Perseus

In Greek mythology, Perseus is a great hero, a demigod and the son of Zeus and Danae. He slays the gorgon Medusa and rescues Andromeda. The tale of Perseus and Medusa was artfully retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his story, "The Gorgon's Head."

In astronomy, Perseus is a not-very-conspicuous constellation located near Cassiopeia. The Perseids are an annual meteor shower, peaking on August 12th; the meteors in this shower appear to radiate from a center in Perseus, hence the name.

Perseus was also the code name for a scientist who passed secrets to the communist Soviet Union beginning in 1943 in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, before the acknowledged spy Klaus Fuchs arrived, and continuing into the 1950s. In 1996 Vladimir Chikov and Gary Kern published the book, Comment Staline a vole la bombe atomique aux Americains, Dossier KGB No. 13676 (How Stalin stole the atomic bomb from the Americans, File No. 13676, The Case of the Cottagers). It is the story of Morris and Lona Cohen, an American couple who were Soviet espionage agents. More particularly, it is the story of Morris Cohen's recruitment in 1942 of an atomic physicist employed by the Manhattan Project. Chikov does not identify the physicist, initially using the alias "Arthur Fielding" to refer to him. At the point in the story when Fielding is transferred to Los Alamos--1943--Chikov gives him the spy name Perseus. However, Chikov stated that Perseus was not fictitious; that, in fact, it was a field name (cover name) actually used by the Cohens and their Soviet controller to refer to their prodigious source working at the heart of "Gorgon," the bomb.

The Chikov-Kern collaboration began in 1993, and the manuscript was largely completed by mid-1995. At the time of writing Vladimir Chikov was a Lt. Colonel press officer with the Russian SVR intelligence service, formerly the KGB. Kern, who studied at Princeton, is a widely acclaimed Russian translator and sovietologist. The Preface of the book was written by Robert Lamphere, FBI liaison to the Venona Project, head of the SOVME Unit and later supervisor of the Rosenberg Case. Chikov's earliest writing about the Cohens' involvement in atomic espionage was a magazine article in New Times (Novoye Vremya) in April 1991. A number of elements from that account are incorporated in this set--they differ from Comment Staline, but may be closer to the truth.

Almost all commentators agree that Vladimir Chikov constructed his Perseus legend from the espionage activities of two or more KGB sources on the Manhattan Project. Based on the above conflation, an alternative profile for Perseus might be: a Manhattan Project physicist who was acquainted with Steve Nelson; who was an associate of Robert Oppenheimer; who worked at the Met Lab in 1942; and whose career reflects employment in the Philadelphia area in mid-1944.

In The Theory of Fielding, H. Laes concludes,

"J. Robert Oppenheimer was an agent of the Soviet Union. He was not Perseus, the spy alleged by Chikov. However, he was the witting enabler of Perseus and other spies."