In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  Rest was full of daring. “Simple,” he said as if he really believed it was. “I’ll tell them: ‘But no one ever said I have no right to take my own notes with me. I work nonstop for twenty-four hours, and an idea can come to me at home just as easily as in the lab.’”

  Sasha, his interest purely operational, also wanted to know with whom his agent was sleeping. One of his greatest fears, lodged deep in his anxious mind by the spymasters at the Center, was that Rest would get caught in a honey trap dangled by the opposition.

  Rest’s answer was vague, both hesitant and embarrassed. Sasha thought the implication was that he went to prostitutes from time to time. The handler decided not to press. Instead he tried a different tack.

  “Why don’t you get married? Aren’t you tired of being a bachelor?” Sasha wanted the suggestion to sound genial, the advice of one concerned friend to another. But his professional’s mind was thinking that a wife would be a useful bit of cover. Marriage conveys trustworthiness. With a wife by his side, Rest would get invited to social occasions at Harwell. There’d be more opportunities to meet the sort of people who would further his career.

  “I think about it from time to time,” Rest said. “But, you know, I’m walking through a minefield. One false move and it will all blow up. I can accept the worst-case scenario, but I can’t involve a wife and children.”

  Sasha listened, and suffered through a moment’s guilt. He felt ashamed by his small attempt to manipulate his agent’s life for his own reasons. But in the next instant, he was once again the KGB professional.

  He had a list of memorized questions that had been passed on to him by the Center. Like all the graduates of the KGB spy school, his memory had been drilled until he could repeat the license plates of at least nine cars that passed in rapid succession. But this was a completely different task. He had been tutored in atomic theory before he’d left Moscow, but it had been basic concepts. The questions posed by the Russian scientists were quite specific, and full of terms that might just as well have been in an incomprehensible language. Sasha could not trust himself to remember more than five of their carefully crafted inquiries.

  Rest listened without interrupting. His answers, too, were patient. He spoke in a slow, calm voice, while at the same time gauging his handler’s reaction. When he saw that Sasha seemed lost, he’d start over again, repeating the information with a deliberate precision.

  Sasha’s concentration was immense. He filed each response, he’d say, “in different drawers within my memory.” Yet the exchanges were taut, filled with the constant fear that if he made a single mistake, forgot a phrase, or erred with a number, the Center would extract an unforgiving punishment. His only hope was that after he returned to the rezidentura, he’d “empty each drawer one by one, and put on paper what had been said.”

  When the five specific questions had been answered, Sasha gave Rest a list of additional, more complex technical areas that the scientists working in Laboratory Number 2 wanted him to explore. The list was written on cigarette paper; it could easily be swallowed. He instructed Rest to bring the information at their next meet.

  Rest read the list. “No problem. You’ll get all this next time.”

  Then he handed the slip of paper back to Sasha. He didn’t need it; it was all locked in his mind. Rest’s dossier had stressed his nearly photographic memory, but still Sasha was uneasy. Yet he decided that he could not at this first meet challenge his joe; it was more important that a bond of trust develop between them.

  As the meet was about to end, Sasha asked for the documents Rest was carrying. The agent had wanted to hand them over as soon as they’d left the pub, but Sasha had refused. It was another of the inviolate rules of Moscow Center tradecraft that exchanges occur only at the very last moment. If the opposition suddenly emerged from the shadows, the agent would stand a better chance of talking his way out of the incriminating predicament than if the secrets were found on a foreigner.

  Rest handed over a notebook with about forty pages in small but carefully legible handwriting. It revealed the latest information on the workings and manufacture of the plutonium bomb.

  “Thank you,” said Sasha as he was about to leave.

  “My pleasure,” answered Rest. “I shall always be indebted to you.”

  Then they went off in separate directions, handler and agent disappearing into the night’s fog.

  OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS, Sasha would meet with Rest every three or four months. They would meet at pubs, or at the cinema, or on the street, using brush passes to exchange secret documents. For a while the Center grew concerned that the enemy was on to Rest. It was decided that a DLB—the professional’s shorthand for a dead letter box—would offer greater security. A KGB asset, an Englishman by birth, lived in a cottage surrounded by a well-trimmed hedge on a quiet suburban street. Rest was instructed to toss a package containing his next delivery over the hedge and onto the lawn. But at the last minute, the Center overruled its own plan. Despite the risks, the spymasters ordered Sasha to continue his meets with Rest. The yield was too valuable to jeopardize.

  And as Bob and Meredith began their hunt for Rest, an ocean away Sasha prepared for his next face-to-face rendezvous with the very spy who had just come into their sights.

  25

  FROM BOB’S OFFICE IN THE Justice Department headquarters, it was a short walk up Constitution Avenue through the bureaucratic heart of official Washington to the broad limestone building on Nineteenth Street. On the outside the structure was as solid as a mausoleum, and inside it was no more comforting. There was a maze of dimly lit corridors whose walls were painted in a lugubrious shade of green, and the officious clickety-clack of typewriters reverberated from behind closed doors. During the war a cluster of high-ceilinged rooms had been home to the newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff and their army of aides, but with the peace they had moved on to grander suites in the Pentagon. The offices had been recently taken over by another breed of intrepid warriors—the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). And now Bob, not knowing where else to begin, had come here hoping to get the help he needed to find the Russian spy known as Rest.

  The cable Meredith had deciphered offered, Bob was convinced, one potentially promising clue. It stated that Rest had passed on to his handler the third part of “Report Sn,” and while Meredith had struggled to get the complete title, he had managed to make out that it concerned “fluctuations in . . . the diffusion method.” Bob decided that if he could identify the actual report, then he might be able to get something that could direct him to the spy who’d passed the document on to the KGB. Specifics still eluded him; he was running on pure instinct.

  After making a few calls, he’d been told to try the AEC; they had custody of all the Manhattan Project files. Yet even as he walked across town on that late October day in 1949, Bob was gripped by the disturbing awareness that he might not get too much cooperation. For one thing, he couldn’t reveal why he was looking for the report, how the fragmentary title had come to his attention, or even the fact that the KGB cable sent from New York had been dated June 15, 1944, and therefore that was why it seemed likely that the report had also been written about that date. Adding to his uncustomary level of professional trepidation, he knew he’d be entering a realm that was beyond his grasp. The prospect of using some scientific mumbo-jumbo about “fluctuations in the diffusion method” as his avenue of attack had him seriously doubting he was up to the task. The best he could do was remind himself that he’d won Meredith over; these AEC pointy-heads couldn’t be more difficult, or, for that matter, more brilliant, than his new friend at Arlington Hall. He’d come a long way from the days when his biggest intellectual challenge was hammering away with a pickax in the dark pit of an Idaho silver mine, he once again reflected with some amusement.

  It took Bob a bit of doing, a judicious mixture of his natural charm and what he called his “G-man stare,” to get the AEC officials to agree to look through their files. But once they wen
t into action, it didn’t take them long to find the document. All the pieces neatly fit: it was dated June 6, 1944, and titled “Fluctuations and the Efficiency of a Diffusion Plant.”

  Bob thumbed through the pages, more a reflexive gesture than any determined hunt, with only a faint hope of finding something incriminating. All he discovered were dense paragraphs, often mixed with mathematical formulae, and he swiftly came to the conclusion that the entire report was as incomprehensible to him as the encoded cables that Meredith somehow managed to decipher. Perhaps the AEC official (his identity a lost footnote to this story) saw the bewilderment on Bob’s face, and that was why he offered a brief and indulgently simplistic explanation of how the diffusion process was essential to manufacture the sort of uranium necessary to create an atom bomb. Bob listened, and while he didn’t follow all the science, he did grasp the bottom line of what the official was telling him: this was precisely the sort of valuable information that this government wouldn’t want the Russians to have.

  Bob next focused his attention on Part III of the report, but it was no less daunting. The section was headed “The Effects of Fluctuations in the Flow of N2.” He remembered enough of his high school chemistry to know that N2 was nitrogen, but the rest of the section was way beyond anything he’d learned in school. He gave up quickly.

  His cursory tour of the report over, Bob returned to the cover page. And there it was: an author was listed! A “K. Fuchs.” Bob knew that simply because this “K. Fuchs” had written the report, that didn’t necessarily mean he’d handed the report to the Russians. Someone else could just as easily have stolen the document. Still, grasping at whatever sliver of encouragement he could, Bob remembered that the cable had described Rest by stating that “work”—and here Bob assumed the KGB meant the diffusion process—was “his specialty.” Who, he asked himself, would be more of a specialist than the author of the report? Bob at once decided his next step would be to identify this “K. Fuchs.” It would be too much to hope that Fuchs was Rest, but he should at least be able to give Bob an idea of who had access to the document.

  Despite all his initial apprehension, Bob felt he’d accomplished something. He had no definitive answers, but he had determined the direction he’d be taking. And experience had taught him that was all a fieldman could ever do: keep putting one foot in front of the other until he reached his destination. Standing still killed more investigations than anything else.

  In this optimistic mood, Bob waited for a photocopy of the report to be made. Once he had it, he’d head back to his office and direct his troops to chase down all they could about “K. Fuchs.” He was eager to get going, but he had time to kill and so he absently picked up the file folder that had held the report. It was crammed with other documents, and on the file cover was the designation “MSN.” Why did those three letters trigger something in his mind? Bob wondered. Then he remembered: inked across the front page of the report that he’d just read was a handwritten “MSN-12.” Okay, he now deduced, it’d been the twelfth report in the MSN series. But what was MSN?

  The letters MSN, the clerk explained when he returned with the photocopied pages, denoted documents prepared by the group of British scientists who had come to New York during the early days of the war to work on atomic energy research.

  IT WAS LATE NOVEMBER 1943, just as the SS Andes was preparing to sail from Liverpool, when a protective detail of military police led fifteen men in civilian clothes onboard. Before the bewildered captain could complain, he was handed an envelope marked “Secret.” Inside was a brief note written beneath an impressive Whitehall letterhead and bearing the even more impressive signature of a cabinet member. It was imperative, the note stiffly informed, that these passengers arrive safely in America. Nothing less than the entire Allied war effort was at stake.

  Over the tense days that followed, as the captain steered a circuitous path west toward Virginia across an Atlantic patrolled by German U-boats, he could only wonder as to the identity of his last-minute arrivals. Were they soldiers? No, they didn’t have the look. Nor did he think they were pilots. And they certainly weren’t sailors. Perhaps, he finally decided, they were civil servants who were working with the Yanks on Lend-Lease shipments. That would explain why they were so crucial to winning the war. Yes, he congratulated himself, that had to be it.

  He was wrong. They were much more important than he had imagined, or could ever have imagined.

  They were scientists who had been handpicked by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project. They were chosen to work with a team at Columbia University to solve the remaining questions in the essential gaseous-diffusion manufacturing process. If they could not provide answers to the engineers from the Kellex Corporation, whose multimillion-dollar facility was already under construction in Tennessee, the Manhattan Project would be unable to produce the specific uranium needed. And America would not be able to build an atomic bomb.

  Six years later, as Bob studied the boat’s passenger manifest, he suspected that one of the fifteen British scientists was also a Russian spy.

  After the initial soft-pedaling round of burrowing, Bob’s team had discovered plenty of reasons not only for suspicions, but for wrenching concerns. The group of British scientists included more than its fair share, as one Bureau memo put it, of “big names.” Many of them émigrés from Nazi Germany, they had studied atomic theory with Max Born in Edinburgh (which was like studying gravity with Newton) and in the process had helped to reinvent physics. After their time in New York, several of them had also been recruited to work in key positions at the secret compound in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic weapon had been constructed. They were all precisely the sort of well-placed, knowledgeable agents the enemy would want to recruit.

  It was such a ghastly possibility that Bob’s mind rebelled against it. He did not want to believe that any of these British scientists, no doubt vetted first by MI5 and then by the Manhattan Project authorities, had all along been working for the Russians. But then Meredith called. In his usual tentative, almost self-effacing way, the code breaker told Bob that he had something “you might want to see if you’re not too busy.”

  Bob accepted the latest decrypt from his friend, a cable sent to KGB headquarters from the New York rezidentura nearly five years ago, in February 1944. He quickly scanned the words until he came to the sentence Meredith had underlined. He read aloud:

  “Rest arrived in the Country . . .” Bob stopped, and Meredith explained that “Country” was Moscow Center’s cover name for America.

  He continued reading: “. . . as a member of the Island . . .” Another pause, and once again Meredith dutifully filled it: “Island” was KGB-speak for England. Then Bob went on to finish the sentence: “. . . mission to Enormoz.”

  There was no need to explain what “Enormoz” stood for.

  Bob read the entire decrypted cable again. When he spoke, his words were directed to his friend, but he might just as well have been speaking to himself.

  There’s no longer any doubt that Rest was part of the British scientific delegation, he said.

  None, Meredith agreed.

  At last resigned to the distasteful task, Bob hurried back to headquarters, determined to find the traitor.

  IN THE HUNT FOR A spy, the standard counterintelligence strategy is to pursue opportunity and motive. There were fifteen names on Bob’s list, and after just a glance he saw that the question of which of them had the opportunity to steal America’s atomic secrets could be answered in a flash—depressingly, they all did. Therefore, Bob decided he’d make better use of his time by concentrating on which of the scientists possessed a motive. Once again, he did some quick elimination. Money, sex, blackmail—none of these usual motivations for betrayal, Bob’s instincts told him, were in play in this case. All his experiences on the SE desk suggested this was a political operation. The spy had gone to work for Moscow Center out of an allegiance to the Soviet cause. It was a crime driven b
y ideology, not passion or greed.

  Yet even as Bob took this investigative tack, he pursued it with a measure of distaste. He had been raised by a famously (at least in the mines and saloons of Mullan) contrarian father, a man who liked to lecture that people have a right to think and talk as suited them. That was what America was all about, Joe Lamphere was fond of saying. And Bob was his father’s son. While there were many passionate cold warriors on the Bureau’s fifth floor (including, he knew, the director) who could work themselves up into quite a lather about the Red Menace, Bob never could muster their knee-jerk outrage. Spying was one thing, but being “a little bit pink,” as he’d put it, was another thing entirely. In fact, despite all the recent headlines Senator Joseph McCarthy had been making, Bob couldn’t help feeling (and the instinct would, with hindsight, build over the years into an angry conviction) that McCarthy’s “approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist activities in the United States.” Bob was totally committed to battling the KGB’s operations in America, but at same time he believed “McCarthy’s star chamber proceedings, his lies and overstatements, hurt our counter-intelligence efforts.” Tar and feathering people based on little more than contrivance and innuendo—that had no place in Bob’s kind of patriotism.

  Still, when his burrowers now dug deeper, four names on the list came back to him with distinct ties to Communist organizations. And Bob understood that this alignment of potential motive as well as certain opportunity made each of the four scientists a prime suspect. Each fit the profile of a sympathizer who had volunteered his services to Moscow Center, or had been targeted for recruitment.

  After a more intensive search, Bob quickly winnowed down his list. Two of the scientists, he discovered, had only a youthful infatuation with communism. He could find none of the incriminating signs—Party membership cards, presence at demonstrations, signatures on petitions, or finger-pointing reports from the legions of FBI informants who had pervasively infiltrated both the Party and the aligned front organizations—that suggested any ongoing sympathy with Moscow. Perilously aware that the spy could still be actively working for the Center, that Rest could be passing secrets about the ongoing manufacture of the hydrogen bomb, Bob decided to move forward. He concentrated his attention on the two names that remained.