Is This the Cold War's Most Bizarre Untold Story_ _ Express Yourself _ Express.co

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Jimmy Young

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Alan Titchmarsh

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Dr Rosemary

Russian spies

‘tried to

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Sir Bernard

Lovell, who

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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 He had written a detailed account, he added, but it would not be published until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

column now

, ,

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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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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