450 • RHYDYMWYN
Inside Soviet Military Intelligence, his autobiographyAquarium, and
Spetsnaz. Whether Rezun really wrote all four books, in the space of
five years, has been questioned, particularly since some of his asser-
tions have proved inaccurate. For example, his claim that the head of
the GRU in 1940, I. E. Proskurov, was deposed in July 1940 and shot
is definitely wrong. In fact Proskurov was appointed to the Far East
Air Force in August 1940, and at the end of September 1940 he was
transferred to Strategic Aviation. He was arrested in April 1941 and
executed in October of that year. According to Michael Parrish of
Indiana University, Rezun has made other mistakes about the careers
of Ivan Serov, A. P. Paniflov, I. I. Il’ichev, and I. F. Dashichev.
In 1993, still using the pen name Suvorov, Rezun releasedIce-
breakerin Russia, a controversial interpretation of the origins of
World War II, which concluded that Stalin had always intended to go
to war against Germany in July 1941—a theory not entirely unknown
in Western academic circles, but a proposition that was demolished
convincingly by the scholar David M. Glantz writing in theJournal
of Military History.RHYDYMWYN.In December 1940, as a first step in the development
of an atomic bomb, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was awarded
a contract to produce uranium hexafluoride, a highly corrosive gas
that hitherto had been a key to fission research, and the company set
up an internal unit to liaise with theMaud Committee. Five months
later, in May 1941, Metropolitan-Vickers was contracted to build a
pilot gaseous-diffusion plant at Rhydymwyn in northern Wales, and
a plausible cover story was prepared for the local population that the
heavily guarded site was engaged in the manufacture of synthetic
rubber.
The site selected for the British atomic bomb project, codenamed
Tube Alloys, was remote and secret and was then in use by ICI as
an underground storage facility for high explosives and the highly
toxic chemical ingredients of mustard gas. The entire area of the
Alyn valley was dotted with abandoned lead and zinc mines and
quarries, amounting to some 80 miles of passages and connected
workings, and in September 1938 the Ministry of Supply had begun
tunneling into the limestone at Hendre to construct a series of deep
chambers, initially to store up to 10,000 tons of TNT. By October