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Jimmy Young
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Vanessa Feltz
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Alan Titchmarsh
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Dr Rosemary
Russian spies
‘tried to
assassinate’
Sir Bernard
Lovell, who
died this
week,
because they
feared his
telescopecould destroy
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IS THIS THE COLD WAR'S MOST BIZARREUNTOLD STORY?
Professor Sir Bernard Lovell
Thursday August 9,2012
By Anna Pukas
Have your say(0)
IN a long and productive life, the late,
great astronomer Professor Sir Bernard
Lovell wrote two dozen books and
countless articles and academic
papers. But probably none of them has
ever excited quite the same sense of
anticipation as that which surrounds the
publication of his next work in a little
more than two weeks’ time.
It is the story of how a distinguished
British scientist went to visit some of the mos t secret sites in the old Soviet Union at the height of
the Cold War – and lived to tell the tale.
As the man behind the gian t telescope at Jodrell Bank, Sir Bernard was a pioneer of radio
astronomy and the study of cosm ic rays. When the telescope tracked Sputnik 1, the world’s first
satellite that was launched by the Soviets, the com munis t regime became very interested in Sir
Bernard. In 1963, they invited him to the USSR for an unprecedented tour of their observatories.
Soon afterwards, he fell ill with severe sickness and remained s o for a month.
It would be another 46 years before he voiced his s uspicions as to the cause but when he did, in
a television interview in 2009, jaws dropped in astonishment: the Soviets, he said, had tried to
kill him by bombarding him w ith lethal radiation. He also hinted that the KGB had tried to “turn”
him during his visit, implying that his refusal to defect would have given them another reas on to
want him dead. He had written a detailed account, he added, but it would not be published until
after his death.
The notion of how one of the world’s deadliest organisations
was prepared to unleash its forces against a single, mild-
mannered s cientist is s urely one of the more extraordinary tales
of the Cold War era. And as other more recent events have
shown (see box), it is one that is entirely feasible.
A physics graduate from Bristol , when the Second World War
broke out, 26-year-old Bernard Lovell was seconded to the
Telecommunications Research Establishment where he
developed the Pathfinder airborne radar system that enabled
RAF bombers to find their targets at night.
German Admiral Doenitz said radar wreaked havoc among the
Nazis’ submarines and Sir Bernard’s invention of shortwave
radar enraged H itler. In 1946, Lovell was awarded the OBE for
his crucial work during the war.
After the war he tried to continue his stud ies into cos mic rays at Manchester University but noise
from the city’s trams interfered with his equipment too m uch. On learning the university owned
land at Jodrell Bank near Macclesfield, Cheshire he m oved all his equi pment there.
’
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Leonard
Read the l atest
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, ,
could be s teered and pointed at the sky in any direction.
A Sheffield firm accepted the job in 1949 for £100,000 but eight years later the telescope had
gone four times over budget and it was still unfinished.
The hostility was mounting until the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 and the British Government
realised Lovell’s telescope could track it – and the intercontinental ballistic missile it carried.
And if it could track Sputnik, it was capable of tracking any of the rockets and mis si les that one or
other of the superpowers might launch. It was the only instrument in the West with that capability
– and it was right there on their doors tep.
Professor Lovell (as he still was then) received a telephone call from the Ministry of Defence. He
confirmed he could detect if a missile had been launched but said he could do nothing about itonce it had happened. “On the contrary,” said the MoD official.
“You can give us seven minutes warning.” After working non-stop for 48 hours, Lovell and his
team received an echo from the satellite, proving that the big steel dish could indeed track
spacecraft. It was, he said “a dramatic m oment.”
Thus Jodrell Bank became the world’s early warning system and one of the most famous
scientific structures in the land. There was no m ore talk of unacceptable cost after Lord Nuffield
sent a cheque for £80,000 to cover the balance s till owing on the structure.
Lovell’s money worries were over but his observatory became “the middle of a sandwich
between the Soviets and the Americans”. These were, after all, the days of the Cuban mis sile
crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall. In 1959 the Soviets asked him to track their lunar
probe, Lunic. The following summer there were Americans living on site in caravans as they
tracked their Pioneer 5 probe on the first 10 million m iles of its voyage to Venus.
He was knighted in 1961 and two years later in June 1963 cam e the invitation from the Soviet
Academy o f Sciences . To his surprise, Sir Bernard found himse lf being taken round all the
major top s ecret optical and radar obs ervatories in the country.
The high dose of radiation that made him fall ill was, he be lieves, given during a visit to a radio
telescope in the Deep Space Communication Centre on the Black Sea coast.
“I think they had an extremely powerful transmitter of the type we had on the telescope for
planetary research,” said Sir Bernard.
“The radiation from this telescope here [in Jodrell Bank] was so dange rous that we would never
use it at an elevation below about 15 degrees because of the risk of endangering people’s
brains. They tried to remove from my memory the fact that they had taken me to their own
defence nucleus on the Black Sea coast because they did not want news of what they had to be
brought back to this country.”
As to what tactics the KGB used to try to pers uade him to defect, he never said. Reflecting on his
trip years la ter, Sir Bernard said he should never have been allowed to travel to the USSR as it
was obvious that the purpose of the Jodrell Bank Observatory was defence as well as research.
“It was a sinis ter time and a lot of my compatriots who went to the Soviet Union in those days in
the early Sixties never did return, or when they did return they never survived. I was jolly glad to
see the lights of London. I was one o f the fortunate ones.”
For Sir Bernard, the primary role of Jodrell Bank had always been research and study of the
cosmos.
However when he returned from the USSR, he was s o stricken with doubt about its defence role
that he considered giving up science to become a Church of England clergyman.
But he stayed on as director and in 1987, the telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope in
his honour.
It is still the third largest steerable telescope in the world and is still at the cutting edge of
astronomical research.
Other honours flowed his way from educational and research ins titutions all over the world. Sir
Patrick Moore called him “the Isaac Newton of as tronomy”.
Sir Bernard left his papers to the John Rylands Library at Manchester University and it is there
that his account of his time in the Soviet Union lies waiting to be released after the funeral on
August 23.
It will no doubt make fascinating reading as well as s hedding light on the very darkest corners of
the Cold War era.
However, whatever the Soviets tried to do to him, they failed miserably. When Sir Bernard Lovell
died on Monday, it was in his own bed, surrounded by his family and just three weeks away from
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s r ay.
HOW RUSSIA’S FOES HAVE MET THEIR FATE
THE ICE PICK
After being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 , Communis t hero Leon Trotsky took refuge in a
leafy suburb of Mexico City but was always fearful of ass ass ination attempts by Stalin.
In August 1940, he was finally tracked down by Ramon Mercader, a Russian-born Spanish
undercover agent for the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB).
Mercader got access to Trotsky on the pretext of needing his help and then attacked him in hisstudy with an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat. It took Trotsky 24 hours to die. The KGB
calls the assassination one of its most successful “special operations”.
THE LETHAL SPRAY GUN
In 1959 Ukrainian Nationalist, Stepan Bandera was found dying outside his apartment in
Munich, Germany. He was thought to have had a heart attack. It was only in 1961 that defected
KGB assas sin Bohdan Stashynsky testified in court that he had been ordered to kill him by the
KGB and used a specially designed gun that sprayed gaseous hydrogen cyanide in Bandera’s
face.
The cyanide, an artery and vein constrictor, had induced heart failure. Stashynsky maintained the
sam e “spray” gun had been used successfully many times before.
THE SPIKED UMBRELLA
In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was poisoned in a plot worthy of a
James Bond fi lm. White waiting for a bus on London’s Waterloo Bridge, he was jabbed by the
tip of umbrella by a pass ing “commuter”.
Markov felt a “stinging pain”. No wonder: the brolly contained a tiny pellet of the poison ricin.
Markov died three days later. It was the third assas sination attempt by Bulgarian agents to kill
him, aided by KGB operatives.
DEATH BY RADIATION
In 2006, defected KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had s ought political asylum in Britain,
fell ill after eating at the Itsu sus hi res taurant in Piccadilly.
He was rushed to hospital where he died three weeks later, suffering from acute radiation
syndrome – the result of being exposed to the lethal radioactive polonium -210.
It is still unknown how he was subjected to the subs tance, one theory being that it was in a cupof tea he drank in his London hotel.
Before he died he released a statement accusing the then president Vladimir Putin of being
involved in his death. A British investigation resulted in a failed request to Russia for the
extradition of chief suspect Andrey Lugovoy.
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IDYLLIC is not a bad w ord to desc ribe Doina
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