Special Tasks.

• Author: Pringle, Peter

No personal memoir from the fallen Soviet Union has generated such outrage among historians and academics in the West as former KGB general Pavel Sudoplatov's new Special Tasks. The focus of this outpouring is a single chapter, a mere 48 pages out of 509, which contains sensational charges of espionage against some of the century's greatest nuclear physicists, especially J. Robert Oppenheimer. Time magazine bought a huge extract of the book and ran it in April under the provocative title, "The Oppenheimer Files." Then, the backlash set in: "Book Saying U.S. Scientists Aided Soviet Atom Bomb Is Faulted," declared The Washington Post; even the Russian Intelligence Service, which replaced the KGB, moved quickly to denounce this revision of history by Sudoplatov, an old Stalinist hatchet man.

Without a stitch of official documentation, Sudoplatov boldly states that Oppenheimer, who built the American A-bomb, and his colleagues Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard knowingly allowed nuclear secrets to pass from their highly sensitive U.S. laboratories to Moscow.

Within days of the book's publication this spring, historians and physicists hacked away at Sudoplatov's evidence until his case against the physicists is as bare as a Stalinist prosecutor's charge against a kulak. His accusations rest, it soon became clear, only on his say-so and on recollections of his short time spent in charge of the KGB's atomic research at the end of World War II.

Oral history is of course important, and especially so in the former Soviet Union, where so many documents were deliberately destroyed, falsified, or lost during the upheavals of the second Russian revolution. Any high-ranking official who comes forward to talk about a closed period like this one is a find for historians. Sudoplatov gives us his serial killer's perspective on Trotsky's assassination, on Raoul Wallenberg's death, and on the 1934 murder of Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov. He also makes his own personal case for the rehabilitation of Lavrenti Beria by suggesting that Beria, Stalin's KGB chief, was not as evil as others have portrayed him.

But if the oral historians want to rewrite hostory and accuse famous dead scientists of treason, as is the case here, the charges must stand up to scrutiny. Otherwise, people will conclude the book is simply self-serving, either written to enhance the reputation of the author, or to make it more marketable, or both. In the case of Special Tasks, the offending...