Morris Cohen; Passed A-Bomb Plans to Soviet Union in 1945

Morris Cohen, the American who was instrumental in relaying atomic secrets to the Kremlin in the 1940s, has died, it was announced this week in Moscow.

Cohen was 84 when he died June 23. He never publicly revealed the name of the American scientist who 50 years ago gave him the top-secret information he passed to top Soviet officials.

Cohen had joined the American Communist Party in 1935 and later went to Spain to fight for the left-wing Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which attracted many Americans during the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded and, while recovering, was recruited by Soviet intelligence agents to spy for them in his homeland.

In July, 1945, during the first test of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., Cohen and his wife, Lona, recruited a Los Alamos scientist to obtain detailed blueprints of the weapon. The information was passed to Moscow 12 days before the American bomb test.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was thus able to order a crash program, and the Soviets set off a similar atomic device four years later.

The Cohens were considered a vital part of the spy ring that involved Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for treason in 1952.

After fleeing arrest and taking the pseudonyms Peter and Helen Kroger, the couple moved to London in 1954 and started a new intelligence network posing as rare book dealers. The network existed for seven years before British intelligence exposed it.

They were arrested in 1961 and sentenced to 20 years in prison but were exchanged in 1969 for British teacher Gerald Brooke, arrested in Moscow by the KGB for distributing anti-Communist propaganda.

Cohen’s wife died in 1992.