The next discussion between Raymond and his controller was more fraught. They posited various schemes and agreed on contacting Klaus’s sister, who lived somewhere in the Boston area. When Raymond located her at 144 Lakeview Avenue in Cambridge and knocked on the door, a cleaning lady answered and said that the family was on vacation. Raymond asked about the wife’s brother and heard that he had visited to say goodbye.
The next cable to Moscow Center read, “Contact with ‘Rest’ has been lost.”
CHAPTER 13
Trinity, Los Alamos 1944
The trip to the Southwest, three days long and dull, transported Klaus to a new world. He stepped off the train in Lamy, the nearest main line rail station to Santa Fe, a hot, dry desert town with little more than a hotel and lunchroom and a few run-down adobe houses. All around, rugged mountains sprouted prickly green tufts of sagebrush. The air was thin at the sixty-five-hundred-foot elevation, the sun strong. Left far behind was the humidity of New York, crowded with 7.5 million people.
A car met him and carried him fifteen miles north to East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe. They stopped at a long, low-slung, centuries-old adobe building in the middle of town. There was no sign, just a plain, nondescript door and the number 109. It was a magical door, beyond which physicists lost their identity and became “engineers”; driver’s licenses showed a number only (no name); and banking was done in Albuquerque. All mail came to one address, box 1663 in Santa Fe. Guards, invisible in civvies, hung around day and night. Just as Peierls and Fuchs had researched the whereabouts of German physicists (that produced little information), Groves wanted no telltale signs to alert curious Germans to the whereabouts of his own scientists.
On hand to greet Klaus was Dorothy McKibbin, the indispensable gatekeeper for the Hill, as Los Alamos was called. Besides running the registration office and handing out security badges, she organized deliveries, helped plan parties, and basically mothered anyone who needed it, including Fuchs, whom she found to be polite and gentle—as well as “attractive.” From her, Fuchs received a white badge indicating almost unlimited access to the secrets of Los Alamos. Without a badge from Dorothy, there was no access to the Hill.
The research site was still forty-five miles away, including a ten-mile detour around a rickety bridge. As Fuchs’s driver went north, about two miles from the center of town off to the west was another guarded site that no one talked about: a Japanese American internment camp with a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence, searchlights, sentry towers, and well-armed guards, very similar to where Klaus had been interned in Canada. Intermittently, it housed German and Italian POWs.
After Fuchs and his driver crossed the Rio Grande, they reached the Pajarito Plateau, where high mesas, striated pink and white, rose before them. These high, flat-topped hills with steep sides had formed out of the fire and smoke of volcanoes that exploded into the sky a million years ago, prefiguring the kind of combustion these men were exploring. The blistering, roaring eruptions had spewed so violently that jetsam covered the earth in a five-hundred-mile radius. The vestiges of ash, pumice, and lava flows created the soft, porous rock out of which erosion created a labyrinth of deep canyons setting these stark and stunning formations in relief.
From the canyon floor, the car slowly climbed another two thousand feet, following the curves of the switchbacks, most not more than one lane wide, that edged a precipitous drop, no guardrails in sight. At the top, a white clapboard hut appeared, the Los Alamos Main Gate on the east side of the mesa. After the guards checked Fuchs’s pass, the car headed down the dirt road through a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, stands of piñon and juniper trees on either side. Two miles farther, they stopped at another security gate that marked the entrance to the town, and after another check of credentials they drove past rustic log cabins and a lodge with a pond in front, eventually reaching the housing office, where Fuchs picked up the keys for his bachelor room in the “Big House.”
This two-storied lodge and the log cabins around it were relics of the Los Alamos Ranch School that had educated a diverse collection of wealthy young men ranging from William S. Burroughs to Gore Vidal to Arthur Wood, a future president of Sears, Roebuck. Familiar with the location and its inaccessibility, Oppenheimer had identified the school as a potential site for the nuclear research facility, and the government purchased it in 1942. The Big House, formerly a dormitory, became the residence for single men.
Fuchs’s next-door neighbor there was Richard Feynman—six and a half years younger and a rising star in the physics firmament. He wasn’t a bachelor, but his wife suffered from tuberculosis and was in a sanitarium in nearby Albuquerque.
After Fuchs bought a very beat-up Buick of the fifty-dollar type in Santa Fe, he regularly lent it to Feynman so that he could visit his wife. The two men became good friends, and Fuchs watched out for him. One night when Feynman passed out from too much alcohol, Fuchs carried him back to the Big House.
Evenings when they were free, they pondered politics, Los Alamos security, and what constituted an acceptable exchange of information with foreign scientists. They even bantered about which of them was more likely to be a spy. It was the kind of game that the spirited Feynman in particular enjoyed. They mutually agreed that Feynman, who later gained fame for his humor, his bongo playing, and his popular books—as well as his contribution to physics—was the more likely one.
Feynman ran computations with a new IBM machine using punch cards and quickly advanced to become a group leader. Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Division in group T-1 under Rudi Peierls. Bethe assigned this group exclusively to handle the theoretical problems of Division X, the explosion group. Group T-1 did the calculations for and design of the lenses, a key component of the implosion mechanism that was the triggering device for the plutonium bomb.
Implosion was a completely different type of trigger design from the gun type for the U-235 bomb. Most simply, thirty-two lenses made of explosive material, surrounded a core of plutonium. Detonating the lenses compressed or crushed the plutonium core to start a chain reaction. To work, the pressure from the exploding lenses had to be sufficiently powerful, completely symmetrical, and perfectly timed. The firing mechanism, shape, and speed had to be so exact that the lenses exploded simultaneously down to a tolerance of one-millionth of a second. Otherwise, some of the plutonium would squirt away from the whole, creating a jet. The optics group at Los Alamos developed X-ray cameras that could take microsecond exposures to assess the symmetry. Fuchs made or reviewed the theoretical calculations supporting many of the components in the mechanism, especially the lenses, creating the theory to eliminate jets.
Oppenheimer had originally designated the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller to head group T-1, but the assignment didn’t measure up to Teller’s sense of his own worth. Teller, who would later become highly controversial for his testimony before Congress questioning Oppenheimer’s loyalty, as well as for his backing of what others saw as extreme uses of technology, thought that he, rather than Hans Bethe, deserved to direct the whole Theoretical Division.
Teller was a brilliant physicist; he was also loud, assertive, and not widely liked. When he refused to head the implosion group, Oppenheimer acquiesced in his wish for a separate team to work on the more powerful hydrogen bomb, also called a fusion bomb. Theoretically, it worked by taking the energy from a fission bomb and using it to fuse small atomic nuclei together. Many more years would be needed to make it operational, and in 1944 it wasn’t clear it would ever work.
Teller, like Fuchs, was among the many leading physicists who had come under the tutelage of Max Born. Teller had been his assistant in the early 1930s, and Born had helped him escape Germany then. Oppenheimer had received his PhD under Born, around the same time as Maria Goeppert Mayer, the Columbia University physicist who had invited Fuchs to dinner in New York.
In the mid-1920s, at the height of the quantum revolution partly led by Born
, a program of the Rockefeller Foundation had academically cross-fertilized the physics world, sending the best young physicists to study in a foreign country—the Americans to Germany, the Germans to Denmark, and on and on. Teller and Peierls had studied together at the University of Leipzig—just before Klaus Fuchs arrived there—under Werner Heisenberg, another former assistant to Born. This new generation of physicists had played together, gotten drunk together in bars, pubs, and Kneipen, and studied together. The best minds in physics had all been intellectual intimates until the Nazis ripped them apart.
Ironically, the historical development of physics in Germany and the Eastern European countries opened the theoretical area more readily to Jews than the experimental one. When these young Jewish scholars fled, the Germans forced an extraordinary scientific shift to Britain and America. This interwoven but partitioned world fostered a respect by those in America for their German rivals, one that pushed them to work all out to win the race.
General Groves, with a thoroughly military mind-set, had no interest in camaraderie and the free flow of information. He wanted Los Alamos to run as an army base with scientists in uniform and all groups compartmentalized and isolated. He might not have said as much to Oppenheimer, but Groves’s insistence on maintaining tight controls was directed not just against the Germans but also against America’s allies. The pioneering work of British scientists might have been instrumental in getting the Manhattan Project going, but he didn’t want the British to build their own bomb using his information.
Oppenheimer, as thoroughly academic as Groves was military, refused to go along. Success, he told Groves, required a combination of the spirit of collaboration and a constant exchange of ideas. To Groves’s credit, Oppenheimer prevailed; one physicist deemed Los Alamos a “scientific paradise.” With weekly coordinating meetings and colloquiums, Oppenheimer created what the scientists thought was a perfect research environment, enriched by the exciting and uncompetitive free flow of ideas. Although it wasn’t so free. The United States kept a list of which British personnel went to the colloquiums or coordinating committee meetings in order to forestall any attempts by the British to claim a patent on an invention that arose by way of meetings there.
Fuchs’s first invitation to a colloquium came in October. The topic was “on preparing shaped masses of high explosives for implosion spheres.” Although Fuchs was one of eleven British scientists—along with Peierls, Skyrme, and Frisch—with blanket permission to access all reports (except those specifically limited), as well as any area of the laboratory, it was December before he began attending Oppenheimer’s meetings on a semi-regular basis.
Weekly meetings of the Theoretical Division’s working groups were different. Hans Bethe handled those. Whenever he asked for a liaison to a group, Fuchs raised his hand. Bethe considered him vital to the project.
Fuchs regularly attended the weekly working group that designed the lenses. Their design was one of his main theoretical challenges. He was the only physicist to take an interest; he said little but dutifully took notes.
* * *
—
On October 24, 1944, Raymond knocked on the door of 144 Lakeview Avenue in Cambridge around 10:00 a.m. This was his third try to make contact with Christel Fuchs Heinemann.
When she opened the door, Raymond introduced himself as a friend of her brother’s, and they exchanged code words as Klaus had informed her to do. He had brought candy for her children and a book, Hersey’s Bell for Adano, for her. She had not heard from Klaus, she told him. She thought he had most likely gone to England.
Undeterred, Raymond returned the next week on Thursday. Again, he brought candy for the children and the book Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers for her. She had very good news for him: Klaus had traveled to Chicago for business and called her. He told her that he was working in New Mexico—he didn’t specify where—and that he would visit her for two weeks at Christmas. Overjoyed, Raymond stayed for lunch. He said that he would visit again in three or four weeks.
A month later, Raymond was there again. Christel had heard nothing more from Klaus, but she expected to see him over the holidays. On the previous phone call, her brother had said that he might have to go to New York for a few days. Raymond took that as a message that Klaus wanted to see him, and he wrote a note to Klaus for her to give him. On it was a name and phone number for Klaus to call when he arrived.
* * *
—
The scientists on the Hill worked day and night. Whenever an idea hit them, they could stride through a security gate into the Tech Area, which was isolated from the small town by another fence topped by barbed wire, and enter one of the barracks-like buildings. Fuchs’s office was in Building E, confusingly referred to as the “T-Building,” T for “Theoretical,” also the location of Oppenheimer’s office. Fuchs shared room E-118 with Tony Skyrme. Peierls was next door in E-119. Johnny von Neumann was a member of T-1 and a few offices away. An extraordinary collection of intellect, but that was true for every floor in T-Building. Feynman, leader of group IV, and Victor Frederick “Viki” Weisskopf, leader of group III, were one floor up.
Weisskopf was yet another of Born’s former students and had overlapped with Teller. He and Teller never got on, but they did have a deep, unknown connection. They both adored Maria Goeppert Mayer, the former Born student now at Columbia, their whole lives. When Teller later learned that Weisskopf was equally smitten, he said with surprise, “That’s the only thing I know that Weisskopf and I ever agreed on.” T-Building held more than simply atomic secrets.
The scientists were sworn to silence about the project; not even their spouses could know. Guards allowed only those with the appropriate badge into the Tech Area. Everything that happened inside this fence stayed inside. Patrols in jeeps and on horseback wore a track outside the main perimeter of the base to ensure that it did. Others on horseback rode into the mountains and camped out looking for spies.
The secrecy, as well as the pressure to accomplish what some considered the impossible, created a constant tension. Social life, as much as time allowed, helped to dissipate it.
Administrators encouraged their cooped-up researchers to make the most of their splendid isolation. The denizens of Los Alamos hiked or rode horses through the pristine forests; they fished in the streams of the Jemez Mountains; they skied; they visited nearby pueblos for the festivities and beautiful pottery. The fresh air and the remarkable beauty rejuvenated tired minds. It only took gazing at the red glow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at sunset to appreciate the mysterious wonderment of the universe, despite their efforts to redirect some of its most basic principles.
The British team was particularly close knit. Klaus often joined the Peierlses and friends on excursions into the mountains, taking risks and dealing with the challenges. Genia remembered him climbing over extremely dangerous cliffs to test himself. Risk-taking was a central feature of his personality, as was control. The group’s explosives expert had cleared an overgrown slope with dynamite and fitted it out with a tow rope. They called it Sawyer Hill. One afternoon, as he was learning to ski, Klaus severely damaged his ankle. Genia watched as he skied down with great control in spite of the pain.
He dated a couple of the grade school teachers at the facility, later admitting that with one he almost formed a relationship. At that time in his life, though, he wasn’t quite capable of a long-term commitment.
Otherwise, filling the few down hours meant chess, bridge, charades, hobbies, music, and lively parties at Fuller Lodge. Fuchs was noted as a skilled dancer, and one with very good rhythm—at one party leading the conga line through the commissary. He also had a reputation for consuming large quantities of alcohol at parties. Genia’s impression was that he could drink a whole bottle of vodka in one gulp. How much it affected him wasn’t clear. Rudi Peierls’s memory wasn’t consistent, on one occasion saying he never saw Klaus drunk, on another rememberin
g that he sometimes had “a little more than he could stand.”
Klaus sometimes supplied what he and others drank, volunteering to drive to Santa Fe for liquor. Everyone on the Hill was entitled to one shopping day a month in Santa Fe. Exiting involved a stop at the gate to let the guards inspect the car; drivers and passengers were not searched. In Santa Fe, some of the British mission thought that GII (security) men kept an eye on them; others thought they were left alone. For sure, GII watched the American scientists closely.
At first the army didn’t want anyone to leave the Hill, but by 1944 the officers realized that the scientists worked so hard that they had to get away. Klaus asked for leave at Christmas to see Christel in Massachusetts. The travel time was three days out and three days back. But Klaus’s Christmas leave was canceled and rescheduled for February.
* * *
—
Klaus arrived in Cambridge in February and quickly used the contact number that Raymond had left with Christel. Raymond didn’t call first, fearing that the phone could be bugged, but merely showed up at 144 Lakeview on the morning of Monday, February 19.
This time when Christel answered the door, she asked him to return on Wednesday because her husband was home. Raymond could see Klaus sitting in the parlor. Raymond couldn’t stay in the area until Wednesday, so he called the house an hour later. A man answered the phone, whom he took to be Christel’s husband, and he pretended to have a wrong number. He took the train home to Philadelphia and returned to Cambridge on Wednesday.
This time, Raymond and Rest were reunited, and they went into Boston so Klaus could buy presents for friends at Los Alamos.
They talked while traveling into and out of the city, Klaus explaining that he had to report on every person he met outside work hours at Los Alamos, even those outside his own field. On Monday, he hadn’t wanted to introduce his brother-in-law to Raymond. He also said that he had checked carefully, and he wasn’t being watched.
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