Perrin brought up concerns about Fuchs’s reaction. Would he try to escape or commit suicide? Skardon thought neither option likely. Fuchs had “complete confidence in the likelihood of his remaining at Harwell.” He regarded himself as the “lynch-pin” there. Skardon assured Perrin, “In his present state of mind it is almost inconceivable to FUCHS that he might be removed.”
There had been no Listeners, no tape recording on that rainy afternoon of the twenty-fourth when Fuchs confessed. Just Skardon. MI5 later released a one-and-a-half-page report of the several-hour interview. Skardon wrote a longer version that it did not release. The surety of Skardon’s remark to Perrin—“complete confidence in the likelihood of his remaining at Harwell”—certainly creates questions of what further assurances Skardon had offered Fuchs.
Nor were any further tapings to occur at the prefab. MI5 reestablished SF (the washer inserted into the phone) there but decided not to reinstall the Listeners in Newbury because the advantage was unclear. The mic didn’t always provide a clear transcript. Besides, Skardon indicated that a tape recording might embarrass him. He didn’t explain why—maybe offering more inducements? The DG agreed that its use was at Skardon’s discretion.
Fuchs’s actions backed up Skardon’s confidence in his state of mind. After his confession, he had gone to the office for half an hour, busied himself at home between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., and then was out until 10:00. The bugs gave no hint of where he was for those two hours.
Robertson had reduced surveillance after Klaus and Erna returned from their short holiday. No one expected Fuchs to flee or to spy. It was a calculated risk, but they also didn’t want the possibility of surveillance to unnerve him.
Around 11:00 the next day, Fuchs stopped in Arnold’s office to apologize “for having been secretive hitherto.” Skardon had always maintained that only MI5 knew about the allegations and had never suggested that Arnold was involved. For his part, Arnold indicated no awareness. But Fuchs sensed otherwise and said that he thought Arnold knew more than he admitted. As he had throughout, Arnold stayed mum.
Then Fuchs lunched with a potential new staff member at his office and showed the recruit around Harwell and houses in Didcot. Erna went along for the ride. An ordinary day, and no hint of concern on the part of MI5.
Fuchs arrived at his office around 10:00 on the morning of January 26 and checked in with Arnold to ensure that MI5 understood his position at Harwell in light of an upcoming conference. Arnold told him that Skardon did understand and appreciated it. Using the opportunity, Arnold asked Fuchs if he had handed information to the Russians. Fuchs said yes—on the plutonium bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and diffusion. Arnold told him that “it was a dreadful blow” and hurt him deeply. To Arnold, Fuchs seemed “much affected.”
Then Fuchs met Skardon at his prefab at 11:00. They discussed Fuchs’s main concern, resolving his position at Harwell as quickly as possible and ensuring that the authorities understood his importance to the research program.
Skardon’s memo for the meeting shows that immediately after Fuchs shared his worry, Skardon “asked him whether he would like to make a written statement incorporating any details that he thought to be borne in mind.” Between the lines, one can almost hear Skardon, polite and friendly, say, “Sure, just write down what happened and then we can figure it out.” Fuchs wanted to believe, and Skardon let him.
For the rest of the interview, Fuchs generally described his rendezvous over the years. He disagreed with Skardon that “espionage is properly considered to be an offense.” He countered that he had supplied information to the British obtained from the United States, which the McMahon Act had made illegal to reveal. Skardon had no response. At this moment, the legality of spying wasn’t the issue. The issue was whom you chose to spy for.
Skardon left just after 1:00, and Fuchs quickly called Erna. She asked how he was. Sounding confident, and obviously pleased with the outcome of the interview with Skardon, he answered, “I think it’s under control.”
He told her he was going to see Mary Buneman in the hospital in Oxford.
Erna demanded, “Why do you do things without consulting me? I mean, you promised you wouldn’t.”
Klaus had a simple but confident answer: “Yes, I’m sorry. Just now I’m in the habit of taking things into my own hands.”
When she couldn’t persuade him not to go, she asked, “Well, can you drive? Because if you’re going to drive as you’ve driven me lately—!” Apparently, the death-defying ride Skardon had experienced with Fuchs at the wheel was not an isolated event.
The next morning, Friday the twenty-seventh, Fuchs took the 9:28 train from Didcot to London. He had told Erna that he was meeting up with Perrin.
While he traveled, White and Robertson called Perrin to brief him about Fuchs’s interview with Skardon later that morning. Robertson stated in his minutes, “We regard this as of over-riding importance at the moment in view of its bearing on the possibility of a successful prosecution which—although it would be unreasonable to be too optimistic—now seems by no means out of the question.”
They also reminded Perrin that Fuchs was coming to London supposedly to see him. It was a ruse; he wasn’t to be available. The real reason was that room 055 in the War Office in Whitehall had recording equipment.
Fuchs met Skardon at Paddington Station, and from there they traveled to the War Office, just minutes south of Trafalgar Square. This time, Skardon cautioned him of his legal rights beforehand, and Fuchs said he understood. He dictated his statement to Skardon, read it over, made some edits, and signed it. His last sentence was “I have read this statement and to the best of my knowledge it is true.”
Fuchs’s statement gave a largely accurate, although cursory and carefully crafted, description of his personal history, especially his becoming a communist. Protecting Gerhard, he omitted any mention of his leadership and tutelage during the early 1930s. The only name included other than his father’s was Rudi Peierls’s, and this in the context of claiming that, initially, he had not known the nature of Peierls’s work in Birmingham. (He might have forgotten that he and Born had discussed Peierls’s work on the bomb, or not.) He declared that Britain’s strategy was to have Germany and Russia fight each other to the death, but differing from his oral confession, he omitted that internment reinforced this perception. Instead, he stated that he understood the necessity of internment. Only one sentence related any specifics about spying, but it was all that MI5 needed. In that one sentence, he stated what he considered the worst, “namely to give information about the principle of the design of the plutonium bomb.” It was a confession that befuddled analysis because it revealed so little other than that he had spied. Interpretation offered the opportunity for misguided perceptions.
Not everyone was satisfied. Liddell’s diary entry for January 27 once again brought up inducement. He had read the troublesome sentence in Fuchs’s statement: “I was given the chance of admitting it and staying at Harwell or of clearing out.” A prosecution would be difficult, Liddell thought, if Fuchs made his confession because of promises to stay at Harwell.
Fortunately for MI5, the statement was top secret, so the government could bury those words or, if made public, twist them. A few years later, MI5 hired a journalist to write up the Fuchs case to improve its image. In explanation, he wrote, “He had confessed, and that was that. It was all over and done with. And the price Skardon had to pay for the confession was that he had to ensure that Fuchs remained on at Harwell.” Fuchs had an “absurd illusion.”
* * *
—
That Friday night Fuchs returned home about 7:00 and went to the Skinners’ until the wee hours of the morning. After that, the weekend was quiet. Klaus puttered about, spending some time in the office.
Herbert Skinner, though, made noises. He had three roles: Klaus’s boss, Harwell’s deputy director, and Klaus’s friend. Cockcroft and he
had discussed Fuchs, with Cockcroft naively revealing, once again, more to him than authorized. Skinner planned to take steps “to ensure that FUCHS remain at Harwell,” even perhaps to gain access to a meeting of Lord Portal’s to discuss the case. MI5 assigned Perrin to warn off Skinner sharply. The message: the Fuchs case was very serious, and he must stay out of it and not reveal anything he has learned.
The FBI, as yet, had received no report on the interrogation and demanded a full one. The British embassy in Washington told Martin that the FBI suspected MI5 of being “cagey.” MI5 knew it had to send the reports that day or the next to appease J. Edgar Hoover.
* * *
—
On Monday morning, January 30, Fuchs took the train to London once more for a prearranged visit with Perrin, this time without any pretense. They met with Skardon in room 055 at the War Office, where, for more than four hours, Fuchs explained the technical information he had given to the Russians.
In a soft but firm voice, Perrin questioned him, going over the details from each era, one by one.
First there was Birmingham, and as Fuchs explained, he confined the information passed along to his own research on gaseous diffusion, usually handing the agent carbon copies of his reports. He also gave the general scope of the atomic project in the U.K.
In the second period in New York, as part of the British mission, he expanded beyond his own work and gave any important documents that came to hand, though still mostly on gaseous diffusion, such as one on the type of membranes used in the filtration process. Most were the product of his team, and half of those were his own. Given that the copies and the names of those to whom they were distributed were meticulously indexed, he handed over his handwritten manuscript. Besides that, he indicated the construction of an industrial superstructure for producing U-235, such as a large production plant somewhere (it was Oak Ridge, Tennessee). He told Perrin that he didn’t have the impression that the Russians were intensively pursuing a bomb at that time.
Once he arrived in Los Alamos in August 1944, he realized for the first time the extensive scope of the American program. When in Cambridge visiting his sister in February 1945, he met his agent “Raymond,” as he knew him, for the first time since seeing him in New York. Until this, Fuchs had provided no data on a plutonium bomb. While there, he wrote a six-page report on the problems of constructing an atomic bomb—the differences in triggers for plutonium and U-235 bombs and in critical mass. Many details remained to be worked out.
By the time he and Raymond met in Santa Fe in June 1945, he had the mother lode, the design of the plutonium bomb, the Gadget, that the Americans would soon test at Alamogordo. The documents he handed Raymond included a sketch and a full description of the components, such as the tamper, aluminum shell, and lens system, as well as the dimensions, all of which he had checked out at Los Alamos to ensure precise figures.
In the fall, the two met in Santa Fe again, and Fuchs gave him a bit more precise information on the metallurgy of plutonium, but none on how to produce it.
Back at Harwell, in the fourth period, he didn’t make contact with an agent until 1947, six months after he returned. He had begun to question Stalin’s Russia, and he didn’t answer all the questions put to him or pass on all he knew. Still, the Russians received data on the British Windscale Piles (reactors) on the northwest coast of Britain, along with more mathematical details on the plutonium bomb. He told what he knew about the hydrogen bomb from his time in Los Alamos.
Throughout the years, his various Russian agents had occasionally asked him about research not derived from material he had provided, so it was clear the Russians had other sources. When he was at Harwell, those questions increased. In the past, he often didn’t know the answer, because he was unfamiliar with the research. Now he pleaded ignorance or gave them only a piece, extracts of information from Los Alamos but much less from the U.K. research. As he rattled off as many as he remembered, Perrin hastily wrote up a list.
Perrin felt Fuchs was sincere in recalling all that he could.
They went on to assess the bomb tested by the Russians in August 1949, which largely duplicated the Gadget. A plutonium bomb was Fuchs’s initial expectation, and measurements of airborne fissile material confirmed this, even though lack of evidence of plutonium in the clouds made it inconclusive. What had surprised Fuchs was the Russians’ ability to create the industrial superstructure to manufacture the components so quickly, especially considering the devastation they suffered during the war. Fuchs estimated that the research he furnished to the Russians saved them one or two years, an estimate that other physicists generally agreed with.
* * *
—
In 1942, as the Russians fought the Germans to the death, Stalin had assigned one of his top physicists to launch an atomic bomb project. The Russians knew from intelligence sources that the British, Germans, and Americans already recognized the potential of this new class of weapons.
They had a year’s worth of Fuchs’s research on diffusion—his actual espionage beginning in August 1941, not 1942 as he confessed, perhaps conflating the year with signing the Official Secrets Act in 1942 or, perhaps, protecting Peierls. Fuchs shouldn’t have known any secrets until signing the act. Impossible to conduct their research with that restriction, Peierls had largely ignored it.
In any case, it was a date with little scientific significance. With the Germans’ invading its cities and a meager supply of uranium ore, Russia’s prospect for an intensive U.S.-style program was nil. Diffusion was not a research path that could bring a bomb to fruition quickly.
Fuchs’s details of the plutonium bomb in 1945 did have consequences, but only after Stalin saw the extraordinary results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Afterward, fearful rather than cowed (as the American military had hoped), he ordered a crash atomic bomb program so that Russia wouldn’t be next.
No scientist doubted the Russians’ ability to create a bomb on their own. As Edward Teller later said, “From what I have seen of the competence of Soviet scientists, I have reason to believe that they could have produced the weapons independently, once they knew that an atomic bomb could be produced.”
But an implosion bomb, one using plutonium, required more than knowledge of the relevant science and engineering. With the explosive lenses all needing to detonate within one-millionth of a second, it required precise timing and symmetry. The state of Russian electronics technology lacked this degree of exactness. By replicating the design of the Trinity bomb that Fuchs passed to “Raymond” in Santa Fe, they circumvented the electronics problem and gained a design proven to work.
But even with secretly obtained information, the Russians faced additional hurdles. The political director for the Soviet bomb project was the ruthless and paranoid Lavrentiy Beria. He demanded that the scientists ensure that the intelligence wasn’t “disinformation.” The science director Igor Kurchatov kept the American design under wraps in his desk drawer. He masked its origins by creating a fiction of other Russian scientists’ working on the bomb and forced his scientists to check out all the specifications.
* * *
—
The technical information Perrin took down at the War Office on Monday, the thirtieth, was damning. At Leconfield House, Liddell still struggled with the role of inducement in Fuchs’s confession. When a visitor (unnamed) scanned the confession in Liddell’s office the next day, he allayed fears, confidently claiming, “We ought to get away with it.” The idea was to stress the moral side, as Fuchs had done, that he confessed because of his friends—which was, in fact, his reason.
After he stated in his written confession that he had a choice of quietly leaving or of confessing and staying at Harwell, he related his struggles over the possible effect on his friends of not confessing:
I would deal a grave blow to Harwell, to all the work which I had loved and furthermore that I would leave suspicions against
people whom I loved who were my friends and who believed that I was their friend. I had to face the fact that it had been possible for me in one half of my mind to be friends with people, be close friends and at the same time to deceive them and to endanger them. I had to realise that the control mechanism had warned me of danger to myself but that it had also prevented me from realising what I was doing to people who were close to me.
Fuchs self-diagnosed this inner conflict as “controlled schizophrenia”; that is, he compartmentalized his mind, one part for making friends and being a good person and one part for spying. His conceptualization—certainly not psychosis—spoke to the whole person who rigidly divides his life’s actions: a nice person who leads a secret life, whether it is betraying information, stealing from the business, or having an affair. Fuchs had his belief system to reinforce his actions, so similar to many people where the belief in the cause transcends the rights of the individual and excuses the harm done to others. “Controlled schizophrenia” rationalized an irresolvable conflict, a trap he had unwittingly created for himself—loyalty to friends whom he had come to love or to communism, which he believed in with religious zeal. Stripping away the certitude of the cause as promulgated by Stalin exposed the conscience of a human being overwhelmed by turmoil completely new to him.
Fuchs took the train back to Harwell after his interview with Perrin and was in the prefab by 9:00 p.m., the late arrival caused by a visit to his doctor in London for a prescription, probably sleeping pills. Once home, he rang Erna. Seemingly recovered, she insisted that they see each other. He had no car but said he would ride his bike over. He was back by 10:45. January 30 had been a long day for everyone. Perrin later reflected that the experience had caused him to feel “years older.”
February 1 was a Wednesday, eight days since Fuchs had first confessed to Skardon. He was in the office by 10:00 a.m., having gotten a second call from Erna at the early morning hour of 1:00 to visit, then not returning home until 5:20. He had also just received a letter from his father touting his inaugural lecture at the University of Leipzig. That was the good news. Otherwise, Emil asked for funds to care for his grandson Klaus for two months, and he expressed worries about Christel, still hospitalized. He wanted her to come to Germany, but her German passport had long ago expired. “To think of her is a constant torment,” he wrote to Klaus.
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