A friend began to proselytize to him about communism. He resisted at first but eventually surrendered—not to the politics of meetings and lectures and ranting, but to the Soviet Union’s social and economic needs. Gold engaged in small-scale industrial espionage for a while, but he still longed to make a difference for a principle he had come to believe in: the fair and just society promised by communism.
Gradually, Gold went deeper into the underground, and there he met “Paul Smith.” Gold had no specifics other than the name, obviously a cover. He didn’t know that Smith was an agent for the KGB or that he was based in the Soviet consulate in New York. When Smith assigned him to be Fuchs’s handler, Gold saw his chance to make a difference.
It was not any connection to Fuchs that initially called the FBI’s attention to Gold. It was his original small-scale industrial espionage. In 1945, the American Elizabeth Bentley, who had spied for the Russians, confessed, and a domino effect implicated Gold with a suspicious chemical company. In 1947, he was called before a federal grand jury and lied himself out of an indictment. The principal fallout was an FBI file with his name on it. In 1950, this file produced the poor photograph Fuchs had rejected at the end of February, choosing Joseph Robbins instead.
A sharp FBI agent with a good memory, noting a resemblance between Robbins and Gold, dug deeper. Clues from Fuchs and the Heinemanns matched details in Gold’s file. Knowing that photographs from different angles boosted the odds of identification, agents started following him and snapping pictures.
On May 15, 1950, two agents interviewed Gold in Philadelphia about specifics of the earlier grand jury case. On May 20, the same day that Lamphere and Clegg first met Fuchs, they interviewed Gold again, this time for seven hours straight. They showed him photographs of the Heinemanns, whom he denied knowing, and discussed his travels. He had never been west of the Mississippi, he said. The next day, Gold held to his story during another long interview and agreed to their searching his residence.
On the morning of the twenty-second, the agents showed up at 8:00, climbed the stairs, and entered his cluttered bedroom. Methodically, they searched, extracting incriminating items one after the other, including a map of Santa Fe, where supposedly he had never been. With inconsistencies in his story mounting, his defenses crumbled until he simply stated to the agents, “Yes, I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave the information on atomic energy.”
A voluble Harry Gold emptied his conscience to the FBI. Besides the specifics in the Fuchs case, agents heard about David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos working on lenses for the plutonium bomb—a name that led to his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg, an engineer living in New York, and his wife, Ethel, later executed for crimes of espionage. Julius passed on secrets gained from his brother-in-law on lenses and gave over whatever tidbits he could find on electronics for other advances, such as radar. Neither Rosenberg nor Greenglass had the scientific understanding of Fuchs. The Russians couldn’t have created a bomb from their information.
Fuchs had no knowledge of them, or they of him.
Washington headquarters cabled details from the confessions to Lamphere in London. No suspicious differences emerged between the statements made by Fuchs and by Gold—more matters of date and time. Lamphere did spot one inconsistency and confronted Fuchs.
When Fuchs visited Christel in February 1945, he wrote up several pages of notes from memory. He insisted that he handed this material to Gold two days later on the banks of the Charles River, not at his sister’s house, where, according to Fuchs, they only set up the next meeting. Gold had no such recollection of visiting Boston proper. He said that Fuchs gave him the material at Christel’s. Lamphere saw Fuchs’s story as protecting Christel and judged it “the only time during our long interviews, I think, when he did not come entirely clean.”
KGB records based on Gold’s report showed that he and Fuchs had gone into Boston to buy gifts for friends at Los Alamos. Gold had misremembered, although the transfer of documents seems to have occurred upstairs in Klaus’s room at Christel’s.
Fuchs was adamant that he never involved Christel. Other than relating that he gave her a phone number for Klaus to call, and then checking in with her, Gold supplied no evidence to the contrary. Although he visited a few times on his own, he and Klaus had only one meeting there. Christel, outspoken and somewhat ingenuous like her father, would have been a poor choice for a spy. She might have guessed what her brother was doing, but it is highly unlikely that he told her that he was handing information to the Russians. She professed no involvement—then and over the years to her children.
* * *
—
Fuchs had given Perrin an account of what he passed on. Gold filled out the story of where the transfers had occurred, their meetings in Santa Fe being the most significant. The KGB’s methods tantalized the FBI and MI5.
That Fuchs never, as he claimed, saw Gold again seems clear from Gold’s own testimony. Did he meet someone else? When, in January 1950, Fuchs detailed for Perrin the information passed to Gold, Perrin wrote down, “He had several further meetings with him [Gold] in Santa Fe in the autumn of 1945 and spring of 1946 but could not remember precise dates.” Fuchs never repeated this statement. Perrin might have misunderstood. Or Fuchs might have come to realize that MI5 had little actual knowledge of his activities, and he could simply erase events.
Arguing against their meeting—or Fuchs using a new agent—were the two espionage cases in 1945–46—Gouzenko in Canada and Bentley in the United States—that had put the KGB on high alert and forced them to suspend meetings.
* * *
—
When Gold’s arrest hit the press on the twenty-third, MI5 reeled with surprise, completely blindsided. Hoover had directed Lamphere and Clegg to reveal nothing about the U.S. investigation into Gold. Lamphere thought it “ludicrous” but had followed orders. Hoover demanded that all FBI agents swear a personal allegiance to him.
A perturbed Liddell penned an exceptionally convoluted sentence in his diary that spoke to the PR stunt he had feared when Lamphere and Clegg had first arrived:
The arrest of Harry GOLD has broken. As we rather expected, the reflection in the Press here is that the Americans told us about FUCHS, leading to the latter’s arrest, but we refused to allow them to interrogate FUCHS, but that now we have done so they have solved their case in fourty-eight [sic] hours, where we failed. The question arose as to whether I should have said anything to Clegg before the break. I took the view that it was difficult to accuse the F.B.I. of trying to make a scoop before they had done so, and that in any case we had to reckon with the fact that we were dealing with a cross between a political gangster and a prima donna, who had no intimate knowledge of the case and who, even if he had, would be quite prepared to sacrifice anything and anybody if his own position was at stake.
An equally perturbed Patterson sent a telegram to Dick White: “He confessed before (R) BEFORE F.B.I. knew F had positively identified photographs.” Gaining Fuchs’s belated identification let Liddell’s political gangster/prima donna, J. Edgar Hoover, do exactly what Liddell had predicted—make MI5 look like a failure. Liddell considered the tactics “childish”; Patterson, seeing a bit more maturity, used the term “adolescent.”
Two days later, Fuchs signed two statements prepared by Clegg, one with sensitive technical information and one without, the latter for possible grand jury use. Lamphere interviewed Fuchs for another week, during which time Lamphere learned that each answer required a very precise question. Fuchs responded as narrowly as possible with each detail requiring a further probe. Teasing out every tidbit of Fuchs’s meetings with Gold this way took time and patience. In the end, Lamphere mined little more than Skardon had already dug out.
Soon after they left, Klaus wrote to Erna that it was his choice whether to be interviewed and reassured her that he didn’t answer questions about “purely per
sonal relations.” MI5 toyed with censoring this comment but let it pass through.
* * *
—
Sillitoe returned from a trip to the United States and Canada on May 30, 1950, “profoundly dissatisfied.” He had experienced the news coverage in America firsthand. He asked Lamphere and Clegg to meet with him before departing.
Holding the meeting in a drab conference room, rather than his paneled office, Sir Percy had brought in his senior officers and introduced them to the two agents. He calmly addressed both Hoover’s criticisms from earlier letters and the press reports on the Fuchs case. The implications that MI5 had failed where the FBI had succeeded affronted him.
The impact of the meeting rippled for weeks. According to Clegg’s report to Hoover, Sillitoe accused Hoover of leaking information detrimental to MI5, something Hoover denied. Clegg urged Sillitoe to apologize and, when he did not, recommended that the FBI retaliate. Hoover did just that, ordering his agents to share no intelligence on Gold that wasn’t specific to the U.K. MI5’s relationship with the FBI spiraled down to a “mere formality.” Furious though MI5 was, it affirmed that it would continue providing the FBI with access to its intelligence and personnel.
* * *
—
On June 25, 1950, four weeks after Clegg and Lamphere left London, North Korea launched a full-scale invasion along the 38th parallel that had separated it from South Korea since the end of World War II. The threat of nuclear attack hung over the peninsula for the first year of the conflict, at which point the bombs and bombers sitting on a tarmac at the Okinawa air force base went back home. President Truman did not authorize the use of nuclear bombs.
CHAPTER 24
Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, 1950 and On
A few days after the FBI left, Skardon wrote a letter to the head of the Prison Commission commending the governor and staff at Wormwood Scrubs for the excellent arrangement during the ten-day interrogation. He ended it by quoting Fuchs, who said that “he had been agreeably surprised to find the Americans so courteous and forbearing.” The FBI’s questioning seemed to leave little mark.
A couple of days later, Klaus wrote to Christel, the first time since his arrest, and began with “a short lecture”:
It seems to be a general family weakness that we feel so strongly about our convictions that we take a good deal on ourselves. We have to pay for that and I think that again may be characteristic for us that we do not complain [about] the price. With our strong convictions we are apt to forget the rights of other people and if we do that, the price is so much heavier.
Klaus understood his betrayal, which was not handing secrets to the Russians. In that he did what his conscience dictated and was proud. Prison was someone else’s sense of justice, and he accepted that as well. Where he had to carry the burden of guilt was in his disloyalty to his friends.
Christel knew that her family had paid a price too, but for that she never chastised her brother. Her husband, who had committed her to a psychiatric hospital and cut her off from her children, left her there during the search for Klaus’s handler. Meanwhile, FBI agents silently followed their eleven-year-old son on his two-mile walk to school every day. His father told him it was the FBI; he didn’t know what that was, and it scared him.
Despite the four months Klaus had spent behind bars, the rest of his letter had a lighter tone. He said that he felt young, “almost ready to throw away the whole past and start again on something quite different.” His new direction was “going to school,” reading everything he had never found time for, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Otherwise, every day was the same: sewing mattresses—advancing, with his usual efficiency and focus, from the typical household sewing machine with a pedal to a motorized model.
It was as though he had his life, however changed, back under his control.
* * *
—
More change was a few weeks away. At the end of June, officials moved him to HM Prison Stafford in the West Midlands, not far from Manchester. From prison to prison was a four-hour drive, but Skardon arranged a detour. With the MI5 driver Reeve and two prison officers, Skardon and Fuchs first went south to Kew Gardens Station so that Fuchs could confirm the locations of the chalk-mark signals as well as the house where he would throw the men’s magazine over the fence to change a meeting date. As when Skardon had checked on his own, he reported that it was all exactly as Fuchs had described.
On arrival at Stafford, Fuchs was held in maximum security “at all times.” He read philosophy and worked in the Mail Bag Shop, sewing again. Letters were fewer, as were visits. The Skinners, for one, complained to him that he didn’t write anymore. Their letters to him reported that they were both unwell, especially Erna, who suffered everything from mumps to a nervous breakdown, lived on sedatives, and was out of bed for only half the day.
Living in Liverpool, they were about two hours away from Stafford and close enough to visit. There’s no record that they did. Letters seemed to cease as well. Herbert continued with his work and died suddenly in January 1960, apparently of a heart attack. He was only fifty-nine. Erna died a decade or so later, having never recovered health-wise from the traumas of January 1950.
In keeping with his words to Christel about throwing out the past, which might have included people, Klaus decided to forgo physics and study economics.
* * *
—
Gaps in Fuchs’s contacts still pestered MI5. Who was the young woman in Banbury who walked along the country road with him in 1943? Who was the man who began meeting him in London pubs in 1947? Perhaps in the Christmas spirit, Fuchs gave up one at the end of 1950: Ursula Kuczynski, a.k.a. Ruth Werner, a.k.a. Hamburger, a.k.a. Sonya. Skardon was pleased.
Ursula claimed never to have seen Klaus after their “trysts” in Banbury. The Russians, for a reason she either didn’t know or didn’t tell, deactivated her in January 1946. The next year, two MI5 officers, having no idea of her ties to Fuchs, knocked on her door to question her about her previous activities in Switzerland.
In the fall of 1949, tired of her inactivity, she began to organize her departure from Britain. At that time, she lived in Great Rollright, thirty-five miles north of Harwell and on the edge of the Cotswolds. Having already made preparations, she was exfiltrated soon after Klaus’s arrest, leaving for Berlin on February 28, 1950.
The proximity of Harwell to Great Rollright certainly leads to speculation. Did she, as Klaus had, learn of trouble early in 1949? Did they meet again to strategize about MI5? Did Klaus slip off to see her after his first interview with Skardon? Given the visit from MI5, it would have been very risky but not impossible.
* * *
—
Wanting more from Fuchs, MI5 realized that their approach had to be gentle. When the Home Office pushed to take away his citizenship quickly, Liddell fended them off, not wanting to give him “a body blow until we had got all the information we wanted.” The Home Office waited to send Fuchs notice of the denaturalization process until June 1950. He responded with a long letter arguing and then pleading for them not to strip it away. It was against the law, he said, to reverse naturalization as a punishment. It was to be based on consideration of his present and future loyalty, which his cooperation with MI5 and the FBI demonstrated. His consent to exclude charging inducement at the trial attested to his loyalty. He asked that the Home Office confirm this with MI5 and the prosecutor’s office.
Skardon met with Fuchs just after the Home Office letter arrived. In tears, Fuchs asked for his advice. As Skardon stated in a letter to the Home Office, “There is no doubt whatever about his feelings at the prospect of being deprived of British citizenship. . . . Having read FUCHS’ letter with care, I am satisfied that it is wholly true.” He had come to know Fuchs well and did not consider him a security risk now or in the future. He emphasized that without Fuchs’s voluntary confession, they
could not have arrested him, that he had been free from espionage for a year before that, and that he had newfound friendships and loyalties. Skardon did not think that denaturalization “should necessarily follow automatically” from conviction.
The Deprivation of Citizenship Committee met to hear his case in December 1950. Fuchs chose not to attend or be represented because he didn’t want to incur publicity or cause stress to friends or the authorities. To no consequence. A version of his letter showed up in the Evening Standard, and every London newspaper carried the story.
Attorney General Shawcross presented the history of the case and read parts of Fuchs’s letter. The committee then adjourned to consider its recommendation to the home secretary. On February 12, 1951, the Home Office canceled his citizenship because, according to the committee, it was not conducive to the public good. Politics clearly played a part.
Fuchs was devastated, but other than the letter he wrote, he made no remarks or complaints. It seems, though, that he began to isolate himself from Britain.
* * *
—
Although overwhelmed by Klaus’s conviction, Emil Fuchs wrote to his son regularly. His traditional Christmas letter to friends in 1950 thanked them for their love during the difficult year and passed on some good news, that Christel, although still hospitalized, was improving and that Gerhard had finally returned from Switzerland. Emil, seventy-six and president of the peace committee at the University of Leipzig, ended on a note of courage as written in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
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