Ex KGB: West Was Used to Build Bomb

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service acknowledged Thursday that Soviet scientists utilized information from foreign sources gleaned by the KGB in producing the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb.At the same time, a top official of the service strongly denied a new report suggesting that a leading Western nuclear scientist passed on secrets to the KGB and insisted that Soviet physicists did the lion's share of the work on the bomb. In Communist times, authorities maintained that Soviet scientists did all the work and received no intelligence information to aid them."An atomic bomb is not such a simple device that someone could look at and copy, just like that," Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the first deputy head of the intelligence service, told Itar-Tass."If our science had not been close to perceiving the secrets of the atom, it wouldn't have been able to understand and assess the information obtained by our intelligence on nuclear problems," he added.He was reacting to an article published in the Moskovskiye Novosti on Thursday, which cited a recently declassified 1945 KGB report to Stalin. The report contained the transcript of a conversation between a Soviet physicist and Niels Bohr, a Nobel-prize physicist who was a key figure in the U.S. Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bomb.The newspaper quoted Russian State Archives director Sergei Mironenko as saying that the transcript contained the Russian physicist's questions, Bohr's answers to them and an evaluation of the answers by Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb.The report could not be obtained from the archives Thursday.Mironenko told Moskovskiye Novosti that the document confirmed allegations by retired Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov that Western nuclear physicists knowingly passed on bomb secrets to the KGB. Those allegations have been refuted by both the Russian intelligence and Western scientists.But Russian intelligence officials have since modified their earlier denial. While they still maintain that none of the Manhattan Project scientists cooperated with the KGB as agents or otherwise, they concede that the KGB could have obtained information coming from these scientists."The Soviet intelligence was trying to get all the available information, and if there was something in that stream of information that came from Bohr, that doesn't mean he worked for the KGB," said Boris Labusov, a spokesman for the Foreign Intelligence Service.Bohr, a Danish scientist who died in 1962, created the first quantum theory of the atom and was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of the atom.In 1943, fleeing German-occupied Denmark, he sailed to Sweden and then was taken to the United States on a British military plane. When in the United States, he worked on the Manhattan Project. The scientist later became active in the movement to ban the nuclear weapons he had helped produce.