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My December 2023 Article on the Soviet Influence Operation, “SNOW”

How the Soviets May Have Caused the Bombing of

Pearl Harbor

he anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor is a painful day in history for Americans — “A day which will live in infamy,” as President Franklin D.

Roosevelt termed it. Many likely know that this resulted in the loss of 2,043 lives and led to America’s entry into World War II, but the events of Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor also resulted in the eventual creation of a Civilian Intelligence Agency, which became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), tasked with ensuring that the United States never again is caught off guard by such an attack.

But how many Americans know that Washington’s wartime “ally,” the Soviet Union, actively worked to instigate a war between the U.S. and Japan by conducting a covertaction operation — known in Russian intelligence parlance as “active measures” — or that the Soviets may have been directly responsible for pushing the U.S. into World War II via an operation code-named “Snow” by Soviet intelligence?

It’s a tale of intrigue involving a Treasury Department economist who, historians argue, may or may not have known that he was being groomed as an “agent of influence” for the Soviets.

By the summer of 1940, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin recognized that his nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich eventually would collapse and the Soviet Union would face the threat of a two-front war against the Germans and the Japanese. The Soviets already had come close to entering into an all-out military conflict with Japan in 1939, when Japanese and Soviet forces clashed in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

The USSR was not ready to fight a two-front war against Berlin and Tokyo, and so, with knowledge from Soviet intelligence that the Japanese also knew they could not sustain large-scale military operations against the U.S. and USSR simultaneously, Stalin decided that his best option was to instigate a war between the U.S. and Japan. He ordered the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), Lavrentiy Beria, to develop a plan to start a war between the U.S. and Japan. Beria, in turn, ordered the NKVD’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then known as the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), to execute Stalin’s directive.

Ultimately, the job of pushing the U.S. and Japan into a war fell upon the shoulders of Vitaliy Pavlov, a 26-year-old OGPU officer and recent graduate of its intelligence academy. Pavlov was chosen not because of his experience conducting foreign intelligence operations but because of the “head room” created by Stalin’s purges of Soviet intelligence services in the late 1930s. Pavlov, in fact, had never served abroad, had never run an intelligence operation, and had only rudimentary knowledge of the English language.

But Pavlov was fortunate to have a more experienced OGPU officer on his staff, Ishkak Akhmerov, an ethnic Tatar who spoke Turkish, French and English. Akhmerov had worked under diplomatic cover in Turkey, then as an “Illegals” officer in China, before arriving in the U.S. in 1935 under an assumed identity. He served almost five years in the U.S. using the aliases “William Grienke,” “Michael Green,” and “Michael Adamec.”

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Akhmerov was credited with recruiting for the Soviets valuable Americans from the

Treasury and State Departments, and he was the officer handling Soviet agent Helen

Lowry — the niece of Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of the United States — whom he eventually married. But by 1939, Akhmerov, like many other Soviet intelligence officers, was suddenly recalled back to Moscow and demoted to a clerk’s position in the OGPU headquarters, where he worked for Pavlov. Some might think Akhmerov would have been bitter about being “rewarded” for the dangerous work he did successfully overseas, but by Soviet standards he was considered “lucky” that Stalin did not order Beria to simply put a bullet in the back of his head or send him off to a Siberian labor camp, like many others caught up in Stalin’s purges.

The American destroyer USS Shaw explodes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, home of the American Pacific Fleet during World War II, on Dec. 7, 1941. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Before Akhmerov left the U.S., he established contact with Treasury economist Harry Dexter White, a staunch anti-Fascist and Soviet sympathizer. At the time of their first meeting, White was considered to be a valuable adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Some historians claim that Morgenthau, a personal friend of FDR, knew almost nothing about finance or economic issues himself and relied heavily on White to devise fiscal policy for the administration. This relationship gave White a great deal of access to government leaders, including the president, making him a valuable source for any foreign intelligence service.

Akhmerov met White in 1939, using the alias “Bill” and posing as an academic studying Far East issues. “Bill” told White during one early conversation that he would be traveling to China soon to investigate Japan’s activities there, and he offered to relay the results of his research to White, either in person or via a friend. It is likely that Akhmerov understood that White was critical and suspicious of Japan’s actions in the Far East and he planned to use White.

To this day, however, there remains a good deal of debate regarding White’s relationship with Akhmerov and Soviet intelligence. It’s not clear whether White knew that he was speaking with a Soviet intelligence officer when first approached by “Bill,” or whether White understood that Akhmerov was cultivating him to be an agent of influence. But it is almost certain that the Soviets realized White’s potential value to them.

Pavlov knew about Akhmerov’s contact with White and ultimately gave White an important role in “Operation Snow” (though it’s also still unclear whether White was a witting accomplice). In the spring of 1941, Pavlov traveled to the U.S. with another OGPU officer and made his way to Washington, where he contacted White by phone and introduced himself as an acquaintance of “Bill.” Pavlov would later tell Soviet historians that this phone call was one of the scariest things he did in his career. But despite Pavlov’s nervousness and poor command of English, White accepted a lunch invitation from him and the two met at the Old Ebbitt Grill.

According to some Russian versions of the lunch meeting, Pavlov passed along instructions from Moscow for White to convince FDR to take the hardest possible stance towards Tokyo, guaranteeing a reciprocal response from the Japanese that would instigate a war between the two countries. Other versions of the meeting claim that Pavlov passed White information on “Bill’s” research in the Far East and that White agreed to relay his shared concerns about Japanese aggression in the Pacific with U.S. government leaders.

Their meeting came at a critical time in U.S.-Japan relations. Some Japanese officials believed that Japan could not sustain a war against the U.S. in the Pacific and wanted to find a way to relieve tensions between the countries. Hoping to avoid a war with the U.S. in November 1941, the Japanese emperor sent a delegation to Washington to try to address concerns about Japan’s actions in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, as the OGPU was executing “Operation Snow,” Soviet military intelligence operative Richard Sorge was using his agent network in Tokyo to influence the Japanese government to go to war with the U.S. instead of the USSR.

In his book Operation Snow, author John Koster claims that White supplied sensitive

U.S. government information to Soviet intelligence via his contacts with the Communist Party of the United States from 1935 to 1937, but was forced to end his work with the Soviets when his American “handler,” Whitaker Chambers, broke contact with the Communist Party and threatened to expose White unless he agreed to also stop helping the USSR.

Though Koster is among those who accuse White of being a Soviet agent, others, such as historian R. Bruce Craig, argue that White instead was anti-Fascist and a strong believer in “Rooseveltian Internationalism,” and that he may have made mistakes in his dealings with the Soviets but never was their agent. However, CIA and State Department historian James C. Van Hook believes Craig’s defense of White fails to address key questions exposed by allegations made against him by former Soviet agents Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, who both claimed, after their defections from the Communist Party and cooperation with the FBI, that White worked for the Soviets.

While “Operation Snow” and Stalin’s other active-measures operations against the U.S. may be unknown to many Americans, Russian President Vladimir Putin no doubt studied this operation during his KGB training and was taught to emulate Pavlov and Akhmerov, who are portrayed as heroes by Russian historians. This is one reason why the Russians have continued to invest in such operations.

Of course, it is also important to remember that Russia is not the only country that engages in these types of operations. Recent reporting indicates that Iran actively worked to exploit access to senior U.S. officials to conduct its own covert influence operation against the United States and European governments. And there is no doubt other countries are pursuing the same type of operations against Washington and its allies.

This reality makes it essential that Americans learn the history of influence

operations against the U.S. and understand that foreign actors will continue to try to manipulate U.S. domestic and foreign policy to serve their own interests — something that is especially important to remember as the 2024 presidential election draws nearer.

Glenn Corn is a retired senior executive with the CIA, whose 34 years of service include leadership positions, such as the president’s senior representative on intelligence and security issues. He is fluent in Russian and Turkish/Azeri, with a working command of Arabic. He is an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics and expert with The Cipher Brief.

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