Perseus (spy)

Perseus was the code name of a hypothetical Soviet atomic spy that, if real, would have allegedly breached United States national security by infiltrating Los Alamos National Laboratory during the development of the Manhattan Project, and consequently, would have been instrumental for the Soviets in the development of nuclear weapons.
Among researchers of the subject there is some consensus that Perseus never existed and was actually a creation of Soviet intelligence.
Character and history
A reference to the profile of a spy who can be identified with Perseus describes him as an American scientist of young age at the time of the Manhattan Project.
If they were real, Perseus would have supposedly participated in the Spanish Civil War.
In the early 1940s Perseus would have been in New York City visiting his sick parents. During his stay in that city, he would have managed to be recruited by the GRU after looking for and contacting Morris Cohen, an American who joined the Communist Party during the Great Depression and worked as a Soviet spy.
The meeting with Cohen must have been between September 1941 and July 1942, before Cohen enlisted in the army and left for the Western Front in Europe.
Perseus reportedly introduced himself to Cohen as a physicist who had been invited to join the work at Los Alamos research center. By 1942, Perseus was supposedly already working at Los Alamos, being that he would have started sometime at least 18 months before German physicist and also atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, who joined the investigation in mid-1944. However, Perseus appears to have been recruited by the Soviets around the same (or at least a nearby) time as Fuchs.
According to articles published in Russia by The New Times, Perseus would have collaborated with the Soviet government for purely ideological reasons to the point that he refused any financial rewards in exchange for classified information, since he was convinced that the United States would use the atomic bomb against the Soviet Union, claiming that:
With Morris Cohen in Europe, his wife, Lona Cohen, took it upon herself to travel to Albuquerque on one or two occasions (depending on the source consulted) to serve as a carrier.
Once there, Lona Cohen would have received information allegedly directly from Perseus, and took it to the Soviet consul in New York, Anatoli Yatskov. This information allegedly included crucial details about the Trinity Test, which was detonated in July 1945.
In the 1950s, Perseus was supposedly under the control of Rudolf Abel.
According to one source, Perseus was supposedly still alive in 1991.
Perseus was also allegedly referred by or identified with the code names of "Mr. X", "Youngster", FOGEL, PERS and "Mlad".
This name is also given to a spy at White Sands Missile Range, located further south near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Alleged confirmations of existence
Vladimir Chikov
In April 1991, KGB colonel and public relations officer Vladimir Chikov published articles in the Russian weekly "The New Times" in which he commented on the existence of a Russian spy who worked in the Manhattan project under the code name of Perseus, giving details of his recruitment and achievements.
Regarding the information published by Chikov in The New Times, an article in The Washington Post comments:
Anatoli Yatskov
In an interview published in 1992, the former Soviet consul in New York, Anatoli Yatskov, confirmed the existence of Perseus, as an important figure among scientists working on the Manhattan project.
During his tenure as consul, Yatskov used the pseudonym Anatoly Yakovlev and served as a Soviet intelligence agent, coordinating atomic spies in the United States.
Yatskov gave details about Perseus' recruitment, how he sent information from New Mexico to New York (through Morris Cohen's wife), and confirmed that the Soviet Union received information from both, Klaus Fuchs and Perseus.
Morris Cohen and Lona Cohen
In an interview given before his death in 1995, the American-born Soviet spy Morris Cohen confirmed that in addition to Karl Fuchs, there was a second physicist in the Manhattan project who worked as a Soviet spy.
The details in Cohen's story coincide with the statements of Colonel Vladimir Chikov a few years ago, such as the recruitment of people close to the Manhattan Project as spies, the existence (suspected by the American intelligence) of an unidentified scientist who collaborated with Soviet intelligence, and the interaction of said scientist with Lona Cohen (Morris Cohen's wife) to transport stolen information.
According to Cohen, by the fall of 1994 there were very few people left in Soviet intelligence ("two or maybe three") who knew the real name of the second spy scientist.
For her part, shortly before her death in 1992, Lona Cohen had a telephone interview with historian Walter Schneir. In that interview, Lona Cohen confirmed that she had made at least one trip between Albuquerque and New York to transport classified information stolen to the United States, but she could not quite remember who she had interviewed with in New Mexico, saying that it was probably a scientist or physicist.