It was strength he would soon need to draw on. With Klaus’s arrest, the Swiss police had questioned Gerhard about his communist ties and political activities. It resulted in their revoking his entry pass and forcing him to return to Germany in June 1951. He found a job at an economic research institute in Berlin.
Even with twelve years in the sanatorium, Gerhard had never regained his health and had become obese. Now the stress of the move and the change from the pure air of the mountains to the pollution of the big city caused his asthma to come rushing back almost immediately. Then he contacted his former wife, Karin, who wrote that she had to finish her PhD dissertation. Their son, Jürgen, born while the Nazis held Karin in the women’s prison in Berlin, had drowned a few years before. Gerhard never saw him.
At Christmas, Emil visited Gerhard in a clinic in the Harz Mountains where he was trying to recover from asthma. He didn’t, and he died on February 10, 1951. Emil wrote to Klaus a week later about the bitter reality: “Every moment I feel as if the pain should kill me and I live on.” This was just days after Klaus had the final word on losing his citizenship.
It took Klaus three months to respond. He explained that he “found it difficult to write, since it is not easy to get one’s feelings in perspective if one has so little chance to take one’s sorrows away from the eyes of the curious.” He wrote the day before his father’s birthday and ended the letter with good wishes: “So for your 77th birthday, I send you the faith of optimism and youth, that youth which you have always retained through all trials and which perhaps we should trace back to our French ancestors. But tempered a little by Socrates wisdom, which perhaps shows that I am beginning to grow old.” Klaus, at thirty-nine, and imprisoned for one year, had begun to realize the limits of his knowledge.
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In spite of the strained relations between the United States and the U.K. over Fuchs’s arrest and the McMahon Act of 1946, one common concern had kept them talking—uranium ore, particularly the lode in a mine in the Belgian Congo. If the United States wanted to build more bombs, it needed that ore. The two countries had signed an agreement with a very favorable distribution for the United States, and in 1949 it was about to expire. Without another, the split reverted to fifty-fifty. The U.S. government thought the chances of gaining congressional approval for a renewal, no matter the need for the ore, were slim. Congress feared that the U.K. would use it to blackmail them, wringing out concessions on atomic energy and weakening the McMahon Act, which it guarded zealously.
Even so, by the summer of 1950, the two governments had established talks on a uranium agreement and on security standards. A year later, at the Americans’ urging, the British introduced a new security system as a move to encourage Congress to amend the McMahon Act and to cooperate more closely on atomic energy. It had had many setbacks. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, every time they were to do it, another spy scandal erupted. First, there was Fuchs; then the British physicist Bruno Pontecorvo fled to Moscow in September 1950. In May 1951, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who had worked at the British embassy in Washington, followed, taking along another British diplomat, Guy Burgess. A sobering account.
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Acutely aware of its tattered image, MI5 took an opportunity to shape the story. The respected war correspondent turned public relations officer at the Ministry of Defence, Alan Moorehead, proposed writing “a serious study of Fuchs” to examine “the schizophrenia of the high, scientific mind.” The Ministry of Supply was “enthusiastic” about the project, and MI5 was “keen,” especially Sillitoe and White. They saw that it could be “anti-Communist propaganda” and offered to provide Moorehead with “factual information . . . not of a secret character.”
To interview Fuchs, Moorehead needed the permission of the Prison Commission, which objected. It didn’t want to set a precedent should someone ask to interview a notorious murderer for a book. Moorehead proceeded without meeting Fuchs and shifted his focus. Writing to Max Born, he described the project as a book on Soviet atomic espionage for the purpose of putting forth the British case, especially to the Americans. Moorehead explained to Born that “Fuchs can be understood only in the light of these early days before the war, at first in Germany and then when he came first to Bristol and then to you.” True enough, but unfortunately for Moorehead, Born answered that he didn’t have any information.
Other friends and acquaintances did have something to say. Erna Skinner even handed over all her correspondence with Klaus. From a collection of letters, memories, and MI5 input, Moorehead re-created every motive and behavior that he assumed Fuchs felt. Some were accurate; others completely bowed to whatever MI5 needed to repair its status.
Skardon was Moorehead’s minder. He handed him “factual information” that Moorehead sometimes quoted verbatim and massaged to excuse MI5’s security failures and the inducement, turning Fuchs’s thinking that he could stay at Harwell if he confessed into an “absurd illusion.” Moorehead’s opinions served as the official Fuchs character template for years.
Published in 1952, The Traitors featured Fuchs and two other atomic spies, Alan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo. The book was very popular in Britain, where thirty thousand copies were quickly snatched up. In the United States, The Saturday Evening Post published an excerpt. The British film producer and director Alexander Korda planned to turn the book into a movie but never did. Fuchs wouldn’t give him permission. The book, however, did little to alter the opinion of the U.S. Congress about MI5’s lax security procedures.
The well-known literary critic Raymond Mortimer wrote in his review, “Mr. Moorehead acquits our security officers of all blame; and maintains that the Americans, if they had investigated him [Fuchs] independently, could have discovered nothing.”
Mortimer recommended the book but faulted Moorehead’s condemnation of Fuchs for following “his own conscience and society afterwards.” Mirroring the overblown tone of the entire text, Moorehead had written, “How that conscience was formed, who gave it authority—this he [Fuchs] did not discuss. The conscience was divine, unquestioned, and inexplicable; it simply gave forth its inevitable light, and one obeyed.” Mortimer, finding Moorehead’s statement “shocking,” reminded him of the martyrs who died for their faith and quoted E. M. Forster: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
Emil Fuchs had his own unique response to issues of conscience. A pastor published a newspaper article about Emil titled “Conscience Without Reason!” It blamed him for the problems that had befallen his children. Emil explained to his friends with a smile, “The man is right. Had we been as reasonable as the mass of our bourgeoisie, we would have said ‘Heil Hitler’ and spared ourselves everything. Then maybe my children, like so many, would have died for Hitler instead of their own convictions.”
Even after two years of his silence, stories of Fuchs sold newspapers. Besides Moorehead’s book, Rebecca West, noted British author and critic, featured him in articles on treason, “friends” from prison sold false information, and the American government held hearings and published white papers about him. When Emil Fuchs and his grandson Klaus Kittowski applied for a visa to attend a Quaker world conference in 1952, the British government refused. The cabinet feared that the American press would sensationalize the story.
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One news story that went around in America in 1951 was that from his prison cell Fuchs continued to do research, particularly on the hydrogen bomb. Embassy staff in Washington cabled London for a denial.
The rumor seemed to precede the facts. In May 1952, Dr. William Penney requested an interview with Fuchs to review information he gave to the Russians. Within the atomic weapons section of the Ministry of Supply, Penney was charged with designing Britain’s first atomic bomb. While Fuchs was at Harwel
l, he was one of Penney’s main theoretical consultants. They knew each other well from working together at Los Alamos and having an ongoing debate on the blast waves of the Hiroshima bomb.
MI5’s Guy Liddell was doubtful that Penney would find anything substantive but agreed that he, with the appropriate permission from the prison and accompanied by Skardon, could see Fuchs. Months later, on February 23, 1953, with all permissions in hand including Fuchs’s, Penney, Skardon, and an MI6 officer traveled from Paddington Station to Stafford. Penney checked that the train schedule allowed for a three- to four-hour interview. This was no ordinary visit with a twenty-minute limit.
What the three men talked about on the twenty-third wasn’t set down. In various letters, the subject was intentionally not named, referred to instead as “the matter about which we spoke,” “real grounds for you to have another dig,” or “technical issues.” Regardless of what Penney told Liddell, it was likely not about information given to the Russians but about what Fuchs knew—the importance of which was narrowing quickly. By the time Penney saw Fuchs, Britain had tested its first atomic bomb, so it didn’t need him for that, although when Penney first made the request, that wasn’t true. More relevant in 1953, the Americans had detonated their first hydrogen bomb. Could the Russians be far behind? The question for Fuchs might have been, what could he tell Penney about the hydrogen bomb?
Fuchs had as much to say as any other physicist in Britain, perhaps even more. He had heard lectures at Los Alamos in 1945 on Teller’s classical Super, as it was called, which didn’t work. Before leaving there in 1946, he had searched the library for any additional information—for the British and the Russians. On his declassification trip to the United States in 1947, he had gathered hints on recent research on the hydrogen bomb at the behest of the British. Earlier at Los Alamos, he and von Neumann had designed a trigger device for which they applied for a secret patent. Fuchs hadn’t told Perrin about it, because he didn’t ask. KGB files indicate that he did tell the Russians. Did he tell Penney?
The Russians, led by Andrei Sakharov, exploded a hydrogen bomb in 1955. The British with Penney detonated theirs in 1957. They both used radiation compression as the trigger, an original idea from the Americans Edward Teller and Stan Ulam. With this device, high levels of electromagnetic radiation compress the core of the bomb to set off the chain reaction. Sakharov always equivocated about how he came to this concept. His friends decided that he wasn’t trying to obfuscate the use of foreign intelligence. He wasn’t quite sure of the origin himself.
Implicit in the Fuchs–von Neumann design, which as a whole didn’t work, was the idea of radiation compression—so implicit that if one did not already know it, it wasn’t obvious.
Ideas are amorphous creatures. An impression one absorbs subconsciously can provoke images and designs without awareness. A fully developed idea often has many parents. Whether the hidden insights of the Fuchs–von Neumann design, which Fuchs later stated was mostly his work, seeped in can never be known, nor whether he shared it with Penney.
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By April 1953, the prison system had moved Fuchs a hundred miles north of Stafford to Wakefield prison, his permanent home for the remainder of his sentence. The first reports indicated that he settled in nicely and did surprisingly well with the other prisoners. His physical health and mental health were good. The wardens noted that he had no time for any “spiritual reasoning” and was cheerful and no longer interested in communism, considering it a “vile and vicious organisation.”
As he moved farther away, the distance from Harwell increased in more than miles. Henry Arnold, who agreed to pay his bills, also disposed of his belongings, from pots and pans to bed linens to his violin, skis, and two cars. Science books to the Harwell library; various items to friends; correspondence—seemingly every personal letter sent to him since 1933—stored in boxes, along with his German school reports and two dozen letters received during internment, all scoured by MI5. From under his bed, Arnold pulled out a uniform. On the back of the jacket was a red circle a foot in diameter, the target, as the internees in Camps L and N had thought of it. Arnold wrote to Fuchs that he wanted to burn it. And Fuchs indifferently agreed.
Such was the disposal of a life.
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In the summer of 1956, Fuchs’s twenty-one-year-old nephew, Klaus Kittowski, successfully applied for a British visa. Having a last name other than Fuchs made it easier. Before visiting his uncle, he worked at a Young Friends Work Camp in the south of England, building a brick house in the community. When finished, he hitched rides for two weeks over two hundred miles to Wakefield, sleeping in barns and living with a gang in Birmingham. When he finally reached Wakefield, they allowed him one whole hour with Klaus. It had been seven years. A report to the prime minister said that they spoke in English and talked about the family.
Nephew Klaus brought two presents: a radio that he had bought with the money earned from translating at the Quaker camp, and greetings from “Margot.” “Margot” was the French diminutive for Margarete used that summer so long ago by Grete Keilson, Klaus’s comrade in Paris in 1933. She now worked for the Foreign Ministry in the East German government, and it was from her that the young man had received his visa. Klaus sent greetings in return.
The next year, 1957, Emil Fuchs made one more attempt to see his son. There was another European Friends conference, and this time the government decided that it was unlikely the press would be interested. Finally, father and son reunited. They talked about where Klaus would go and what he would do when he was released. Following standard policy, Fuchs’s good behavior would reduce his sentence by a third, releasing him in June 1959. Klaus saw his prospects as “dismal,” discredited in England and probably unwanted in socialist countries. Emil assured him that East Germany would welcome him and use his talents.
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Fuchs became a full member of the prison community at Wakefield and more than a model prisoner. He was, as a warden wrote, “held in high esteem by other men on the Wing.” He shared his cigarettes; he listened to and tried to solve their problems; he joined clubs (French, German, Modern Science, and the Atomic Physics Radio Listening Club); he enjoyed chess matches with members of the Irish Republican Army; he regularly donated blood; he was a Stroke (a trusted prison leader); he advanced from the laundry to the library and in the last two years to education, organizing and teaching courses in math and physics. He later wrote that creating the courses was a difficult task that “demands the whole man.” He always kept the notebooks he used for the classes, a positive memory to hold on to from the long nine years of lost life.
In 1958, the British government began to contemplate Fuchs’s release. Its primary goal with any activity surrounding this prisoner was not to upset the Americans and the endless negotiations on atomic energy. When the governor of Wakefield requested that Fuchs be transferred to an open prison—one with no walls or fences that prepared inmates for the outside world—the Foreign Office rejected it. Talks to amend the McMahon Act were taking place in the U.S. Congress. Part of the reason for the request was Fuchs’s deteriorating health. The Foreign Office hoped it didn’t worsen in the next six months.
The Americans wanted him to remain in Britain and not disappear behind the Iron Curtain. The British pressured him to stay, but he had made up his mind. The home secretary did gain assurances from the U.S. government that it would not lodge a formal protest if Fuchs went to East Germany.
The British government had hemmed itself in. It had no control over Fuchs. Because it had revoked his British citizenship, he was stateless. It couldn’t deport him if no country would take him in; it couldn’t prevent him from staying in Britain if he wished to nor from leaving if a country gave him entry.
First, officials needed to know what he wished. The governor of Wakefield, who liked Fuchs very much and tried to
persuade him to become a Christian, had already learned that he wanted to go to his father in Leipzig, but only if the “Stalinists are not in power.” They, of course, would mete out very rough treatment. Fuchs ruled out West Germany, Britain, and America because of the stigma of being a traitor. If East Germany wasn’t an option, he would consider India or Brazil.
Turning eighty-five and not well, Emil could still draw on his lifelong tenacity to ensure that Klaus arrived in East Germany as desired. He had arranged entry permits early and even sent a friend to London in March 1959 to smooth out details with prison officials. In fact, the whole East German government wanted to ensure that he made it there, unimpeded by the Brits or the Americans. As the KGB wrote, “We attach exceptionally serious significance to [Fuchs’s] presence in [East Germany].” From the German side, the senior official in the Foreign Office in charge of Klaus’s immigration process was Grete Keilson, Margot from 1933 Paris.
Arrangements for him to leave the country weren’t simple. The British didn’t recognize East Germany. Going by a British boat or plane meant traveling to another country first. They debated which travel mode, what date, from what prison, consulting Fuchs throughout. The final plan, kept secret, was for Fuchs to leave on June 23 on a Polish airliner from London Airport, traveling to Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin.
Members of Parliament had a slew of questions. During the deliberative ritual of Question Time, Home Secretary Rab Butler stressed that any scientific information Fuchs had possessed was out of date. One member asked if “his brain will be of no future use to the Russians” because at his trial the attorney general had described him as “this brilliant scientist.” The home secretary answered, “I cannot extend my influence as far as that.”
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