Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

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  When Raymond met with his contact in New York, he learned that he shouldn’t meet with Fuchs again but should visit Christel, tell her that Klaus should leave materials for him and that he would come for them. A sign in her window would let him know that Klaus wasn’t there, avoiding any ties in case the FBI was watching Gold.

  By now, caution was very much in order. In September, a Russian file clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected from the Russian embassy in Ottawa with a pile of documents exposing a Canadian spy ring. In the United States, Elizabeth Bentley, an American agent for the Russians, defected and began to name names. In January 1946, the KGB would order all agents connected to “Enormous,” its code name for the American atomic bomb project, to suspend activity.

  Raymond did make one more visit to Cambridge. In April 1946, he knocked on Christel’s door and learned that Klaus had returned to England and hadn’t left any materials for him. Strangely, Klaus was still at Los Alamos. Either Christel didn’t want to be bothered by Raymond anymore, or somehow Klaus had slipped a message to her. Raymond had no more contact with either of them.

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  During Fuchs’s twenty-two-month stay at Los Alamos, he produced more than fifty scientific reports. He summed up his work as a member of the “Implosion Group” for his personnel form in Los Alamos:

  I developed the theory of the jets observed in non-lens implosions, the elimination of which is necessary in order to make the type of implosion workable. I directed the work on the theory of the hydrodynamical processes in the initiator for the implosion bomb, and worked on other implosion problems.

  The theories on the jets, hydrodynamics, and the initiator were of fundamental importance in the development of the atomic bomb. As with his time in New York, Fuchs had strongly served America’s interests. He had also repeatedly betrayed its most vital national security secrets.

  CHAPTER 14

  Director, Harwell 1946

  The war’s end brought sweeping change for the British Isles. Not two months after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the government called new elections, the first in ten years. Fuchs, who was still in America, gave Max Born his proxy vote for the Labour Party, Born’s choice as well. In a landslide, voters sent the indefatigable Winston Churchill, savior of king and country, back into retirement. The detritus from the war years—food shortages, strict rationing, and lack of housing—was too strong a reminder of the misery of the 1930s depression under Churchill’s Conservatives. Even Born’s district in Edinburgh, always Tory by a large margin, swung left. The people’s choice was the quiet, contemplative leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, who had been deputy prime minister in the coalition government during the war.

  The election took place during the Potsdam Conference, where Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met to discuss the shape of postwar Europe. Midway, Attlee arrived to take Churchill’s chair at the table. Tellingly, the only veteran leader in the triumvirate was Stalin.

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  After six uncertain years, British scientists were eager to bring the benefit of the research they had conducted back to their home country.

  In two world wars, Britain’s victory had depended on the newly emerging global power of the United States. The Soviet Union, having shown its strength in defeating the Nazis in the East, was now challenging the old order in Europe by retaining control over the lands it had occupied. The Atlantic Charter, initiated and signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, had advocated decolonization. The new United Nations reinforced that dictate by guaranteeing an international platform for emerging nations, put to the test by India’s declaration of independence in 1947.

  Britannia still ruled many a wave, but the lands they washed upon were breaking free, and Britain’s stature was declining. Having an atomic weapon would free the U.K. from being dependent on the vicissitudes of the Americans for protection. It would also secure British authority and influence in the evolving new world.

  As the British mission straggled home from America, the government requisitioned a surplus Royal Air Force base near the village of Harwell as a research facility. Appointed director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment—the official name with Harwell the colloquial one—was the eminent physicist John Cockcroft, very much in the reserved and thoughtful mold of so many other British men of science. Fuchs was one of his first recruits.

  During his two years on the Manhattan Project, Fuchs’s brilliance had matured. While still at Los Alamos, the young German was named to head the Theoretical Physics Division of the British nuclear research effort. He accepted the offer but requested that it be a temporary one. He didn’t explain why he wished to maintain this flexibility. Perhaps he wanted the option of a more traditional academic career, or perhaps he thought of his long ago promise to return to Germany and help build a new country. Many of his refugee friends in London made the trip back during 1945 and 1946.

  While details were being worked out, Rudi Peierls, who had returned to the University of Birmingham, advised Fuchs on staff possibilities and the scope of the division.

  “Harwell” was a new word in everyone’s lexicon. Curious, Peierls visited it and sent “Klaus” his impressions. With an informality and comfort emulating the Americans, they now used first names in the salutations of letters, especially with colleagues who had shared the Los Alamos years. No more of the stiff British and Continental tradition of “Dear Fuchs,” “Dear Bethe,” “Dear Frisch,” and so on.

  The location of the place is very nice. It is about 15 miles almost due south of Oxford with lovely country around, but few amenities other than those provided by the place itself. Such buildings as are there now are all still the permanent buildings of the [RAF] and they are very nice. For instance, the Skinners’ house is a lovely house, although not quite of the standard of their house in Bristol. The officers’ mess has lots of clubrooms which compare very favorably indeed with Fuller’s or the Big House [at Los Alamos], both in space and standard.

  Throughout the war, bombers took off from three runways, casting silhouettes on the town of Harwell a couple of miles away, rattling its thatched-roof houses. Prior to that, cherry orchards and cornfields had interlaced green meadows, horses and sheep grazing on the undulating hills of the chalk downs. Millennia ago, the Druids offered prayers and sacrifices in mystical rituals. One of their legacies was the “White Horse,” a sleek minimalist graphic dug into the earth and outlined in white on the top of a chalk down. The graceful beauty of its striding form flowed seamlessly from the Iron Age into the Atomic.

  The similarities with Los Alamos were obvious: isolated and self-contained, with older buildings reuseable for laboratories, atomic piles, housing, and dining, and a secluded setting for top secret research. For Director Cockcroft, other characteristics were useful: a runway on which his five children could ride their bikes, and the Downs where he could stroll along the pre-Roman road that ran along the crest.

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  At the request of a U.S. government eager to retain his services, Fuchs remained at Los Alamos for six months after the British mission departed. He compared the density of the ball of fire for the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki explosions, examined the blast wave, optical data, and blast measurements at Trinity, and calculated the effect of the A-bomb on ships. When Hans Bethe stepped down from the Theoretical Division, he inherited the production of his volume on blast waves, the pressure emanating from the bomb’s core that toppled buildings and bent steel.

  Also while still in New Mexico, Fuchs advised the British when conflicts with the Americans arose. Acknowledging their past cooperation, the U.K., Canada, and the United States were trying to reach a cooperative agreement to formulate rules for declassifying some of the wartime research. At the same time, the McMahon Bill to oversee and restrict the availability of future
atomic research gained momentum in Congress.

  On Sunday, June 16, Fuchs set out for Washington, D.C., to see British officials. Afterward he visited Christel in Cambridge, where he showed slides he had taken of the Trinity test—the expansion of the ball of fire from six milliseconds to thirty seconds as it ascended into the sky, its skirt of dust on the ground, its radioactive glow. He borrowed a car from a friend, and the two drove to Cornell to see Hans Bethe. Then it was home to England.

  Administrators preferred that he travel on the Queen Mary, a two-week ocean voyage, but Harwell was impatient. He flew by bomber from Montreal on June 28 and, as requested, arrived in Harwell on July 1 to attend Cockcroft’s steering committee meeting at 9:30 a.m.

  One of his first “duty calls” as division director was to Oscar Buneman and his wife, Mary. They had moved back from Berkeley, California, and the component of the Manhattan Project there a few weeks before. Klaus found them unpacking boxes in the run-down, semidetached home assigned to them.

  Oscar was a theoretical physicist who worked under Fuchs and was almost Fuchs’s doppelgänger: a German physicist who grew up in a non-Jewish, socialist family, was sent to jail by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi flyers, and left Germany in the early 1930s. He gained entrance to Britain as a political refugee to finish his studies. Mary was a pretty, vivacious hostess who developed a sweet spot for Fuchs, whom she had met in 1944, in New York, as she and Oscar traveled to Berkeley. At that time, he had been a pale, quiet man in a somber suit. Now she hardly recognized the confident and keen Fuchs, his pallid complexion bronzed by the New Mexico sun, his clothes more stylish—so changed. She also noticed that he walked with a new air of authority.

  Now thirty-four and a naturalized British citizen, Fuchs was widely recognized as one of the top atomic physicists in the world. The refugee years, internment, poverty, and lower-status jobs faded as the auspicious future offered at Harwell lay before him.

  Even so, one administrative matter still needed sorting out. The war’s end had strengthened the government’s attitude on security. In the fall of 1946, the “Standard Conditions of Government Contracts” was revised to stipulate that hiring naturalized citizens for classified work now required a more extensive background check by MI5. Straightaway, the counterspies opened an investigation on Fuchs. They were already mindful of their long-standing hesitancy over his past—in particular, the 1934 statement by the Gestapo on his communist activities and his friendship with Hans Kahle during internment. Peierls faced the same scrutiny. He had visited Russia in 1937, after all, and still had a Russian wife.

  After heated wrangling within MI5 on past and present governmental attitudes toward security, the deputy director ordered mail inspections on both men, but they discovered nothing untoward. In early 1947, MI5 sent their security files back to the Registry in the basement of Leconfield House.

  If MI5 had done more than a mail inspection—surveillance, bugs, or phone taps—it would have come up with nothing. Fuchs didn’t follow through with the arrangement he and Raymond had made back in Santa Fe for contact in London. The risks were simply too great. For almost a year, tales of Russian spies had rocked three countries: in September 1945, in Canada, the defection of the Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko; in November 1945, in the United States, the defection of American spy, Elizabeth Bentley; and in March 1946, in Britain, the arrest of the physicist Alan Nunn May for passing nuclear secrets, implicated by Gouzenko’s documents. With the security agencies on high alert, Fuchs waited a full year before making contact in England, which was almost two years after his last meeting with Raymond.

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  By the summer of 1947, when Fuchs felt that it was reasonably safe to make contact, both his former liaison Jürgen Kuczynski and Hans Kahle had left for Germany. He managed to connect with Johanna Klopstech, an old friend probably going back to the Berlin underground days and someone he had worked with in the KPD ranks in London. On July 19, 1947, they walked through three-hundred-year-old Richmond Park, a famous red deer habitat established by King Charles I. Under the ancient, spreading oaks, on the sunny summer afternoon, Johanna gave Klaus the date, location, and signals for a rendezvous with a new agent.

  The location was the Nags Head pub across from the Wood Green tube station, a distant suburb of London. On September 27, 1947, at 8:00 p.m., Fuchs was to meet his new handler, “Eugene.” To be sure there was no surveillance, Eugene checked out the location a few days before. To reach Wood Green, both men traveled in the opposite direction, then doubled back by bus and underground. As the fog rolled in, Eugene exited the tube station a few minutes early and waited by a bus stop reading a newspaper. He kept an eye out for the man who could be Fuchs. He saw someone tall and thin, with “his head held high,” come around the corner and go into the pub. Surely it was Fuchs. He continued to watch for anyone who could be following him, and once assured that he was not being watched, he opened the door to meet the aromas of beer and tobacco in the pub.

  Klaus was on a stool at the bar, drinking a beer and reading a newspaper as prescribed; Eugene carried the agreed-upon red book. He sat farther down the bar and ordered a beer. They exchanged the conversational passwords. Soon, Klaus finished his beer and left, and after a minute Eugene followed, barely having enough time to enjoy the warmth of the pub. When Eugene caught up with the slow-walking Klaus, they exchanged names and started to get to know each other. Klaus handed Eugene some documents on the production of plutonium, and Eugene handed him cigarette paper (easily swallowed if necessary) with a list of questions, which Klaus read, memorized quickly, and handed back.

  At this meeting, Eugene offered him two hundred pounds as gratitude and as extra cash because Moscow knew he was now financially responsible for his father, his brother in Switzerland, and his nephew. Klaus would accept only a hundred pounds and later said he took it to prove his “loyalty.” Other than travel money early on, it was the only money he ever accepted.

  They then set up the next meeting. This would be their routine: about every three to four months, 8:00 p.m., second Saturday of the month. If one of them missed a meeting, the backup was a month later. Throughout, Klaus never asked Eugene for his real name or any personal information.

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  MI5 had undertaken its security review of Fuchs without appreciating the expanding scope of the research at Harwell. The public objective, and what MI5 knew, was to harness nuclear energy for domestic use. Harwell had an in-house pile (or nuclear reactor) to experiment with producing plutonium for this purpose. This pile had another use as well: plutonium harvested for energy production could just as well be harvested for use in an atomic bomb. Prime Minister Attlee kept this program a deep secret for years.

  The British thought they had secured access to American scientific technology through the 1943 Quebec Agreement. Signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, it promised that the two countries would share in “full and effective cooperation.” Under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, research conducted with this open-access policy created an atomic bomb against high odds. The British scientists, instrumental in the ultimate success, had paid for the access by waiving all patent rights.

  But the U.S. Army now had another objective—to preserve its monopoly on atomic energy. And with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the U.S. government easily relegated the Quebec Agreement to the past. It ordered a report on the extent of the British physicists’ knowledge, the September 1945 report concluding,

  The extent of the technical knowledge of the Project by British personnel cannot readily be determined. . . . It is safer to assume, and more nearly correct, that everything which is common knowledge in this laboratory is known also to the British. . . . This full knowledge of the local project cannot be doubted [because the British mission had] general access to (1) the Document Room, (2) the various local sites, and (3) the organized meetings of the local project.

 
In August 1946, Congress enacted the McMahon Bill to reshape the future. A colleague in the United States wrote to Fuchs of the demise of the collaboration between the allies:

  As a result of the passage of the McMahon Bill, there has been a considerable tightening up of all access to information relating to Atomic Energy. For instance, the few people remaining at Los Alamos will only be allowed access to the material previously available to them, but they are not to be allowed access to new material. This, of course, is not really serious at present, but it indicates the way things are developing.

  The new U.S. policy meant that the British scientific program would require more effort than appreciated at first. Nonetheless, buoyed by wartime wisdom and peacetime enthusiasm, the British moved forward on their own to initiate what would prove to be a huge industrial endeavor: reactors, diffusion plants, and high-speed centrifuges and compressors. Harwell was one of three main divisions in the section for atomic energy under the Ministry of Supply.

  Fuchs’s Theoretical Division with its fifteen to twenty physicists was integral to the success of the overall effort. They solved whatever theoretical problems arose, worked on the diffusion plant under construction, and pursued fundamental research on nuclear reactors for the peaceful use of atomic energy. He committed himself to running the division.