ESPIONAGE: Red Faces

We didn’t do it; and even if we did it, it didn’t amount to much; and even if it amounted to a lot, Canada showed bad manners in talking about it; come to think about it, it was a downright, premeditated attack on us. So ran the gist of the official Russian reply to the Canadian disclosure that some Canadians had supplied atomic-bomb secrets to the Russian military attaché’s office.

Russian faces were red, partly from embarrassment, partly from anger, partly from annoyance that they had so little to show for such a fuss. Moscow said that it had recalled the offending military attaché, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, “in view of the inadmissibility of the activities” of members of his staff. The secrets he got were not very good ones, Moscow added in tactless vexation, because they could be found in published works, including the “well-known pamphlets of the American Smyth.” Quipped one wit: “The Russians complain the diamonds are paste.”

In a quick shift to the offense, Moscow accused Canadian Prime Minister King of launching an “unbridled anti-Soviet campaign . . . aimed at inflicting political harm on the Soviet Union.” Echoed Pravda: “Mr. King barged out to give aid to Mr. Bevin who put the British Government into a difficult position with his speeches … at the United Nations.”

Joseph E. (“Pal Joey”) Davies, onetime U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., came to the Reds’ rescue: “Russia in self-defense had every moral right to seek atomic-bomb secrets through military espionage, if excluded from such information by her former fighting allies.”

Disgruntled Russians curled up with a very good book—the U.S. best-seller Atomic Energy for Military Purposes by the “American Smyth” (Dr. Henry DeWolf Smyth, consultant for the Manhattan project). Thirty thousand copies were available to Russians who wanted to learn atomic “secrets” the easy way.