The Gorodomlya Island Project: The Inside Story of How the Soviets developed Rocket Technology

When 20-year old RAF recruit Neville Cox, or ‘Cocky’, joins up in 1946, he is dismayed that the end of the war means he will never get to fly. Instead, he will be doing more of the technical drawing he is trained for. On a mission to a former Nazi-supported laboratory in Austria, he meets pilot and scientific intelligence expert Eric Ackermann, forming a friendship that lasts for years.

They encounter Russians who are, like them, combing out ‘scientific institutes’ in a search for remnants and instruments connected with the V2; the ‘wonder weapon’ that devastated London in the Blitz. Shockingly, Cocky is abducted from an airfield on his return from a trip to the UK and taken to Gorodomlya Island, where German rocket scientists have been supporting Soviet efforts to recreate and develop the V2 rocket. Utilising the expertise of their captives on the island and in several other ‘design bureaus’ around Moscow, the Soviets aim is a powerful rocket with a nuclear warhead, four times more deadly than the atomic bomb the Americans dropped on Hiroshima.

When a colleague is ‘disappeared’ to a remote closed city for using a self-made radio to pass on technical secrets, Cocky is convinced he will be next. An opportunity to escape arises through a visiting string quartet, but his eventual escape is not the planned diplomatic intervention, but a risky and hair-raising effort to outwit the KGB. Following a career in signals intelligence, Cocky struggles to adjust to civilian life, and to having a civilian wife.

Three children and ten years later, he escapes again with a new partner, this time to Nova Scotia in Canada, where he still lives to this day.