Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Genia didn’t visit. She wrote a direct, honest, uncompromising letter after Rudi returned from his visit on the fourth. It came from the depths of her own life: growing up in Russia during the revolution, when she learned to trust no one. She berated him for putting his friends in England and America in such a difficult position that people wouldn’t trust them, because if he could spy, why couldn’t they? She thanked him for not taking his life and leaving a terrible mess for others to sort out.

  “This is your job, Klaus. . . . You are now going through the hardest time a man can go through, you have burned your god.”

  Klaus responded in kind:

  I have told myself almost every word you say, but it is good that you should say it again. . . . They gave me a much easier way out; I could have left Harwell to go to a university a free man, free from everything, free from friends, with no faith left to start a new life. I could even have stayed at Harwell if I had admitted just one little thing and kept quiet about everything else. I bungled the “take your life” stage; yes, I went through that too, before the arrest. The elaborate precautions taken after my arrest, I am glad to say, were quite unnecessary. . . .

  Klaus

  Then, in a postscript, he added, “And don’t worry if you don’t see the tears. I have learned to cry again. And to love again.”

  Liddell, who had access to all of Fuchs’s mail, rated Genia’s letter “first class.” He made no comment on Klaus’s.

  * * *

  —

  Most colleagues questioned the news. Those who didn’t question it were simply shocked. Robert Oppenheimer read The New York Times headlines while having breakfast at Grand Central Terminal. Said his breakfast partner, “Robert was in shock. He just stared at the story shaking his head. He could not believe the man had done this.” Fuchs’s former next-door neighbor at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman, understood. He had led a double life in 1945, carefully hiding his wife’s fatal illness and his torment over it, only letting out his carefree, bongo-drumming side. At a press conference on February 4, Hans Bethe remarked off the record that he understood Fuchs’s attitude because “a scientist is of the world and works for the world.” In an interview with the FBI, he added another emotion: that he had considered Fuchs trustworthy; now he didn’t know whom to trust.

  Dick White, who became director general of both MI5 and MI6, considered Fuchs’s motives “relatively speaking pure. Different from other spies, money was not the goal. He was a scientist who got cross at the Anglo-American ploy in withholding vital information from an ally fighting a common enemy.” White, too, understood him.

  Of course, Max Born, Nevill Mott in Bristol, and Skinner from his days there knew that Klaus was a communist, but none of them knew that he was a spy. Once while Born lectured at Oxford in 1948, he dined with Fuchs, who expressed a certain boredom working at Harwell. Born stated the obvious—that he could find a professorship—and Fuchs responded that he had “a greater task at Harwell.” When Born mentioned the remark in March 1950, everyone interpreted it as related to spying. It is just as likely that his investment in and feeling of importance at Harwell prompted the remark.

  The obliviousness of MI5 was equally shocking to some. At a party at Harwell, Francis Simon, Fuchs’s erstwhile collaborator on gaseous diffusion during the Birmingham days, remarked on the reaction of Gustav Born, who was living with them. “Young BORN . . . who after learning of the arrest of FUCHS from the newspapers, came downstairs with a very white face. . . . How was it we [the government] did not know that he had Communist sympathies, when this was widely known in Edinburgh University?”

  Those from the internment camps had the same question as Gustav. One wrote to an MI5 officer that he had been impressed with Fuchs’s lectures at Camp L and “repelled by his apparent doctrinary communist fanaticism.” This was his second letter to them, he explained. When he returned from internment, he wrote a similar note to the government and never heard back.

  * * *

  —

  Skardon had visited Fuchs the same day as the Skinners at Fuchs’s request, a necessary precursor for Skardon to have a thirty-minute interview. Fuchs wanted to confide meeting places and descriptions of Russian contacts in the United States and the U.K. But as Skardon discovered, vagueness still clouded them. His U.S. contact was “about 40, fairly tall, 5’10”, fairly broad with a round face,” probably a first-generation American, origins unknown, some sort of technician. More useful was his description of “Alexander,” his first contact in London. With it, MI5 was able to match “Alexander” with Simon Kremer, secretary to the Soviet military attaché. Including the intermediary who introduced him to Alexander and another who found a courier for him in 1947, that was one person out of six identified.

  Fuchs asked Skardon if the government had other evidence besides his confession. Skardon answered that no other evidence would be presented at trial because his confession was a “complete case.” He left Fuchs’s curiosity unsatisfied. Then again, turnabout was fair play.

  Martin cabled Washington with the description of the U.S. contact, along with a warning: “If F.B.I. show a tendency to regard this as a success for pressure tactics by them, you should emphasise this development wholly unexpected and springs solely from F. himself.”

  * * *

  —

  Fuchs was a controlled and contained risk-taker, his demeanor calm, quiet, and polite in most situations. He never gave hints of tension or anxiety. After his arrest, Genia Peierls reflected on the years he had lived with them in Birmingham. She realized that maybe there was something. Although generally healthy, he would sporadically develop a nasty cough, stay in bed—although he had no fever—and look depressed and miserable. (Of course, he was a chain smoker and did have asthma.) She now diagnosed this regression as a psychological reaction correlated, in her mind, to his guilt for betraying his friends whenever he met his Russian contact.

  If Edinburgh is the control, a period before spying, her intuition was accurate. Over Klaus’s three years there, neither Max Born in his extensive correspondence, Hedi Born in her diary, nor Walter Kellermann in his memoir noted Fuchs ever being sick. If Fuchs’s illness had hampered Born’s research, he would have mentioned it to friends.

  His illnesses in 1949 certainly strengthen Genia’s premise. On February 12, Klaus met “Eugene,” and on February 21, 1949, Klaus wrote to his father that he was sick. Although to MI5 he always pegged the twelfth as his last rendezvous, on April 2, they met again, and a few weeks later, while in the Mediterranean with the Skinners, the illness developed into bronchial pneumonia, ultimately sending him to convalesce at the Skinners’ through the end of June. Recuperating under Erna’s doting care, he had a protected space for pondering his fate and making decisions.

  Had he simply picked up a persistent bug? Or was this serious illness a reaction to stress, as Genia would have surmised?

  Fuchs always maintained ignorance of MI5’s eye on him in the fall of 1949. In May 1950, he sent his father a different message. Sitting in a prison cell, he wrote him to apologize for his deception during the visit of the previous July. “I am sorry if I had to deceive even you. I don’t know whether you felt it, but I expect you know now that I could not take [nephew] Klaus here, however much I would have liked to do so.” The release of tension witnessed by young Klaus from the backseat of the car as they returned to Harwell from the school visits was very real.

  But what did he learn, how did he learn it, from whom, and when exactly? His awareness of a threat almost had to stem from the steady, although still vague, advances on cracking the Venona messages. This information didn’t crystallize until August 13, 1949, when MI5 received a telegram with the first hint of “Rest.” If Fuchs’s identity had come from a confession—Raymond knew it as did his Russian controllers—MI5 and the FBI wouldn’t have needed Venona or the surveillance. And KGB notes might have reflected it. Years later, that securi
ty agency was still anxious to know what had happened.

  We may never know the truth. Fuchs never met Eugene after April, later claiming to MI5 disillusionment with Stalin’s regime and appreciation of the British character. After a frank examination of conscience, these may well have been true, if incomplete—and the reason, built on hope of deliverance from suspicion, he didn’t flee.

  His calm recitations to Skardon do suggest foreknowledge. Although momentarily flustered in his first interview when Skardon accused him of spying—the intended effect of the boldness—he recovered quickly and error-free, as though he had seen the hand they held. He had had time to firm up his defense.

  As for suspecting MI5’s interest in him, in London with Erna at the end of September 1949, his “bad” driving reported by MI5 surveillance would have served to spot a tail. And, coincidentally, the next day, she noted to friends his ghastly appearance and difficulty breathing. A week later, while in London for another meeting, he ran in and out of photography supply shops looking for film, a basic technique for identifying a Watcher. Fuchs was well-practiced in the tools of spycraft.

  Moscow Center had another very important asset: a mole deep inside the British embassy in Washington. It was Kim Philby, a member of the infamous Cambridge Five spies, a double agent since the war who would not be exposed until 1963, and an officer in MI6. During the 1940s, he had eagerly served up to Moscow the names and activities of MI6 agents and anticommunist partisans in Eastern Europe who fought to create democracies in their countries and be free from Russia. Collectively, hundreds died at Philby’s hand—a hand that pushed Soviet expansion and weighed heavily on the balance of power.

  Philby didn’t learn that Fuchs’s name had emerged from Venona until the fall of 1949. He gave the information to Guy Burgess, another Cambridge Five spy, who supposedly bungled alerting the Russians. Confusion has always existed around these events. In effect, it doesn’t matter. By the time they knew, Fuchs already had a plan.

  CHAPTER 22

  Trial, London, March 1950

  It took only a day after Fuchs’s arrest for the wires between the U.S. and the U.K. security services to become, as Liddell described them, “red hot.” The charges against Fuchs in his court appearance on February 3, 1950, had roused the ire of the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose career had been built on tracking down subversives, beginning with German agents during World War I, then moving on to communists. In a closed hearing of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, he testified that Fuchs had given the Russians information on the “super-secret” hydrogen bomb. A subcommittee member leaked this testimony to a reporter from The Washington Post. Before another committee, Hoover said (and later denied) that “the British made a muck of the FUCHS case.” They had a noncooperative security service and a cumbersome legal system. MI5 told the FBI’s newly arrived representative Lish Whitson that Hoover’s words could jeopardize the whole case if the British press published them.

  In British law, a fair hearing in court overruled the freedom of the press to report on a case. If a newspaper article was deemed prejudicial to the defense, the case could be thrown out. One British reporter had tumbled on Fuchs’s cleaning lady and heard assurances that he was a wonderful person, but generally the stories stuck to the revelations directly from the courtroom and so far there wasn’t much.

  The problem for Hoover was the charge of spying in the United States, raising the obvious question: Why had his agency not detected it? The problem for the U.K. was that MI5 was Hoover’s excuse. The British intelligence agency had cleared Fuchs and assured U.S. officials of a thorough vetting. Even so, MI5 would have none of the FBI’s demands for details on the clearance. “Wrong in principle,” scribbled Liddell.

  It was one of many demands from the FBI that MI5 ignored: The meeting places in the United States? Fuchs’s confession? No details. A copy of Skardon’s interviews for the FBI agent Whitson? No, sub judice. (Whitson was allowed to read them but not to have a copy of the documents.) Information on what Fuchs passed on to the Russians? Maybe after conferring with other government agencies.

  Sillitoe wrote to Hoover, trying to tiptoe around by emphasizing that MI5 earnestly wanted to cooperate, but British legal procedures restricted its ability to give the FBI the access it desired. At the same time, the FBI’s Whitson took whatever MI5 gave him, always relieved to have something to pass on to Hoover, “of whom everybody in the F.B.I. is terrified!” quipped Liddell.

  * * *

  —

  Hoover wasn’t the only anticommunist firebrand in the United States in 1950. Long before Fuchs, there was HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which embodied all the hysteria of “the Red Scare.” Soon after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the fear of Bolshevism had gripped the minds of politicians, and for more than three decades the committee, under one name or another, had hammered away to uncover threats of communist subversion and to enhance its own power, stirring panic whenever possible. Its prominence escalated to dizzying heights with an investigation into communists in the motion picture industries in 1947 (the Hollywood Ten, blacklists), quickly followed in 1948 by sensationalized probes of Whittaker Chambers, a journalist, and Alger Hiss, a former high-level official in the State Department. It propelled the rush to judgment that executed the Rosenbergs for turning over largely inconsequential information.

  In the early days of February, the FBI warned the Foreign Office that HUAC wanted to send a representative to Britain to investigate the case, warning that without prior notification the committee had recently done so in Canada.

  The Fuchs case emboldened the anticommunist fervor in the United States. Within days of Fuchs’s arrest, Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic Republican senator from Wisconsin, proclaimed in a speech in West Virginia that he had a long list of communists who worked in the State Department. McCarthy quickly became the standard-bearer, carrying his banner to a Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations to hunt out communists, amassing massive political influence along the way. Congress saw that those he supported won; those he didn’t lost. Those who criticized him he tarred as communists or sympathizers. His Republican Senate colleagues stayed mum for the most part—cowards all—until public opinion shifted and McCarthyism collapsed.

  With emotions running high, J. Edgar Hoover continued to be the zealous avenger of the perfidious communists, refining the art of exploiting fear and manipulating public perceptions.

  The British political air was less contaminated. Morale at Harwell did fall, and while a few, such as Buneman, felt pressure, Peierls could write to Bethe at the end of March that except in the tabloid press things had settled down without demands for increased security. Gossip continued, and the Theoretical Division struggled as personnel were investigated and transferred, such as Buneman and Behrens, but it functioned.

  Nonetheless, MI5 had instituted a covert “purge system” of Communist Party members employed by SIGINT, signal intelligence. The thought that anyone who believed in communism could be turned to betray the government was pervasive. If such a brilliant mind as Fuchs could be misled, what was to stop anyone? Others recommended that the Communist Party be outlawed. Liddell agreed with the necessity of the purge, so long as it was restrained by an intensive investigation of cases. Declaring the party illegal, he considered ill-advised, fearing that any party with sympathies for Russian foreign policy could be penalized.

  * * *

  —

  The first weeks of February 1950 had been mild to very mild as London winters go. Friday, the tenth, was no exception. That morning, police drove Fuchs from Brixton Prison to Covent Garden in London’s West End. He entered the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court for the start of the 10:30 hearing in the mahogany-paneled courtroom No. 3, then walked to the dock—a raised, oblong platform with a heavy iron railing—and sat on the bench inside. When Commander Burt, who had arrested him the week before, asked if he felt all right, he ans
wered, “Yes, thank you.” Those were the only words he spoke throughout the hearing. Otherwise, he sat somewhat motionless in a rumpled brown suit, occasionally writing on a pad of paper or gripping his knee with his left hand.

  Government officials, two U.S. representatives, and about sixty reporters who had stood in line for two hours crammed into the tiny courtroom that usually held twenty-five. Members of the public were barred.

  Christmas Humphreys presented the evidence for the Crown. His ten-page opening statement began with the two charges of violating the Official Secrets Act. The first half of it listed generalities about Fuchs’s background: from internment to the high value of the scientific information to Russia and his “controlled schizophrenia.” Humphreys minced no words, referring to what Fuchs had done as the “planned and deliberate treachery” of a “political fanatic” driven by “unswerving devotion to communism.” Then he read the last two pages of the confession, noting beforehand that Fuchs had made it “without threat or promise.” “He corrected it himself, he paragraphed it himself, and finally signed it, and I understand that he actually wrote in his words the final phrase, to the effect that ‘I have read this statement and to the best of my knowledge it is true.’” Humphreys’s words strongly implied that he would read a verbatim statement.

  These last pages dealt with Fuchs’s confidence in the rightness of Russian policy and his growing doubts and ended with his concerns of how his actions could affect his friends. Humphreys omitted a few sentences—one because Perrin wanted to omit reference to Fuchs’s giving the Russians the plans to the plutonium bomb and their having an atomic bomb. Fearing the public’s “alarm and despondency,” he would agree only to their having “caused an atomic explosion.”