In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  His first target was the leader of the British mission, Rudolf Peierls. After just scratching the surface, Bob was convinced he’d found gold. The scientist’s biography could’ve served as a casebook history of a Soviet mole. A German émigré who had continued his studies in England, Peierls had met his wife, a Russian physicist, on a visit to Odessa. But what set off alarm bells clanging in Bob’s mind was that following their marriage—in Leningrad, in 1931—no obstacles had been placed on Eugenia Peierls’s emigration, or on her acquiring German citizenship. The spiteful Russians were rarely so accommodating in such circumstances, and certainly would have been even more resolute when the immigrant was an acclaimed physicist doing sensitive work. Why had they so complacently cut her loose? The answer to this question became even more perplexing when Bob probed her family tree. Her sister was a biologist, and her widowed mother had remarried a writer. This was the sort of intellectual family that Stalin would be more likely to ship off to Siberia than allow, seemingly without the slightest restrictions, to leave the Motherland. Adding more kindling to Bob’s fire of suspicion, Peierls’s brother was an expert on electric condensers who had also married a Russian, a member of the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin. They were a family with such improbable biographies that Bob was convinced that their histories could only be a collection of cover stories written for long-term penetration agents working for Moscow Center.

  Confident he had found his man, Bob nevertheless went ahead and dutifully did his due diligence on the final suspect on his list. Klaus Fuchs, also known as Karl, was the “K. Fuchs” who had written the gaseous diffusion report that wound up on a desk in the Lubyanka. Fuchs had impressive academic credentials—he had studied under two of the high priests of theoretical physics, first in Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg (who would become a principal scientist on the Nazi nuclear weapon project) and then, after escaping to England, with Max Born at the University of Edinburgh. His family background seemed equally admirable. His father, a Lutheran pastor, had converted to Quakerism and held a chair in theology at the Educational Academy in Kiel. When the Gestapo targeted the Quakers, Fuchs, who had apparently inherited his father’s pacifist streak, was one step ahead of the storm troopers, escaping first to France, and then making his way to England, where he was taken in by a Quaker family. After working with the British scientists in New York, he spent the next two years as part of the theoretical division team at the Los Alamos laboratory. There was, Bob decided after making his way through the background file the AEC had provided, nothing here to raise suspicions. All his tracking through Fuchs’s life, Bob was certain, had only served to eliminate him as a suspect. Besides, he already had his man: Rudolf Peierls was Rest.

  Or was he? For just as Bob decided he was ready to write his report for the fifth floor, his buddy Ernie Van Loon pulled him aside. Following up on Bob’s order, Van Loon had been digging through the Bureau’s own files, and he had found not one but two items that he felt the man running the show had to see. At once.

  The first was a Gestapo document, part of the Nazi records trove the Allies had gotten their hands on after the war, and which Military Intelligence had recently passed on to the FBI. This file identified Klaus Fuchs not as a Quaker but as a militant Communist who had been fighting the Brown Shirts in the streets of Kiel. There were orders for his arrest on sight.

  Bob read the document, but he was not yet willing to accept it. Instead, he tried to persuade himself that “Klaus Fuchs” was a common name. How many young men must have shared that name in Kiel? he wondered. It was a good-sized city, after all.

  So Van Loon offered up his second find—an address book. After the defection of Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet embassy cipher clerk, the Canadian authorities had used the leads he’d provided to round up Russian agents. In the apartment of Israel Halperin, a mathematician who was also an agent of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence organization, they found an address book with Fuchs’s name. It seemed a stretch, Van Loon pointedly argued, that a Soviet agent who had been poking around the Canadian uranium production facility would be in touch with a Los Alamos scientist simply to talk about the weather.

  But Bob remained unconvinced. Enormoz was a KGB operation. In his experience there was about as much crossover between the GRU and the KGB as, well, between the FBI and the CIA. Before Van Loon started treating this thin evidence as counts in an indictment, a lot more had to be established. Stubbornly, Bob held on to his belief that Peierls was Rest.

  Then Meredith called.

  MEREDITH WAS IN A STATE of high excitement. Bob recognized the now familiar telltale signs—the beaming, proud smile, the uncharacteristically rapid speech, the gesturing with his hands—as soon as he entered his friend’s office. And as Bob listened to Meredith’s briefing, he, too, grew excited. A flurry of recent decryptions had added more flesh to the previous bare-bones description of Rest.

  A cable from the Center, sent in February 1945, had asked about Rest’s postwar activities: “Advise forthwith . . . the object of his trip to Chicago and whom he met there. . . .”

  In addition, an earlier cable—dated November 16, 1944—from the New York rezidentura informed the spymasters in Moscow that Rest “is at Camp No. 2”—the KGB’s cover name for Los Alamos. “He . . . telephoned his sister . . . and promised to come on leave for Christmas.”

  Bob closely followed his friend’s discoveries, and all the time his investigator’s mind was making the evidentiary connections. When he left that afternoon he took with him three new clues: Rest had been to Chicago after the war; he’d worked at Los Alamos; and he had a sister. He was optimistic that it wouldn’t take him long to draw direct lines between each of these items and Rudolf Peierls.

  AS HE’D EXPECTED, IT DIDN’T take Bob long to find the matches for which he’d been looking. Only, he had been wrong about where they’d lead.

  Four of the fifteen British scientists on the original list, including both Peierls and Fuchs, had worked at Los Alamos. But only one had been to Chicago in the winter of 1945. And only one had a sister who lived in America.

  These revelations shattered Bob’s previous certainty. And now, when realigned, the scattered parts fit together seamlessly. He had been wrong, but at last he’d gotten it right. The mystery was solved. Klaus Fuchs was Rest.

  26

  WHEN BOB HAD BEEN TAKING law classes at night in Washington, one of his professors had shared a much quoted wisdom: “If you have the law on your side, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither, hammer the table.” But that advice, Bob wanted to moan, came up empty when he had both the facts and the law on his side yet was restrained from using them. In this complex situation, all that pounding the table would get him would be bruised fists.

  That was the frustrating dilemma Bob confronted as he tried to plot a strategy for dealing with his unmasking of Klaus Fuchs. The strongest evidence he had that the scientist was a Soviet spy code-named Rest was not only inadmissible in court, it couldn’t even be whispered to anyone but the handful of people who had been cleared for Venona, as the Arlington Hall decryptions were now known among the initiates. All the confirming facts about Fuchs’s Communist background were black marks against his veracity and would jeopardize the scientist’s security clearance, but they were not proof of any crime. And, not the least of the many factors making prosecution a murky possibility, Fuchs was no longer in America. He was a well-respected naturalized British citizen. The likelihood of the British extraditing him to stand trial—and for what? the decrypted cables were capital that could never be tapped—hovered near nonexistent. For all practical as well as legal purposes, Fuchs was beyond the reach of the decidedly foreshortened arm of American law.

  A victim of these circumstances, Bob, with a gloomy resignation, did the best he could. First, he opened a formal criminal investigation into Fuchs; Foocase was the Bureau’s code name. And for good measure, he sent the industrious Ernie Van Loon to dig up all he could on
Fuchs’s sister, Kristel, and her husband, Robert Heineman, who were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next, he wrote a carefully guarded memo—no mention of the Venona decryptions; only the thin charade of a “reliable informant” as his source—that nevertheless laid out a persuasively incriminating case against Fuchs. On his orders, the memo was hand-delivered to the representative of His Majesty’s secret intelligence service at the embassy in Washington; or the STOTT, as this intelligence liaison officer was known in Bureau-speak. And then he waited impatiently for the British reaction, all the time harboring the unnerving knowledge that a Russian spy was well entrenched in a top-secret nuclear research facility.

  Three maddening weeks passed before British intelligence replied to Bob’s memo. And the official response was no less maddening. MI5 “felt bound to advise the appropriate authorities in England that the continued employment of Fuchs in the Atomic Research Station at Harwell, England, represented a grave risk to security and that Fuchs should be consequently removed.” Yet despite the lip-service acknowledgment of “grave risk,” the British had so far taken no action. In fact, as they pondered how to proceed, their interim strategy was to make sure Fuchs had no reason to suspect he was under scrutiny. He was given a promotion, a salary increase, and, as a further mind-boggling reward, residency in one of the highly prized detached houses at Harwell.

  Bob exploded. While he had previously restrained himself, now all his irritation bubbled over. He had reached the state where he just might follow his professor’s advice and give his desk one hell of a hammering. It seemed evident that there would be no reckoning. Fuchs could only be convicted by his own admission, and Bob was convinced there was no chance that a sly spy like Rest would ever betray himself.

  YET REST WOULD BE SLOWLY nudged toward a confession—and the initial shove would come from a most unlikely quarter.

  There was a Russian spy in the British embassy in Washington. Meredith had ferreted him out months ago, decrypting cables that revealed that a busy agent code-named Homer had been regularly scooping up piles of classified message traffic that passed through the embassy and forwarding copies to the Soviets. Cable after lengthy cable sent to Moscow Center began with the heading “Materials from Homer.” Bob had alerted the STOTT officer that “a fairly high placed person in the British embassy” was a mole, but, as best Bob could determine, MI5 was either unconvinced or infuriatingly complacent. Whenever he inquired, the response was a weary shrug followed by a terse “nothing new.” It would be two more years before the British got around to unmasking Homer as Donald Maclean (and by then the British foreign service officer, one prescient step ahead of the authorities, would have hightailed it to Moscow). But in the autumn of 1949, Homer, still the diligent spy, had passed on to the spymasters in the Lubyanka the news that the Americans had alerted the British about Fuchs.

  Moscow swiftly let Sasha know that his agent “could be placed under surveillance by MI5 at any moment.” And the shaken handler couldn’t help noting that “this memo was written in the somewhat alarmist terms that were atypical of the Center.” Still, the KGB directorate, their eyes firmly fixed on the prize, refused to put Rest “in hibernation,” as the jargon would have it. “Fuchs,” Sasha would write in an attempt to justify his boss’s callous operational pragmatism, “was giving us immensely valuable information and every month counted.”

  Still, an increased level of caution was required, and so the news was shared with Fuchs. And it left him spooked. The interior world of any traitor is always in mayhem, always poised for one slowly festering nightmare to rise up suddenly and wreak havoc. The Center’s agitated warning pushed Fuchs closer to this breaking point. Informed that the Americans and the British were breathing down his neck, Fuchs began to look for a way out of the madness that had become his life.

  A letter Fuchs had received from his father became the opening move in his rapidly improvised game; and such was Fuchs’s anarchic mood that even as he played along, he had no idea where it would end, or even how he hoped it would end. The letter had announced that the elder Fuchs was planning to take a chair in theology at the University of Leipzig, behind the Iron Curtain that had cut off East Germany. Dutifully, the son went to Henry Arnold, the Harwell chief security officer, and shared this development. He offered it up accompanied by the sullen acknowledgment that it would undoubtedly affect his security clearance; it was bad business for the East Germans to have potential leverage on a scientist doing extremely sensitive research.

  Arnold, who had already been briefed on Bob’s memo, told Fuchs he’d pass this on to the Harwell managers. They would decide what, if any, action to take, he deadpanned. But when Arnold informed the authorities, he couldn’t help adding that it seemed as if Fuchs wanted to be stripped of his clearance. The scientist, he judged, was suffering through “a full-blown psychological crisis.”

  YET FUCHS CONTINUED TO SPY, reconciling the warring sides of his life by what he’d call “a controlled schizophrenia.” With a brush pass down the block from the Spotted Horse pub in Putney, he gave Sasha a packet of documents that included a diagram of the next generation of hydrogen bomb. Accompanying the schematic of the Super, as the weapon was nicknamed by the boastful scientists bringing it to life, was the official estimation of its destructive power:

  “Blast—100 square miles. Flash burn to horizon or 10,000 square miles if detonated high up. Radioactive poison, produced by absorption of neutrons in suitable material, could be lethal over 100,000 square miles.”

  The Russians read this report with a shudder. The new weapon could destroy a city the size of Moscow.

  In response, the Soviet Council of Ministers established a new thermonuclear research team to be based at a secret facility 400 miles east of Moscow called Arzamas-16. Its urgent mission: to manufacture a Russian hydrogen bomb.

  IN ENGLAND, MEANWHILE, MI5 HAD come around to deciding that it was time to apply pressure to Fuchs. Perhaps a little heat might thaw him from his seemingly frozen state, they reasoned. The job was assigned to William Skardon, an intelligence officer who had shrewdly coaxed confessions from Nazi collaborators during the war. Using the excuse Fuchs had conveniently provided, Skardon went to Harwell to question the scientist ostensibly about the elder Fuchs’s appointment to an academic post in East Germany.

  They sat down cordially in Fuchs’s office on December 21, 1949, and the interrogation was the opening act in what would become a long-running play whose dialogue lurched back and forth between friendly concern and outright hostility. Yet all the while Skardon was deliberately hurling his questions, one moment a lob, the next launched like a missile, at Fuchs’s self-exposed vulnerability.

  This first session ambled along, Fuchs chattering happily about his time in America during the war. Then Skardon, as if the thought had just come to him, challenged: “Were you in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York?”

  Fuchs did not answer.

  And Skardon did not press. But finally: “And did you pass on information to that person about your work?”

  “I don’t think so,” Fuchs tried half-heartedly. But in the next moment he recovered sufficiently to assume a defiant stance: “I never did such a thing.”

  But Skardon’s question hung in the air. Both men could feel its presence crowding the room as they broke for lunch.

  After lunch, Skardon came out swinging, but Fuchs remained on his feet. Nevertheless, Skardon returned to London that evening convinced that the Americans’ suspicions were accurate. It would not be long before Fuchs, who had already adopted the fatalistic look of a man staring from his cell at the gallows, put his own head in the noose.

  Two more meetings occurred, Fuchs alternating his strident demands “to tell me what the evidence is” with ponderous soliloquies about his “contributions to science.” Finally, something inside Fuchs broke and one morning he called Arnold, the Harwell security chief. He asked to see Skardon.

  On January 24, 195
0, seated across from Skardon in his office at Harwell, Fuchs confessed. The words spilled out in a flood, as if he were glad to be at last sharing his secret life. There was no written statement at the time. Only later would he dictate his confession, an account of his descending deeper and deeper into the circles of hell that became his life:

  “At first I thought all I would do would be to inform the Russian authorities that work on the atomic bomb was going on. I concentrated . . . mainly on the product of my own work, but in particular at Los Alamos, I did what I consider the worst I have done, namely to give information about the principle of the plutonium bomb.”

  Yet the session ended with its own sort of lunacy. Fuchs, with a valiant incomprehension, resisted conceding that he had done anything criminal. He hoped, he told Skardon, that his admission would not prevent his still attending the scheduled Anglo-American conference on the declassification of nuclear research as Britain’s representative. And Skardon, a victim of his own wild logic, concluded the interview by simply walking off; MI5 officers were prohibited from making arrests.

  Three long weeks would pass before the inspector for the State Commission for Atomic Energy, an old acquaintance of Fuchs’s, called to suggest the scientist come to his office in London to “clear up some of the details.” When Fuchs got off the train at Paddington Station, teams of police converged around him. “You’re under arrest!” a Scotland Yard inspector announced. Burly men grabbed Fuchs’s arms and led him off, the scientist staring into the distance, his eyes fixed in disbelief.