In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  “Yes, I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave the information on atomic energy,” Gold said, the words a soft, doleful surrender.

  RAYMOND HAD BEEN FOUND, BUT Hoover was still not satisfied. He had sent Lamphere over to London not just to get Fuchs to identify the courier, but also to demonstrate that the Bureau, his vaunted creation, could accomplish what the British, what any other law enforcement agency, for that matter, could not. Only the FBI could get a Moscow Center spy to crack. And if events had moved too swiftly to allow that prideful point to be made to the world, Hoover was determined to manipulate history until it unfolded to his liking.

  Gold had confessed at 10:15 on Monday morning, but his arraignment was deliberately postponed for two days. Hoover hoped it would be enough time for reality to catch up to his version of the truth.

  While a forlorn Gold sat in custody in Philadelphia, Al Belmont scurried about headquarters, making sure that new still photos and motion pictures of the chemist were shot and sent by special air courier to London. And he sent a flash cable to Bob and Clegg. Along with sharing the still secret news that Gold had signed a written confession, he ordered them to keep their next session going “as long as possible without interruption.” The implicit message was clear: it was now more important than ever to get Fuchs to identify Gold.

  Bob went into the session on May 23 with the resolve of a man who knew he would be making a last stand. He had not told Fuchs about Gold’s confession, just as he had not previously revealed that the chemist was the Bureau’s primary suspect. His only operational advantage was the newly arrived still photographs and the motion picture footage. The photos were not surveillance shots, but clear, crisp images taken under good lighting; they reminded Bob of the portraits from his high school yearbook. He wanted very much to believe they would resolve Fuchs’s small but lingering doubts.

  As the blackout curtains were being draped over the windows and the film was being threaded into the projector, Bob took an impetuous gamble. He laid the new photographs on the table in a neat row.

  Fuchs needed only a quick look. “Yes,” he said, “that is my American contact.”

  Clegg hurried out of the room, eager to get a cable off to the Bureau. The next day, May 24, when Fuchs’s arraignment was reported in the New York Times, the headline spread across the front page announced, “Philadelphian Seized As Spy on the Basis of Data from Fuchs.” Hoover could at last enjoy his triumph.

  Bob, too, was lifted out of the doldrums. “The Director had charged us to find Fuchs’s American contact, and we had fulfilled that assignment,” he recalled, still relishing his accomplishment. Two days later he passed the still photographs of Harry Gold to Fuchs, along with a pen. He watched as the man he had once known only as Rest turned the photos over and began writing on the back, on one photo after another: “I identify this photograph as the likeness of the man whom I knew under the name of Raymond—Klaus Fuchs, 26th May 1950.”

  At that moment, Bob would say, without embarrassment, “an unbelievably great weight seemed to lift from my shoulders.”

  31

  THE SIX-STORY WHITE-BRICK BUILDING ON Pestschanaya Street in Moscow had been built by German prisoners of war, and so it was still nearly new when Sasha and his wife and young daughter moved in shortly after his return from London in April 1950. They shared rooms in a communal apartment, but it was with only one other family. The space felt luxurious. During his postings to New York and London, the family’s belongings had been scattered among many relatives for safekeeping. Back, at last, in Moscow, it was a comfort to be able to gather all their possessions in their own home.

  The Center assigned him to the British section, part of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate for foreign intelligence. The spymasters were grooming Sasha for bigger things and they wanted to keep an eye on him, curious to see if as a deskman he would live up to the promise he’d shown in the field. His old friend Yatskov had also returned to Moscow, still part of the Tenth Department, science and technology. They would meet from time to time for a drink; after the intensity of their long days at the Center orchestrating complex and fitful covert plots around the world, the two friends needed to unwind before returning home to their families.

  One evening a few days after Victory Day (May 10, 1950), Sasha peered into Yatskov’s office, hoping to suggest a drink.

  His friend looked, he’d remember, “drawn,” his eyes “lifeless.”

  “Do you have a minute?” Yatskov asked.

  Sasha took a seat, but rather than start right in, Yatskov pulled himself up from his desk and closed the door. The unusual precaution took Sasha by surprise, and he had a sudden sense of dread.

  “We have a traitor in our American networks,” Yatskov said after he had returned to his desk.

  Sasha waited to hear more, but the sickness in his stomach had already started.

  “It’s Gold, that strange bird,” he announced. The words were a small attempt at gallows humor. The Russian word for goose—gus’—was Gold’s code name. Neither of the friends, though, could manage a laugh.

  The Americans were still looking for Raymond, but Yatskov, full of a gloomy certainty, explained that he had no doubt that with Fuchs in custody they would eventually find the courier. And when pressure was applied to Gold, he was sure to break. He’d reveal all he knew about the American networks.

  They left for their drink, telling each other that it was still possible the enemy would never find Raymond. But that night, a beautiful May evening, both men got very drunk. Two weeks later, on May 24, when the ominous news spread through the Center that the FBI had arrested Harry Gold, Sasha had to admit to himself that his friend’s prediction would come true. “Disaster,” he acknowledged, is “now at hand.”

  The next day there was, Sasha heard, a series of quickly convened meetings where one spymaster after another spoke up, each saying something had to be done to save our agents in America. But all the sessions ended with the same head-hanging realization: there was little that could be done. At this point, it was too late to make the complicated arrangements that would be necessary to get them out of the country. And if the Center’s escape plans failed, if the FBI caught the fleeing agents as they were furtively attempting to make their way behind the Iron Curtain, it would immediately establish their guilt and reinforce the validity of the enemy’s accusations. Worse, it would compound the KGB’s visible failures. It was agreed: all the Kremlin would do was offer vehement, outraged denials if the Americans charged their agents with espionage.

  In the days that followed, the mood in the Center grew more upbeat. Any fatalistic thinking, the spymasters confidently insisted, was precipitous, even unwarranted. The FBI was a collection of clumsy farmhands. They would never succeed in breaking our networks.

  Yet Sasha was not so reassured. He foresaw the future with a woeful prescience. “When dominoes are lined up,” he knew, “the first one to fall draws all the others with it.”

  32

  AS BOB, DETERMINED TO BE the courteous American guest, made his farewells in London—a mischievous gift of nylons to the MI5 linkman’s pretty wife; a pipe purchased on Regent Street for the helpful Skardon—the Bureau in these first days of June was already on full battle footing. The once sleepy SE squads, agents formerly resigned to tracking Soviet officials from a discreet distance, had become headhunters. The bagging of a Soviet atomic spy and his courier had left the men in the field excited by the prospect of what might lie ahead. They all wanted a piece of the looming counterintelligence prize.

  Yet despite these high hopes, the dampening reality was that in the two weeks that followed Gold’s arrest, his interrogations had yielded a thin product, its promise more tantalizing than its operational value. In weepy soliloquies to his court-appointed attorneys, the chemist remained determined not to “turn rat,” to be a “squealer.” There were boundaries he refused to cross.

  In response, the Bureau ratcheted up the pressure. From his desk at headquarters, Al B
elmont issued stern instructions. He cabled the interrogators in Philadelphia that Gold was to be “exhaustively interviewed for all the information in his possession.” Belmont had his heart set on the pot of gold that he knew was waiting at the end of the rainbow—the “descriptions of his contacts in the espionage field.” Bring me, he ordered, the names of “other persons engaged in espionage at Los Alamos or at any other locations.” The Bureau had finally come around to Bob’s way of looking at the world: it was riddled with active Soviet spies.

  After two weeks of being subjected to almost daily interrogations, Gold’s obstinacy proved no match for the agents’ persistence. As the Bureau’s inquisitors kept flaying away at him with sharp questions, his resolve staggered. He realized there was no choice but to accept the harsh terms of his unalterable fate. Yet still trying to cling to a small measure of honor, Gold broke not with a bang but with a series of whimpers. He doled out his betrayals of the networks he’d served one laconic revelation at a time. As Scotty Miller, who had led the team trolling for his secrets, complained, “Interviewing Gold was like squeezing a lemon—there was always a drop or two left.”

  Nevertheless, when Bob returned to headquarters in early June he found a bounty of gifts welcoming him home. “Cases developed from the confession of Harry Gold were breaking everywhere—dozens of them every day,” he recalled. And with this sudden frenzy of activity—the constant flurry of priority teletypes from the field offices as they pursued one lead after another, normal business hours and five-day weeks replaced by a nearly round-the-clock commitment—Bob at last had the enemy’s secret armies arrayed in his line of fire. Over the past year he had rambled on to Meredith in a largely abstract way about “the Big Picture,” his code for the enemy’s master plan, but this would be his long-anticipated opportunity to shove the KGB’s picture out of focus. “We would continue to race ahead to the point where we would be able to arrest whole KGB networks.” And making his return home even sweeter, the fifth floor, formalizing what had long been the reality, christened him administrative director of the whole operation. Bob was in command.

  Gold only had to offer up a name and Bob’s troops fanned out to take the enemy agent down. The chemist, for example, had started out in his hedging way referring to an agent he had serviced code-named Martin. Seven meets over a series of years, in locations from Rochester, New York, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The yield was a wealth of industrial secrets; the best material involved the manufacture of explosives. But now Gold’s hesitancy slipped away and he added an identity to that KGB code name—Alfred Dean Slack. Soon enough Slack was in custody, telling the Bureau all he knew, and providing more fruitful leads in the process.

  Next, Gold turned on an old friend, Thomas Black, identifying him as the Soviet asset who had recruited him for the KGB back in 1936. And now that they had Gold talking, the Bureau, still bitter about the lies that had allowed Abe Brothman to walk away unscathed, sicced the chemist on his old business associate. Gold spilled all he knew, and the Bureau now had the goods to make a perjury case against both Brothman and his longtime girlfriend, Miriam Moscowitz.

  The dominoes, as Sasha had dolefully predicted, were indeed starting to fall.

  BUT AS HE SENT HIS agents scurrying off in all directions, Bob’s mind was elsewhere. A small piece of intelligence Gold had revealed to the interrogators kept bothering him, the proverbial pebble in the shoe that made its presence felt with each new step. On its surface, the courier’s account of his meet in Los Alamos jibed with what Fuchs had told him in their sessions in Wormwood Scrubs; even the date matched. Nevertheless, there was something that left him troubled, something that didn’t seem quite right about Gold’s version of the June rendezvous with the physicist on the Castillo Street Bridge. Only Bob couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Mystified, he picked up the interrogation transcript and began to reread the relevant section:

  “I traveled to Albuquerque on this first meeting via train to Chicago, then by train to Albuquerque, and finally by bus to Santa Fe. My meeting with Dr. Fuchs was on Saturday afternoon. Then I returned from Santa Fe to Albuquerque by bus that same day. As I recall, I slept in the hallway of a rooming house where those who were unable to obtain local hotel accommodations were bedded.”

  Bob went over the section one more time, still suspicious, yet still baffled. And then all of a sudden he was shouting at his clerks, telling them to bring him bus and train schedules. He wanted to see if there was a more direct route from Chicago to Santa Fe, one that wouldn’t have required the courier to pass through Albuquerque.

  It did not take Bob long to establish that there was a train that went straight to Santa Fe. There was no apparent reason to stop at Albuquerque. With that clear in his mind, when Bob went back to Gold’s statement still one more time, the connection was made: The courier had not only traveled through Albuquerque, but he’d stayed the night. Gold couldn’t get a hotel room, yet he still had spent a night in Albuquerque. Why?

  Bob thought he knew, but he needed Gold to say it.

  When the interrogators put the question to Gold, he understood at once that they were on to him. Cornered, he swiftly conceded defeat. He shared what he had been holding back: yes, he’d had a meet in Albuquerque.

  Gold told the story haltingly, and with few specifics, but he insisted it was his memory’s fault; he was trying to cooperate. As he was preparing for his meet with Fuchs in Santa Fe he’d been summoned to New York by his Soviet control. There he was given an additional assignment: he was to make a second pickup on his trip out West. His control gave Gold a piece of cardboard torn from a Jell-O box; the agent would have the matching piece. If the fragments fit together, he was to proceed with the pickup.

  In Albuquerque, Gold went to a private house, and the recognition signal was exchanged. He couldn’t remember the address, or the agent’s name. The best he could offer was that the agent was a “U.S. Army man,” noncommissioned, married, the wife’s name “may have been Ruth,” and they both had New York accents. The soldier gave him some handwritten pages and a sketch; they concerned the atomic bomb. He suspected the soldier was a technician, someone with a scientific background. They talked of a future meeting in New York where the soldier would deliver more material. Gold handed him $500, which the soldier accepted, and then Gold left.

  Bob read the interrogator’s thin report, and he knew with a reinforced certainty what he had known all along. Meredith had been right: a possible link between Enormoz and wartime nuclear fission research. There was another Soviet spy at Los Alamos. Just as Meredith had also told him.

  FEBRUARY 1950. A GRAY AND chilly winter’s day in Washington—Bob’s memory, unlike Gold’s, remained clear. A quick mental transposition, and Bob found himself back in that heady, fast-moving time. Meredith, working brutal hours, was making discoveries almost daily. And nearly as rapidly, his previous theories were being revised as the more recent decodings dictated. The search for truth, Meredith repeatedly lectured his friend with dogmatic pedantry, was a constant search for better hypotheses. And now, once again, that frigid day summoned up in his thoughts, Bob was making the bone-chilling walk across the base’s campus, and there was Meredith pouncing on him before he had a chance to make his way to the office’s rattling radiator to thaw out.

  Meredith wanted to talk about the second Soviet spy at Los Alamos. It was an argument he had been stitching together for a few weeks, sharing with Bob from time to time provocative fragments from the cables he’d been deciphering; and now he was ready to make a preliminary finding. He laid the results out as a prosecutor might, exhibit after exhibit. Bob followed along with only brief interruptions, judge, jury, and, in the event of a guilty verdict, avenging angel.

  Exhibit One was, on its surface, as incriminating as any KGB transmission Meredith had ever decoded. The November 1944 cable from the New York station to Moscow Center read:

  “Bek”—Meredith explained: Sergei Kurnakov, Soviet agent working under journalistic cover in New
York for the Russian Voice—“visited Theodore Hall, 19 years old, the son of a furrier. He is a graduate of Harvard University. At present time Hall is in charge of a group at Camp-2—”

  Now Bob chimed in; this was not the first time they had gone over this cable. Camp No. 2 is the atomic research facility at Los Alamos, he clarified, making sure his friend knew he had his attention. Meredith agreed, and then resumed reading from where he’d left off.

  “He handed over to Bek a report about the Camp and named the key personnel employed on Enormoz. He decided to do this on the advice of his colleague Saville Sax, a Gymnast”—i.e., Young Communist League member, Meredith offered—“living in Tyre”—which, as we know, said Meredith, is code for New York City. “We consider it expedient to maintain liaison with Hall through Sax.”

  Okay, Meredith said. When we first grappled with this, we’d focused on the fact that both Hall’s and Sax’s names had been sent en clair. No code names had been used. That meant they weren’t KGB agents.

  No crime, no foul, agreed Bob. We had nothing on them, unless we were willing to go to a U.S. attorney and reveal the existence of Venona. Besides, by the time you deciphered this, Hall had been long gone from Los Alamos and government work. Our hands were pretty much tied.

  Meredith didn’t disagree. He simply moved on to his Exhibit Two, a cable from New York to Moscow, sent in May 1945. He read:

  “Mlad’s material contains (a) a list of places where work on Enormoz is being carried out. . . .” That is, a list of the Manhattan Project research centers, he explained; and then he resumed reading: “(b) a brief description of four methods of production of 25—the diffusion, thermal diffusion, electromagnetic and spectrographic methods.”

  When Meredith came to the end of the cable, he put on his professor’s voice and offered up a brief lecture to his class of one. “Mlad” is short for the Old Slavonic adjective mladoi, which means young. A code name that might very well be appropriate for the nineteen-year-old Hall. And as further confirmation of that assumption, Meredith went on confidently, Mlad often appeared in the cable traffic in conjunction with his cutout, Star. Which, Meredith explained, was the short form of the adjective starii, or old.