The First Counterspy: Larry Haas, Bell Aircraft, and the FBI’s Attempt to Capture a Soviet Mole by Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut

Abstract

In August 1943 the director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, received an anonymous letter describing Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. Written in Russian, the letter identified Soviet foreign intelligence officers by name and bizarrely asserted that they were secretly funneling information to Japan and Germany. Both the FBI and the Soviet government eventually learned that the letter had been written by a mentally ill Soviet intelligence officer.The letter marked the beginning of the end of a golden age of Soviet espionage in the United States, a time when men and women loyal to Joseph Stalin penetrated the upper levels of the U.S. government, the U.S. business community, and the broader society, from the White House to Hollywood. Soviet intelligence agencies achieved their most spectacular and consequential successes in stealing information about the most closely guarded U.S. military technologies: nuclear weapons, radar, aircraft designs, jet engines, the proximity fuse, and much more.In addition to describing the activities of the top Soviet intelligence officers operating in the United States, the letter included a terse mention of “Schevchenko, agent for the Purchasing Commission in Buffalo.” The FBI quickly ascertained that this was Andrei Shevchenko, a Soviet purchasing agent who had been posted to the Bell Aircraft plant in Buffalo, New York, to inspect aircraft prior to their shipment to the USSR. Shevchenko was also secretly working for the foreign intelligence service of the Soviet People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD).Hoover ordered FBI personnel to place Shevchenko under surveillance, along with the other people mentioned in the letter. The surveillance indicated that Shevchenko had befriended Leona Franey, a librarian at Bell who had access to classified reports, and was wining and dining Larry Haas, a Bell engineer who worked on aircraft designs the U.S. government had withheld from the USSR. The FBI recruited and ran Haas and Franey as double agents, along with Franey's husband, whose job at a chemical company gave him access to classified information of interest to Moscow.The Franeys and Haas provided the FBI a close-up look at the NKVD's methods of recruiting and running agents. Shevchenko showered them with money and gifts, seduced them with flattery, started by asking for small favors, moved on to ask them to bend the rules, and gradually escalated his demands. The double agents provided details on how the NKVD center communicated with agents, trained them to detect and evade FBI surveillance, and set up clandestine meetings.Unlike “legal” spies who operated under diplomatic cover, Shevchenko lacked diplomatic immunity. This left him vulnerable to prosecution. By November 1945, Shevchenko was becoming increasingly suspicious, and Hoover was eager to move against him. To Hoover's frustration, U.S. Attorney General Thomas Clark and Secretary of State James Byrnes refused to approve the FBI's plan to give classified information to Shevchenko and arrest him before he had a chance to send it to Moscow.The stalemate was broken on 4 December 1945 when the New York Journal-American revealed the existence of an espionage ring targeting U.S. aviation technology, as well as the Truman administration's decision not to prosecute Soviet spies. Although Hoover was careful not to leave any fingerprints, there can be little doubt that he was behind the story.The revelations presented Shevchenko with a choice. He could defect, putting the fates of himself, his wife, and their daughter in the hands of the FBI, or he could face the grim fate of those who publicly failed Stalin. In the end, possibly seeking to save his son, who had remained behind in the USSR, Shevchenko decided to return home. On 3 January 1946, he boarded the S.S. Stalinabad in Manhattan and vanished from the public record.Declassified FBI files, the decrypted Venona intercepts, and the Vassiliev notebooks, along with the memories of Haas's daughter, Kay, coauthor with Walter Pickut of The First Counterspy, provide more than enough raw material for a fascinating, fact-based account of an important early Cold War espionage case.Unfortunately, Haas and Pickut were not satisfied to stick with verifiable facts. They have written a thinly sourced farrago of stories that might be true, are unlikely to be true, and are extremely unlikely to be true. Their technique for telling the tale of Shevchenko, Haas, and the Franeys rests heavily on dialogue, some based on notes FBI agents wrote while debriefing Haas, and much that the authors concede is based entirely on their imagination. Manufactured conversations are interspersed with descriptions of what the various characters were thinking or feeling. The authors portray Haas as an accomplished liar, but they do not question the veracity of the stories he told friends and family.Kay Haas believed her father when he said that a Polish immigrant who befriended her in high school had been sent by Soviet intelligence to murder her. She also apparently trusted her father's claim that the FBI had killed the boy and his parents, disguising the assassinations as a traffic accident. She and Pickut present no evidence to support any of this.Larry Haas also told his daughter that on 29 December 1945, disguised as a plumber, he was smuggled into the White House for a clandestine meeting with President Harry Truman. The First Counterspy reports that Truman personally gave Haas an envelope containing a U.S. passport and Minnesota driver's license, both with Haas's photographs and bearing the name John L. Bergstrom, a memorandum titled “John ‘Jack’ Lars Berstrom: Legend—Read and Destroy,” and a ticket for the S.S. Stalinabad dated 3 January 1946. The book, apparently inspired by a James Bond story, asserts that Truman gave Haas, a civilian with no formal government affiliation, authorization to kill, ordering him to board the Stalinabad clandestinely and assassinate Shevchenko. The mission was intended to appease Hoover and ensure that justice was served, according to Haas and Pickut.The First Counterspy depicts Haas as a skillful assassin who found his man alone one stormy night, struck a blow that knocked him unconscious, and threw the body into the cold waters of the Atlantic. The deed, we are told, was perfectly timed, allowing Haas to clamber over the side of the ship, shimmy down a rope, and jump into a Norwegian fishing boat operating under the command of an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency.The book contains other incredible tales, including a total of seven bungled or thwarted attempts by Soviet operatives to kill Kay Haas. It claims that Soviet intelligence murdered Kay's mother, Dorothy, by poisoning a bottle of beer and that Larry colluded with a physician to record the cause of death as a stroke.Haas and Pickut may believe these stories, but readers would be wise to take all of them with a large dose of salt.