Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Lord Goddard then peered at him and spoke with a hard voice:

  Your statement which has been read shows to me the depth of self-deception into which people like you can fall. Your crime to me is only thinly differentiated from high treason. In this country we observe rigidly the rule of law, and as technically it is not high treason, so you are not tried for that offense.

  I have now to assess the penalty which it is right I should impose. It is not so much for punishment that I impose it, for punishment can mean nothing to a man of your mentality.

  The maximum sentence which Parliament has ordained for this crime is fourteen years imprisonment, and that is the sentence I pass on you.

  The trial was over. It had lasted all of one hour and twenty-eight minutes.

  At first, Fuchs didn’t move. A warden patted him on the back to nudge him out of the dock. He later admitted that at that moment the prospect of years ahead filled with nothingness terrified him. A journalist noted spots of color highlighted on Fuchs’s pale cheeks as he left the courtroom.

  Back in his office at FBI headquarters in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover must have been pleased. With journalists’ passions aroused by the allegation that the Home Office knew of Fuchs’s communist ties, Time, quoting the Manchester Guardian, wrote, “Luckily, the Americans were not sleeping too. . . . The slowness of the British government’s detectives is something which the free world will not forget or forgive in a hurry.”

  TASS, on the other hand, published the Soviet government’s official statement a few days later: that the case against Fuchs was a “gross fabrication since Fuchs is unknown to the Soviet Government and no ‘agents’ of the Soviet Union had any connection with Fuchs.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The FBI, London, May 1950

  With the trial over, Hoover and his FBI expected access to MI5’s documents, and to Fuchs as well. MI5 said no to both. Fuchs’s attorney had three weeks to decide whether to appeal, and an appeal itself could take another two to three weeks. During this period, sub judice prevailed, therefore no interrogation.

  “How can there be an appeal when he pled guilty?” stormed Hoover. Lish Whitson offered an insight: “A strong inference exists that Fuchs believed his cooperation would substantially reduce his sentence.”

  A few weeks later, MI5 provided the FBI with Fuchs’s scientific statement, a background memo on Fuchs’s family members, and the all-important confession. Whitson’s sop that MI5 had fully cooperated met with “Hogwash!” from Hoover. He wanted his men to interview Fuchs. MI5 had snared its spy, but the FBI had yet to find his American contact.

  * * *

  —

  Director General Sillitoe had his own problems. He gathered his officers for a postmortem on the Fuchs case and hailed them with congratulations on their success. Then he surprised them with an unexpected reprimand.

  Parliament had buzzed for a month on MI5’s failure to uncover Fuchs, and especially the clearance they gave him to work at Harwell. The press reveled in the gossip. Sir Percy wanted to end all this and to support his officers, so a couple of days after the trial he had met with Prime Minister Attlee and handed him a brief on the case—Fuchs’s background, work history, investigation, and confession. Relying on Sillitoe’s brief, the prime minister addressed the House of Commons on March 6 to defend the security service, declaring, “There was no means by which we could have found out about this man.”

  Before the prime minister spoke, Sillitoe had not read Fuchs’s security file. He did so afterward and was stunned. Liddell paraphrased Sir Percy’s reaction in his diary: “Had an enquiry been ordered, he felt that he would probably have lost his job and the department would have been split from top to bottom.”

  Enlightening his officers, Sillitoe rattled off what he considered three remarkable blunders in the file. In 1944, MI5 had advised Perrin not to mention the reports of Fuchs’s communist history to the Americans. In 1946, shortly after Fuchs’s arrival at Harwell, Henry Arnold reported that he was a spy. A few months later, Michael Serpell conducted a security clearance for Fuchs’s Harwell appointment and, alarmed, recommended his removal. How, Sillitoe asked, given these minutes, could they do nothing but a mail check for his clearance at the end of 1946? Especially because they knew full well that spies don’t communicate by mail!

  Many spoke up in their defense. Skardon clarified that the black marks in Fuchs’s security file were so tepid that they had provided nothing of material value when it came time to interrogate him. Another officer rationalized that with hundreds of émigrés fitting Fuchs’s profile, resources didn’t exist to investigate them all. Yet another, referring to the Kahle association in internment, shifted the blame to incompetent camp intelligence officers and leaned on the myth of Fuchs’s being surrounded by Nazis.

  After the meeting, Liddell spoke to Sillitoe alone, giving a bleak assessment of their situation. “We had to realise that we were permanently sitting on a hornet’s nest. A huge increase of staff would not produce the answer. It would only turn us into a mass-production organisation like the F.B.I. It would not be tolerated by the public, and it would produce no better results.” He didn’t yet know that the most insidious spies weren’t immigrants but homegrown, many from Liddell’s upper-class stratum. One of these, Guy Burgess, later made infamous as a member of the Cambridge Five of Soviet moles, was a close friend.

  Two days after Attlee’s speech, Asik Radomysler, a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote a letter that ultimately reached the prime minister. Radomysler had known Fuchs in Camps L and N in Canada and objected to Attlee’s claim of ignorance. All the internees knew Fuchs was a communist.

  The result was an interview for Radomysler with MI5’s Michael Serpell in room 055 in the War Office. It was Serpell who, outraged in 1946, had urged Fuchs’s removal from Harwell in large part because of the link with Hans Kahle in the camps. The bug in the interview room provided fifteen single-spaced pages of transcript.

  * * *

  —

  Radomysler began with his background in the camps. Like Fuchs, whom he knew, he had been a hut father and a member of the Refugee Committee. In this latter capacity, he had helped Fuchs divvy up internees between the “Aryan” camp and the kosher Camp N.

  Serpell wanted to know why he identified Fuchs as a communist. Radomysler explained that terminology was the “distinguishing characteristic” for him and his camp friends: language created to step around the complications of the Russian-German pact signed in 1939. The party had imposed it, he said, within a week of the war’s breaking out. Serpell questioned his ability to recognize this “line of conversation.” “Because of course, as you know,” he noted, a tad condescendingly, “some people find difficulty in deciding whether a man is extreme Left Wing or Communist or whatever he may be.” It was a point he belabored throughout the interview.

  Radomysler had an answer. “When others were sort of whole-heartedly, say, for the war or against the Germans, they [communists] would try and join the sentiment without subscribing to any particular form of words which would contradict the official Russian policy. . . . It was that which made it so startling.” He assured Serpell that his friends, whom he had recently met with, agreed on who were communists. “FUCHS was certainly one of those who we knew was.”

  Serpell asked him about the proportion of Nazis in the camps, a key point given MI5’s excuse for Fuchs’s being friends with Kahle. Radomysler said Camp L was largely Jewish—“Out of a given 700, I should say 600 were Jewish”—and the kosher Camp N even more so. And many of the non-Jewish were anti-Nazi too. Serpell was taken aback. “Predominantly anti-Nazi, was it? There’s no doubt of it. I see, yes.” Not an answer that aided MI5’s exculpation.

  Did you report this information to the intelligence officer? asked Serpell. No, said Radomysler, but there were plenty of informants in the camp. And the camp records had to be someplace. Ev
en without them, he insisted that “there were so very many people with whom he had been close enough for sufficient time to give a reliable account of this one single fact.”

  Radomysler and his friends were disappointed never to be asked. As they saw it, MI5’s ignorance about Fuchs was simply unacceptable.

  Serpell tried to salvage an excuse by advancing the difficulty for the uninformed person—of course, not Radomysler, he added—to know whether a person was a communist. “I hope you understand that . . . it wasn’t a very straightforward issue, from the point of view of the Intelligence Officer.”

  Radomysler gave some ground: “I can see that it looked different from the outside, much more difficult.”

  Even without hard evidence, Serpell considered Radomysler’s judgment of Fuchs as a communist convincing. In his report, Serpell justified MI5’s error by exploiting the excuse of camp personnel not reading Fuchs’s communist activities. The report allowed the prime minister’s secretary to state dismissively “that further enquiry has hardly confirmed the criticism of the Security Service implied in [Radomysler’s] letter.” If Serpell had dug further, he would have found camp intelligence reports naming Fuchs a communist. An even simpler course would have been merely to speak with Oscar Buneman at Harwell who had witnessed it all.

  None of this addressed why MI5 hadn’t contacted internees, an omission contrary to its meticulous fact-checking. Nor did it correct its story. In mid-June 1950, the MI5 officer Roger Hollis, who worked in counterespionage in B Branch, and Michael Perrin traveled to Washington, D.C., to discuss security changes with the FBI. Once again, Hollis rather shamelessly offered up the “surrounded by Nazis” defense for Fuchs’s association with Kahle in the camps. A few years later, bewildered by many lapses, Arthur Martin and other MI5 officers investigated the possibility of a high-level mole in MI5. Their hunting served up a target, Roger Hollis, who, in 1946, had clearly rebuffed Serpell’s security objections. He was interviewed in the mid-1960s and never confessed. He was MI5’s director from 1956 to 1965.

  * * *

  —

  Before Fuchs’s arrest, the FBI had snuck around peeking into dimly lit corners to unearth his American contact. Afterward, agents scoured the country unchecked for the unknown chemist whom they called the “unchem.” A “top-grade man-hunt for Goose,” as Patterson described it to Martin.

  Location circumscribed MI5’s participation, but it did have the source—and a photo identification was worth gold. So Skardon carried slews of photographs to Wormwood Scrubs, Fuchs’s new home—another dismal, Victorian-era, redbrick prison five miles to the west of downtown London. According to his jailers, Fuchs was settling into prison discipline, in “good fettle,” and, to Skardon’s and everyone else’s relief, not resentful toward him or the government. An FBI special agent told Patterson, “That guy Skardon of yours is sure doing a swell con-job to keep Fuchs talking after the Judge threw the book at him.”

  It was essential to keep Fuchs talking until they had exposed all his contacts. It wasn’t easy. One spoiler was prison rumors, and the case spawned many. Recently, British tabloids had reported a “national search” for an unknown woman friend.

  On this particular day, when Skardon spread out photographs on the table in the visitors’ room, one stood out to Fuchs—that of a man named Joseph Arnold Robbins. After a long look, he said to Skardon, “I cannot swear, but I am pretty sure that this is the man I met in the U.S.A.”

  Martin dispatched the name to Washington, and Patterson replied the next day with positive anticipation—his own and the FBI’s. It was short-lived. Neither of the Heinemanns recognized Robbins, even with Bob’s traveling to Philadelphia and viewing him in a lineup. Sillitoe thought both were dissembling. In fact, Robbins’s schedule definitively eliminated him.

  The FBI, assuming they would find Goose, desired more than a photo ID; they wanted Fuchs in America to testify in Goose’s trial. Would MI5 transport him? they asked. After a week of silence, the director general responded emphatically, “You may take it that this is entirely out of the question.” Fuchs could give evidence, if needed, from England.

  Days later, Cimperman hand carried a letter to Sillitoe from Hoover. The delay in receiving the confession, barriers to interviewing Fuchs, and lack of forewarning of Fuchs’s arrest had outraged the director. Rather than argue those charges, Sillitoe sought to pacify, offering to intervene with the Home Office—the department blocking the interview—about granting the FBI access to Fuchs.

  The Home Office feared the precedent of a foreign government’s interviewing a British prisoner. When the prime minister belatedly learned about the to-do from Sillitoe, he was “slightly peeved,” not caring a whit about precedent in the current “unprecedented world.” Sillitoe cabled Patterson to give the FBI permission.

  A week later, the press splashed the secret agreement onto the front page, and the British Foreign Office sent the U.S. State Department a telegram of protest. It was the fourth leak in quick succession. As Liddell lamented, “It appears to be impossible to do anything in the U.S. without consulting the Congressional Committee or the semi-public (?) Commission where representatives of the Press take copious notes.”

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks afterward, on Friday, May 19, 1950, Special Agent Bob Lamphere, a counterespionage expert, and the assistant FBI director Hugh Clegg, a sycophantic admirer of Hoover’s, arrived in London after the thirteen-hour flight from New York. As they rode in from the airport, Lamphere was surprised by the debris still piled up on London’s streets from wartime bombing.

  The next day, trying to thwart reporters and photographers, Lamphere and Clegg drove with Skardon to Wormwood Scrubs in an unmarked van. Hoover was aggravated that Skardon was on hand, but sensing a trap, Liddell had insisted. He saw the interrogation as a PR stunt. “It seems to us that it was their intention to represent this visit as a scoop for the FBI where the British had failed.” Two weeks later he returned to that thought.

  Sitting at a circular table in a drab, unheated interview room across from the warden’s office, Lamphere met a colorless, sallow-complexioned, slightly stooped Fuchs, a dramatic transformation from his arrival in Harwell four years before. The agents had to handle this sad-looking prisoner very carefully. Although they had MI5’s agreement for the interview, they needed Fuchs’s agreement, and Fuchs saw no reason to give it because he didn’t trust the FBI and he had no intention of answering questions. The United States had refused a visa to someone who knew Fuchs. He had already put Skardon on notice that he wouldn’t name names if it led to pursuit by a “foreign intelligence organisation.”

  At first, Lamphere made no progress. He then tried the only leverage he had—Christel. He assumed that protecting Christel had hardened Fuchs’s reluctance. By mentioning her cooperation and acknowledging her innocence (a statement that in reality offered no protection), he persuaded Fuchs to answer questions.

  Lamphere and Clegg had brought several photographs of a man named Harry Gold. Fuchs had rejected one of him six weeks earlier. On this particular Saturday, however, Fuchs told Lamphere, who conducted the interviews while Clegg took notes, that he couldn’t exclude this person as his contact.

  Sunday, they all rested, and on Monday, the twenty-second, Lamphere started in on Fuchs again, discussing details of his meetings with the contact, trying to wring out an ID. After forty-five minutes, the wardens blacked out the interview room, and Fuchs watched a film clip of a man walking down a street. “I cannot be absolutely positive,” Fuchs said, “but I think it is very likely him. There are certain mannerisms I seem to recognize, such as the too obvious way he has of looking around and looking back.”

  But something didn’t fit. Fuchs saw the film again and spotted the problem. His contact was always happy when they met; the person in the film was very serious. He watched it a third time with the projector moved back to enlarge the picture. T
his time Fuchs said, “Very likely.”

  Two days later, on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, Fuchs viewed another film of the man taken the day before and declared, “Yes, that is my American contact.”

  Lamphere was relieved but surely not surprised. Two days earlier, the FBI had taken Gold into custody and obtained a confession. The news had broken immediately in the press. Rumors in the prison could have tipped off Fuchs before he fingered Gold, but Fuchs had a different reason for his ID. In the first clip, he saw a very nervous Gold, perhaps concerned that he was being followed. In the second one, filmed in jail, he saw a man, as he later said, “who had just gotten a big load off his chest.” It was only then that he identified him.

  His interviewers, MI5 and the FBI, had already noted a pattern. Fuchs withheld names of his contacts until he knew that he couldn’t cause them harm. He never implicated anyone through an unguarded moment. His record was perfect.

  * * *

  —

  Harry Gold—“Goose” to the Russians, the FBI, and MI5; “Raymond” to Fuchs—was about the same age as Klaus. He was also a scientist of sorts with a passion for chemistry. He’d studied at the University of Pennsylvania until his father lost his job, both victims of the Great Depression. With the economic crash blighting all opportunity and devastating the hard-up immigrant family, they tottered on the edge of eviction and homelessness. The industrious Gold worked a night job to support them while he took a two-year course in chemistry, earning a diploma and eventually a college degree. But he was a gentle and sensitive person, and the hardships and humiliations, especially for his family, had deeply affected him.