Opening Moves

More than that, her Aunt cultivated the darker side, the like of which had been Emilia’s father’s domain in his final years. Again, this appealed to the young woman and she found pleasure in hiding her true feelings from everyone save her aunt and older cousin Victoria. Indeed, it appealed to her ego, to be clever enough to hide what was true from those around her. Recruitment into the shady world of espionage followed, in keeping with her cousin and aunt, who both clandestinely served the Red Banner. She learned much from her relatives and the gentlemen who came calling. To the outside world, they were probably suitors for the young women favours. They always brought flowers or candy but in reality, they were communist agents charged with the task of secretly preparing the young Emilia for a life of espionage.

Educationally, her progression under the guidance of the US state was impressive, and she was offered a senior place in a government research programme on her twenty-second Birthday, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

She moved from project to project, gaining trust and, more importantly, higher clearances as her credentials were carefully scrutinised, checked, and re-checked. The fact that she showed no interest whatsoever in politics was noted, and that one of her two living relatives, both of whom resided in the US, was employed as a laundress in the Turkish Embassy was not considered unusual.

Victoria Alejandra Calderon was twenty-seven and had no adverse history; her name only appeared in a file associating her with a US Air Force major, since killed in an accident in the Philippines during June 1941. The other, her Aunt Marta Alejandra Calderon, worked as a sales clerk in a local shoe shop, housed in a building mainly used by a clothiers business belonging to a Michael Green, a gentleman of slight interest to the FBI for no other reason than he met with many military men in the course of his work.

Notes indicated suspicion of some relationship between Michael and Marta, but none was confirmed. Maybe Green just bought a lot of shoes, surmised one annotation. Another noted that he fulfilled private uniform contracts for senior army officers, based in Washington, contracts including the provision of shoes. In any case, neither he nor the women were of concern to the FBI and therefore, by dint of association, neither particularly was Emilia, until she was slated for Manhattan.

Perversely, it was any communist links that were considered more of a threat and prioritised accordingly. Her father’s service with the Nationalists was explored but his clandestine belief in the Republican cause was not uncovered.

The Nationalist link did still cause some concern to investigators and, for a while, it was touch and go as to whether her higher security clearance would be passed.

Emilia applied for US citizenship on her twenty-third birthday, which actually helped clinch her acceptance and she was soon moved to the secret facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, wherein “Manhattan” was making huge strides forward in understanding fission.

As agreed with her aunt and cousin, there would be no coded exchanges for six months regardless, as her letters were bound to be scrutinised carefully, which they most certainly were. They were just full of the things that girls speak of to each other and the FBI must have been sick to death of reading about dresses, make-up, and boyfriends. Which was most definitely the plan.

Long before that self-imposed time was up, her risk category was downgraded and Emilia had become less of a priority, but the women stuck to the agreed time scale and so it was late 1943 before Victoria started to receive information from her cousin.

Because of Emilia’s existing ‘professional’ contacts, a more complex system of reporting and ordering had been set up to protect all involved. There was delay as a result but even Beria felt it was safety first with this asset. There were occasional doubts about the security within the Soviet Embassies, so those premises were avoided as much as possible, as was the case with every important Soviet agent at this time.

Whatever came in from Emilia was decoded by Victoria and re-encoded very precisely with her own special cipher, then passed to her aunt, who secreted the message in shoeboxes purchased by her contact, Iskhak Akhmerov, the resident illegal in America, also known as Michael Green.

He then further encoded in the appropriate NKGB code and then passed it to Hakan Ali Hakan. Hakan was a Turkish intelligence officer who gave his loyalties to the communist ideal, and who, in his turn. further encoded the message, this time in an ancient Turkish Intelligence cipher and forwarded it to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara.