Review: The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold History of How the Soviet Union Stole America’s Top Secret, Svetlana Lokhova, 2019.

I’m pretty sure that most biographers of spies think their book should be titled “the spy who changed history”, but Lokhova actually justifies her title.

Using archival information from the NKVD archives she came across in a previous history about Stalin’s Great Purge, she gives us the story of Stanislav Shumovsky the man who could be said to have made the Cold War possible.

How? Because Shumovsky was not only involved in stealing the secrets of America’s atom bomb but, perhaps more importantly, the means of delivering it – stolen American aviation technology that resulted in the Soviet Union’s Tu-4, its first strategic, transcontinental bomber that could nuke America.

Shumovsky was the first of the USSR’s very useful scientist spies, agents who not only knew the usual tradecraft but who also had the scientific expertise to know what to seek out on their own initiative, how to chat up loose-lipped scientists and engineers who were happy to talk to a fellow colleague, and how to use the gained secrets to develop Soviet technology. Continue reading →