad discovered the Toshiba container with all the sensors, and the Red Banner Fleet was placed on maximum alert against NATO's attack submarines trying to sink any Soviet boomers hastily going on station in the Barents and Black Seas in response to the shooting of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme. Still, the Reagan administration went ahead with the showdown, though it had no KH-ll laser satellite to blow up any Soviet ICBMs if they started preparing for launch in response to the surprise because of the failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger to even achieve a successful liftoff, much less launch the laser satellite in space. Moreover, the Anglo-American conspirators knew nothing of the 82 nuclear-tipped SS-23 missile launchers in the USSR and East Germany - under the command of Soviet hawk, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov - which would have been fired if the shooting started. (Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence, p. 290)

Under the circumstances, the prevention of the shooting showdown turning into armeggedon rested almost entirely with how the Red Banner Fleet conducted its countermeasures underwater against Anglo-American provocations. US Navy Chief of Naval Operation Admiral James Watkins had announced a few days before the Stockholm shooting that any Soviet aggressive action in this regard would result in NATO attack submarines responding within a few minutes by sinking their boomers wherever they were discovered. The awards that the US Navy gave many of its submarines taking part in this hunt are well documented in Appendix C that Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew provided in Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, pp. 426-7. Glimpses of the struggles were also provided by them in the text (pp. 366-8), and Greg Vistica added more in the Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S.Navy (p.214ff.), especially the fallout that Admiral Carl Trost's mutinies in the operations caused. (pp. 221-5) When no suspect for blaming the shooting of the statsminister on the Soviets was found, Moscow set up Lybia as the convenient fallguy for the trouble it caused by supplying the aggressive Provisional IRA with weapons for a tet-offensive in Northern Ireland by making it look as if Gadaffi's men had been behind of La Belle Discotheque bombing in West Berlin, killing two people, including a US Army sergeant, and wounding 230 others. (For more on the set up, see Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, p. 482ff., though noting that the spin doctor never sees anything sinister and conspiratorial in what Washington does.)

These harrowing troubles made both Moscow and particularly Washington desirous of settling their outstanding differences by diplomacy rather than wars, provocations, and conspiracies though the Soviet leader went out of his way to inform the Reagan administration of how reckless it had been in attempting them. When the two sides met in Washington in December 1987 to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, eliminating all imtermediate nuclear weapons - what had been proposed in 1983 without success, and made Soviet officials, especially the KGB's FCD Vladimir Kryuchkov, assume that Washington was planning a first strike - the Soviet leader brought along the now KGB head to prove that he had not been sceptical of his previous claims. During the discussions, Gorbachev volunteered the existence of the 82 SS-23s which the Brits and Yanks had overlooked in the USSR and East Germany, Mark Urban concluding nonchalantly that "...they could have been castrophophic in the event of war." (p. 290) For good measure, the US government's trial of the US Navy's John Walker spy ring - just the tip of what Moscow had uncovered about the first strike - in the Federal District Court of Northern California in September 1986 resulted in the Admiral Willaim Studeman, the Chief of Naval Intelligence, admitting that it might well have had "...powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side." (Quoted from Sontag and Drew, p. 353.)

All this showed how dangerous East-West relations still were, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) continued its efforts to put a laser-equipped KH-II satellite in space, finally achieving so in 1988. But by then, it seemed increasingly clear that its chances of winning the Cold War by force were diminishing by the day as Gorbachev proceeded by pulling the rug from under its Warsaw Pact by refusing to intervene in the internal disputes of its members. Two START treaties were agreed to, making serious cuts in their nuclear arsenals, and agreeing not to aim their weapons at one another. "In 1989," Hugh Gusterson wrote in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, "the U.S. government gutted Livermore's free electron program, stripping $37 million from the laboratory's budget, and began a series of sharp cuts in its X-ray laser program as well. In 1990 the lab was forced to close down R Program, its X-ray laser design division." (p. 227) It seemed like the end of an era - a fork in the road, as Gusterson stated - where both national laboratories might have their days numbered as the designers, testers, producers, and maintainers of nuclear arsenals.

This possible outcome was a wake-up call for Danny B. Stillman, the intelligence director at the Los Alamos laboratory where nuclear weapons had been vigorously developed since the beginning of the Manhattan Project. Stillman decided to make an in-depth survey of what America's potential enemies, especially now China, had accomplished in the whole field, and what they were planning for the future in the hope of keeping everything going at the national laboratories. It was in June 1988 when he set up the plan by getting Professor Yang Fujia, one of six Chinese scientists attending a meeting of the American Physical Society at Los Alamos, to allow him and possibly others to see the unknown Chinese test site at Dujiangyan where its prompt-burst reactor was located. "Just send me a copy of your résumé," the naive Fujia replied, "and tell me what other nuclear weapon facilities in China you would like to visit." (Quoted from Reed and Stillman, The Nuclear Express, p. 221.) Of course, Stillman wanted to see everything, and the innocent Chinese obliged, agreeing to his ten unprecedented visits which resulted in Washington learning everything it wanted to know about Chinese achievements - what Reed tried to make out was simply the other way round, Beijing wanting to let the West know just how clever it had been all along.

It was still awhile before Stillman made his first visit to China - after the dust and blood had settled and had been swept away from the suppression of the student protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and the USSR had itself imploded - but he was soon taken in April 1990 to where he most wanted to go, the area around Chengdu where Mianyang, Zitong, Science City, and the all important Dujiangyan were located. The first question that Stillman obviously asked about these facilities, though Reed never mentioned it, was why had Beijing chosen such a difficult area - one known for its raging waters, and difficult mountains - for the center of its nuclear weapons industry, and the Chinese answer was surely to get as well away from Soviet threats as possible. Undoubtedly, the Chinese said quite a bit about what had happened at Tangshan in July 1976 - what confirmed what Air Force Secretary and NRO Director Reed had realized back then. Moreover, Beijing at the time had most friendly relations with Iran's Shah, hoping that they would result in a Chinese-Iran, anti-Soviet bloc, backed by the Americans. Beijing had obviously built a vast, underground complex with the idea of making it invulnerable to nuclear attacks in order to avoid some kind of disaster which led to the demise of not only its 'Gang of Four' but also Iran's Shah.

If the Soviets had had such an impact on the power struggles within China and Iran with their laser satellites, Stillman reasoned, why couldn't Washington do the same with regimes it wanted to change the leadership of, especially now Iraq and Iran, given the continuing trouble it was having with Saddam Hussein. Saddam had been the Soviets' biggest ally in the Middle East after it agreed to the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Baghdad in April 1973. Up until then, Iraq's biggest opponent had been Iran's Shah who had been seeking Saddam's assassination, stoking up trouble with Iraq's Kurds, and bottling up Iraq's oil exports through the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. (For more on this, see Con Coughlin, Saddam: The Secret Life, p. 79ff.) The Iraqi dictator had even funded Iran's mullahs in the hope of overthrowing his Iranian counterpart while there had been bloody clashes in 1977 in the city of Najaf, the home of the exiled Iranian Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, resulting in the arrest and execution of eight Iraqi clerics. "More than two thousand Shiites were arrested," Coughlin added, "and an estimated two hundred thousand were expelled to Iran by Saddam on the grounds that they were non-Iraqis." (p. 148)

It was quite obvious that Saddam was pilling on the troubles for the beleaguered Shah in the hope that Iran's fractured civil society would revolt, and Moscow was most happy to help out, though Pelling and Dill somehow ignored this most obvious man-made earthquake in their previously noted article, " *Natural' disasters as catalysts of political action." On September 16, 1978, Tabas-e-Golshan, the oasis town in Iran's eastern Khorassan Province, experienced the largest recorded earthquake in the country's history, 7.7 on the Richter scale. It was a repeat of what the Soviets had done two years earlier in Tangshan, but because of Tabas's extensive qanat system of underground reservoirs, it was even more powerful. There were no foreshocks, but the expected anomalies in animal behavior, plus a predicted lunar eclipse which impended the rescue operation. The earthquake destroyed 85% of its housing and inhabitants (11,000 out of 13,000). "The earthquake," A Preliminary Field Report stated, "was preceded by a strong roaring noise described as like the firing noise of fifty cannons by many survivors in Tabas and in the adjoining villages." (p. 2) Only a few seconds later, the earthquake occurred. It was felt as far away as Tehran, and over an area of 1,130,00 square kilometers. It "...destroyed," the report concluded, "over 15,000 housing units, and thirty qanats (underground water canals) in the epicentral region." (p. 1)

The political timing of the earthquake showed that it was Soviet-made, and for Saddam's benefit. In William Shawcross's The Shah's Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally, the earthquake was seen as the event which sealed the Shah's fate in Iran as it descended into chaos. The regime had become a powderkeg because of the way the Shah corruptly ruled while its inhabitants suffered more and more deprivation. Then it was struck by two hammer blows - 1) the August fire in an Abadan cinema which killed 400 people, and his troops opening fire on demonstrators in Tehran's Jaleh Square, killing and wounding hundreds, and 2) the devastating earthquake. The Shah only visited the airport where the rescue effort was being mounted while eveyone else, especially mullahs, was still trying to rescue those still buried. "He stood around, stiff, resplendent, and uncomfortable," Shawcross concluded, "in the brilliant plumage of a field marshal's uniform. Then he flew out again. In terms of identfying himself with the people's suffering, it was a disaster." (p. 21) Then Saddam expelled Khomeini from Iraq at the Shah's request, and his Empress Farah, in an alleged attempt to shore up the Shah's collapsing regime, was invited to Baghdad to royally celebrate the tenth anniversary of Algiers Agreement over the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.

By the following February, the Shah and his Empress were gone for good from Tehran.

These insights by Stillman's Chinese hosts about the Tabas earthquake were just what Washington wanted to hear as the showdown with Saddam loomed. By this time, the destructive Iran-Iraq war had been stopped, though no peace treaty had been agreed to, and Saddam hoped to mend fences with Tehran's new President, the liberal, elected Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, so that Iran would not be used as a front in any Western showdown with Baghdad. Ayatollah Khomeini had died in June 1989, and Tehran itsefl was feeling its way towards better relations with its regional neighbors as a more independent, nationalist one rather than a spreader of Pan-Islamism. Now Saddam was willing to go back to the humiliating conditions about the waterway which had been settled with the Shah in the 1975 Algiers Agreement just to save his own skin.

To cut the ground from under Saddam's feet, thanks to input from Stillman about the 1978 earthquake in the Shah's Iran, the NRO hastily arranged the June 21, 1990 earthquake in Iran's northwestern area closest to Iraq. "The Rudbar-Tarom earthquake, the largest in the country to affect an urban area in Persia," according to Manuel Berberian's article, "100years; 126,000 death," in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, "killed 40,000 people, injured 60,000, and left more than 500,000 homeless. The earthquake destroyed three towns (Rudbar, Manjil, and Lowshan) and 700 villages and damaged another 300 villages in Gilan and Zanjan provinces of northwest Persia, southwest of the Caspian sea." Of course, Presiden Rafsanjani led the rescue effort, even accepting aid from the United States - what the New York Times duly noted as "...one of the biggest signs of cooperation between Tehran and Washington in years" - though more hard-line mullahs wanted nothing from America.

The cause of the earthquake which again had no warning foreshocks - another one which Pelling and Dill somehow missed - seems to have been the magma-like effect that the laser beams had on the fragmented, complex system of surface faults whích had not previously been considered active, and the collapse of qanats and wells in the surrounding small towns and isolated villages which no one suspected, and only discovered the destruction of days later. The seismologists only had the shock waves and the destruction wrought to make up their explanations with, and they seem like just convenient goobledygook. Martin C. Faga - the NRO's tenth Director, noted for putting together in integrated satellites the various capabilities that the CIA, DOD, and US Navy possessed about imagery, signals and communication lasers - who had taken over in September 1989 was well prepared to do the job, once Stillman identified what had to be hit with the new capability. Little wonder that Faga then became known as the grest discloser who brought the NRO allegedly 'out of the black', and became a principal architect of its role in the 21st century while serving on the Jeremiah Panel at the end of the 1990s.

Reassured about Iranian neutrality in any Gulf War because of the massive troubles caused by the earthquake, Saddam now tried to take advantage of the 'green light' that American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given the Iraqi dictator at a July 25th meeting at the Presidential Palace about his plans regarding Kuwait - what turned out to be a buzzsaw when he took advantage of it. (For more, see Coughlin, p.250ff.)

Little wonder that Robert Gates, who became Pappy Bush's DCI a little bit later, and is now Obama's Secretary of Defense, complimented "Stillman's ability to adapt the latest advances in science to solve unmanageable problems and to analyze foreign technologies made him an invaluable asset to the Intelligence Community." (back of the dustjacket for The Nuclear Express) The latest advances in science are in lasers; Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and China are the biggest problems confronting America; and Stillman was the principal analyst in determining what the Soviets, Chinese, and others were doing with their nuclear weapons - what only caused Washington more problems.

Perhaps in future, Gates will be more careful about observing his own order about DoD employees keeping quiet when it comes to such matters.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 13)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The Tangshan earthquake in July 1976 was a wake-up call to the Americans and the Chinese while it was a reassuring one for the beleaguered Soviets. Washington, thanks to input by Air Force Secretary and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Director Thomas C. Reed, realized that it had been barking up the wrong tree with the Soviets, continuing to upgrade its missiles and their warheads under the cover of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, while it should have been involved in upgrading its satellites and developing powerful lasers for them. For Beijing, the earthquake had shown just how vulnerable its defense establishment was. Not only had Moscow left its in shambles during Khrushchev's last days but now showing that what was left of it above ground was vulnerable to attacks by more earthquakes. For the Soviets, the Tangshan earthquake - whose cause was unexpectedly successful - induced the Ministry of Defence despite its bloated status to go full speed ahead at its immense Semipalatinsk facility with the Fon-1 program to develop a variety of similar technologies for its new missiles.

Mao's hand-picked successor, Hua Guofen, went to the Tangshan disaster site, and managed the rescue effort while the infamous 'Gang of Four', especially Mao's wife Jian Qing, avoided it for fear of exposing the regime's weakness during a most serious challenge. "Anecdotal evidence suggests that the socio-political and cultural dynamics put into motion at the time of catastrophic 'natural' disasters," Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill wrote in " 'Natural' disasters as catalysts of political action" to mark the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, "create the conditions for potential political change - often at the hands of a discontented civil society." Of course, by not identifying why they thought that the Tangshan earthquake, like Hurricane Katrina, might well not have been a natural one, they conveniently left Moscow out of the equation, and apparently out of fear of raising the hackles of colleagues more than the international power players involved. Professionals do not look kindly upon their kind who raise damaging questions about who they are, and what they are up to. The grievances that Hua's men, particularly Deng Xiaoping, exploited were the fallout from Mao's similarly dying Cultural Revolution. Mao's interregnum had left a power vacuum which they exploited after the earthquake struck.

Rather than treating the Tangshan earthquake as the source which triggered the maladaption of socio-environmental relations throughout the Chinese political system, as Pelling and Dill had, Reed just acted as if it was a natural phenomenon irrelevant to the ongoing power struggle. Reed had been a most creative designer of thermonuclear weapon warheads, especially MIRVed ones which were multiple independently targeted, during the 1960s when Livermore was engaged in its massive overkill in alleged deterrence, even gaining Edward Teller's approval for his performance. Hua's and Deng's more pragmatic policies simply triumphed over those of Mao's followers who wanted to continue the revolutionary struggle for a more communist world. If Qing's associates had won, there certainly would have been a military showdown with Moscow whose outcome no one can imagine with any kind of clarity or certainty. "Within a month of Mao's death," Reed wrote, "Hua arrarnged for her arrest and imprisonment along with her key associates." (p. 162) Then the Chinese constitution was changed to suit the needs and expectations of the rebels. "Those shifts would give rise to a booming economy, but they also brought to power a man who had decided to proliferate nuclear weapons into the Third World."

In doing so, Reed took an unexpected great leap forward, acting as if the Chinese already had a fully developed nuclear industry which they could use to help supply friendly countries like Pakistan with tested nuclear weapons. Actually, Reed had only touched on the nuclear weapons industry northeast of Chengdu and Mianyang, acting as if the sum and substance of it was essentially located around Zitong, where the Chinese built their new Research and Design Academy of Nuclear Weapons to get further away from the Soviets. It was spread out all over the place, "...with facilities strung down narrow valleys." (p. 104) While this made for difficult travel between facilities, they were all sitting ducks, being above ground, if the Soviets decided that Beijing needed more 'natural' disasters as catalysts for more agreeable political change. More disasters could open the current Chinese political leadership to further scrutiny that even it might not be able to contain.

It was only in November 1979 that the Chinese leadership finally admitted the 240,000 killed in the Tangshan earthquake - an alleged natural disaster - to stem more damaging speculation about the numbers dead and why. Since it had occurred, as CHINA.ORG.CN recounted in "Tangshan Earthquake - 30 Years' Sorrow," it had been "...surrounded by speculation, guesswork and rumors because no official information about what had actually happened or casualties sustained was made available." The biggest source of the speculation was that many precursors of an earthquake had occurred, and geophysical and geochemical anomalies detected, but no one had put them all together in a prediction, especially since there were no foreshocks. The Chinese authorities had established stations to check for such precursors in Hsingtai County in 1968 to warn Beijing of a likely quake, and one in Aksu, Sinkiang - right next to the nuclear test site at Lop Nur - in 1971, but had not gotten round to establishing one at Tangshan near the North Korean border. "It was not a man-made disaster," Xu Xuejiang, the reporter for the Xinhua New Agency belatedly wrote, "and the deaths have no direct relation with the government."

Of course, the placing of these test stations - particularly to record animal reactions to possible earth tremors - showed that the government was most concerned about their occurring in the capital and at its major testing center in the desert. The facilities were not just a few shacks, like what the Americans had in Nevada, but a vast complex on the sand which would have been shaken to pieces by any serious earthquake, natural or man-made. "Co-author Stillman had the opportunity to visit there a quarter century later. The dimensions were overpowering. The Chinese Nuclear Weapons Test Base," Reed recounted, "is seven times the size of the equivalent U.S. facility in Nevada." (p. 108) More important, the site had all kinds of underground equipment for recording the results of a test from its inception. Moreover, the Chinese, according to Reed and Stillman, were most vigilant in proecting its secrets, unlike the Nevada test site where American protesters were given pretty much the run of the place whenever they felt like it. (Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, p. 178ff.)

During the early 'eighties, after Deng had consolidated power as chairman of the Central Military Commission, he built a whole complex of underground nuclear facilities around Dujiangyan - the epicenter of China's export of nuclear and ballistic missile technology to Muslim and communist states - a place only alluded to in The New Express. Reed explained how Stillman opened up the country's whole nuclear industry for US inspection, starting in June 1988. That's when five, unknown Chinese experts attended a meeting of the American Physical Society, along with fellow Chinese Professor Yang Fujia, director of the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear Research. Stillman decided to ask him some probing questions about China's nuclear arms industry, starting with: did China possess a prompt burst reactor - a device to test laser design. When Fujia said it did, Stillman asked where it was, and "...much to his surprise, Professor Yang pointed to a location off in the mountains, a considerable distance west of the known Chinese nuclear weapons facilities." (p. 221) This turned out to be Dujiangyan which they personally visited the following year.

This was not the first bit of ignorance that the USA had about what was going on in China. As the Soviet Union was heating up the area around Tangshan with its laser satellites, James W. Plummer, the fifth Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), suddenly retired in June 1976, apparently having learned that there was much more to the satellite business than just creating Corona ones for meteorlogical, communications, and reconnaissance purposes. Their spotting what Moscow was cooking up over China shook the NRO to its very foundations, and Reed was hastily called in to replace him by the collapsing Ford administration in the hope of somehow stopping the rot. Jimmy Carter, Ford's obvious replacement, was on record that he wanted to negotiate a comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT) if elected. NRO Director Reed, it seems, got the national laboratories to oppose any test ban treaty because they allegedly needed tests to assure the reliability of their nuclear weapons while, in fact, they just wanted loads more money to catch up in the Star Wars game.

The need for testing was totally belied by the fact that despite all the money for it, the labs only tested, on average, one stockpiled weapon per year. Then there were disagreements about why Carter, once President, gave up on the idea. The directors of the two national laboratories, Harold Agnew at Los Alamos and Roger Batzel at Livermore, claimed that they talked him out of it by stressing the reliability concern. Herb York, a previous director at Livermore, and a proponent of CTBT, claimed that it was because of Soviet and Iranian behavior against American interests that the negotiations failed. Whatever the cause of Carter changing his mind, there was no doubt about why the scientists at the labs opposed it, as insider opponent at Livermore Hugh Dewitt explained. "The laboratories oppose a comprehensive test ban because they want to continue their nuclear weapons development - to refine existing designs and do research in exciting new areas such as the X-ray laser." (Quoted from Gusterson, p. 147.)

Reed, of course, had long left the position by then, having left the NRO shortly after Carter's inauguration, for more productive pastures in the private sector. It can be safely assumed that he was working behind the scenes with officials like Stillman, the manager of the Los Alamos intelligence program, to insure that the nation's weapons laboratories were gearing up for what a Reagan administraion required. Reed had long worked as a key supporter of the California governor, becoming a member of his cabinet, and had only turned to more important policy possibilities when his election seemed assured, thanks to the infamous 'October surprise' regarding the release of the American diplomatic hostages in Tehran. Reed became Special Assistant for National Security Policy in Reagan's National Security Council. For more on this, see these links:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/02/how-cia-operatives-managed-to-salvage.html

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/02/why-john-hinckley-jr-almost.html

Before anything could be done regarding space weapons, Reed had to stop the rabid campaign over the MX missiles - how many MIRVed ones to have, and where to place them. The least dangerous, expensive option seemed to be what the former President had proposed - the MX/MPS plan of having 200 MX missiles, and shuttling tham back and forth among 4,600 shelters in the Utah and Nevada deserts - but, of course, the Reagonites wanted nothing to do with anything the former Georgia peanut farmer proposed about MX for closing the alleged window of vulnerability. To make a long, mind-blogging story short, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger persuaded Reagan to go along with placing a few dozen MX missiles in existing Minutemen and Titan ICBM silos, freeing up vast funds for the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative.. "The proposal," Lou Cannon wrote in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "astonished military planners and was opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it had a virtue that overwhelmed its technological deficiencies: it had not been proposed by Jimmy Carter." (p. 137)

With the MX missile issue finally off the table, the Reagan administration was then able to do what Reed really wanted - the Star Wars program. On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced: "I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves." The proposed system would have high-energy lasers, sensors to locate missiles in preparation for launch or in flight, and command and control centers to direct the lasers to destroy them. To quiet the potential critics, the whole idea was presented as an "anti-weapon weapon", and "...even a small laser system - despite its ineffectiveness as a defence - would create profound instabilities," Daniel Kaplan explained in an article, "Lasers for missile defence," in the May 1983 issue of the Bullentin of the Atomic Scientists, "in the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Uniion." (p. 5)

While doubting scienists debated all kinds of alleged problems with the proposed system - e. g., disguising the five-megawatt power of the hydrogen flouride lasers while still managing to get the massive machines in the sky, possible use of battle stations in the sky, need of 200 satellites to direct the missiles if the Soviets fired all 2,000 of theirs, would require possibly 14,000 shuttle flights to get the whole system in the sky, etc. - the Reagan administration got the necessary funding to start work, starting with $50 million additional funding in 1982 alone, on the massive program despute claims that even a small system of lasers could be seen by the Soviets as offensive, and "such a huge system of lasers is certainly not practical." (p. 6) Lockheed Martin Missiles has already "...unveilled a model of a space-based laser weapon, though, it seems to have more publicity than technical value." (p. 8)

As I have already discussed in the first article of this series, Washington was technically able to put such a Keyhole-11 satellite in the sky in 1984, though it later failed while there, and a similar one in the Kennan series failed the following August, resulting in the rush job to put up yet another one in the Space Shuttle Challenger - what resulted in the famous disaster which most of us witnessed on television at the end of January 1986. What I did overlook in the article is that the KH-ll satellites' first task was to knock of the Soviet ICBMs if Moscow prepared to launch its liquid-fuelled rockets in reaction to the surprise assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme - what was intended to kickoff a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War. The missiles would be sitting ducks for the laser-powered satellite overhead - what Moscow was to believe were merely imagery ones - once the container of sensors that Toshiba shipped across the Soviet Union alerted Washinton about what was possibly afoot. It was the spying by Rick Ames, Robert Hanssen et al. which ruined Washington's well-disguised plan, and apparently saved all our necks in the process.

In the wake of the disaster, it was now Stillman's responsibility to figure out what to do with the laser satellites remaining as the Cold War collapsed, as Reed had been forced to resign right after the program seriously got started because of alleged insider trading with his father's import-export business which netted him a significant fortune.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 12)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The defining moment for the use of nuclear weapons came when the Chinese exploded their first one in the atmosphere at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province on October 16, 1964, though almost no one realized it at the time. Ever since 1950, the United States had been at war, or on the brink of it with China. "Four of the five crises in which American Presidents seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons," Richard J. Aldrich has written in The Hidden Hand, "occurred in Asia." (p. 293) Most recently, in August 1958, the Air Force had recommended bombing the Chinese mainland with a dozen or so kiloton nuclear bombs if they went ahead with their plans of blockading the Taiwan Strait, but Eisenhower had rejected the proposal. Now with LBJ as President - thanks to the Dallas assassination of JFK after the world's narrow escape during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the heating up of the Vietnam War in August 1964 by the manufactured Tonkin Gulf incidents, - it seemed just a matter of time before a nuclear showdown with Beijing would happen. The newly-elected British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, refused to back the massive introduction of American troops into Vietnam for fear that it would be dragged into a nuclear Armageddon.

Soon, more sober views prevailed, as LBJ even learned that the use of atomic weapons would bring total disaster - what the invasion of North Vietnam or the bombing of China would trigger. As a result, the obtaining of a nuclear capability by China had helped stabilize the explosive situation, contrary to what the so-called nuclear
realists of international affairs had assumed - rather than led to all-out war. Of course, as the previous article showed, the Anglo-Americans had helped tremendously in bringing this about by supplying Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists with the scientists, know-how, and many materials for making such weapons - what fell to Mao's communists when the Generalissimo proved not up to the job - but there was no mournful confessions from either London or Washington about what had transpired because of unexpected nuclear proliferation. Mao, despite all his pronouncements about what he would do with the bomb, once he got it, proved to be just engaging in empty rhetoric. If Beijing had not had the bomb, Washington would have certainly used it by the time the 1968 presidential campaign rolled around.

Still, the Chinese staged the test in a way so as to thumb their nose at the USA, especially the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From the very first, China had worked hard to minimize nuclear fallout by conducting tests in the atmosphere. "...there were no surface bursts at Lop Nur," Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman have written in The Nuclear Express, "sucking up great clouids of radioactive debris." (p. 128) This is a far cry from how the Americans staged tests, conducting them either on the surface of land or in the sea, and the agencies responsible more at war with themselves than keeping up with the communists. The hostility started, according to Hugh Gusterson in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, when Livermore instead of Los Alamos got media credit for conducting the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb, and intensified when its first real test only bent the tower which was supposed to be vaporized by the blast, leading Los Alamos's scientists to crack all kinds of jokes about the use of the damaged tower. (p. 24) It was not until the March 1955 Tesla and Turk tests that Liverpool finally got off the mark in the business, but they were still surface bursts, contaminating the Nevada Desert.

More important, Lawrence Liverpool's design, testing, and manufacture of nuclear weapons - what some physicists, especially Robert Oppenheimer, the alleged "Father of the Atomic Bomb", had denounced after the first ones were used on Japan - increasingly haunted its membership. These scientists - headed by Albert Einstein and Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard who had been most instrumental in getting FDR to adopt the Manhattan Project - led the Pugwash Conferences, warning of the dangers of the nuclear arms race, and calling for international control of atomic energy - what Oppenheimer assisted as best he could as head of America's Atomic Energy Commission until he lost his security clearance in 1954 because of the Red Scare. Thereafter, though, Oppenheimer became what Michel Foucault labelled in Power/Knowledge the prototype of the "strategists of life and death" whose pronouncements determined the "regime of truth" - how the whole issue of nuclear weapons, and what to do about them was determined by these experts of "technostrategic discourse".

Little wonder that the establishment experts, especially those at Lawrence Liverpool, became apopletic when Oppenheimer in increasingly emotional terms opposed their alleged rationality in doing such things. At Los Alamos, there was a stronger contingent of liberal physicists to question what was going on there, especially when Truman revived up its work to suit the demands of another Hungarian émigré, Edward Teller, but they soon saw themselves besieged by deriding cartoons on their doors, practical jokes at their expense, and so much censorship that they had no hope of gauging where things were going. As Oppenheimer explained about his continued presence there, and doing what he really opposed: "For the last four years I have had only classified thoughts." (Quoted from Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, p. 199.) Still, long after Oppenheimer left, there were the deadly "blue flashes" of radiation emissions which nuclear weapons workers so fear, the naming of the results of ongoing tests as his babies, and his becoming the original and ultimate victim of speaking out against the whole process. (Gusterson, p.269n20).

Gusterson better illustrated the effect at Livermore when he discussed how George, an anonymous nuclear weapons designer, reacted to an above ground test, apparently in the Nevada desert - what led him to resign shortly thereafter from the laboratory: "And then there is this incredible flash of light, and you always go back to thinking how Oppenheimer describes this incredible flash of light. He described it as brighter than a thousand suns. Just incredibly intense. And it's very frightening. Just terrifying. Just absolutely terrifying. I was crouched over. I'm sure I urinated in my pants at the time as a result..." (Quoted from ibid., p. 128) "I encourtered no one," Alex Forman, co-founder of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, added to Gusterson's text after his inquiries during the Reagan years at the lab, "with the humanistic sensitivity of an Oppenheimer or a Szilard in those publicly representing Livermore." (p. 238)

Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Reed and Stillman picked on Oppenheimer as a convenient Soviet spy throughout this whole period, though without naming him, and he left Los Alamos at the end of the war. "The Venona transcripts," they declared, "and supplementary sources" - Gordon Lonsdale courier Lona Cohen's alleged deathbed confession to her first KGB handler Anatoly Yatsov, and confirmed by several investigators of Soviet spying - "make it clear that another agent lay hidden deep within the Los Alamos fence, under the code name PERSEUS." (p. 30) Actually, this is an attempt to blame Oppenheimer for the fear, paranoia and isolation which pervade the nation's national laboratories without actually saying so - what was actually done by the still unidentified Soviet atomic spy 'K', apparently MI5's former Assistant Director Peter Wright, and others who provided the Cohens, later part of Lonsdale's spy ring as the Krogers, the means, especially microdots, for convening what they were able to collect through their book-selling business in Ruislip for Moscow.

For more on what Wright, Londale aka Vilyam Fisher, Rudolf Abel and Konon Molody, and the Cohens accomplished, see these links:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/01/mi5s-peter-wright-cold-wars-most.html

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/01/gordon-lonsdale-cold-wars-most.html

When one looks for the supporting evidence of Reed's and Stillman's claims about the long time spy at Los Alamos, there is nothing in Nigel West's Venona and John Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America to support them, though West in another book, The Crown Jewels, acknowledged that the most important atomic spy 'K' - the communist sympathizer also known as SCOTT who had previously helped recruit spies for Moscow in Whitehall until the Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis, and British disinformers recently tried to make out was Wright's own choice for the role, Arthur Wynn (Spy Catcher, p. 265) - did exist. (p. 231ff.) The recent claim that SCOTT was Wynn is based upon a July 1941 memo that NKVD counterintelligence chief Pavel Fitin wrote to chief Vsevolod Merkulov to give the most important Oxford recruiter which Wynn never attended new cover in case anyone suspected that he was Wright. For more on the misinformation, see this link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6276267.ece

For continuing spin about who 'K' might be, Christopher Andrew, as expected, does all he can to keep him from being identified. "In December 1942," he wrote in The Sword and the Shield, "the London residency received a detailed report on atomic research in Britain and the United States from a Communist scientist codenamed 'K'. Vladimir Barkovsky, head of scientific and technical intelligence (S&T) at the residency, later reported that 'K' 'works for us with enthusiasm, but...turns down the slightest hint of financial reward'." (pp. 114-5) But then he goes on about Barkovsky so helping him, even supplying a key to open 'K' own safe rather than the other way round, that 'K' is even identified as Barkovsky in the Index.(p. 689) For good measure, Andrew then acted as if 'K' was essentially Melita Norwood by atttributing his contribution to her without mentioning him (p. 127) while making it in the Index cited. This is junk research, intended to keep the lid on what British spies, especially Wright, did for Moscow.

The most intriguing thing about what Andrew wrote about 'K' is that Reed and Stillman, either ignorantly or more like deliberately, read it to mean that he was a U.S.communist scientist, especially when they wrote this which I earlier quoted: "We are of the view that PERSEUS was a real communist sympathizer/agent; he joined the Los Alamost Scientific Laboratory at its inception and remained there for decades until his retirement." (p. 38) To keep the convenient myth going, they take most seriously the alleged spying by Arhur Fielding - the name the dying Lona Cohen provided Yatsov aka Anatoli Yatskov. After the Red Scare passed, according to them, Fielding turned his spying "...to the new frontier of thermonunclear physics" (p. 39) - just what was driving Oppenheimmer et al. to despair. "Fielding was deeply involved in the hunt for ideas within the thermonuclear program. He exchanged memoranda and held discussions with Edward Teller, Stanislaus Ulam, Lab Director Norris Bradburgy, and other heavy hitters of the thermonuclear world as those ideas took shape." (ibid.) Prior to the Mike test of the first thermonuclear bomb, Fielding was appointed to a senior Las Alamos position from which he observed everything for years to come for the Soviets and the Chinese. (p. 40ff.)

"In the mid-1990s," Reed and Stillman concluded, "Stillman reported his suspicions as to the identity of PERSEUS to the FBI's special agent in charge of its Santa Fe office. Stillman reviewed the files and the supporting evidence with the Bureau's counterintelligence expert, but within weeks that agent was reassigned to the Wen Ho Lee case, and then became ill and was transferred to another state. Both the PERSEUS and Wen Ho Lee investigations died, botched beyond recognition, until the latter case returned to public scrutiny." (p.38) Of course, instead of identifying the man, especially since he has since died according to them - and Peter Wright died in 1995 in Tasmania - they provided a most unconvincing case about any such spy, though conveniently connecting Fielding to Los Alamos when Oppenheimer was its administrator. (p. 39)

The main purpose of all this disinformation is to explain away Chinese thermonuclear achievements to Fielding's alleged spying - what they had done earlier with Fuchs's when it came to their Fat Man atomic bomb. In doing so, they completely overlooked the achievements of Chinese scientists who continued to be trained in the West in the hope that they would work for the Nationals, and had returned to China, for one reason or another, to work in various areas for the communists, persons I had earlier partly identified. (p. 88) Chen Nengkuan, who became the Chairman of the Ninth Academy's department of nuclear weapons diagnostics in the city of Haiyan in Qinghai Province, obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1950 from Yale. An associate of his, Deng Jiaxian, became Chairman of the Ninth Academy's nuclear weapons theoretical design department after he received his doctorate at Purdue in 1950. Guo Yonghuai became "Father of China's Space Program" Qian Xuesen's assistant after he got his Ph.D. at Caltech, and left in 1956. Zhu Guangya, a protégé of Peng Huanwu - the designer of the first fission and thermonuclear weapons - received his physics doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1950. The earlier mentioned Wang Gangchang, the manager of the nuclear weapons program, was deliberately brought back to Caltech after the war by the Americans, though he did not participate in classified research, only to return to China just before the communist takeover.

For more on this Anglo-American training of Chinese physicists - what made any spying superfluous - see John Wilson Lewis, and Litan Xue, China Builds the Bomb.

It was then Moscow's turn in the summer of 1969 to ask Washington for permission to attack Chinese nuclear facilities with nuclear weapons - what JFK had sought from the Soviets six years earlier but without success - but Nixon's White House refused (Henry Kissinger, The White House Years, p. 56), knowing full well that Beijing's response on the American forces involved in the Vietnam war would be devastating since the Chinese had two years before successfully tested a thermonuclear bomb, with a yield of 3.3 megatons. There could be no showdown by either the Soviets or the West with Beijing until Mao - who had regained power in May 1966, and had instituted the Cultural Revolution to put the country on a wartime basis - had departed, and some less obvious means of destruction had been found. In 1976, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai died In January, and the dying Chairman Mao confirmed in writing in April the unknown Hua Guofeng as his replacement

This lesson was particularly not lost upon the Soviets after they lost the race to the moon with the Americans, and managed to achieve détente with the Nixon administration as they became more and more embroiled in dísputes with China, thanks to Mao's return to power with his go-for-broke Cultural Revolution. The Soviets had hoped to put up a space station from which to launch their flight to the moon, but were never able to build the big rocket, N1, to manage it, losing out to NASA's space shuttles where Moscow was decidedly inferior because of its inadequate technical base. The best hope that the Soviets had - while the American weapons labs were creating more efficient ones for more sophisticated missiles despite the treaties signed with the White House, thanks to continuing underground testing - was to more than match the National Reconnaissance Office's KH-11 digital imaging satellites with first the Yantar-6KS ones, but they were cancelled in May 1977 because its project weight was beyond the power of the Soyuz booster, leaving the assignment to the Zenit-4MK ones which Dmitri Kozlov designed, and went into service in 1972. To go along with it were the first Tselina-O satellites which were first launched in 1970, and went into service a few years later because of the delays caused by weight growth and payload development.

About the Zenit-4MK and Tselina-O combination, Soviet Space History stated: "It not only localised and classified radio emitters but also characterized their functional regimes. This allowed it to identify command traffic from the military units, allowing the targeting of those units by photo reconnaissance satellites. Constant improvement resulted in Tselina-O being abandoned in 1984 and all systems being put on Tselina-D." To go into these satellites, the Soviets installed various high energy lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns, and novel warhead technologies of a space war nature - experiments which were planned to see if Moscow should really go ahead with a whole development program aka Fon-1 of such new weapons. For more about this, see this link about Sary Shagan weapons center in Kazachstan, near the Chinese western border:

http://oook.info/dyson/sdi.html

When China was in its greatest disarray because of Zhou's death, and the interregnum caused by Mao's slow demise, the Soviets, it seems, started heating up the territory around Tangshan, causing precursors of an impeding earthquake - clouds to rise, abnormal animal behavior, repeated boiling over of water and oil wells, "three belts of glittering flashes", etc. - just before it struck on July 28, 1976, killing around 240,000 people, and destroying about 90% of the surface buildings. The strangest fact about the earthquake - if it were a powerful one, caused by deep underground clashes of the earth's plates - is that no underground miners in all the region's mines were killed, none were even injured. The earthquake was caused by airborne beams, and the only ones who had them were the Soviets. For more on the earthquake, see this link:

http://www.earthquakesignals.com/zhonghao296/A991218.html

It was because of this earthquake that Professor Shou Zhonghao went on to make a career of predicting similar man-made earthquakes.

There were few Americans who had any idea of what had happened, but one of them was this same Thomas C Reed, the Secretary of the Air Force, and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) during the Ford and Carter Administrations - something he prefers to ignore while others, like Edward Teller aka 'Doctor Strangelove' prefer to talk about his work in designing thermonuclear devices at Livermore during the 1960s. As NRO Director, Reed's Keyhole-11 satellites discovered what the Soviet laser ones had done, and he took advantage of it, especially the safety of underground man-made structures like mines, when détente with the Soviets was scrapped, and a showdown with China loomed.

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters (Part 11)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

In researching the most secret covert operations - like the plots to eliminate Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution or the campaign by the West during the 1980s to get rid of the Soviet Union without Armageddon by provoking it with air and sea intrusions - there are almost always aspects which get overlooked somehow, whether it be when and how the process actually started, unforeseen cockups along the way, unexpected blowback from seemingly unsuspecting adversaries, and the like, and looking into America's use of underground and space weapons, especially laser satellites, for strategic purposes has proven no exception. The whole build-up of the process has largely escaped my notice up until now.because it was connected, almost from the outset, by the United States and the United Kingdom with their efforts to gain a nuclear monopoly over the rest of the world.

When Washington and London were finally persuaded that an atomic bomb could and should be built by early 1943, the conventional fear was that the communists would somehow steal it - given their support in the United States and Britain - and, of course, they did, as we well know. For example, David Holloway has written in Stalin and the Bomb that intelligence materials the NKVD supplied Moscow from Britain in February, what the still ultra-secret spy 'K' provided, convinced Igor Kurchatov, head of the Soviets' atomic project, that an atomic bomb could indeed be made, resulting in the USSR going for broke to attain one. The possibility of this occurring had completely escaped the attention of the British and American intelligence services because they had little information about the Manhattan Project's existence, much less what it was all about. Their counter espionage agents were so busy catching domestic communists, and engaged in inter-service rivalry that they had no idea of what Moscow was up to.

By almost all accounts, Hoover's FBI and Britain's MI5 had a terrible time during WWII while dealing with the Soviets, much more interested in flushing out alleged
domestic spies like Under Srecetary of State Dean Acheson, Vice President Henry Wallace, John J. McCloy who presided over the Nuremberg trials et al. whose purpose was allegedly "obtaining all information possible with reference to atomic energy" (Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p.350n), while the Security Service was involved in proving that British Ambassador to Moscow Sir Stafford Cripps, Professor J. B.S. Haldane, and Daily Worker reporter Ivor Montagu were more general Moscow spies. While William Donovan of the OSS had provided without Roosevelt's permission the NKVD with all kinds of equipment and intelligence for all kinds of spying, especially in the United States, the Soviets had all the agents they needed for spying in the UK. Little wonder after a decade of such unappreciated activities by Moscow, as Richard J. Aldrich has written in The Hidden Hand, "... the shock of the Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949 was intense." (p. 219)

London and Washington had not been sleeping while all this had been going on, though, they had just been looking in the wrong direction - China. Ever since the Japanese had commenced their assault in 1937 on the country proper, the British had become increasingly concerned where it would all end. At first, they allowed the Japanese so any liberties in conducting their hostilities that Joseph Needham - a notable, left-wing Cambridge academic - "...was apoplectic." (Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, p. 48) When conditions in China became worse, a meeting in North Oxford in November 1939, led by the young Chinese philosopher Luo Zhongshu, who later wrote the Fortress Besieged, urged that Needham lead a mission to determine the effects it was having upon its universities, apparently in fear that the Japanese were obtaining valuable information for the construction of atomic weapons. By the time the Anglo-Americans were on the road to constructing their own, in February 1943, they sent Needham there in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain over the Hump to Chungking aka Chongqing to assess its conditions - now that the West had repudiated almost all controls over its affairs - and to gather up all materials relating to its potential.

Needham, a rather naive ideologue, owed his appointment to the recommendation of Sir George Sansom, Britain's former Ambassador to Japan, and a current member of the Far East War Council in Singapore which determined how it should conduct the war East of Suez. Sansom knew first-hand that Japan had bitten off more than it could chew, especially because of its failure to mobilize completely for the massive task, by attacking America, ultimately writing Japan's Fatal Blunder - what would make China the force to be reckoned with in the Far East, especially when it came to reining in the rising Soviets. While Needham was officially given the assignment of finding out what the Chinese needed, his more important task was to work with the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office (SBSC). Winchester has claimed that its function was to inform Chinese universities that "...they needed to begin their own research all over again," (p. 79)

The real purpose of the SBSC - much like William Steveson's British Security Coordination before America joined the war - was to mobilize as much suuport for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Chungking now that Japan had nearly shot its bolt, and Needham - the Chinese speaking, rabid supporter of the underdog, especially in China - was the ideal spy to work his way upon the troubled land while, apparently innocently, supplying his spy masters all they wanted to know. The trips by Needham were carried out by truck, displaying the names of the SBSC in both English and Chinese, and they displayed both the Union Jack and the Nationalist flags - what Winchester has conveniently explained away by stating that it would have been imprudent and contrary to diplomatic protocol to be flying "...any hammers, sickles or red stars." (p. 102) This seems most counter-productive given the alleged purpose of the mission was to mobilize everything within "free China", especially since the communists' biggest army, the Eighth, was also headquartered in Chungking.

To determine where Chinese physics was starting from - what the West had last learned of when the famous nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who modeled the the atom's nucleus as a drop of water, held together by surface tension, visited China in 1937 - Needham first went to Chengdu, where he picked up his driver and assistant Huang, and then on his way back he stopped at Loushan, the temporary home of the University of Wuhan, where a thorough inspection was made of its facilities. (p. 85ff.) He found nothing faintly ressembling a modern physics laboratory, only a great ability to improvise - what Cambridge physicist Ernest Rutherford had done in establishing the half-life of radioactive elements, and following the tracks of alpha and beta particles in determining the structure of the atom. If Rutherford and his boys, as Richard Reeves has written in A Force of Nature, could achieve such breakthoroughs with merely their minds and hands (p. 177), why couldn't their Chinese counterparts do the same, once the rubble from the war had been cleared away.

Needham's report of his travels was so successful that his superiors in London saw to the allotment of space for material every week over the Hump to satisfy the growing needs of China's scientists. While all kinds of things were supplied, the most important items regarding the development of nuclear weapons were the weekly issues of the prestigious magazine, Nature, laboratory equipment, reference books, and other scientific journals. The articles that come to mind are James Chadwick's 1932 one on the "Possible existence of a neutron," the 1939 one by Lisa Meitner and O. R. Frish on a new kind of nuclear reaction through the disintegration of uranium by neutrons, and another one the same year by Enrico Fermi on why beta ray decay could result in either negatively charged electrons or positively charged positrons - what recalled Zen Buddhists solving koans, and Bohr and Werner Heisenberg laboring over questions whether Nature seemed to be absurd. (Frijof Capra, The Tao of Physics, pp. 48-50)

The potential of the Chinese physicists who had been trained in the West was already being demonstrated. Qian Xuesen, the father of its space program, gained an M.S. at MIT in 1936, and went on to get his Ph.D. at Caltech, working along side its famous nuclear and rocket designer Charles Lauritsen, three years later. Qian Sanqiang, the father of its atomic bomb program, attended the Curie Institute in Paris in 1937, and went on to get his doctorate there in physics during the war. Peng Huanwu, the designer of its first fission and thermonuclear weapons, received his Ph.D. at Edinburgh in 1945 after studying the subject there for a decade under the tutledge of Max Born, who most belatedly got the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954 because Paul Dirac plagiarized his work back in the early '30s to get it then. Wang Gangchang, the manager of China's nuclear weapons program, had received his doctorate degree at Berlin in 1934 where Heisenberg had recently received the Nobel Prize in physics. The great risk of this training with them and others was that they would learn the greatest secrets of making an atomic bomb while conducting experiments, and consulting with colleagues despite the fact that the scientific community was engaged in self-censorship when it came to publications, even in Nature.

While Needham completed eleven full-fledged, spying expeditions during his stay in China - bringing good cheer to the outposts of its scientific community, boosting its morale by supplying it with everything it could, e. g., electric motors, large tubes of rare gases, cases of optical glass for lenses of all kinds of microscopes, a cathode ray oscilloscope, rubber tubing, etc., and displaying continually the Union Jack for diplomatic purposes while taking advantage of his left-wing entry with the Chinese Communit leadership (Winchester, pp.98-9) - he did continue the spying left off by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, and Aussie Rewi Alley. They had tracked the movements of Buddhist monks who had spread the word of the Budda, finding ultimately Cave 17 whose contents Stein ultimately provided to the British Museum, most important the scrolls of star charts and the fifteen-foot long, printed one, now known as the Diamond Sutra. While Winchester has crowed about its being the first printed manuscript, the sutra, as Capra has repeatedly demonstrated, showed that the ancient Eastern mystics through their intuition had developed a world view similar to that of the new Physics.

The sutra, sounding so much like Einstein's theories, is best known for statements like this:

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is indeed form. Emptiness is not different from form, and form is not different from emptiness. What is form is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form." (Quoted from Capra, p. 215.)

The only problem the Chinese scientists had with such ancient theories is that they had neither the means of proving them in the laboratory nor of taking advantage of them in war and peace.

While Needham went on to make a career of publicing the Chinese manuscripts he found, particularly the 24 volumes of Science and Civilization in China, all the assistance that he had provided its phsicists backfired when Chiang and his Nationalists proved to be no match for Mao and his communists. The Generalissimo never was able to put their act together, ending up as an enigna who no one fully understands. (See Jonathan Spence's review of Jay Taylor's biography in the latest issue of the NYRB, pp. 32-4.) As for the Chinese Communists, their victory on the mainland in 1949 came as big a shock to the West as the Soviets denoting their atomic bomb five weeks earlier, thanks in part to its prejudice against the country, and its rabid anti-communism against its leadership. This only compounded the problems, though, by making gifted physicists, especially Peng and Sanqiang, return home from Britain, joined by those who fled the States, particularly Qian Xuesen, because of McCarthyism, inspired by all the hysteria about spying caused by Moscow's success.

Needless to say, with all this talent given the circumstances, China soon embarked on a go-for-broke campaign to have its own atomic weapons - what most Western observers and historians attribute to Soviet assistance, and Sino spying, but this is just a result of, as they say, closing the barn door after the cows have escaped. The Korean War had shown that the Americans would not use nuclear weapons to solve their most dire circumstances This meant that even the Soviet bear would not resort to their use even if their difficulties with Beijing, especially territorial disputes, resulted in military conflict. In 1955, the Chinese Secretariat, at Mao's direction, agreed to the development of nuclear weapons. Once the Soviets started dragging their feet about providing nuclear assistnace to the Chinese program - apparently because they intended to use them, once they had them - China had to rely on its own resources to complete the job, testing its first nuclear weapon in October 1964 at Lop Nur in the far Northwest.

Under these circumstances, it is simply ludicrous for Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman to contend in The Nuclear Express that the result was essentially
achieved by Chinese intelligence, especially the direct spying by Klaus Fuchs, and PERSEUS apparently Robert J. Oppenheimer throughout for the communist regime. Fuchs had been out of the loop for years, having been exposed in 1950 during the McCarthy era, and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released on June 23, 1959 from Wakefield Prison, and then made his way to East Germany. In July, Fuchs was visited by Qian Sanqiang, according to Reed's Los Alamos associate H. Terry Hawkins, and gave him "...information that greatly assisted the Chinese program." (p. 102n.) Hawkins' source is some unclassied publication that he cannot recall, and Fuchs allegedly gave Qian the design and operation of the Hiroshima bomb, Fat Man! This is exactly a decade after the Soviets had tested their first nuclear weapon, RDS-1, internally an exact replica of America's Fat Man bomb in eastern Kazakhstan.

An even more bizarre tale by Reed and Stillman is their implication that Oppenheimer was PERSEUS, the crucial Soviet spy, it seems, who hung around long enough to even help out the Chinese. After isolating Oppenheimer from the whole process - making out that he only arrived as the administrator of Los Alamos after the key spying had started - they weave a tale about some American spy known as Arthur Fielding who the Cohens recruited and controlled in 1942, and Lona conveniently spilled the beans about on her deathbed to KGB operative Anatoly Yatsov aka Anatoli Yatskov: "We are of the view that PERSEUS was a real communist sympathizer/agent; he joined the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory at its inception and remained there for decades until his retirement." (p. 38) Reed and Stillman also claimed that the Venona transcripts, and the Mitrokhin Archives indicated Fielding's existence, though there is apprently no mention of PERSEUS aka Arthur Fielding in either John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America or Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and The Shield.

The only sense that I can make of this rigmarole is to tar Oppenheimer without saying so. It seems that Oppenheimer, a communist sympathizer like Needham, was forced to spy for the Soviets because while he was working with Max Born, he inadvertantly provided a paper of Born's which Paul Dirac plagiarized to win the Phsyics Prize in 1933. As a result, Oppenheimer was quite willing to overlook the communist background of almost anyone, especially Fuchs. While Born belatedly got the prize in 1954, the anger of other scientists in-the-know about the matter were unabating, particularly when Oppenheimer himself was awarded the Fermi prize by JFK.
As for who PERSEUS really was, I suspect the atomic spy 'K' - apparently aka Peter Wright, ultimately MI5's Assistant Director who Vladimir Barkovsky recruited during the war - and a few other still undisclosed spies.

These were only the first of many deceptions that Reed and Stillman engaged in, as we shall see.