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In the late 1980s and early 1990s the KGB and its successor SVR began a campaign to claim a large share of credit for the USSR’s development of an atomic bomb. Memoirs by KGB officers celebrated their service’s success in penetrating the American “Manhattan” project. As part of this campaign, in 1991, Vladimir Chikov, a serving KGB (later SVR) officer, published an article in Russian and English, followed by a full-length book in French (1996), German (1996), and Russian (1997) on the exploits of an atomic superspy code named “Perseus,” said to still be alive and unknown to American security. “Perseus” was described as a senior physicist who was part of the Manhattan project from its origins, working first at the Chicago “Med” lab with Enrico Fermi and later at Los Alamos with Robert Oppenheimer. Veteran KGB officer Anatoly Yatskov, who had supervised several spies in the Manhattan project, added his endorsement of the “Perseus” story. For years, amateur and professional researchers used the clues in Chikov’s writings to search for the identity of “Perseus,” but no strong candidate emerged. With the opening of the Venona decryptions in 1995, most professional historians became convinced that “Perseus” was a KGB/SVR fiction, but “Perseus” lingers still with the wider public as a yet unidentified Soviet atomic spy. This article points to the internal contradictions and impossible assertions in Chikov’s “Perseus” story, as well as how Venona shows that Chikov took elements of the story of a real Soviet spy, Theodor Hall, to construct the “Perseus” myth. Hall was a junior scientist without an advanced degree who worked at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945 (never at Chicago), but Chikov moved Hall’s story back to 1942 and elevated him from a junior figure to a senior scientist and associate of Fermi and Oppenheimer who, in Chikov’s words, gave Stalin “the Manhattan project on a serving plate.” Further, Chikov gave “Perseus” numerous attributes that precluded the still living Hall from ever being a candidate for the atomic spy “Perseus.”

The Atomic Spy Who Never Was: “Perseus” and KGB/SVR Atomic Espionage Disinformation