Today we look at a March 1944 letter from the US-based GRU spy Arthur Adams, whose covername was “Akhill” (Achilles), to the Director of the GRU on American progress in efforts to create a nuclear weapon.
This letter was sent via diplomatic mail, which in wartime conditions meant it would have to travel a circuitous route; it was also dispatched through other channels.
By his own admission, Akhill had little background or understanding of the topic of nuclear physics. He offered an example of this in one of the paragraphs of his letter, stating that “three primary plutonium production methods have been used in the initial research stages: diffusion, mass-spectroscopy, and nuclear transmutation.” It is doubtful that the Americans studied methods to obtain plutonium using the diffusion and mass-spectroscopy methods, as these methods are used to obtain uranium-235.
Akhill’s “source” spoken of in the letter remains classified. According to Vladimir Lota, in an June 1999 article for the Russian military periodical Krasnaya Zvezda, Adams met with a scientist in January 1944 who supervised a section of a research laboratory where processes were studied to obtain a new explosive. During the second meeting, on 23 February 1944, the scientist gave Adams some 1000 pages of documents and samples of pure uranium and beryllium, as noted in the letter.
The following is the translation of this remarkable letter.
Translating History 