The Traitors PDF book: The Double Life of Bruno Pontecorvo and Alan Nunn May

The Traitors PDF book: The Double Life of Bruno Pontecorvo and Alan Nunn May (1952) by Alan Moorehead

Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos.


Alan Nunn May was a British physicist, and a confessed and convicted Soviet spy, who supplied secrets of British and United States atomic research to the Soviet Union during World War II.

Excerpt from the author's introduction

There is no end to espionage; it flows on in a private world of its own through wars and centuries, and clearly, we are never going to know the whole truth about the atomic spies. But just occasionally some of the truth comes to light, a part of the net is dragged to the surface, and society is given a brief and forbidding glimpse of what goes on in the secret underworld below. This happened—or rather it began to happen—in Ottawa on the evening of September 5th in 1945. On that evening a young cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy named Igor Gouzenko went to the steel safe in his office and took out a number of official documents.


His job was to encipher and decipher these documents for Colonel Zabotin, the Military Attache, as they passed between the Embassy and Moscow, and for some time past he had been turning down the comers of those which seemed to be of special interest. Gouzenko, then aged twenty-six, was of the generation which has been born and brought up in Soviet Russia, and he had been just two years in Canada. But in those two years, he had marveled at the goods that were sold in the shops, at the freedom and friendliness with which the Canadians went about their daily lives, and he had grown to detest the way in which these people were being cheated and spied . on when their only desire had been to help Russia in the winning of the war. And now that his term abroad was over and he was due to return to Russia he had decided to put 5 all his past life behind him and cross over to the Canadian side. The story of Gouzenko’s defection is well known through the published report of the Canadian Royal Commission which inquired into the matter in the following year, but it is worth repeating here because of the peculiar atmosphere it evokes and because it reveals by how much the democracies were It was eight o’clock when he left the Embassy in Charlotte Street carrying the documents in his coat pockets, and he went at once to the offices of the Ottawa Journal in the city. He had the naive but understandable idea that if he could get his documents published there and then he would have warned the democracies and his purpose would have been accomplished.

 It was not, however, as easy as that. Newspapers have settled practices of their own; crimes, politics, and baseball results come in each day on an established rhythm and there is normally no place in this routine for an earnest foreigner who arrives, without announcement, his pockets stuffed with Russian telegrams, to make a point-blank exposure of the Soviet Union. Gouzenko argued for an hour but could get no one to take him seriously. He then returned to his home at 5 n Somerset Street, where he was living in an apartment with his wife, Svetlana Borisovna, and their child, Andrei, who had been born since their arrival in Canada.






Author:
Alan Moorehead  Publication Date:1952

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