The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Gold also tried impressing Fuchs with his scientific knowledge. It didn’t go well. During one meeting, Fuchs admitted that his team was having trouble figuring out how to enrich uranium, the first step in building a bomb core. Gold jumped in and suggested they try thermal diffusion, the process he’d been tinkering with at work. Fuchs dismissed the idea as amateurish, which stung Gold. (Little did Fuchs know that the Manhattan Project had in fact just opened a thermal diffusion plant; without it, there would have been no uranium bomb during World War II.)

  In July 1944, the pair had their eighth meeting scheduled, near the Brooklyn Museum. Fuchs didn’t show. This worried Gold, given how precise Fuchs always was. But they had a backup meeting scheduled a few days later near Central Park, so he took off.

  Fuchs missed that meeting, too. Thoughts of muggers flashed through Gold’s head, and he returned to Philadelphia distraught. He had no idea where Fuchs lived or how to contact him. An invaluable spy—and his good friend—had suddenly gone AWOL.

  He needn’t have worried. Fuchs was fine—better than fine, in fact. He’d just wrangled an invitation to the inner sanctum of the Manhattan Project, the weapons lab at Los Alamos.

  Fuchs had left so abruptly that not even the Soviets knew where he was. Through some unknown but likely underhanded scheme, Gold’s handler in New York finally tracked down the spy’s last known address, near the American Museum of Natural History. He passed this information on to Gold, who bought a used copy of a Thomas Mann novel, Joseph the Provider, scribbled Fuchs’s name and address inside, and visited the four-story brownstone on the pretext of returning it. He found the door unlocked and let himself in, but the Scandinavian couple who owned the place confronted him. Gold kept his cool and explained about the book. This assuaged the couple, but they told him that Fuchs had moved out and had left no forwarding address.

  Getting desperate, the Soviets took a huge gamble and sent Gold up to Cambridge a few weeks later, to visit Fuchs’s sister, Kristel. Gold arrived with a book for her and candy for her children, Fuchs’s niece and nephew. He pretended to be an old friend visiting town. Alas, Kristel had no idea where her brother had disappeared to. But Gold persisted, and after several more trips up, he finally spied Fuchs sitting in Kristel’s living room one afternoon in January. He must have melted with relief—seven months had passed since their last contact. The elation was short-lived, however. When Gold knocked, Kristel answered the door and promptly sent him away, telling him that Fuchs didn’t care to see him just then. He should come back in two days. Gold walked away baffled and hurt—he’d taken a long, expensive train ride up to see his friend, and couldn’t afford more time off to visit again.

  Gold nevertheless did as he was told and returned two days later, even bringing more candy for the niece and nephew. This time Fuchs slipped outside to take a walk with Gold. On it, Fuchs apologized for sending Gold away before; Kristel’s husband was home, he explained, and meeting up would have looked suspicious. The two then returned to Kristel’s empty house for lunch, where Fuchs reverted to form and reprimanded Gold for compromising Kristel’s security by showing up at her home so often. As a result, they’d have to rendezvous in Santa Fe from then on.

  Gold groaned. That would mean even longer, more expensive trips. Wasn’t there anywhere else? Fuchs said no—he was too important to get away very often. Fuchs then produced a map of Santa Fe and a bus schedule. Meet here on June 2, he said.

  Just before they parted, Fuchs handed Gold a sealed envelope, which he called “extremely significant.” He wasn’t kidding: inside were early sketches of a plutonium bomb. Gold in turn handed Fuchs a “Christmas present” from the Soviets. It was a thin dress wallet with an envelope inside full of fives, tens, and twenties—$1,500 overall ($20,000 today). The gift disgusted Fuchs. As Gold recalled, “Fuchs held the envelope containing the $1,500 as if it were an unclean thing.” I don’t spy for money, he spat. This gesture delighted Gold: like him, Fuchs wasn’t driven by material gain. He did convince Fuchs to take the wallet, but returned the cash to the Soviets.

  Shortly before his trip to New Mexico, Gold met his Soviet handler, “John,” at a bar to iron out the details. To avoid possible surveillance, John ordered Gold to take a roundabout journey to the Southwest by train and bus, with stops in California, Denver, and El Paso. For once, though, Gold stood up for himself. He had already borrowed $500 from Penn Sugar to finance the trip and couldn’t afford to take more time off. He insisted on traveling directly.

  If Gold won that argument, though, he would soon lose a second, more important one that day. After wrapping up the details of the Fuchs meeting, John told Gold something surprising: The Soviets had a second mole inside Los Alamos, a machinist. This mole would be on furlough in Albuquerque while Gold was visiting, so he’d be making a side trip there to pick up additional papers.

  In any normal business, this would be a reasonable request. In espionage, it was anathema, a huge security risk. Gold knew this and, feeling his oats, decided to stand up for himself again: “I… got up on my hind legs and almost flatly refused,” he remembered.

  This time, John slapped him down. “I have been guiding you idiots through every step!” he snarled. “You don’t realize how important this mission to Albuquerque is.”

  As the tirade continued, Gold backed down and submitted, as usual. John finally gave him a sheet of onionskin paper with an address in Albuquerque on it and a last name, Greenglass. The handler then gave Gold half a Jell-O box top, which had been cut into a jigsaw shape. You’ll know it’s Greenglass, he said, because he’ll have the matching half.

  Gold’s bus pulled into Santa Fe on Saturday, June 2, at 2:30 p.m. With ninety minutes to kill, he grabbed a map from a local museum and wandered along the nearby river. It looked pitiful, he thought, smaller than most creeks back home.

  Fuchs arrived late in his sputtering blue Buick. They drove to a deserted road and took a short walk. Fuchs discussed his work on the new plutonium bomb but assured Gold, wrongly, that the war would end before it was ready for use against the Japanese. He then handed Gold a packet and they parted. All in all, a good, crisp meeting.

  The second meeting proved different. Gold took a bus to Albuquerque, arriving around 8 p.m., and went straight to the address on the onionskin paper, 209 High Street. He felt nervous holding documents from Fuchs and wanted to skip town as soon as possible. But David Greenglass wasn’t home; he and his wife were at the movies.

  Recreation of the Jell-O boxtop recognition signal used by Harry Gold and David Greenglass. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

  Disheartened, Gold set out to find a hotel room, but got laughed at everywhere he tried. Albuquerque was surrounded by military bases, and there were never any vacancies on Saturdays. A policeman finally directed the spy to a boardinghouse, where Gold begged for a miserable cot in the hallway. Police sirens kept him awake most of the night.

  The next morning Gold trudged up the staircase at 209 High Street and knocked again. When the door opened, he almost fell right back down the steps in shock. The man who answered was wearing army pants. Gold had no idea that the U.S. military had been dragged into this.

  Composing himself, Gold asked if he was Greenglass. Greenglass said yes. Gold then spoke the recognition signal, “Julius sent me.”

  “Oh,” Greenglass said, and retrieved the Jell-O box top from his wife’s purse. Gold held out his half, and the pieces matched. Eager to get going, Gold asked Greenglass if he had any material ready. Greenglass said no, that he hadn’t gotten around to it. Gold should come back that afternoon.

  Grumbling, Gold found some breakfast and waited. When he returned, he and Greenglass took a walk in the blazing sun and made the handoff. The packet included diagrams of high-explosive lenses, one of the most crucial aspects of the plutonium bomb. Gold then handed Greenglass $500—equal to sixteen months’ rent on the apartment, a small fortune to a machinist. Like Fuchs, Greenglass looked stricken at
the offer—albeit for the opposite reason. Can’t you do better than that?, he asked. Gold, disgusted, muttered that he’d pass the request along.

  Gold caught a train out that evening, and spent the next two days rattling east, glad to have escaped. But his side trip to Albuquerque would prove costly. It just so happened that David Greenglass had a sister in New York named Ethel, who was married to a man named Julius Rosenberg.

  Gold and Fuchs certainly weren’t the only scientists corrupted by communism. One of Fuchs’s colleagues at Los Alamos, an eighteen-year-old wunderkind named Ted Hall, spied for the Soviets as well, and a Canadian physicist actually passed along small samples of fissionable uranium. But perhaps the biggest offender was biologist Trofim Lysenko.

  Lysenko was born a peasant in what’s now Ukraine in 1898 and remained illiterate until age thirteen. After the Russian Revolution, he nevertheless won admission to several agricultural schools, where he began tinkering with new methods of growing peas during the long, hard Soviet winters. Although his experiments were poorly designed (and he probably faked his results), his ideas won him praise from a state-run newspaper in 1927. His hardscrabble background—people called him the “barefoot scientist”—also made him popular within the Communist Party, which glorified peasants. Officials eventually put him in charge of Soviet agriculture in the mid-1930s, vaulting him to the top of the Soviet scientific heap.

  The only problem was, Lysenko had batty scientific ideas. In particular, he loathed genetics. Genetics in that era emphasized fixed traits: plants and animals had stable characteristics, encoded as genes, which they passed down to their offspring. Although a biologist in name, Lysenko condemned such ideas as reactionary—in part because the Soviet Union’s greatest enemy, Nazi Germany, championed a perverted form of genetics in its promotion of a master race. But in battling right-wing fanatics, Lysenko let his own, left-wing fanaticism get the better of him, and he was every bit as unscientific as the Nazis. In fact, he went so far as to deny that genes existed. Instead, he promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put organisms in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree. Environment was essence.

  To this end, Lysenko began programs to “educate” Soviet crops to sprout at different times of year by soaking them in freezing water, among other tricks. Crucially, he claimed that future generations of crops would remember these environmental cues and, even without being treated themselves, would inherit the beneficial traits. As science, this is nonsense—akin to cutting the tail off a cat and expecting her to give birth to tailless kittens. Nor did these tricks work on every crop. Undeterred, Lysenko was soon boasting of plans to grow lemon trees in Siberia. More importantly, he promised to boost crop production nationwide and convert the empty Russian interior into vast farms.

  Such claims were exactly what Soviet leaders wanted to hear. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joseph Stalin had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted. Stalin refused to change course, however, and looked in part to Lysenko’s radical new ideas to remedy the disaster. For example, Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds ridiculously close together, since according to his “law of the life of species,” plants from the same “class” never competed with one another. He also forbade the use of fertilizers and agricultural pesticides.

  To be clear, Stalin deserves the blame for the famines, which started before Lysenko’s tenure as agricultural czar and had their ultimate roots in political factors. (Many historians even describe the famines as deliberate genocide, especially in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.) But after Stalin’s crimes, Lysenko’s practices prolonged the food shortages. Deaths from the famines peaked around 1932–33, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in farmland cultivated using Lysenko’s methods, food production was actually lower than before. Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to his methods died or rotted.

  The Soviet Union’s allies suffered under Lysenkoism, too. Communist China adopted his methods in the late 1950s and suffered through even bigger famines. Peasants were reduced to eating tree bark and bird droppings for sustenance, not to mention the occasional family member. At least 30 million died of starvation. As a corollary of Lysenko’s theories—which denied the importance of genes—the Chinese government also relaxed laws against incest and consanguineous marriage. Birth defects soared as a result.

  Because he enjoyed Stalin’s support, Lysenko’s failures did nothing to dim his star within the Soviet Union. His portrait hung in scientific institutes, and every time he gave a speech, a brass band played and a choir sang a song written in his honor.2

  Outside the U.S.S.R., people sang a different tune—one of unwavering criticism. A British biologist lamented that Lysenko was “completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology… To talk to Lysenko was like trying to explain the differential calculus to a man who did not know his twelve times table.” Lysenko in turn denounced Western scientists as bourgeois imperialists. He especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists “fly lovers and people haters,” apparently too ignorant to see that basic research almost always precedes practical breakthroughs.

  Unable to silence his foreign critics, Lysenko tried to eliminate all dissent within the Soviet Union instead. He forced Russian scientists to renounce genetics, and those who refused found themselves at the mercy of the secret police. The lucky ones were simply dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state and starved in their jail cells. Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had arguably the best genetics community in the world. Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts set Russian biology back a half-century.

  Lysenko’s grip on power began to weaken after Stalin died in 1953. By 1964, he’d been deposed as the dictator of Soviet biology, and he died in 1976. His portrait continued to hang in some institutes through the Gorbachev years, but by the 1990s, the Russian people had finally put the horror and shame of Lysenkoism behind them. Or at least they thought they had.

  In 2017, four scientists in Russia wrote a journal article sounding the alarm about a resurgence in Lysenkoism. Several books and papers praising his legacy had recently appeared, bolstered by what they called “a quirky coalition of Russian right-wingers, Stalinists, a few qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church.”

  There were several reasons for the revival. For one, the hot new field of epigenetics had made Lysenko-like ideas fashionable again. But the real explanation was opposition to Western values. The four Russian scientists explained that Lysenko’s latter-day disciples “accuse the science of genetics of serving the interests of American imperialism and acting against the interests of Russia.” Science, after all, is a major component of Western culture. Lysenko the barefoot peasant had opposed Western science—ergo he must be a Russian hero. Indeed, nostalgia for the Soviet era and its anti-Western strongmen is common in Russia today. (See Vladimir Putin.) A 2017 poll found that 47 percent of Russians approved of Joseph Stalin’s character and “managerial skills,” and several of his lackeys, including Lysenko, are riding Big Joe’s coattails back to popularity.

  On the one hand, this rehabilitation is shocking. Genetics almost certainly won’t be banned in Russia again, and support for Lysenko remains a fringe movement overall. But fringe ideas can have dangerous consequences, and the new Lysenkoism distorts Russian history and glosses over the incredible damage he did in silencing and killing colleagues—to say nothing of the thousands of farmers whose crops failed because of his doctrines. The fact that even some scientists in Russia are lionizing Lysenko shows just how deep anti-Western
sentiment runs there.

  That said, there is something depressingly familiar about the Lysenko revival. Even in the Western world, ideology perverts people’s scientific beliefs all the time. Nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form, sans evolution; nearly 60 percent of Republicans attribute global temperature changes to nonhuman causes. And while there’s no real moral comparison between them, it’s hard not to hear echoes of Lysenko in Sarah Palin’s mocking of fruit-fly research in 2008. Lest liberals get too smug, several left-wing causes—genetically modified food hysteria, the “blank slate” theory of human nature—sound an awful lot like Lysenkoism redux.

  To their credit, Lysenko’s contemporaries Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs eventually sobered up and realized what monsters Stalin and his scientific henchmen were—a threat to not only science but humanity. That epiphany came awfully late, though. As Fuchs once said, “Some people grow up at fifteen, some at thirty-eight. It’s much more painful at thirty-eight.” In the meantime, Fuchs and Gold continued to loot the Manhattan Project, and do everything they could to hand Joseph Stalin an atomic bomb.

  Fuchs and Gold rendezvoused in Santa Fe again in September 1945, in the meeting described at the beginning of the chapter. World War II was over by then, but the Soviets were already ramping up for the Cold War and were even more desperate than before for atomic data.

  To Gold’s surprise, Fuchs revealed that night that he and the other British scientists at Los Alamos would be returning to England soon. (Fuchs’s excuse for slipping up to Santa Fe was in fact to pick up booze for a going-away party for the Brits; hence the clinking in the Buick: The trunk was full of bottles.) According to Gold, they talked vaguely of him visiting Fuchs in England someday, since he’d always loved Wordsworth and Shakespeare and wanted to see their homeland. Fuchs agreed that it all sounded grand. He then handed Gold a packet with data on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.