THE GREATEST HEIST: ATOMIC SPY
BONUS CHAPTER: The Real Business Was Always the Bomb
With additional reporting From Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez of The Pugilist.
Jeffrey Epstein claims New Mexico drew him after 1990 — not for the land itself, but for the knowledge clustered there. The valley between the Sangre de Cristo and Sandia mountains is the birthplace of the atomic age. Physicists and mathematicians drift out of Los Alamos into private startups and the Santa Fe Institute. Zorro Ranch, he says, was no accident; he places it 23 miles from the Institute and 50 miles from Los Alamos.
He endows a chair at the Institute, named for Robert Maxwell.
Nuclear weapons are designed not to be used - built on the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Every warhead in a Wyoming silo, every Trident missile under the Pacific, every gravity bomb on a B-2 — none are meant to be used. They are meant to be feared.
As in, “You’d be MAD to use them.”
The Soviets understood by the mid-1970s that they could not out-build, out-miniaturize, or out-submarine America. The gap was unbridgeable but as long as each side had enough to destroy the other, a peace of sorts would prevail.
What they feared is what they couldn’t see.
Nuclear secrets were always the game. It was Robert Maxwell’s first assignment
In the Spring of 1945 in a German interrogation room - a 22-year-old Czech Jewish officer — brave, brilliant, family lost to the Nazis — was handed a dossier: Alsos. The order: find out what Heisenberg knew.
Six years after Alsos, Maxwell pitches British intelligence. The Soviets are flooding the world with physics and engineering journals. Nobody in the West is translating them. Maxwell offers. MI6 signs off. In 1951 he takes Pergamon Press, flies to Moscow, signs an exclusive copyright deal with VOuAP, and secures the right to translate Soviet science into English. The deal gives him decades of cover to sit inside rooms with Soviet nuclear physicists.
If you're asking the right question: the answer is a triple agent. His loyalty tree was Russia, Israel, and only then, British.
It was enough to catch the attention of the FBI. On December 9, 1953, J. Edgar Hoover signs a memo on Maxwell. Four words headline the page.
INTERNAL SECURITY — R & GE
R is Russia. GE is General Espionage. The case file is 105-25063.
“Bureau files contain no information identifiable with subject,” Hoover writes. “It is desired that you obtain through your sources identifying data and information concerning subject’s travels to the United States.”
By the end of 1953, the FBI has classified Maxwell as a Russian espionage subject moving toward the American atomic establishment.
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