Her first meeting with Fuchs was in Banbury, midway between his base in Birmingham and her wartime home in Oxford. At this inaugural rendezvous they walked arm in arm together, according to an established practice of illicit meetings, discussing books and films as a way of gaining mutual trust. No one mentioned espionage; she found Fuchs sensitive, reserved, donnish and clumsy. Their next half-dozen meetings were also in the countryside, because it was harder for watchers to shadow them in open rural areas. She pedalled to their assignations on a bicycle with a wicker child’s seat cushioned by a cheerful green pillow embellished with pictures of daisies. They could conduct their business in two minutes, but it looked less suspicious if they took a pleasant walk together for up to half an hour. Fuchs supplied SONYA with numerous blueprints, copies of all the reports he had written, and data on the gaseous diffusion method of separating the uranium isotope U-235 and on the mathematics used to evaluate the size and efficiency of atomic bombs. By December 1943, when Fuchs crossed the Atlantic with Peierls to work on the MANHATTAN PROJECT, he had confirmed to the Russians that the Americans and British were building plants to produce atomic weaponry and that Germany’s equivalent projects had stalled.
The MANHATTAN PROJECT was based in New York and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In February 1944 Fuchs had his first rendezvous with his new American handler, Harry Gold @ GOOSE @ ARNO @ MAD @ RAYMOND, who was a chemist by training and son of an anti-Romanov radical who had fled tsarist Russia in 1903 to avoid military conscription. The two conspirators met at the entrance to the Henry Street Settlement, which provided health care and social services to the needy in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and identified one another by holding gloves, a green-covered book, a handball and other paraphernalia. Thereafter Fuchs supplied Gold with material on the design and assembly of the atomic bomb, which proved of utmost value in advancing Soviet atomic expertise. Under the Soviet system, with its reliance on denial and deception, the Kremlin’s scant public references to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were an index of the importance attached by Stalin to atomic nuclear weaponry. ‘It has never been admitted that the atomic bomb had any real influence on the Japanese capitulation and Stalin did not refer to it in his final victory broadcast,’ Clark Kerr, the Ambassador in Moscow, reported in September that year. Ignorant of the espionage by Nunn May and Fuchs, Clark Kerr was encouraged by the Kremlin’s mild reaction to Anglo-American duplicity: there had been no denunciation of ‘our failure to impart to them the formula of the atomic bomb which can imply nothing but a lack of confidence in our Soviet allies’.20
A fortnight after the destruction of the two Japanese cities, the Prime Minister Clement Attlee circulated a memorandum on the atomic bomb. ‘No Government has ever been placed in such a position as is ours today. The Governments of the U.K. and the U.S.A. are responsible as never before for the future of the human race.’ Attlee saw no hope of restricting the spread of nuclear weapons. ‘Any attempt to keep this as a secret in the hands of the U.S.A. and U.K. is useless. Scientists in other countries are certain in time to hit upon the secret.’ The experience of recent years had convinced him that the necessary response to saturation bombing was retaliatory raids. ‘Berlin & Magdeburg were the answer to London and Coventry. Both derive from Guernica. The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.’ This was the hard, hostile new terrain through which Fuchs, as well as Attlee’s government, had to find a safe path.21
In the summer of 1946 Fuchs was appointed head of theoretical physics at the new Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell (then a bleak encampment around an empty airfield). From the technical questions asked of him by the Russians, Fuchs deduced the existence of another atomic spy: this, unknown to him, was Melita Norwood. Once installed at Harwell, he tried to contact Jürgen Kuczynski, who however had worked for US military intelligence in 1944–5, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel while attached to the US army of occupation in Berlin, and declined to cooperate with the local NKGB station. In September 1947 Fuchs had his first rendezvous with his new handler, Alexander Feklissov @ KALISTRAT, at the drab Nag’s Head public house in Wood Green. For mutual confirmation of identity, Feklissov said, ‘Stout is not so good: I generally take lager,’ and Fuchs replied, ‘I think Guinness is the best.’22
Fuchs resumed the supply of official secrets, which had been suspended when he left the USA a year earlier. Hydrogen-bomb plans, English and American atomic stockpiles, processes for isolating plutonium, and theoretical calculations of explosion were among the material that he betrayed. ‘I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments,’ Fuchs explained, with acute self-analysis, to his MI5 interrogator in 1950. In one compartment he allowed himself:
to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be … I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point. I could forget the other compartment and still rely on it. It appeared to me at the time that I had become a ‘free man’ because I had succeeded in the other compartment to establish myself completely independent of the surrounding forces of society. Looking back at it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it a controlled schizophrenia.23
Feklissov told Fuchs that if he had to defer a rendezvous or needed an emergency meeting, he should go to Richmond, Surrey and throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over the wall of 166 Kew Road, with a message on page 10 supplying a new place and date. He then had to make a chalk mark on a wall in nearby Holmsdale Road. The garden in Kew Road belonged to a former CPGB activist, Charles Moody, who had become an outwardly conventional Attlee supporter: nominated by the Labour party to the bench of Richmond magistrates in 1945, this former dustman was eventually a respected chairman of the juvenile bench. He had been the husband since 1927 of Gerty or Gerda Isaacs, daughter of a rabbi named Moses Isaacs (described in the 1901 census as Russian-born, but a subject of the Sultan of Turkey). The Moodys lived at 166 Kew Road with three sons and Gerty’s sister Clara Isaacs. The two women were not open CPGB members but, as an MI5 report noted in 1954, ‘Mrs MOODY often refers to people who are merely sympathisers with a pro-Russian or Communist organisation as being “the unconverted”.’24
There were tens of thousands of Soviet sympathizers like the Moodys, who wished to believe that Stalin wanted world peace. When the Atomic Energy Bill was debated in the Commons in 1946, its provisions for safeguarding official secrets were resisted by the Labour MP Wilfrid Vernon, the member of the aviation spy ring at the Royal Aircraft Establishment whose activities had been compromised by the bungling Blackshirt raid on his shack. Vernon lacked subtlety. He advocated open, unrestricted collaboration between nuclear physicists of all nations. Official secrecy, he said, was a hindrance to scientific advances. If the purity of scientific exchanges was polluted by considerations of national security, able graduates would be scared of entering atomic research lest they make an inadvertent slip and land themselves in prison. Scientists working on nuclear weaponry would moreover be prevented from consulting those interested in nuclear energy, and vice versa. The world shortage of fuel was taking the planet back to ‘the Stone Age’, Vernon feared. Instead of maximizing the effort to develop new power to replace coal and oil, ‘we are letting our military madness clamp down on this vital possibility for the future of mankind’. Such ebullitions confirmed the judgement of a former Farnborough colleague that Vernon was ‘a second-rate man with a second-rate mind … an idealist and a type who would die on the barricades’.25
Alexander Foote, Ursula Kuczynski’s former associate in Switzerland-based espionage, defected in Berlin in 1946 and gave full information on her to MI5. As a result of Foote’s defection, Moscow broke contact with her. For several months she cycled on allotted days to her dead drop in the hollow root of the fourth tree on the left after a rail
way tunnel on the Oxford–Banbury road, but never found a message. MI5 began to test Foote’s account. SONYA was found to be living in a house called The Firs in the Oxfordshire village of Great Rollright. Effective surveillance was impossible: she was too careful to post incriminating letters; the local telephone exchange was too small for the monitoring of her calls to pass unnoticed; in a village watchers would be spotted within a day.
On a summer day in 1947, Skardon and Michael Serpell arrived without warning at The Firs. (Serpell was the favoured personal assistant of the then Director General of the Security Service, Sir Percy Sillitoe, who later said after rewarding him with a hoist in the office hierarchy, ‘if I don’t promote him nobody else will’.) They walked into the room and said without pausing, ‘You were a Russian agent for a long time, before the Finnish war disillusioned you. We know that you haven’t been active in England. We haven’t come to arrest you, but to ask your cooperation.’ She almost laughed at what seemed a clownish attempt to throw her off balance. They asked about incidents in Switzerland, which made her suspect that her activities had been betrayed by Foote, but stressed that they considered her a loyal British subject, who had been disillusioned with communism by the Russian invasion of Finland. She admitted to her marriage ten years earlier to an active communist in China, but refused to answer questions about her experiences before she got a British passport. Her interrogators professed astonishment at this obstinate attitude from someone who had been guiltless since settling in England.26
Harwell and Semipalatinsk
Code-breakers posed as great a threat as defectors to Moscow’s espionage apparatus. During 1944–5 the Soviets were careless enough to reissue some one-time pads, which made their cipher system for high-grade diplomatic and intelligence communications vulnerable to American and British code-breakers. In 1946 Meredith Gardner of the US Army Security Agency (ASA), who knew German, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Spanish, French, Japanese and Russian, began decrypting messages exchanged between Moscow Centre and its American agencies. His team of code-breakers, who were mostly young women, embarked on a momentous project which received the codename VENONA. They collected evidence of massive Soviet espionage, which was not reported by ASA to the FBI until 1948. (The CIA was, however, not informed about VENONA until 1952: partly because of bitter inter-agency rivalry; but also because its decrypts revealed that Moscow’s agents had infested the CIA’s predecessor body, the OSS, and Hoover feared that the CIA was equally pest-ridden.)
Moscow Centre heard about VENONA five years before the CIA. William Weisband, a Russian linguist in ASA, codenamed ZHORA and RUPERT by his chiefs in Moscow, was a prowling snooper who peered over Meredith Gardner’s shoulder at the moment when the cryptanalyst was decrypting an NKGB telegram which revealed that Los Alamos had been penetrated by Soviet agents. Weisband was never prosecuted for betraying VENONA to Moscow, because the US authorities shrank from court disclosures about VENONA. He did, however, serve a prison sentence in 1950–1 for contempt of court after refusing a grand jury subpoena: he thereafter worked as an insurance salesman. Moscow was thrown into uncertainty by Weisband’s revelations, for it was impossible to predict which NKVD telegrams would be decrypted or which Soviet agents would be compromised. Its perturbation was increased in July 1948, when Elizabeth Bentley testified in public to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Whittaker Chambers named Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and others in evidence to HUAC a month later. Moscow Centre expected these revelations to lead to a series of show-trials.27
In September 1949, just before leaving for Washington, Philby warned Burgess that VENONA was close to identifying a major atomic spy, who had been active in the United States (Philby did not know the spy’s identity as Fuchs). Burgess’s information from Philby was included in three rolls of microfilm received from Blunt by the new Soviet contact, Yuri Modin, on 11 October 1949. The microfilms had, however, been over-exposed and were unusable. When 168 recopied documents, totalling 660 pages, were delivered to Modin on 7 December, Burgess forgot to repeat his warning about the Anglo-American decryption effort and the atomic spy. If Blunt had not photographed the early batch of material badly, or if Burgess had remembered to repeat his warning note, Moscow could have exfiltrated Fuchs in November or December, or at least briefed him on handling MI5 interrogators. Instead, when Fuchs was arrested, they became obsessed with the idea that he had been betrayed by his former American handler, Harry Gold.
Fuchs underwent repeated vetting in 1946–9 as he took charge of the mathematical work needed to develop nuclear power, and was promoted to be deputy chief scientific officer at Harwell: Roger Hollis had cleared his file for the sixth time. Then VENONA decrypts identified a Soviet agent codenamed CHARLES as a supplier of vital intelligence on the MANHATTAN PROJECT. There were three prime suspects for the part of CHARLES: Fuchs, Peierls and Frank Kearton. A bricklayer’s son with a first-class degree in chemistry from Oxford, Kearton had shared an office with Fuchs in America, never doubted him and treated him as a friend. Kearton, who became one of post-war England’s most formidable industrialists and received a barony in 1970, said the worst time of his life was when he was under MI5’s suspicion. It did not last long. By careful study of all the references to CHARLES, MI5 cleared first Kearton and then Peierls, which left only Fuchs. MI5’s Arthur Martin and John Marriott interviewed Kearton in mid-November. ‘KEARTON could not believe that FUCHS was a spy, although it did not seem from anything KEARTON said that this could be ruled out,’ noted Liddell. In fact, he added, Kearton had been just as incredulous as Nunn May’s colleagues when security doubts were raised about him.28
From July 1949 Fuchs was subject to tapped telephones and intercepted mail, but nothing incriminatory was found. An intensive investigation by MI5’s B Division could find no incriminating evidence because he had by then renounced espionage. MI5 could not use the highly classified secret VENONA decrypts or any SIGINT intercepted material as evidence against Fuchs in a criminal trial. Skardon – the man who had failed to shake Ursula Kuczynski two years earlier – was sent to interview Fuchs at Harwell on 21 September 1949 without being told of the VENONA decrypts. He saw no signs of guilt, as he reported after two interviews. Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet found no suspicious inconsistencies or incriminating contradictions in the interview transcripts. The cover for MI5’s sudden interest in Fuchs was that his father had recently moved to Leipzig, in communist-controlled Germany, and that this raised security concerns which might require Fuchs to leave the Harwell establishment. Dick White coached Skardon like a schoolmaster preparing a star pupil for an examination, and sent him on further visits to Harwell, where Skardon simulated a trusting affinity with Fuchs.
In mid-January 1950, with an air of relaxed sincerity, Skardon suggested that there was still a chance that Fuchs could become Director of Harwell if he told his story fully. Fuchs could not have been incriminated if he had said nothing, but he relented as lonely men under sympathetic questioning sometimes do. He volunteered his story – although, as Skardon did not have a high enough security-clearance, he refused to give technical details of the official secrets that he had given the Russians. There was then a nerve-racking hiatus for Fuchs lasting more than a week. Finally he was asked to come to London, where he gave and signed a full confession on 27 January. Breaking Fuchs was the acme of Skardon’s career. It vindicated his technique of formidably ruthless sympathy. ‘My name is Skardon,’ he would say by way of introduction to someone whom he was about to interview. ‘I was the man who persuaded Klaus Fuchs to confess. A dear man.’29
Edward Teller, the Budapest-born deviser of hydrogen bombs, who had complained that Fuchs was ‘taciturn to an almost pathological degree’, exclaimed on hearing of Fuchs’s arrest: ‘So that’s what it was!’ Fuchs’s trial at the Old Bailey on 1 March took a total of ninety minutes: Skardon was the only witness; no jury was needed, for Fuchs pleaded guilty; he was given a sentence of fourteen years. There was as much official misdirection as there
had been in the trials of Glading and Nunn May. The indictment referred to four specific acts of espionage in 1943, 1944, 1945 and 1947 without revealing that Fuchs had confessed to starting his betrayal of atomic secrets in 1942 and continuing until 1949.30
Ursula Kuczynski left England with her young children, whom she was rearing as anti-fascists, days before the start of Fuchs’s trial. She was unsure whether MI5 had failed to connect her with Fuchs or had preferred her to escape like Glading’s handlers: her arrest might have complicated the case, brought awkward public disclosures about a decade of Soviet espionage and perhaps provoked the punitive ire of the FBI. She was living in East Germany when Stalin died in 1953: ‘every communist I met considered it as I did – a great loss’. Skardon interviewed Charles and Gerty Moody on several occasions; their associates were investigated; Home Office warrants for telephone and postal interception were issued; their file was revisited periodically for years. Evelyn McBarnet of MI5 concluded, ‘I am left with the impression that MOODY must, almost certainly, have been the person concerned with retrieving the magazine thrown over the wall by FUCHS, that he was possibly not aware of the precise significance of his action, and that he had probably never heard of FUCHS before the story of his arrest appeared in the press.’31
Enemies Within Page 45