7/8: 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
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI and the world. I'm John Batson with my colleague, Svetlana Lakova, the spy who changed history, the untold story of how the Soviet Union stole America's top secrets. |
| 0:15.4 | We've stolen aircraft secrets, certainly. We've stolen Ford mass production secrets, certainly. But now the two big ones |
| 0:23.9 | to end the war and begin the Cold War. The atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, and the B-29 |
| 0:31.8 | that delivers the atomic bomb to Japan, but can deliver to the Soviet Union. We begin with the |
| 0:40.9 | atomic bomb. Ovakmian is supervising this from Moscow. He's left America, he's back at |
| 0:48.9 | Moscow center. He has daily correspondence with a man named Igor Kurchatov, who will eventually become the man in charge of the Soviet atomic project. |
| 0:59.5 | But first, they have to steal it. |
| 1:01.5 | And that requires a man named Semyanov. |
| 1:05.2 | So this is Ovak Mayan, the Wily Armenian, who is supervising all of these operations that we know as the penetration |
| 1:13.9 | and stealing of the atomic bombs. Svetlana, this is masterful on their part. They get inside |
| 1:21.1 | the Manhattan Project early. Who is Semyonov? What does he do? And how does Vakmian translate all of this to Moscow? |
| 1:30.8 | How does he do it on being watched? The FBI has been inept in the 1930s, but everybody's |
| 1:40.6 | watching very carefully at the Manhattan Project. |
| 1:44.7 | How do they get inside? |
| 1:46.8 | Well, first of all, Sam Semyonov is somebody who arrives with other four students at MIT in 1939. |
| 1:56.1 | And this is now a path that's been created by Stanislav Shomovsky. |
| 2:00.2 | And in fact, Schumovsky gets |
| 2:01.9 | some places at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He arranges for their accommodation, |
| 2:07.3 | he makes sure they're settled in, and he effectively trains them of how to be a scientist spies. |
| 2:18.2 | And this is all under now supervision of Avakamian. |
| 2:21.7 | Sam Simeon is synonym is Twain, like Mark Twain, the famous author, because this is his favorite |
| 2:29.8 | author. |
... |
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