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PERS PERSEUS

A number of spies within the Manhattan Project have never been positively identified. Most are only known by their codenames, as revealed in the VENONA decrypts. One source, an engineer or scientist who was given the codename FOGEL (later changed to PERSEUS), apparently worked on the fringes of the Manhattan Project for several years, passing along what information he could. Soviet documents state that he was offered employment at Los Alamos, but, to the regret of his handlers, he turned it down for family reasons. PERS seems to have been arbitrarily or erroneously converted to "Perseus" (there is no covername Perseus in the Venona messages) in Russian memoirs as the Soviet and Russian intelligence services sought to describe a high-level source in the Manhattan Project.

Some students of Soviet atomic espionage believed in the existence of a fourth unidentified Soviet spy at Los Alamos, codenamed “Perseus,” later changed to “Mlad.” This belief is based on memoirs of KGB officers published in the early 1990s. But with the opening of the Venona decryptions in 1995, it became clear that Perseus was a Soviet/Russian intelligence disinformation operation to protect Theodore Hall (the real Mlad), then still alive but not publicly exposed as a Soviet spy. The fake Perseus/Mlad was given characteristics that did not fit Hall. Some cncluded there was no PERS.

Another source, a physicist codenamed MAR, first began supplying information to the Soviet Union in 1943. In October of that year, he was transferred to the Hanford Engineer Works. In another case, a stranger one day in the summer of 1944 showed up unannounced at the Soviet Consulate in New York, dropped off a package, and quickly left. The package was later found to contain numerous secret documents relating to the Manhattan Project. Soviet intelligence attempted to find out who the deliverer of the package was so that they could recruit him. They never could, however, determine his identity. An Englishman codenamed ERIC also provided details of atomic research in 1943, as did an American source codenamed QUANTUM, who provided secret information relating to gaseous diffusion in the summer of 1943. Who QUANTUM was or what became of him after the summer of 1943 remains a mystery.

Few aspects of the Manhattan Project remained secret from the Soviet Union for long. Given the size of the pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented. In most cases, the individuals who chose to provide information to the Soviet Union did so for ideological reasons, not for money. They were usually volunteers who approached Soviet intelligence themselves. Further, in most cases, they were not aware that anyone else had chosen to do the same thing. (Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall were all at Los Alamos at the same time, yet none of them knew of the espionage activities of the other two.)

Although the FBI knew that KGB networks were active in the United States following World War II, based on their deeds, their names had not been identified. This book tells the story of how those names became known to the FBI and how the persons were called to account. Following World War II, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere had the task of uncovering the extensive American networks of the KGB. He used a large file of secret Russian messages intercepted during the war.

Venona was a small group of cryptographers attached to National Security Agency (NSA) who work on deciphering certain Soviet intelligence messages covering the period 1942-46. These Soviet messages are made up of telegrams and cables and radio messages sent between Soviet intelligence operators in the United States and Moscow. Consequently, this material falls within the category of communications intelligence information and as such it is subject to the most stringent regulations governing dissemination on a “need-to-know” basis.

Once an individual was considered for recruitment as an agent by the Soviets, sufficient background data on him was sent to headquarters in Moscow. Thereafter, he was given a cover name and his true name was not mentioned again. This made positive identifications most difficult since the US seldom received the initial message which stated that agent “so and so” (true name) will henceforth be known as “_________” (cover name). Also, cover names were changed rather frequently and the cover name might apply to two different individuals, depending upon the date it was used.

There is no question that justice would be properly served if Judith Coplon and the Silvermaster-Perlo groups [suspected of espionage] could be successfully prosecuted for their crimes against the United States. The introduction into evidence of Venona information could have been the turning point in the successful prosecution of these subjects; however, a careful study of all factors involved compelled the conclusion that it would not be in the best interests of the U.S. or the Bureau to attempt to use Venona information for prosecution.

Based on information developed from Venona traffic, there were prosecutions of Judith Coplon, Valentin Gubitchev, Emil Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, Alfred Dean Slack, Abraham Brothman, Miriam Moskowitz, David Greenglass, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell and William Perl. All of these cases were investigations instituted by the FBI directly or indirectly from Venona information. These prosecutions were instituted without using Venona information in court.

Philip Morrison (1915-2005) was an American physicist who was stricken with polio as a child, a disease that left him partly handicapped. He walked with a stick and later rode about in a motor chair. He started tinkering with machinery and was building radios by age 5. Morrison studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. in 1940. In 1942, he joined the Chicago Met Lab as a research associate. He transferred to Los Alamos in 1944, where he worked in the critical assemblies group of the Weapon Physics Division and participated in dangerous criticality experiments. On July 12, 1945, Morrison rode from Los Alamos to the Trinity Site in the back seat of a sedan, next to the case that contained the Gadget’s plutonium core. After witnessing the Trinity test, Morrison traveled to Tinian Island as a Pit Team leader for Project Alberta, where he helped oversee the assembly of the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb.

The Perseus codename is part of a debated narrative in Cold War espionage lore, which suggests that an unidentified Soviet spy, nicknamed "Perseus," infiltrated the Manhattan Project and provided crucial nuclear information to the Soviet Union. The first information on Perseus appeared in post-Soviet Russia. In the early 1990s, the country was going through the period of total publicity and openness. Top secret KGB archives were declassified and the secret service’s former operatives started to give interviews and write books.

It was Colonel Vladimir Chikov, who told the world about Perseus for the first time. According to him, Perseus, also known under the code name ‘Mlad’, was a young physicist at the Chicago University in the 1940s. In 1944, this “native American, who wore a straw hat, white sandals and white sport shirt”, joined the Manhattan project on creation of nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos laboratory. Right then, he was recruited to work for the Soviets and for several years delivered them top secret information on nuclear research. In 1946, he stopped his cooperation with the Soviet intelligence, returned to the Chicago University and joined the movement against nuclear weapons testing.

However, the existence of Perseus remains controversial and largely speculative. New versions of his story appeared, new details: Perseus, according to the new theories, joined the Manhattan project at its launch in 1939 and didn’t quit his service to the USSR, cooperating with famous Soviet agent Rudolf Abel even in the 1950s. Still without real proof, all of them (as well as Chikov’s info) remain as speculation.

A 04 October 1992 Washington Post article about a living American spy code-named Perseus was authored by Post reporter, Michael Dobbs, who had gotten his information about Perseus from an article in the Soviet (English-language) journal New Times, "How the Soviet Intelligence Service ‘Split’ the American Atom”. Its author, Colonel Vladimir Matveyevich Chikov, was a senior officer of the KGB Public Relations Centre. Its obvious purpose was to show that the KGB — not the Soviet atomic scientists — had been the ones who should get the credit for the Soviet atomic bomb.

In the New Times article, Perseus claimed to have been offered “material support” and said: "Oh no, for God’s sake. I’m willing to cooperate with them for a cause, not for money. I want to dedicate my life to averting the danger of a nuclear holocaust looming over mankind, because I have just realized how real the threat of such a holocaust is, and this prompted me to counter it in the ranks of the Soviet intelligence service. ... I am convinced that America’s military quarters have cheated nuclear physicists into developing the atomic bomb by telling them that the bomb was intended to save mankind from the danger of Nazism which had engulfed Europe. As a matter of fact, the Pentagon [sic] is of the opinion that it will be quite some time before the Soviet Union harnesses atomic energy. This will take your country decades, it thinks, and in the meantime America will destroy socialism by means of the uranium bomb."

Stone wrote "The KGB had obviously doctored the recruiting conversation to protect Perseus because it had an anachronistic reference — Perseus refers to the Pentagon in 1942, before it had been built!... Colonel Chikov, or whoever made this substitution for him, did not know, or had forgotten, that the Pentagon was built after the war. I felt sure that the original conversation referred not to the as yet unbuilt “Pentagon” but to “General Groves,” head of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb." In fact, the building was constructed in just 16 months between September 1941 and January 1943, under the direction of Col. Leslie R. Groves. A man of great energy, force, and self-confidence, Groves, who later headed the Manhattan District that developed the atom bomb, exercised oversight of the project until its completion, although he had less time to devote to it after September 1942, when he undertook his atomic duties.

In an interview given before his death in 1995, the American-born Soviet spy Morris Cohen confirmed that in addition to Klaus Fuchs, there was a second physicist in the Manhattan Project who worked as a Soviet spy. The details in Cohen's story coincide with the statements of Colonel Vladimir Chikov a few years earlier.

In 1995, a partial declassification of the Soviet secret messages, collected within the U.S. counter intelligence program, known as the ‘Venona’ project, triggered another wave of discussions. Since they contained the unidentified codename ‘PERS’, many believed it could be this Soviet agent, who stole U.S. nuclear secrets. PERS was identified in the Venona files as part of the group of four Soviet spies (of which only 3 had been identified) who infiltrated the Manhattan Project.

Unlike well-documented spies like Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, Perseus hasn’t been substantiated by direct evidence, and some historians argue that he may be more myth than fact. In 1994 the publication of Pavel Sudoplatov’s book, "Special Tasks", stated that the KGB had created Perseus in the early 1990s. KGB colonel Vladimir Chikov admitted openly in 1996 that he and other KGB officers he worked with had combined Mlad and another spy code-named “Pers” into a single spy, Perseus.

Philip Morrison is sometimes mentioned in this context of "Perseus." due to his work on atomic weapons and his eventual advocacy for nuclear disarmament, which led to scrutiny during the Red Scare. In his undergraduate years, he joined the Communist Party in his Pittsburgh days, and at Berkeley he was labeled a "troublemaker." He was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s. Though an ex-communist, he remained employed and academically active throughout the 1950s. He became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation, helping found the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. However, there’s no solid evidence linking Morrison to espionage activities.

He later became involved in television and film, co-writing and narrating the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," He helped write the script and narrated the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," also by Charles and Ray Eames. In 1992, he and his wife, Phylis, with the Eameses, turned it into a book. Among his legacies is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which sprang from a short paper in Nature that he wrote in 1959 with his colleague, Dr. Giuseppe Cocconi, at Cornell.

In 1999, a major scandal connected to Perseus occurred. Arms-control advocate Jeremy Stone claimed in his book ‘Every man should try’ that Philip Morrison, a respected professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in fact this mysterious spy.

In a May 1999 interview with the New York Times’s Bill Broad, Stone said publicly that Morrison was Perseus. The code name it implied that he could be a figure or character embodying qualities or feats similar to the Greek hero Perseus. Perseus is famed in Greek mythology for his bravery, intelligence, and heroic deeds, including slaying the Gorgon Medusa, who could turn people to stone with her gaze. Perseus's story combines themes of courage, overcoming monstrous obstacles, and heroism for the greater good.

Morrison, in a statement issued on 10 May 2024, demonstrated that he could not be the Perseus described by Chikov. Morrison proved his innocence by pointing out numerous discrepancies between his biography and that attributed to Perseus. The New York Times reported May 14, 1999 "Jeremy J. Stone, having accused a prominent American physicist of spying for Moscow while involved in the making of the first atomic bomb half a century ago, has now written him to accept his denial that he was the Soviet atom spy whom the Russians called Perseus. Mr. Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, laid out his suspicions in a chapter of his new memoir, ''Every Man Should Try: Adventures of a Public Interest Activist'' (Public Affairs, 1999). "Morrison listed ways he differed from the spy's profile, as outlined in Mr. Stone's book and elsewhere. "In the light of these facts, which I certainly cannot contradict," Mr. Stone wrote in response on Tuesday, ''I can only accept your denial that you are Perseus.''"

The identity and whereabouts of Perseus remain unknown. Nobody knows his real name or his background. A valid question is whether he even existed at all. Jeremy Stone himself later wrote a note to his 1999 book "Since the publication of this chapter, I have become persuaded that the spy Perseus never, in fact, existed."

In 2009, VOGEL/PERS was outed as being actually Russell A. McNutt, a civil engineer employed by the company Kellex to work on facilities at Oak Ridge, who was recruited as a spy by Julius Rosenberg. Both studying engineering in New York, McNutt befriended Julius Rosenberg, one of the most well-known Soviet spies and recruiters. It was at Rosenberg’s suggestion that McNutt decided to begin working at Kellex in November 1943. Kellex was one of the main contractors for the facilities being built at the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee location. In February 1944, Rosenberg connected McNutt to the KGB. At that point in time, the KGB did not have any agents or sources within the Manhattan Project, so McNutt was a crucial source for learning about the atomic bomb and Manhattan Project.

According to his interview on the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s Voices of the Manhattan Project website, historian Haynes notes that McNutt was “part of the Kellex design team for building many of the major facilities at Oak Ridge, including the massive K-25 facility, which worked mostly on gaseous diffusion.” While McNutt visited Oak Ridge during construction, he mostly worked at the Kellex design bureau in Manhattan. After Rosenberg was arrested on July 17, 1950, McNutt was investigated by the FBI. The FBI was only able to conclude that McNutt was a Communist sympathizer and a possible party member; it was unable to show that he was a part of Rosenberg’s espionage network. Without this evidence, McNutt was able to live out the rest of his life without further investigation or prosecution.

From 1947 to 1958 he was Chief Engineer for Gulf Oil Corporation in Venezuela. From 1958 to 1969 he was on loan to the National Iranian Oil Company in Tehran, Iran where he worked on projects at Kharg Island and the Tehran Oil Refinery. He also worked in Spain and was VP for construction in Reston, VA. Following retirement in 1979, Russ and Ann traveled extensively and were known for their volunteer contributions to many organizations. Russ was dedicated to public service through active and faithful membership of the Marion Rotary Club and the Ashford-North Cove Volunteer Fire Department, Hospice of McDowell County, the Corpening YMCA and the Democratic Party. He was the proud recipient of the Order of the Long Leaf Pine and was a dedicated member of the Catawba Valley Scottish Society and a member of the founding families of Mecklenburg County.

Russell Alton McNutt, 93, died February 1, 2008 after several years of illnesses which he bore with courage, wit and a good humor. Russ was a loving and generous husband to his wife Ann during 36 years together. McNutt was another of the young Communist engineers whom Rosenberg persuaded to assist Soviet intelligence, giving Julius Rosenberg the distinction of recruiting two Soviet atomic spies: one at Los Alamos (his long-known brother-in-law, David Greenglass) and one source on Oak Ridge (the hitherto unknown McNutt). McNutt enjoyed a distinguished career as senior engineer for Gulf Oil and one of the developers of the planned community of Reston, Virginia. Russ was born on May 21, 1914 in LaCygne, Kansas and was preceded in death by his parents, Ernest and Addie (Arnett) McNutt. His father Ernest was a leftist journalist from Kansas, who was friends with Communist Party chairman Earl Browder.