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The Schecters argue that simply presenting Sudoplatov's account -- not corroborating it -- was all they set out to do. "One of the reasons we left it in the first person and let him say some outrageous things was that this is his story," says Leona Schecter. After his boss Beria was purged and shot in 1953, Sudoplatov was accused of mass murders by the victorious Nikita Khrushchev and jailed for 15 years. He was eventually rehabilitated after addressing a 1982 plea to the Communist Party Central Committee mentioning his exploits in obtaining atomic information from Oppenheimer, Fermi and Bohr, among others. The committee, say the Schecters, could easily have checked every word.
But as for direct documentation -- well, says Anatoli Sudoplatov, many of the papers that might substantiate his father's story, including the record of atomic-espionage work in the so-called Enormous File, are missing or have been tampered with or destroyed. So, he says, the elder Sudoplatov's report "is based on oral witnesses . . . reconstructed from memory" of what his father learned from spies he worked with.
Maybe, but those 50-year-old memories seem to have led Sudoplatov into some serious errors and inconsistencies:
In a taped interview, Sudoplatov asserts (more flatly than in the book) that "in 1944 we received from Szilard material about his work at Los Alamos. This was very important." But Szilard did not work at Los Alamos in 1944 -- or ever.
By the end of January 1943, says Sudoplatov, the Soviets received a full report on the secret experiment conducted the month before by Fermi in Chicago, in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was produced for the first time. But in a memo dated July 3, 1943, and reprinted in an appendix to the book, physicist Igor Kurchatov says he thinks the Americans might conduct such a successful experiment "in the near future"; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed the team of scientists working to produce a Soviet A-bomb.
Sudoplatov reports a conversation between Bohr and Yakov Terletsky, a Soviet physicist and intelligence agent, in Denmark in 1945. Terletsky supposedly told Bohr that a nuclear reactor built in the U.S.S.R. would not work, and Bohr gave precise advice on what went wrong and how to fix it. The conversation did occur, but Bohr's son Aage, who was present, insists his father gave away no technical secrets. His account was backed up by Terletsky -- at least according to Roald Sagdeev, a former Soviet physicist now teaching at the University of Maryland, and other scholars who have read a 30-page report Terletsky wrote before he died. Terletsky, they say, termed the meeting a failure.
Oppenheimer, says Sudoplatov, suggested that Klaus Fuchs be included in a group of British scientists sent to Los Alamos to work with Oppenheimer's American team on developing an atom bomb. That claim was based on a report by a Soviet agent named Alexander Feklisov. But the documentary record indicates the team members were selected by British authorities. The point is of more than passing importance: Fuchs was later found to have provided the Soviets with actual drawings of the American atom bomb.