Stanislav Shumovsky

Stanislav Shumovsky was a former Red Army Soldier and a Soviet spy who operated in the United States where he leaked aeronautical secrets back to his home country.

Biography

Stanislav worked at M.I.T. where he specialized in aeronautics and his brief was the transfer of cutting edge aeronautical technology to the Soviet Union and to recruit American students as spies.

Embedded into the United States by pretending that he was part of a 65 strong cohort of Soviet students who had come to America to attend prestigious universities,Stanislav arrived in the New York in September 1931. His intelligence was used by the Soviet Union both during the Second World War and the Cold War. It is very possible that his intelligence was used to create the Tu-4, a Soviet clone of the B-29 Superfortress

He reached such high esteem in the USA that he was invited to parties attended by Shirley Temple and was also invited to the White House to meet then President Franklin D Roosevelt.

He evaded detection his entire life because the FBI were preoccupied with Prohibition and the rise of Organised Crime in the 1930s. Additionally, the FBI had not been involved in Counter Intelligence since the First World War because they did not expect there was enough espionage occurring in the USA.

Discovery

Archives By-Fellow Svetlana Lokhova at Churchill College, Cambridge discovered the spy after reading documents and papers from the Mitrokhin Archive at Churchill College. In 2018 she published a book on Stanislav called 'The Spy Who Changed History'. He is believed to be a member of a wider Soviet programme aimed at technology transfer from the USA.

Legacy

During the early Cold War, once either superpower could produce atom bombs, delivery of such bomb was of crucial importance. Since rocketry was still in its infancy and ICBMs had yet to be developed, long range bombers were the sole method of delivery. Shumovsky's espionage was an important part of providing a Soviet nuclear deterrent.

Sources

• Wilson, Frances (2018-06-24). "The spy who came into the lab — how the Soviets infiltrated MIT". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
• "The Spy Who Changed History — Archives By-Fellow Svetlana Lokhova on the impact of Soviet infiltration in US universities – Churchill College". www.chu.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
• Lokhova, Svetlana (2018-06-14). The Spy Who Changed History. William Collins. ISBN 0008238111.