3/8: The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets by Svetlana Lokhova (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1931
On a sunny September day in 1931, a Soviet spy walked down the gangplank of the luxury transatlantic liner SS Europa and into New York. Attracting no attention, Stanislav Shumovsky had completed his journey from Moscow to enrol at a top American university. He was concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students heading to prestigious academic institutions. But he was after far more than an excellent education.
Recognising Russia was 100 years behind the encircling capitalist powers, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sent Shumovsky on a mission to acquire America’s vital secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. The road to victory began in the classrooms and laboratories of MIT – Shumovsky’s destination soon became the unwitting finishing school for elite Russian spies. The USSR first transformed itself into a military powerhouse able to confront and defeat Nazi Germany. Then in an extraordinary feat that astonished the West, in 1947 American ingenuity and innovation exfiltrated by Shumovsky made it possible to build and unveil the most advanced strategic bomber in the world.
Following his lead, other MIT-trained Soviet spies helped acquire the secrets of the Manhattan Project. By 1949, Stalin’s fleet of TU-4s, now equipped with atomic bombs could devastate the US on his command. Appropriately codenamed BLÉRIOT, Shumovsky was an aviation spy. Shumovsky’s espionage was so successful that the USSR acquired every US aviation secret from his network of agents in factories and at top secret military research institutes.
In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the reader on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation. She pieces together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives, exposing how even Shirley Temple and Franklin D. Roosevelt unwittingly advanced his schemes
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Island the World. I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:07.3 | Svetlana Lakova, the author of The Spy Who Changed History, the Untold Story of how the Soviet Union stole America's secrets. |
| 0:13.7 | Well, we're going to MIT with a man named Shumovsky, who is a Soviet war hero, but he's now a master agent, assigned like an undergraduate, |
| 0:24.7 | to a prestigious organization that is just beginning to understand the scale of engineering necessary. |
| 0:32.7 | They live together in housing. |
| 0:35.8 | All of their money is provided by Soviet intelligence. Nobody knows that |
| 0:40.3 | at the time. There are problems in all directions because living in America is comfortable. |
| 0:47.9 | Stadlana, Shemovsky seems very disciplined, but all of but all of his classmates are not. |
| 0:54.9 | Are there problems that he needs to solve, or is it left to the INO to solve the problems of the undisciplined students? |
| 1:06.8 | Well, he's indeed very disciplined, but unfortunately other people, not only there is too much parting going on at times, which you would probably expect from foreign students abroad. |
| 1:19.8 | But the bigger problem which transpires later is this plotting going on. |
| 1:25.1 | Because one of the people who is in the same group of |
| 1:29.3 | with Schramowski who is called Chernyovsky he's a military intelligence officer |
| 1:35.5 | and he's there to get the secrets of chemical warfare but what happens along the way |
| 1:42.6 | is he begins to meet American Trotskists. |
| 1:46.6 | And one way or another, ideas begin to pop up about the need to remove Joseph Stalin. |
| 1:54.9 | And so not only members of the group are having to report, you know, |
| 1:58.1 | report, obviously, some unfortunate conversations, but that, in know, report, you know, obviously some unfortunate conversations. |
| 2:02.1 | But that, in fact, |
| 2:04.5 | Charniavsky, |
| 2:05.3 | who is the member of the group |
| 2:07.3 | who lives with the Soviet students, |
... |
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