After joining Halban’s project, Nunn May had an unheralded visit from CPGB members whom he had known as a research student. They urged him to revive his party contacts, which he had let lapse after the Nazi–Soviet pact. Nunn May was told to attend weekly meetings of a secretive cell of government employees who studied party literature and undertook non-subversive work. By this time Chadwick was sleepless with the knowledge that atomic bombs would be used in war and would proliferate among nation states. He was said by his university Vice-Chancellor to have ‘plumbed such depths of moral decision as more fortunate men are never called upon even to peer into’: Chadwick, he continued, suffered ‘almost insupportable agonies of responsibility arising from his scientific work’. Thinking in similar terms, but acting differently, Nunn May decided in the autumn of 1942 that it would be criminally irresponsible to leave the Russians unaware of the possible dangers of nuclear-bomb or radioactive-poison attacks. He wrote a summary of the project and of Anglo-American intentions, so far as he knew them, which he handed across the table in a seedy café after an apparently casual encounter in the street. He and his contact sat at a window table in the café, and afterwards Nunn May worried that the handover had been photographed for blackmail purposes.8
Later Nunn May was instructed by his party group leader to accompany Halban’s team when it relocated to Montreal as the English equivalent of the American MANHATTAN PROJECT. Once settled in Canada in 1945, Nunn May was visited by a man who uttered the agreed recognition signal, ‘Greetings from Alex’. This was Pavel Angelov, codenamed GRANT, from the Russian embassy in Ottawa. Nunn May determined to help the Russians because, or so he afterwards maintained, his American colleagues were explicit that Leslie Groves, the US General who ran the MANHATTAN PROJECT in 1942–7, intended to use atomic weaponry to ensure post-war American domination. Nunn May felt ‘loyalty as a socialist to what was then the only socialist country in the world’, and judged that Stalin’s Russia would be a stronger bulwark against American domination than any London-based parliamentary democracy.9
Nunn May provided uranium samples and laboratory reports as well as material on the chemistry and metallurgy of uranium and plutonium, the design of the American graphite piles, xenon poisoning and the Wigner effect (the displacement of atoms by neutron radiation). He informed on the organization of the MANHATTAN PROJECT, and provided secret information on its successor organization at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He spied on the experimental nuclear pile at Argonne, Illinois and reported on the vast Hanford installation in Washington state. Natural uranium is comprised of two isotopes, U-238 (which accounts for about 99 per cent of the substance) and the much rarer U-235, which is highly radioactive and best for atomic explosions. On the day that the US dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki (9 August 1945), Nunn May stole a platinum foil coated with U-235 from the Montreal laboratory. Within hours it had been flown to Moscow. Angelov so little understood the motivation of Nunn May that he tried to ensnare him with paltry gifts of whisky and 200 Canadian dollars (which Nunn May claimed to have burnt).
Gouzenko’s evidence of Nunn May’s treachery was accepted within days in Whitehall, where the traitor became known by the codename PRIMROSE. As early as mid-September, about a week after Gouzenko’s defection, the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, informed General Groves of the security breach. Groves was enraged, because a year earlier he had raised his concerns about Nunn May’s repeated, prying visits to Argonne, where nuclear-pile technology was being developed. Chadwick had assured Groves that Nunn May was ‘exceptionally reliable and close-mouthed’; but Groves in October 1944 had forbidden further visits by Nunn May to Argonne. After Halifax’s admission to Groves, American trust in Britain dived.10
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr had earlier urged Roosevelt and Churchill to prevent a nuclear arms race by sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. Halifax now raised with Groves and recommended to London that the Anglo-American powers should consider pooling their atomic secrets with their Soviet wartime allies in return for free facilities for inspection and assurances of peaceful intent. ‘Perhaps I should apologize for inflicting such superficial thinking on you, who are so much more deeply steeped in all this baffling business, and I may be dead wrong,’ Halifax wrote in a top-secret message to London on 20 September. But in the aftermath of his discussions with Groves about Nunn May, two facts were revolving in his head: ‘(i) that the Russians are going to get the secret anyway; (ii) that, if Groves is right, they are long years off being able to translate knowledge into practice’. Halifax was not alone in hoping that a policy of cooperative trust of the Russians in nuclear matters might reduce risks. A few days later President Truman told him that he feared ‘the impossibility of keeping scientific secrets secret for more than a very short time’ and was reflecting whether it might be possible to reach a nuclear agreement with the Soviet Union by ‘passing on scientific knowledge which they would probably get anyway pretty soon’, together with development expertise. Groves was insistent that the Russians would cheat and betray any undertakings along these lines. The Foreign Office, too, thought that the Soviets would find ‘specious excuses’ to break any such agreement when they had got all that they wanted from it. A tripartite nuclear treaty, placing trust in Stalin’s intentions, would be reviled: ‘Opposition would be raised in many quarters of these much blitzed islands, and by friendly nations in Western Europe and indeed all over the world, if a gift were made to the country which attacked Finland in 1939 and Poland … of facilities for blitzing us and others out of existence.’11
The advice of Bohr, and the hopes of Halifax and Truman, to attempt to establish mutual nuclear trust were remote from Nunn May’s outright betrayal of his colleagues’ scientific results to Moscow. Nunn May, though, considered that his actions were not dissimilar to those of the atomic appeasers. A few days later, oblivious of Gouzenko’s denunciation of him, he walked along a corridor at the Montreal laboratory to collect the documents for his return flight from Canada to England. Ahead of him were two unmistakably English civil servants holding standard-issue Whitehall briefcases. They were greeted by the senior British administrator who shook their hands and then spotting his approach, said: ‘Why, here is Dr Nunn May!’ The two visitors swivelled round, looking as shocked as if the administrator had said, ‘Why, here is Josef Stalin!’ Nunn May was rattled by this incident. Soon afterwards, back in London, in the coffee-room of the Royal Society, Sir George Thomson cut him dead. Patrick Blackett, who was to be awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1948, was beckoned away by Thomson while talking with Nunn May, and hurried off after Thomson had whispered to him. When MI5 warned that it was too short-staffed to keep Nunn May under surveillance, the Minister at the British embassy in Washington, Roger Makins, who was bearing the brunt of American fury, protested to the PUS, Sir Alexander Cadogan, about MI5’s handling of what the few British officials privy to Gouzenko’s material called the TUBE ALLOY leakage. ‘Apparently our people are now saying they can’t guarantee to watch or control the bird who has come over here,’ noted Cadogan. ‘This [is] ridiculous, & I sent for Liddell.’12
Nunn May was due to meet his new Russian handler on 7 October in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury and was primed with a new recognition signal, with ‘Greetings from Mikel’ replacing ‘Greetings from Alex’. A colleague at King’s College, London said to him casually, ‘you will find this an interesting topic’ and passed a slip of paper on which was written: ‘Do not keep your appointment.’ This warning may have originated from Philby. A few days later Nunn May met a former colleague from the Halban team, who asked: ‘What have you been up to? We have all been told not to talk to you.’ He realized that he was being followed and that his telephone was bugged. On 27 October, in a Bloomsbury street, he met by chance an ex-colleague from the Cavendish whom he had not seen for years. They went into a nearby tea-room to exchange news. Two other men followed them into the tea-room, and sat at the next table, although the other tables
were all vacant.13
On 15 February 1946 Nunn May was unexpectedly confronted by two men in military uniform, Commander Leonard Burt of Special Branch and his colleague Reg Spooner. ‘Burt opened the proceedings by greeting me using the ultra-secret password which had been assigned to me (“Greetings from Mikel”) while looking me straight in the eyes for my reaction.’ Nunn May claimed to have put on a successful show of calm, and to have parried their questions with nonchalance. The MI5 report of the interrogation gives a more convincing account of Nunn May turning pale at hearing ‘Greetings from Mikel’, looking distressed, pausing for two or three minutes before answering questions and almost always limiting his responses to ‘yes’ or ‘no’. When asked if he would volunteer information – that is, to become an MI5 informant – Nunn May claimed to have replied, ‘Not if it is going to be used for counter-espionage.’ Burt regarded his refusal to admit anything as a sure sign of guilt. Although Burt dwelt on ‘Greetings from Mikel’, neither he nor MI5 colleagues challenged Nunn May about the password ‘Greetings from Alex’, which indicated illicit contacts before Nunn May went to Canada. MI5 wanted a clean, clear case to bring to court, and eliminated complications. It was only after Nunn May’s conviction, when he was in prison, that they interrogated him about pre-1945, pre-Canadian espionage. Nunn May was determined not to incriminate himself further, admitted nothing and yielded no information. Indeed, he remained anxious about a further prosecution on pre-Canadian leakages to the end of his life.14
There was insufficient evidence to convict Nunn May without a confession: this was extracted by William (‘Jim’) Skardon, whose working life had begun as a clerk in the household of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and who had been, as a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, seconded to MI5 in 1940. The investigation of the Nazi propagandist William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) in 1945 had shown his abilities as an interrogator. Skardon’s easy manner disguised his purposive ruthlessness. He graded people’s susceptibility to treason by categorizing their hobbies as ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’ – that is to say to connoting safe, trustworthy and stable social values, or insecure characteristics and risky attitudes. Gardening he reckoned was ‘very constitutional’, skiing ‘doubtful’ and motor-racing ‘very suspect’. Skardon won Nunn May’s trust, told him that the British had proof of his treason and bluffed him into a full confession of his guilt in February 1946. Writing of him afterwards, in a book sponsored by MI5, Alan Moorehead declared that Nunn May was ‘an entirely new sort of traitor: a man who gave away secrets not for money or for power or through fear or hatred or the perverse attraction of the act of spying, or even because he believed in a political faith. He betrayed because he found himself in possession of information of the utmost value and with an Olympian confidence decided that he should pass it on for the good of mankind.’ He was, said Moorehead, ‘a self-appointed world saver’.15
Nunn May faced an Old Bailey trial on 1 May 1946 with the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, prosecuting and Gerald Gardiner defending. ‘My Lord,’ Shawcross told the judge, ‘I ought to make it abundantly clear that there is no kind of suggestion that the Russians are enemies or potential enemies.’ He stressed that the charge concerned communicating information to unauthorized (and unspecified) persons, and emphasized that Nunn May had received $200, as if his motives were mercenary. Sir Roland Oliver, the High Court Judge who sentenced Nunn May to ten years’ imprisonment, reiterated Shawcross’s point about this paltry sum as if it mattered. Spy trials are show-cases of misdirection.16
Klaus Fuchs
Unbeknown to the security services, there was another atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs had been born in Germany in 1911. His father was a Lutheran pastor who became a Quaker. He suffered traumatic losses during his early manhood: his grandmother committed suicide, he saw his mother die after taking hydrochloric acid in 1931, one sister threw herself under a train in 1938 and the other was schizophrenic. For years after these tragedies he would be subdued by sudden involuntary bouts of mourning during which he lay for hours, or even days, with his face turned to the wall, starving himself, mute, unresponsive, as if in a trance. He was myopic, cackhanded, preternaturally precise, physically frail, but with formidable self-command. He chain-smoked cigarettes, was a mighty drinker of spirits and drove cars at top speed because he loved the thrill of skids and the excitement of controlling them.
Fuchs had degrees in mathematics and physics from the universities of Leipzig and Kiel. He joined the German communist party in 1932, and was once beaten up by Brownshirt students at Kiel and chucked into a river. On 28 February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, a warrant was issued to arrest him. By chance he left home early that morning, before the police arrived to detain him, in order to meet student communists in Berlin. Seeing newspaper reports of the arson, as he sat on the train to Berlin, he took the hammer-and-sickle badge from his lapel and from that moment went underground. He hastened on party orders to Paris, where he registered with the Quaker Bureau. His entry into England in September 1933 was sponsored by Ronald Gunn, an executive of the Imperial Tobacco Company living near Bristol, who knew of his Quaker affiliations and (perhaps significantly) had visited the Soviet Union a year earlier. It was with Gunn’s help that Fuchs obtained a post in the laboratory of Nevill Mott, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bristol University. In Bristol, Fuchs frequented meetings of the Friends of Soviet Russia and of Münzenberg’s front organization, the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. It seemed innocuous to Mott for a refugee from Nazism to evince communist sympathies.
Fuchs, who was awarded his PhD in 1936, continued to live with the Gunn family until 1937, when he went to work for his DSc in Max Born’s laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. Born spoke of him as ‘a brilliant young fellow’, a sad and lonely refugee, ‘likeable, kind, harmless’, and ‘passionately pro-Russian’. Fuchs reconciled himself to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 by persuading himself that Stalin was buying time to gather strength against Hitler rather as Chamberlain had done by means of the Munich agreement of 1938. His German passport having been revoked by the Nazis, he applied for British citizenship in 1939. This had not yet been granted when war broke out: he was interned as an enemy alien in May 1940 and shipped to a primitive internment camp in Quebec, where he gave classes in theoretical physics. One of the internees who attended his brilliant lectures was Max Perutz, a molecular biologist at the Cavendish Laboratory, who was later awarded the Nobel prize and the Order of Merit. ‘Fuchs is a brilliant mathematician and physicist; he also has an accurate memory and a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly,’ Perutz said; but ‘I had no human contact with that pale, narrow-faced, thin-lipped, austere-looking man.’ After eight months of internment, both Fuchs and Perutz were released in January 1941 following representations by the Royal Society.17
Two refugee scientists in Birmingham, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, had in March 1940 circulated a memorandum showing that only a few kilograms of the fissile uranium isotope 235 were needed to detonate an atomic weapon. Their exposition set in train the development of atomic bombs under the codename of the TUBE ALLOYS project. Forces of incredible violence began to be harnessed by men of mild looks and unassuming manners. Peierls recruited Fuchs to investigate the gaseous diffusion process involved in separating uranium isotopes. When Fuchs joined TUBE ALLOYS in June 1941, he signed the Official Secrets Act. There was no interview or investigation of him by MI5 officers, who were over-stretched on other urgent matters. Jane Archer did comment, after reading inconclusive entries on his file about communist affiliations, ‘Fuchs is more likely to betray secrets to Russians than the enemy.’ She recommended that he should not be shown more secret material than necessary, but, as Peierls commented, in a project like his ‘there was no half-way house’. Everything was hurried in the wartime emergency. Frisch was pleased when Chadwick told him in 1943 that he would have to become a British subject if he was t
o follow the project to America. Within a few days a Special Branch officer visited Frisch to establish his antecedents, personal details and character references as the preliminaries to naturalization. ‘You must be a pretty big shot,’ the policeman mused. ‘I have been told to get everything done in a week!’18
Fuchs joined TUBE ALLOYS in the month that Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia. He soon contacted the NKGB/NKVD organizer in London, Jürgen Kuczynski, was accepted as a source in August 1941 and provided his first tranche of scientific secrets in the following month. His subsequent codenames included REST, BRAS and CHARLES. He became a British subject in 1942. His first Soviet handler Simon Kremer @ BARCH did not build an affinity with him. In 1942, after he had complained of BARCH to Kuczynski, the latter’s sister Ursula was (by Moscow’s decision) put in charge of running him. Best known by her codename SONYA, she was Ursula Kuczynski @ Ruth Kuczynski @ Ruth Werner @ Ursula Beurton @ Ursula Hamburger. Born in 1907, the daughter of an eminent Jewish statistical economist in Berlin, she joined the German communist party at the age of eighteen. During the early 1930s she worked for Red Army intelligence in Shanghai, Peking and Mukden: Mao Tse-tung’s victory in 1949 was ‘the most important milestone in the history of the Labour movement since the October Revolution of 1917’, she wrote in her eighties. ‘For me personally, it was one of the happiest events of my life.’ After returning from undercover work in Switzerland in 1941, she had handled the atomic spy Melita Norwood. She was ruthless in promoting her cause. Noël Coward’s account of his breakdown in the Artists Rifle Corps, which led to his hospitalization in a ward for shell-shock patients in Camberwell in 1918, excited her contempt in 1941: ‘His reactions as a soldier in the First World War are exactly the reaction of a liberal intellectual incapable of disciplining himself, incapable of renouncing his individualism, of subordinating himself and withstanding physical effort.’19
Enemies Within Page 44