Treason in the Secret City
Page 24
Dear Libby,
Your mother asked little Ernie and I to retrieve this book from the farmhouse. She thought it would be meaningful to you. She told me to tell you to look at the inside cover.
Your mother also wanted me to inform you that she would cherish a letter from you when you have time to write but she does not want you to neglect your work to come to the dreary place she will not call home no matter how long she resides there. She further said that a visit would displease her since she has no desire to inflict any more sadness or pain into your life.
Ernie is doing well. He is doing his chores and more with eagerness and makes regular trips over to your farm to make sure your business is being well-managed. He is quite the little farmer.
With best wishes,
Justine Early
I opened the cover and my eyes welled up immediately. The book was inscribed: To my dearest Annabelle, I love you dearly and always. May this token of my love serve as a demonstration of affection for you and heartfelt appreciation for the lovely gift you have given me – my beautiful little daughter Elizabeth Ann ‘Libby’ Clark
The hard, cold spot I’d reserved in my heart for my mother was softening every day. I knew she said she did not want to see me again but her protests against visiting were her way of protecting me the best she could. One day, I’d find that I have forgiven her completely – maybe soon. It struck me that a big part of growing up and becoming an adult is developing the ability to see your parents’ shortcomings and mistakes in context of their humanity – to accept that no parent is perfect and to understand that no human is without flaws.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Spies wormed their way into the Manhattan Project at all levels including the facilities at Oak Ridge. Some worked for the Axis powers, others for the Soviets. Raymond was the actual code name of a Soviet courier. His identity as Harry Gold, the son of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, was not revealed until 1950. His confession to sixteen years of espionage led to the arrest of a multitude of espionage agents including noted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for their crimes.
His wrongdoing may have never been known except for the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in 1949. Fuchs was born in Germany in 1911 and grew up to become a communist in opposition to the rise of Hitler’s power. He moved to England in 1941 and worked as a scientist aiding the British in their exploratory efforts to build an atomic bomb. That country sent him with a delegation of his peers to the United States to advocate a merger of efforts in the production of nuclear capabilities.
From his base at Columbia University, Fuchs delivered information about electromagnetic separation at Y-12 as well as the gaseous diffusion method developed at Oak Ridge to the Soviets. He moved to Los Alamos where he continued to siphon off information for the communists.
Fuchs was arrested in 1949 and ultimately confessed on January 24, 1950, naming Harry Gold as his courier. He was sentenced to fourteen years but was released after he served nine. He died in 1988, but by then had also provided China with details about the plans for Fat Man (the bomb that fell on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945,) enabling them to develop a nuclear program well ahead of schedule.
Harry Gold also pointed the finger at Al Slack, who was a shift supervisor at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. Before arriving there, Slack worked for Kodak in New York state, then transferred to Tennessee Eastman at the Holston Ordnance Works in Kingsport. In that position, he gave the Soviets a sample of the RDX – or Compound B – the strongest explosive known at the time and more powerful than TNT.
Once Slack moved to Oak Ridge, Gold pressured him to provide information from there. The specific nature of the material he delivered from the reservation is not known but the FBI considered him a part of the ‘Rosenberg Network’. Most people in that group were driven by ideology and principle. In contrast, Slack appeared to be another spy motivated by money, not belief. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Also at Oak Ridge was George Koval, who was drafted into the Army’s Special Engineer Detachment where he served as a Health Physics Officer, monitoring radiation levels across the installation. That job granted him access to almost every area. Working at the city behind the fence, he passed secret information about the work on uranium and plutonium to a Soviet contact. When transferred to the Dayton, Ohio, facility in June 1945, he provided them with intelligence about the polonium-based work on an implosion bomb.
He kept his subterfuge hidden and was honorably discharged from the army in 1946. Two years later, he sailed for Europe and never returned to the United States again. He died in his home in Moscow on January 31, 2006 at the age of 92, bitter at the lack of recognition given to him for his highly productive espionage efforts. Thirteen months later, Putin posthumously awarded him the Hero of the Russian Federation Medal, that nation’s highest civilian honor, acknowledging his courage and heroism in carrying out special missions and his important contribution to the Soviet Union’s development of the nuclear bomb. The public had been unaware of his work until 2002.
On February 3, 1941, Company A of Bedford, Virginia, joined the war effort when the National Guard’s 116th Infantry Regiment was activated. Ray Nance, Taylor Fellers and the Stevens twins, Ray and Roy – mentioned in this story – were real people who were among the thirty soldiers still in that company on D-Day, June 6, 1944. They engaged in the first wave of assaults on Omaha Beach. By the end of that day, nineteen Bedford men were dead including Ray Stevens and Taylor Fellers. Two more lost their lives in the continuation of the Normandy invasion and then another two died before the war was over. Only seven of them ever made it back home.
Families in Bedford did not begin to receive notifications of their loved one’s demise until more than a month later on July 17th. The town of Bedford suffered the most severe loss of life per capita of any city or town in the United States on the first day of the invasion of the European continent. For this reason, the National D-Day Memorial is located in Bedford at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Many thanks to Oak Ridge historian D. Ray Smith for his help with historical background information on the Manhattan Project spies and to Alex Kershaw, author of The Bedford Boys, for details about the sacrifice made during World War II by the people of the town I now call home.