Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Mary knew that the government’s 1940 policy of internment had caught up Oscar and Klaus—along with the thirty thousand other “enemy aliens.” She knew that the government had shipped both of them to internment camps in Canada. She knew that to keep away from Nazis in the camps, Oscar had requested to go to a “Kosher camp,” even though he wasn’t Jewish. She didn’t know that they sailed on the same ship to the same camp—or that it was Klaus who had finagled Oscar and other political refugees onto the kosher camp roster.

  At Harwell, Klaus reported his former Social Democratic affiliation in Germany on government forms. Oscar Buneman knew the hidden side of Fuchs’s life. Mary had no inkling, but it seems that Henry Arnold did.

  Around the time that Arnold invited Fuchs to his house in 1946, he contacted MI5. His initial memo didn’t indicate any misgivings, but it did set off an unexpected chain of events, all carefully delineated in Fuchs’s security file during the winter. Through it, Martin and Robertson learned that even back then Arnold didn’t consider Fuchs’s security record “above reproach.”

  * * *

  —

  When Arnold arrived at Harwell in 1946, the scientists had a lax attitude toward security, and he quickly instituted discipline. One of his first requests to them was to inform him of their travel plans. As instructed, Fuchs wrote to Arnold to say that he would be in London on October 5, 1946, for a lecture of the Physics Club at the Royal Society.

  Arnold forwarded Fuchs’s note to the MI5 official John Collard in London, asking if Collard wished to receive such information. A confused Collard responded that he wasn’t sure why Arnold had written: Did he question Fuchs’s integrity, or did he want to use Fuchs as an informant? In either case, Collard explained, he saw no need to act because Arnold had also talked to an MI5 official in field operations.

  A few days later Collard had second thoughts, and he entered a note in Fuchs’s folder for the B Branch analyst Michael Serpell, one of the many who had reviewed Fuchs’s various clearances during the war. Collard suggested that Serpell contact the field operative about his conversation with Arnold. He also mentioned that Fuchs had just arrived back in the U.K. and was engaged in work at Harwell “of extreme importance.” This was news to Serpell.

  Serpell spoke with the field operative whose information contained an unsettling sentence: “Arnold realizes from some quarter that FUCHS has or had a communist background.” This was the fall of 1946. Arnold had known Fuchs for only a couple of months, and he wasn’t privy to his security file. No one asked Arnold how he came by this tip.

  The incident didn’t stop there. From previous security reviews, Serpell knew the Gestapo’s allegations against Fuchs. What alarmed him was his new position at Harwell. Serpell wrote a piercing summary of the risks associated with employing Fuchs in a top secret research facility:

  The facts of this case seem to be that FUCHS in his youth acted as a communist penetration agent in the NSDAP. That he should have begun his political career in this undercover style seems to me to be of considerable significance at the present time. It is also apparent that as late as 1942 he was engaged in some communist activities in a refugee group at Birmingham. What does not seem to be conclusively established is that he was the Claus Fuchs mentioned as having been a close friend of Hans KAHLE in a Canadian internment camp. Although the subject of this file was interned, it was only for a short time (May 1940 to January 1941) and there does not seem to be any direct statement that his internment was in Canada. However, the identification is probable, and, if it is correct, the association with KAHLE may be regarded as particularly dangerous, since KAHLE is known to have acted as an OGPU representative in this country.

  To Serpell, the probability that Kahle, a member of the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, would have recruited Fuchs was high.

  He recognized that the British government didn’t see “the dangers inherent in the employment of such people as FUCHS” during the war, but with the war over he assumed that the danger to security would be a prime issue. Compelled by this broadside, the head of countersubversion in B Branch, Roger Hollis, finally requested verification that “Claus Fuchs” in internment and “Klaus Fuchs” at Harwell were the same person. The answer: they were.

  With that answer, Hollis immediately disputed Serpell’s speculation on the Fuchs-Kahle relationship. He argued that the government had shipped many Nazis to Canada and mistakenly included a few anti-Nazis. For Fuchs and Kahle to become friends was hardly surprising, “surrounded as they must have been by Nazis who would have been uncongenial to them.”

  Serpell’s memo also implicated Rudi Peierls at the University of Birmingham. Peierls consulted at Harwell, was friends with Fuchs, had a Russian wife, and visited Russia in 1937.

  Serpell’s attack ruffled staff at MI5. Concerned only with security in the postwar era and not science, junior officers pushed to “divorce” Fuchs “from all contact with atomic energy” and no longer use Peierls as a consultant. The chiefs thought there was “nothing of a positive nature” against either of them. Minutes, charged with emotions, flew back and forth into early 1947.

  Finally, on January 14, 1947, Hollis ordered warrants on the mail of Fuchs and Peierls. Clerks dutifully hand copied all letters sent to the two physicists for the next two months. A few with sealing wax went unopened. Nothing of importance to MI5 turned up.

  Arnold never knew about the buzz in MI5 caused by his initial request to Collard.

  * * *

  —

  With Arnold’s suspicions about Fuchs since 1946, Robertson didn’t need much context for briefing him on surveillance of Fuchs at Harwell. In their first meeting, he went right to the point: MI5 “had recently received information throwing suspicion upon one of a limited number of British scientists, the particular individual in question having not yet been identified. Fuchs was one of the number.” And he warned: Only a handful of people know about this. Tell no one else. Do not make any inquiries. Put little information on paper.

  Arnold was able to supply ample background: Fuchs had just moved into a prefab at Harwell; he didn’t have a phone but would probably get one; he had an old Morris eight-horsepower motorcar; he traveled to Birmingham, sometimes to Oxford, London rarely, and usually by train; appropriate to his position he had many foreign visitors; and he had a few close friends at Harwell, particularly the Skinners. Herbert Skinner was his boss. Suspected of having TB, Fuchs had lived at the Skinners’ and still often slept there. In six months, the Skinners were moving to Liverpool, where Herbert would take up a physics chair at the university. Herbert divided his time between the two places. Fuchs, Arnold reported, “is on more than friendly terms with Mrs. Skinner.” He summed up:

  [Fuchs] is a very reserved man, and mentally tough. Nevertheless, he is fond of both whiskey and women and can take a large amount of alcohol without being affected. He is a man who is not only brilliant intellectually, but also extremely shrewd from a practical point of view.

  Arnold held his cards close, but he certainly signaled to MI5 his own wary attitude toward Fuchs.

  CHAPTER 16

  Surveillance, Harwell, September 1949

  James Robertson readied an elaborate system of code names—Fuchs was Ramsey, Peierls was Matthews, and Skinner was Piper (and of course his wife became Mrs. Piper). He had the warrants to tap the phones of Fuchs and Peierls and monitor their mail. He made a request for bank records and three Listeners, young female volunteers from the MI5 transcription team, to work from a side room at the Victorian-era post office in the backwater town of Newbury, near Harwell. All day, all night, they staffed the phone taps and microphones while equipment recorded Fuchs’s every word, whether in the office or at home. Just in case, one of them spoke German. When the Listeners were relieved, they had an easy ten-minute walk through the old market square and over the river Kennet to their eighteenth-century coach inn. Their cover story, should anyone ask, was as Ge
neral Post Office relief staff working on a statistical study of calls passing through the Newbury exchange.

  As for mail, the Special Investigative Unit of the GPO, located near St. Paul’s in London, opened Fuchs’s incoming and outgoing mail, mostly using a steam kettle, and copied it. Checking for invisible ink was also part of the job.

  The listening and the mail duplication flowed easily for Robertson, but he wrung his hands over visual surveillance. Because the treeless acres of Harwell offered no cover, a select team of Watchers was on call a few hours away, in a Georgian town house in Regent’s Park on the northwest side of London. The chief of the Watchers, Jim Skardon, was described by a colleague as dapper and pipe smoking. His other important qualities were patience and tenacity. He had “a high opinion of his own abilities,” said one, but was well liked and an excellent interviewer. Their physical separation from Leconfield House supposedly thwarted foreign agents’ observation of comings and goings of this MI5 surveillance team.

  The Watchers had a photograph of their target and a basic description—Height: five feet nine, Eyes: brown, Hair: brown. From Arnold they knew that during the week, Fuchs’s pattern was office, home, or the Skinners’. Occasionally, he made train trips to London for meetings at Shell Mex House or drives to Birmingham to see the Peierlses. When he traveled by rail, the Watchers waited for him at Didcot Station, the closest one to Harwell. If he drove, Robertson had Watchers pick up his car on a trunk road a few miles into his trip. Lightly trafficked rural roads reasoned against tailing him from Harwell. Information from Arnold or the Listeners kept tabs on his plans. If the Watchers couldn’t get to Harwell in time, the backup was to intercept him either at the train station or at his destination.

  When he went out on a whim, especially at night, nothing could be done, which was the cause of Robertson’s anxiety. With holes, the whole system was worthless. But even if they were on the scene, would they be able to detect a handoff that might take less than a minute and involve a servant, a casual acquaintance, or limitless other possibilities? Besides, they knew they could be spying on someone who was not a spy but merely going on about his business.

  The first days of tracking had their tribulations, especially Sundays, a free day with no fixed schedule. The first Sunday, garbled messages sprinkled with the voices of strange men forced Robertson to drive to Newbury to learn details firsthand. It all turned out innocently enough. It seems that car trouble outside Harwell had triggered phone calls from Fuchs, a stay at the Skinners’, and—according to a neighbor—unidentified men stopping at the Skinners’ in the middle of the night. The muddle involved Fuchs’s recent purchase of a car from Herbert Skinner: a used dark gray sedan, which looked like new, its long hood and tall gleaming grille with the prominent MG crest now signaling Fuchs’s arrival—when it didn’t break down.

  Fuchs invited Arnold to drive it sometime. Pleased, Arnold reported to MI5 that he could keep an eye on the mileage, which shouldn’t increase much because wartime gas rationing was still in effect. Nevertheless, the next Sunday, MI5 lost Fuchs from 1:00 in the afternoon until 4:00 the next morning; the Listeners heard no sounds from his house. Arnold guessed that he was at the Skinners’.

  The first real test of a road trip came on Thursday, September 22, when Fuchs and Skinner drove to the General Electric Company in Wembley, on the western outskirts of London. The prior day’s activities, all recorded by the Listeners, involved their secretaries going to and fro about who would drive and in how many cars, given that two others were coming along. Robertson recapped the trip’s arrangements as “working satisfactorily enough.” The only person disappointed was Erna Skinner, who wasn’t allowed to go along.

  The investigation slogged along, discovering mostly that Fuchs had a very mundane life and spent most of his time working. The Listeners noted that on weekdays he usually got up around 8:30. Sometimes he whistled. At the other end of the day, it was mostly quiet after 11:30 p.m.—perhaps broken by a sneeze. Weekends were much looser—later rising and later retiring.

  Meetings, memos, and list-making clogged the routines of Martin and Robertson. They kept up Fuchs’s multiple security files, now exploding with details on every person he spoke with on the phone, corresponded with, or saw face to face. Identifying first names mentioned on the bugs was a tiresome chore. Robertson kept updating his list of code names. The town of Cambridge became “Backwood”—indicating that perhaps the labeler was from Oxford; Maidenhead easily converted to “Virginia”; and Beaconsfield was designated “Primrose,” a historical nod to the favorite flower of Benjamin Disraeli, a.k.a. Lord Beaconsfield.

  * * *

  —

  One September morning around 9:40, the Listeners reported two visitors (and maybe a baby) who were not the Skinners. The wife, who had a foreign accent, did most of the talking and was “difficult to follow as her speech was a mixture of shouting and screaming. She addressed RAMSEY by his first name.” At 9:46, they probably left the living room, the Listeners noted, to tour the prefab. Not clear who they were (although it was probably the Peierlses).

  The prefabs, compact aluminum boxes with two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen with built-in fridge, were a marvel to all. They had evolved as a postwar solution to a lack of housing. As though pressed from a cookie cutter, these efficient boxes stretched row upon row across Harwell’s gentle hills.

  Fuchs’s regular visitor was Erna Skinner. The friendship between the Skinners and Fuchs had sprung up in 1947—and particularly between Erna and Klaus. Erna most likely forged the relationship because typically, wherever he lived, the wives of his scientist friends mothered him. His quiet nature with the agreeable but evasive smile appealed to their expressive personalities and challenged the maternal instincts of the likes of Genia Peierls, Mici Teller, and Mary Buneman. The women at Harwell had him over for dinner, hung his drapes, sometimes even came over to cook breakfast for him. Klaus was generally friendly toward people, expressing neither his likes nor his dislikes, and didn’t welcome any hint of emotional interest, except from Erna Skinner.

  By 1949, he and Erna saw each other almost daily, either for lunch or in the evening, sometimes at his prefab, sometimes at her house. Erna’s background and personality made her a natural complement to Klaus’s reserve. She was fun-loving, outgoing, very bohemian with many artistic, cosmopolitan friends—the patina of her heritage—and a big drinker. She had been pretty and, although she had gained weight, still “had pretty remains,” as Mary Buneman put it. Erna’s specialty was acting out hilarious stories of her everyday happenings and poking fun at herself. And sometimes others. She labeled Klaus’s discourses “evangelistic sermons on democratic principles.”

  Being four years his senior might have added to the attraction too. He seemed to prefer older women.

  For Erna, an anxious person who required constant companionship, he was a godsend. Caring for him during the summer, while she nursed him back to health from his lung condition, was hardly an imposition. With the impending move, Herbert traveled to Liverpool every few weeks, and she didn’t want to be alone.

  Henry Arnold described Erna: “Age about 37. Plump. Short (5’4” to 5’5”). Dark. Attractive type of Jewess. Generally well-dressed though inclined to be untidy. Clothes usually darkish.” In the Yiddish of her hometown of Czernowitz, she would have been “zaftig”—round and full figured. Listeners’ reports indicated that she talked a lot—about trivial incidents that no one seemed to listen to, about her health, and about her kittens. Mary Buneman liked her but thought her a flirt.

  Erna Skinner, née Wurmbrand, was nominally Austrian, born in the city of Czernowitz in 1907, a slice of central Europe that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then. Originally a city in Moldova, centuries of submission to Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian, German, and Polish conquerors and the accompanying waves of immigration seasoned it into a multicultural, multiethnic, and prominent intellectual center. It had a slig
ht plurality of Jews, and German was the lingua franca. Erna was a product of this rich culture, and her casual patter, often seemingly frivolous, concealed a lively intelligence and quick mind.

  The sterile details from British passport records requested by Robertson listed that Erna divorced a husband named Abrahamson before coming to the U.K. in 1929, visited Boston in 1932 for six months, and traveled extensively on the Continent before the war. She lived in the United States in 1944 while Herbert worked for the Manhattan Project in Berkeley, California. Her parents lived in New York. Not on the passport records—her father was a respected journalist who reported on atrocities in Germany until 1933, when Nazi intimidation forced him out.

  The Skinners had married in 1931 and in 1934 had a daughter named Elaine. During this time, Herbert Skinner was on the faculty of the University of Bristol, and Klaus was a student there. Herbert later recalled Klaus as “an uncouth and callow youth.” There is no indication that they knew each other well.

  Mary Buneman found Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner a proper English gentleman, reserved, and discreet, as one might expect of a graduate of the elite prep school Rugby and of Trinity College, Cambridge—and now, besides being Klaus’s boss, was deputy to the director of Harwell, John Cockcroft. He also had an aptitude for the clerihew, a distinctly British form of poetry, whimsical and often nonsensical, as was his for Fuchs:

  Fuchs

  Looks

  An ascetic

  Theoretic.

  Herbert and Erna were devoted to each other in their own way. He wanted to keep her happy. But for Erna, one man was not always enough. He knew of her affairs and looked the other way. Klaus, for his part, satisfied her whims and needs and let her take the lead. At the same time, he held an admiration for Herbert and a willingness to please him and do what he asked. Mary Buneman once asked him why he went over to the Skinners’ all the time. He answered, “For Herbert.” But it seemed more complicated than that.