Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  The Watchers did pick up Fuchs on his return to King’s Cross at 7:10 a.m. They noted his trip to Paddington Station, a phone call, and breakfast at the station. A man joined him. They ate and paid the bill, and Fuchs took the 9:15 train to Didcot. The Watchers followed his breakfast companion, and they found that his life was about as exciting as Fuchs’s. He went to the men’s room, took the tube to Trafalgar Square, visited a number of bookstores specializing in scientific texts, ending up at a branch of Butterworth’s where he spent the next three and a half hours in the Scientific Research Department. After having a bite to eat and getting his backpack from the coatroom at Paddington, he boarded the 5:35 p.m. train to Didcot. Such was the humdrum of a researcher at Harwell—and those who watched.

  A few days later, the esteemed Danish physicist Niels Bohr arrived to give a lecture. Because Cockcroft was busy, Fuchs played host, driving him to Cambridge and then to London to see James Chadwick, the man who had directed the British mission in America during the war.

  * * *

  —

  On November 25, Martin cabled Patterson in Washington that “all necessary clearance has been obtained for the interrogation.” Three weeks later, MI5 officers gathered along with Perrin. They decided that Jim Skardon, their top interrogator, would meet with Fuchs on Wednesday, December 21. If he wanted to confess and needed assurances, they authorized Skardon to tell him that “his position can only be improved by complete frankness.” If they were forced to dismiss him from Harwell, they would give Emil Fuchs’s move to Leipzig as the reason, ideally blunting any objections from colleagues. With his new chair at the University of Liverpool, Skinner would probably welcome Fuchs there.

  Dick White outlined the strategy, saying that Skardon should accuse Fuchs of being a spy and focus on his activities in New York. Skardon, White argued, needed to convince Fuchs that they knew he was a spy and that the inquiry didn’t arise simply because the Russians had detonated a bomb. Once again, there were concerns that the solidity of their evidence against Fuchs might compromise the long-standing American decryption program Venona.

  Robertson put the Watchers and Listeners on alert for the twenty-first, not only for Fuchs, but for Yapou, Malleson, and Peierls as well. He established that Fuchs should not be detained if he were to leave the country before the interrogation. If the outcome of the interrogation was unfavorable, however, the Metropolitan Police (Special Branch) was “to detain FUCHS on any pretext if he is seen to be intending to leave the country.”

  On December 21, Skardon took the train from Paddington and arrived in Didcot at 10:27 a.m. Arnold met him and drove to Harwell, where Arnold introduced him to Cockcroft. The latter had been briefed on the interrogation and possible reactions.

  Robertson gave Arnold strict instructions not to forewarn Fuchs. So, Arnold came to Fuchs’s office around 11:00 and asked the physicist to accompany him. Someone wanted to speak to him about his father. Arnold walked with Fuchs to his office, introduced him to a tall, thin man named Jim Seddon (Skardon’s alias), and departed. Skardon opened up by explaining the security risk with his father moving to Leipzig. Fuchs then described his youth in Germany for over an hour. Suddenly, in the midst of this recitation, Skardon broke in and accused him of spying. Fuchs, somewhat stunned, replied, “I don’t think so.” Skardon continued to prod him until they broke for lunch at 12:45. Skardon wanted Fuchs to eat alone so that he could take time to reflect on what he had said.

  Fuchs had other plans. The controlled and contained Fuchs, seemingly unfazed, went to the Skinners’, where Erna fixed him a lunch of soft foods. Having broken the plate for his front teeth, he was in significant discomfort. He called a dentist in Oxford to schedule an appointment, then went back to Arnold’s office.

  In the afternoon, Skardon made it clear that the Ministry of Supply planned to remove him from Harwell because of his father. The Ministry didn’t know about the spying, though, and with a favorable report from him on his espionage activities, he might be able to stay at Harwell. The interview ended at 3:45.

  Shortly after the interrogation broke up, Skardon called Leconfield House to say that Fuchs had confirmed much of what was known about him but denied being a spy. He then returned to London for a debriefing at 8:00 p.m. Robertson alerted the Listeners, Watchers, and Arnold to pay special attention to Fuchs’s reactions and movements.

  The Listener on Fuchs’s office tap recorded that he seemed preoccupied on his return to his office. When a man came into his office reminding him of the division’s Christmas tea party, he departed and returned an hour and a half later. Then he left for home. Part of the evening he spent at the Skinners’. The rest of the evening was a blank. He wasn’t home by midnight, when the Listeners signed off. When he came in wasn’t recorded.

  Deputy Chief Guy Liddell summarized MI5’s evening meeting with Skardon in his diary:

  He [Fuchs] went over the whole ground, beginning with his early career, FUCHS admitted everything that we knew and, in fact, volunteered the information with certain additions. He had been associated with the KPD in his activities against the Nazis and after Hitler came into power he went to Paris where he had been in touch with Otto Katz and others. He had not, however, engaged in any such activities in this country, to which he was extremely grateful for the hospitality that it had extended to him, and for his naturalisation. Finally, Skardon came to the point, when he suggested that FUCHS had been passing information to the Russians. FUCHS smiled and said he did not quite understand. Skardon then put the point quite bluntly, when FUCHS denied flatly that he had ever done anything of the kind; he could not see why he should want to. Skardon then took him very carefully over the ground during the period when he was in America, and told him that our information was positive and that we could not disclose our informants, and said that if it was not FUCHS it “could only be his twin brother.” FUCHS said that he could offer no explanation as to how this mistake occurred. He admitted having visited his sister and even possibly to have taken papers with him; he could not conceive, however, that his sister would have betrayed him, even if she had an opportunity to do so.

  Liddell further noted that when Skardon asked Fuchs why he went to see Arnold, Fuchs explained that his father was very outspoken, and if he was dissatisfied with the “Soviet zone,” he could make a fuss, even be arrested. He wanted Arnold to know of this possibility. He hadn’t recognized the potential for pressure on himself. Liddell’s conclusion:

  FUCHS demeanor throughout was wholly consistent with guilt or with his innocence and we are, therefore, left with an extremely awkward situation on our hands.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, the Listeners came back on at 8:00 and heard Fuchs get up at 8:45. Erna’s call to him mid-morning at the office centered on herself, telling him that “she didn’t know how she was going to get through the day until 3:20 when ELAINE [her daughter] went.” Her remedy was lunch with him, suggesting scrambled eggs because of his teeth. She relayed an interesting piece of information. She “told him what a heavy sleeper he was—she had telephoned for about 11/2 hours the night before about 2 a.m.!”

  After midnight the microphone in his house recorded a knock on the front door that he also didn’t answer.

  The bugs and phone checks left many unanswered questions. Who knocked on the door? Was he at home when Erna called at 2:00 a.m.? He could have been. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he didn’t answer her calls. Did he go someplace after visiting her? Did he simply drive around and ponder?

  MI5 did not address these mysteries the next day, and the Watchers and the Listeners contributed nothing more. MI5’s records focused on the outcome of the interview.

  Martin boiled it down in a cable to Washington:

  FUCHS volunteered or admitted all facts except those deduced from [VENONA].

  He flatly denied espionage and admitted no contacts which might suggest
he was unconscious source.

  We shall re-interrogate.

  Meeting with Directorate Atomic Energy December 28th will decide disposal.

  Please inform F.B.I. Stress value of any new information on network they may have.

  No one questioned Fuchs’s ease of delivery. From Skardon’s notes his presentation seemed smooth, organized, and lucid, rehearsed almost—especially his recitation of his background. No unintentional slips of names or details. No entanglement in a web of lies. No crack for MI5 to widen. Skardon’s accusation that he had spied did make him pause. But a bit of a surprised response would be expected.

  The next day Perrin came over to Leconfield House to talk with Liddell. They decided that the negative outcome required an analysis of the evidence—two columns, with the raw information in one and MI5’s explanation of each piece in the other. Perrin wanted to separate accusations of Fuchs’s spying from the question of what to do with him, and he wanted to resolve the latter quickly.

  At the embassy in Washington, Patterson reacted with disappointment. Complying with Martin’s request, he spent several hours at FBI headquarters searching for anything new to help but came away empty-handed. He ventured to Martin that although Fuchs’s guilt wasn’t definite, all signs still pointed to him.

  Most of MI5 felt even more certain than Patterson. The 10:30 meeting on the twenty-eighth at Shell Mex House included a full roster: Portal, Cockcroft, Perrin, Liddell, White, Skardon, and Martin. Skardon reviewed the information from the interrogation, and others dissected the evidence.

  Martin’s minutes noted a difficult moment when Portal suggested that he and Cockcroft interview Fuchs to get him to confess. He wanted to pledge to Fuchs that if he confessed, “no legal or repressive action would be taken against him for his activities in New York.” Dick White quickly pointed out a number of problems with the suggestion and gently reestablished the responsibility for the interrogation within MI5. The question of what was to become of Fuchs was deferred once again until after Skardon’s next round with Fuchs.

  That afternoon the MI5 group reviewed the morning’s discussion. Their first concern was to maintain Fuchs’s impression that MI5 would not inform the Ministry of Supply about the espionage allegations. Their second was to disabuse Portal firmly about interrogating Fuchs. They spun a rationale to offer Portal: he had to disassociate himself so he couldn’t be questioned by Parliament or the press about the source material. He needed to maintain deniability.

  Another problem, quietly brewing, brought the meeting to an end with a tense discussion. The decoders in Arlington had just identified a Venona message that referred to a trip Goose, Rest’s handler, made to Rest’s sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1944. Because of a corrupt number group, it wasn’t clear if a certain sentence referred to Rest’s departure on that date or his sister’s. If it was Rest’s, Fuchs’s movements did not fit the timeline in the messages. He was already in Los Alamos then. Liddell reflected in his diary, “It is evident we are on somewhat shifting sand, and that it is never possible to be certain that we have got the correct solution unless we have all the groups in the sentence. This is rather disturbing.”

  In the midst of his uncertainty, Skardon’s second interrogation of Fuchs took place on December 30.

  V

  RESULTS

  Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London

  CHAPTER 19

  Disposal Again, London, January 1950

  As the second half of the twentieth century began, the question looming over MI5 was what to do about Klaus Fuchs. They had no hard evidence to support prosecution, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. A new episode in the five-month saga of Fuchs’s investigation—the interrogations—had unfolded in just the last two weeks.

  On January 2, Liddell reviewed the case for Prime Minister Attlee. He reminded the PM that after careful analysis MI5 had determined that interrogating Fuchs promised the best resolution and that Fuchs’s report of his father’s move to the Soviet zone opened up this option. They had undertaken two interrogations, so far with no results. The interrogator had conveyed three important “facts to him”—that his father’s move jeopardized his remaining at Harwell; that MI5 knew he had spied; and that MI5 had not relayed his spying activities to his employer, the Ministry of Supply (which wasn’t true). Fuchs’s demeanor throughout was ambiguous, consistent with either guilt or innocence, and the government had yet to make a final decision of how to dispose of him. But they had decided that retaining Fuchs at Harwell was an unacceptable risk. How to dispose of him and when were the questions that vexed them.

  January 4, 1950, became the day of decision. The Ministry of Supply’s directors along with Guy Liddell met at 4:00 p.m. at Shell Mex House to finalize Fuchs’s disposal. They outlined three steps:

  Harwell’s director, John Cockcroft, will inform Herbert Skinner, Fuchs’s direct boss, that Fuchs must leave Harwell because of his father’s move. Cockcroft will ask Skinner if he can find a position for him at the University of Liverpool, where Skinner will take a chair at the end of March. If all agreed, the government would publicly indicate Fuchs’s departure to take another job. Nothing more said.

  Cockcroft will tell Fuchs that he must resign because of his father’s move, that MI5 is “adamant” about that.

  Fuchs will prepare to hand over the department to his successor and can leave when Skinner does so in March, the risk to his staying not high, because he can pass any information he has to the Russians “as long as he is alive.”

  They mulled over whether they should interrogate him one more time, perhaps softening him up by confronting his obvious concerns about implicating his sister. They could guarantee him that “anything he told us would not be passed to the Americans.” Of course, the gathering cynically noted, the Americans already knew, and MI5 could do nothing to stop the U.S. government from prosecuting Christel if it had evidence. Protecting Christel wasn’t MI5’s problem; getting Fuchs to confess was.

  In fact, MI5 had no real interest in absolving her. As Sir Percy Sillitoe, MI5’s director general, declared, “We ourselves think the Heinemans [sic] were in it up to the neck.”

  * * *

  —

  The steps unfolded on January 10. Some time after lunch, Fuchs met with Cockcroft and heard that he had to resign from Harwell because of his father’s move.

  Michael Perrin talked to Cockcroft about the discussion, and as he reported to MI5 officer John Marriott, the time limit Cockcroft gave Fuchs for his departure was vague. Arthur Martin and Marriott journeyed to Harwell to hear Cockcroft’s account of the meeting.

  Cockcroft’s account disturbed them. He had offered to help Fuchs find a university position, perhaps with Skinner in his new post in Liverpool or, as he added at his own discretion, maybe one at the University of Adelaide in Australia, where there was also a post. Fuchs, in turn, admitted that he had thought of taking such a position for some time. He had delayed the decision while waiting for results from the “fast” reactor, a pet interest that would lead to exploiting atomic energy for large-scale commercial nuclear power. These reactors generate more fissile material than they use and so are also known as “breeder” reactors. Reprocessing the excess creates more plutonium to fuel another reactor and leaves less nuclear waste to deal with, a boon to civilization.

  Cockcroft suggested a six-month leave of absence starting at Easter and told him that only he, Perrin, Perrin’s boss, Lord Portal, and Arnold knew that he was to resign, something MI5 was adamant about unless Fuchs gave them further information about his life and background. Otherwise, they could help reverse the Ministry’s decision.

  The suggestion of Fuchs’s teaching in Australia, the lack of specificity for the basis of his departure—whether a university offer or his father’s move—and especially the delay until Easter seriously aggravated Marriott.
He told Cockcroft that he would speak with the DG, Sillitoe, to determine if MI5 would maintain surveillance until Easter.

  Folded into this mix of aggravations were tentative travel plans for Fuchs. Just prior to Klaus’s conversation with Cockcroft on January 10, he had spoken with Erna, and she had expressed concern that he might be getting sick. He thought not. Why then, she wanted to know, was he now “all wonky” again? He had been much better. What was the mystery? A long meeting, he explained. Maybe he would take off the whole of next week. Erna suggested leaving on Monday night.

  Erna’s chitchats the next day exposed another travel option—a potential trip to Switzerland with some Harwell neighbors. Erna doubted whether he would go, she told her friends. “He’s in such a state of indecision about everything, I just don’t know. I’ve been trying to push him hard.”

  A few hours later, MI5 picked up hints from another phone conversation between Erna and Klaus that he might have told her about “his forced resignation.” Herbert wanted him to come over for a chat that evening. In all probability, Cockcroft had, in accordance with the MI5 disposal plan, briefed Herbert on Klaus’s resignation, making it equally likely that he leaked the information to Erna.

  The proposed travel interrupted James Robertson’s plans to reduce surveillance further, something the overtaxed MI5 team desperately needed. With Fuchs informed about his resignation, Robertson had decided to eliminate the Listeners at Newbury. He saw no need for fast feedback to MI5 or the SF reception equipment (the small washer on the phone that kept the connection open). The regular taps on Fuchs’s home and office phones, and on the Skinners’, would continue to chronicle life in Harwell, picking up the usual dinners, lunches, teas, and an upcoming party at Klaus’s prefab for a departing colleague. As for travel outside the U.K., MI5 advised that Fuchs not be restrained. They couldn’t justify it; they had no hard evidence.