Arthur Adams (spy)

Arthur Aleksandrovich Adams (October 25, 1885, Eskilstuna, Sweden – January 14, 1969) – a Soviet spy, Hero of the Russian Federation, who passed to the Soviet Union critical information about the American Manhattan Project.

Adams was born in the city of Eskilstuna, Sweden in 1885 to a Swedish father and a Russian Jewish mother. Following the death of his father, Adams's mother with her children returned to Russia, where she died in 1895. Adams entered a military navy school in 1896. In 1903 he graduated from a school of mining technology in Kronshtadt. His wife, Dorothy, was an aunt of American book editor Robert Gottlieb.

While in college, Adams joined the Bolshevik party and actively participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution in Russia's South. The Tsarist police arrested him and sent him into exile in 1905, Adams escaped from his place of exile and emigrated to the United States in 1913. His Russian biographers claim he served in the United States army during World War I and eventually achieved the rank of major.

In 1919 Adams was included in the Martens' mission (a de facto Soviet trade mission in the United States).

An acute lack of qualified personnel (a situation partially created by the Bolsheviks themselves) meant that Adams, with his strong engineering background, immediately became a top bureaucrat.

In 1925 Adams became deputy head of the Main Board of Aviation Industry of the USSR, and worked in that position for 10 years. Adams was responsible for supplies of imported equipment and materials for the aviation industry and therefore often made trips abroad. That's when he was noticed by experts of surveillance agency of Red Army (future GRU).

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