As he had done at Los Alamos, he took a personal hand in every dimension—“ubiquitous,” one person labeled him—from committees for the design of the Windscale Piles, to the diffusion plant, to nuclear power. Construction of the actual bomb was assigned to another division in the Ministry of Supply, and Fuchs was the only Harwell scientist deeply involved with that effort. He kept his ties to American scientists as well, through declassification conferences for which he was a “responsible reviewer,” making the initial determination on what research from the Manhattan Project to declassify, a job involving no review of current research.
But when he traveled to the United States for a declassification conference in 1947, new information was part of his mission. Someone had asked him to glean what he could about American progress on reactors and bombs. He brought back invaluable intelligence for the British—and for the Russians: the latest developments in producing the hydrogen bomb.
Fuchs’s approach to running the division earned mixed reviews. One physicist in the division, Derek Behrens (Mary Buneman’s cousin), saw him as encouraging researchers to develop their ideas rather than simply carrying out specific tasks, the same sort of “curiosity-oriented research” Oppenheimer had promoted at Los Alamos. Another one, Brian Flowers, who eventually took over the Theoretical Division, turned Behrens’s opinion upside down: “very authoritarian over silly things; bit of a megalomaniac. He took interesting problems for himself, he thought he alone could do something. He thought he was better.” Rudi Peierls, observing from Birmingham, saw a director who energetically intervened if a staff member was treated unfairly or, on the other hand, not working efficiently.
As far as we know, Oscar Buneman never recorded his judgment, but Mary did. She saw none of the “opinionated conceit” noticed by colleagues like Flowers.
But all of the disparate assessments had some element of truth. Fuchs was kind and unselfish with friends and colleagues. At the same time, with ideas, he could be rigid and intellectually arrogant, and in this context generosity did not always hold. Rudi advised him to be less aggressive and more polite in his critiques.
In 1948, Rudi Peierls and John Cockcroft weighed in on Fuchs as a researcher by proposing him for membership in the Olympus of British science, the Royal Society. They cited his contributions to quantum theory as well as his pioneering work on atomic energy, stating, “There is hardly a theoretical problem in the atomic energy field in which our knowledge has not been widened considerably by his work, or by work done under his guidance and inspiration.”
* * *
—
In May 1948, three junior researchers at Harwell were fired because of links to the Communist Party. At the same time, Klaus missed his first meeting with Eugene, who had sat on a bar stool, sweaty and anxious, waiting. He missed the backup a month later too. Moscow Center attributed it to the firings and alerted London that Fuchs could be under surveillance and might even have been interrogated. Rather than possibly lose him, Moscow began plans to “remove” him to Russia to do research there.
He did arrive for the meeting that October and excused his absences by citing the need to be at Harwell, where the work had focused on readying the launch of a new reactor. He missed another too, and Eugene suffered again. Eugene decided to try a new system for rescheduling a meeting. He identified a house in Kew on a corner across from Kew Gardens where Klaus was to throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over a fence between the second and third of four trees. On the tenth page, he would mark a new date for a meeting if an interruption had occurred. Klaus tried it out once to make sure it worked. He never used it, because Eugene decided it was too risky. The owner of the house belonged to another network, and it was against the rules to mix separate networks.
* * *
—
Geographic remoteness, along with the gas rationing that lingered into peacetime, meant that those living and working at Harwell played out their life’s dramas largely within the enclosure. Squabbles, promotions or being passed over, and suspected affairs buzzed around the place as the pressures mounted. Relief valves for the increasingly close community were the drama society, band, orchestra, and choir, which made the most of the exceptional degree of musicality among the physicists. The wives, largely minding children, hanging out the wash, and finagling to stretch ration coupons, organized dances, plays, musical events, and “beer nights.” Brushing aside Mary’s nudge for him to play the violin, Klaus confined his rhythm to the dance floor.
But unlike his remoteness at Los Alamos, where he was mostly a social tagalong, at Harwell he made friends. He often stopped by the Bunemans’ for a drink and sometimes stayed for dinner, expressing great fondness for Mary’s cooking. The younger Buneman son, Micky, remembered him as “kind, generous, quiet, tall, slim, underfed and very intellectual.” Mary remembered a hesitant Klaus, reluctant to leave, stifling yawns, then admitting, “I had better be getting along.”
Mary’s cousin Derek Behrens, who was more like a brother to her, would often stop by as well. The two men became good friends, so much so that Klaus served as best man at Derek’s wedding.
* * *
—
In 1945, when friends had gone to Europe to scour for scientists and secret facilities, Klaus asked them to search the concentration camps for his father and his nephew and namesake. As he left Los Alamos in 1946, he learned they were alive, both living in Frankfurt in the American military zone. He wrote to officials in London about their coming to England. He hadn’t seen his father in thirteen years, and he had never met the boy.
For non-Jewish nationals to exit Germany was almost impossible. The Allied military governments examined everyone for a Nazi stain, and Emil’s file stated that he had belonged to an organization that assisted Nazi families. What it was and what he had done weren’t clear, although the military government later wrote that it had wrongly classified him. Nevertheless, correcting the record so that he could gain permission to leave was a Herculean task.
Klaus made up some work-related justification for a trip to Germany in May 1947. The British were wary that the Russians might kidnap a top scientist, so he traveled under the assumed name of Strauss. He reported back that his father wasn’t in Frankfurt, seeming to imply that he didn’t see him. He didn’t report that he saw his brother in a TB sanatorium in Switzerland, or that he met Emil while his father was in Bad Pyrmont for a Quaker meeting. Emil remembered Klaus dressed in an American army uniform—the reason for the uniform or its origins unspecified. But with Pyrmont only about fifteen miles from the East German border, maybe it was a safety precaution on Klaus’s part. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to be there.
* * *
—
Surviving the war—evading the Gestapo, dodging bombs in Berlin, and eking out a living by selling (illegally) his interpretation of the Bible—had taken all of Emil’s grit. With no other family around, he and his six-year-old grandson stayed with friends. Given that his friends were often targeted and arrested by the Gestapo, they had moved every few months. When the bombs fell on Berlin, the diminutive sixty-six-year-old pastor had to prod the robust and resistant boy to the basement shelter.
Eager to find safety, in 1944, Emil answered a newspaper ad for free room and board in an Austrian village.
Gortipohl, five hundred miles to the south of Berlin, sat nestled in a long valley dotted with hamlets and surrounded by ten-thousand-foot alpine peaks. With the local men at the front, the old farmers needed field hands, so grandfather and grandson made their way. While Emil traveled back and forth to Berlin, the boisterous, by now ten-year-old herded cows on the mountainside during the summer and attended a one-room school during the winter while also tending a small plot of potatoes.
It was a harsh life, and the isolated location, which should have suggested safety, actually presented a danger. Gortipohl was only twenty kilometers from the border with Switzerland, and the under
ground resistance led by a shoemaker from a nearby village smuggled Jews and political victims across the border. Young Klaus climbed up the mountainside with food for those hiding and waiting in a cattle hut. Twice he guided a family to the border when the regular smuggler didn’t show up.
In the spring of 1945, German soldiers rolled in to wipe up resisters and blow the dam of a large reservoir, assuring a flooded valley to block a thrust by Allied troops. The resistance stripped out the explosives, though, allowing French Moroccan troops to invade. Capping the final moments of his wartime experience, young Klaus escorted a Nazi official at gunpoint to the resistance leaders.
The boy and his grandfather survived, but with most rail lines nonfunctional it took them six arduous months—including thirty-six hours crammed in a cattle wagon—to make their way to Frankfurt. What they found was a city of skeletal buildings, mountains of rubble, and little food, shelter, or clothing.
Emil suffered from exhaustion and starvation, and his friends feared that if he couldn’t get away from Germany for a rest, “it will be the end.” Nevertheless, he found a niche lecturing to labor unions on religion while he persistently applied for visas to visit Gerhard, still in a TB clinic in Switzerland, and Klaus, now working in England. As was his wont, he succeeded with both, spending a couple of weeks with Gerhard and four months with Klaus in the fall of 1947, much of the time teaching at a Quaker center near Birmingham.
Emil’s ultimate objective was America: to lecture and to see Christel and her three children. Unfortunately, the U.S. stance in 1948 was “Immigration for Germans is not yet open.” A special U.S. education program provided a visa for Emil only, but he refused to leave young Klaus behind. Eventually, they both received visas, and, in 1948, the two traveled to England and then to New York, with Klaus paying all their travel expenses.
Before Emil left, the University of Leipzig in the Russian zone had offered him a position as a professor of religion, but he declined, saying that he wasn’t willing to separate from his children, all of whom lived outside Germany. The success of his lecture tour made Emil contemplate trying to immigrate to the United States with his grandson. He told friends that Klaus was thinking of it too, to be near Christel and her children.
But during Emil’s visit with his daughter at Christmas, a letter arrived from Leipzig, saying that the university wanted him anyway. Here was an opportunity to do reconciliation work through religious teachings in the Russian zone. He told friends that he would never be satisfied if he didn’t grab the offer. By mid-June, Emil had firmed up plans to become professor of Christian ethics and the sociology of religion in Leipzig.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had watched as Christel sat despondent for long periods gazing out of the window. Eventually, her husband committed her to a psychiatric hospital for what Emil described as a “nervous breakdown.” He worried that his being there had awakened painful memories of the prewar and war years. She hadn’t suffered as the other family members had, but she had the frustration of failure when she had tried to save them.
* * *
—
From 1947 to 1949, Klaus and Eugene met about six times. During that period, Klaus handed Eugene ninety documents on such highly sensitive areas as the theory behind the hydrogen bomb, the plans for an isotope separation plant, and the blueprints for nuclear reactors. Most of the time their meetings were short, with little time to talk. One cool and cloudy Saturday in February 1949, they sat on a bench in Putney Bridge Park near the Spotted Horse pub—keeping a stranger’s distance between them—and chatted a bit about personal matters. Usually Moscow Center had more questions for Eugene to ask than time allowed—nothing but business. But Eugene wanted more and initiated the conversation.
When he asked Klaus why he had never married, Fuchs told him, “I think about it from time to time. But you know I’m walking through a minefield. One false move and it will all blow up. I can accept the worse-case scenario but I can’t involve a wife and children.”
Then he added, “Furthermore, to have a family in England is not part of my plans for the future.”
Then he added with a smile, “I’d like to help the Soviet Union until it is able to test its atomic bomb. Then I want to go home to East Germany where I have friends. There I can get married and work in peace and quiet. That’s my dream.” His comments to Eugene certainly suggested that his future plans centered on Germany.
Klaus and Eugene met again soon, at the beginning of April. They ended the meeting by setting up the next one for June 25, and a backup on July 2. Klaus then left for the Mediterranean coast on vacation with his boss Herbert Skinner and wife, Erna, with whom he had become very friendly. While there, he developed bronchial pneumonia—certainly exacerbated by asthma and heavy smoking—and struggled to recover. He spent most of June in bed, nursed by Erna Skinner at her house.
With the three junior researchers fired from Harwell a year earlier for communist ties and spies exposed in Canada, the United States, and Britain, all of which had been covered in the press, Fuchs was wise to lie low. Another reason for increased caution had reached the KGB by way of William Weisband, a naturalized American and double agent who spoke fluent Russian. He worked in the decoding unit for Venona in Arlington, Virginia, and advised on translations. He had passed details of Venona to Moscow Center early on. By late 1948, he could tell them that the decoders were making progress. No specific names yet.
At the same time, KGB records indicate that it worried about the possible arrest of Raymond, Klaus’s contact in New York, who knew his real name and background. Raymond had been increasingly exposed since the summer of 1947, when he appeared before a grand jury in connection with the confession of the spy Elizabeth Bentley. The FBI questioned him again a year later. Now the KGB was pressuring Raymond to leave the country illegally. But he wouldn’t; he had fallen in love.
* * *
—
Toward the end of July 1949, Fuchs’s father and nephew arrived at his new prefab at 17 Hillside Drive, the last house in the row, just as Klaus was moving in. He entertained his family with picnics and dinners with friends, but these occasions made Klaus nervous, especially when Henry Arnold, Harwell’s security chief, was a guest. Mary Buneman was there, and she sensed the tension, which was for good reason. Emil was not particularly circumspect, and Klaus was never sure what tales of the Nazi times and Klaus’s alignment he might tell.
The conversation within the family was mostly about the future, though. Emil realized that if young Klaus came with him to Leipzig, he might never be able to get him out again. The boy’s schooling was an issue, especially after a very spotty education at thirteen different schools during the war. One option was a British boarding school, with Uncle Klaus becoming in loco parentis and covering the costs, something his thrifty lifestyle would make possible.
The three visited some schools, and on the way back to Harwell from one of them, Emil decided that they were too rigid. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Emil lectured, young Klaus had lived with Aunt Christel and, along with her children, had attended the progressive Shady Hill School, where he had thrived. They would both go back to Germany, perhaps with young Klaus attending the denazified Odenwaldschule. Sitting in the backseat, the boy saw his uncle’s shoulders immediately relax. Something about caring for his young nephew had made Klaus very tense.
Emil had another concern and wanted Klaus’s opinion: Would his move to Leipzig be a problem given Klaus’s position at Harwell? Klaus said he didn’t think so, but he would speak with Henry Arnold. The next evening, Klaus reported that Arnold saw no difficulties with Emil’s move to the Russian zone.
Time and events showed this response to be peculiar. Klaus brought the same news to Arnold three months later. On that occasion, Arnold advised that they both think about it and then meet again, at which point Arnold quickly informed MI5.
Did Klaus really ask Arnold in July? This leaves th
e question of why he asked him again in October. Or did he simply give the answer that his father wanted to hear, knowing that Emil had his mind set and could stir up problems?
IV
RECONNAISSANCE
Prefabs at Harwell, 1940s
CHAPTER 15
Suspects, London, September 1949
Klaus Fuchs’s fifteen years in Britain had taken many paths, but it took Arthur Martin of MI5, sitting in downtown London in Leconfield House, only a couple of days to scour them in his security file. Now it was time for him to determine if the compilation of rumors and innuendos confirmed that this respected scientist was indeed Rest, the man who had shared the atomic secrets with Soviet Russia.
He composed a note, “Comparison of evidence from source with facts known of Klaus FUCHS,” to evaluate how well Fuchs’s personal history fit the evidence drawn from Venona, the top secret decoding project run by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service:
Male?—yes
In US from March 1944 to July 1944?—yes, posted to Oak Ridge in August
Had contact with MSN report?—no document yet but probably British
Had a sister in US?—Probably
Details of the scientific project?—if project is atomic energy, they fit
Nationality?—yes, naturalized British
Assumption about transferring back to the UK?—fits but not conclusive
Movements of sister in October 1944?—fits if sister lives in Cambridge MA
Later that day, September 5, 1949, he melded his appraisal into a cable for the British embassy in Washington. It began by correcting the name of the individual in question—it was Klaus, not Karl. “Your para 1. Presume identical with Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs.” He then continued with Fuchs’s biographical data, stating that he had found a letter in Fuchs’s file from a Mrs. Klaus, signed Kristel, sent from Harvard University. He concluded, “Consider evidence against Fuchs very strong but not conclusive. All above information may be passed to the FBI with request for report on ‘Mrs. Klaus.’” He added that since Fuchs’s return from the United States, he was a senior researcher at Harwell, the Ministry of Supply’s main nuclear research center.
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