Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Robertson postponed the additional decrease in surveillance until after Fuchs and Erna Skinner returned from their three-day vacation that would start on January 16.

  The Skinners’ daughter, Elaine, always maintained that a chaperone—one of her mother’s regular companions—accompanied Klaus and her mother on these outings, of which there had been a few others. MI5’s surveillance didn’t confirm that version. Klaus and Erna timed their travels to coincide with Herbert’s now regular trips to the University of Liverpool.

  * * *

  —

  Skardon met with Fuchs for the third time on January 13. As with the previous interrogations, Skardon checked on a few details such as Fuchs’s address in New York and his friendships there, both important to Arthur Martin’s efforts to match up information and liaise with Washington and the FBI.

  As sure as MI5 was of Fuchs’s espionage, they weren’t sure enough. The intelligence from the Venona decodes received six months earlier had to reconcile with those from the administrative files of the British Diffusion Mission in New York. Martin had waded through layers of bureaucracy to track down the files and then dig through them. The Venona messages gave him Fuchs’s dates of travel to Los Alamos, mode of transportation, specifics on a call to Kristel in November 1944 while in Chicago on a business trip, visits by his handler to Kristel, worries of the handler when “Rest” disappeared from New York.

  Everything pertaining to Rest needed to agree with Fuchs’s actual record. This circumstantial evidence was the bulk of their proof. The only hard evidence of secrets passed on was the MSN-12 document on fluctuations in the flow of nitrogen.

  Given Martin’s burden, Fuchs’s corroboration helped him, but Skardon’s goal for the meeting was to determine Fuchs’s understanding of his conversation with Cockcroft, which Skardon summarized in his report: “He had been told that he must go, but that there was nothing very urgent about it and he had not so far made any positive enquiry to find any job.”

  In this third interview, Skardon found Fuchs “completely composed.” None of the “wonkiness” that Erna had observed a few days before showed through.

  MI5 was less composed when hearing of Fuchs’s understanding about his departure. Dick White called Perrin stating that the director general “would be extremely averse” to Fuchs’s going to Australia and that if he stayed at Harwell indefinitely, MI5 would take no responsibility. The next day, a letter from the director general to the director of the Ministry of Supply diplomatically stated that Fuchs needed to leave Harwell “as soon as it is decently possible.”

  * * *

  —

  On January 19, the day that Klaus and Erna returned to Harwell from their brief retreat, he spent a few hours at the Skinners’ in the evening. One result was that the next morning Skinner called Henry Arnold requesting to see him about Klaus. Skinner also said that he wanted to speak with John Cockcroft, who apparently had said something out of turn to him, such as “he wished Fuchs had been more co-operative.” Arnold, who well understood the personalities in his charge, guessed that during his trip with Erna, Klaus had revealed his sessions with Skardon. He put off Skinner until 5:00 that evening. He needed guidance from Robertson on how to handle the situation.

  The advice was straightforward: for Arnold to acknowledge basically what Skinner already knew and no more—that is, a security officer had talked with Fuchs about his father’s move to the Russian zone and that the authorities insisted that Fuchs resign because of it. As for Cockcroft, Arnold was to tell him to admit to those points, again nothing more.

  In the convoluted world of espionage, it wasn’t that straightforward. MI5 had to coordinate three players, Arnold, Skinner, and Cockcroft, each of whom had a different level of knowledge and different concerns. MI5 didn’t trust the one in charge, Director Cockcroft, to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. A kindly academic, he seemed to lack the necessary guile. Skinner, on the other hand, had additional information from Fuchs. How inclusive it was, MI5 didn’t know. So, Arnold (whose knowledge was limited) was to tell Cockcroft that Skinner might believe that other factors had led to Fuchs’s resignation. If there were other factors (ones that Arnold himself didn’t know), Cockcroft should not reveal them to Skinner. MI5 also alerted Perrin, who knew all.

  Most important, Fuchs understood from Skardon that only MI5 knew he had spied, not Cockcroft or the Ministry of Supply—who both, of course, did know in a general way. If Klaus perceived their deceit, the scheme to get him to open up could crumble.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next few evenings, Klaus visited the Skinners to talk about the situation. The discussions ended with Herbert’s expounding on the obligations of friendship. What Klaus might have told Erna—and then she told Herbert—while on their trip was never made explicit, but whatever it was, it was sufficient to set off Herbert on one’s responsibilities to friends, how one’s actions reflect on others. Klaus later ascribed this discussion to his next decisions that determined his fate.

  On January 21, he called Henry Arnold, who wasn’t home. When Klaus reached him the next morning, he said he wanted to have a “long, quiet talk.” They made plans for lunch the following day and then discussed the Bunemans.

  Harwell, its insular environment inhabited by exceptionally talented and intelligent people, wasn’t immune to the ordinary, or maybe extraordinary, problems of everyday life, including affairs of the heart and all the attendant complications. In addition to the complexities of the Skinner relationship, the marriage of Mary and Oscar Buneman was in trouble. Mary was having an affair with one of Klaus’s staff members, and thus a close colleague of Oscar’s. The wives gossiped in their kindly, concerned way, and the Skinners and Klaus spent late nights discussing the personal as well as the professional. No one took sides. Arnold and Klaus were doing as much as they could to help, including Klaus’s promise to Oscar to help him find a new job. Everyone supported both Mary and Oscar, all the while Erna, Herbert, and Henry Arnold circled around Klaus’s situation.

  Seemingly, Arnold made his call to MI5 for guidance about the meeting with Fuchs. Robertson instructed Arnold to try to get Fuchs to open up. If Fuchs wanted a guarantee of immunity, Robertson advised, Arnold must say that he doesn’t know the details and doesn’t have the authority. If Fuchs adds information that Arnold isn’t supposed to know or information completely new to Arnold, he should listen and then make it clear to Fuchs that he has to report this information to the authorities. “Arnold should however,” forewarned Robertson, “postpone any statement to this effect until the latest possible stage of the conversation.” MI5’s idea of a caution was to wrench as much information as possible from the confessor before warning about the legal consequences.

  Arnold and Fuchs had lunch on January 23 at the Railway House Hotel, a few miles outside Harwell, close to Abingdon. Their relationship a friendly one, they chatted a while, and then Fuchs came to the point: he asked to speak to the MI5 security officer the next day. Notes from Arnold’s later call to Leconfield House suggest that Fuchs revealed more, but Arnold didn’t provide the details on the phone. The notes said that Arnold, trying not to be too optimistic, “had the impression that FUCHS wanted very much to talk and to talk a lot. Arnold thought that he might well now be ready to make a confession.” MI5 couldn’t hope for more than that.

  By 4:30 that afternoon, both men were at the Skinners’. Erna needed their help with Mary Buneman. She had fallen apart and was at the Skinners’ on her way to the hospital. Oscar was there as well. In the midst of the to-do, Henry Arnold slipped in a phone call to his deputy at Harwell to ask him to “ring Jimmy or James on 126 and leave a very cryptic message—11 a.m. as arranged prefab.”

  Arnold also talked with Erna that afternoon. She was concerned about Klaus’s level of anxiety, which seemed out of proportion to his father’s move to Leipzig, she remarked, perhaps fishing for more. He had told
her that there were other factors but they weren’t very serious. She assured Arnold of Klaus’s integrity. The rumors about Fuchs’s resignation and his father’s move to Leipzig had already started at Harwell. But the Skinners knew more. How much more was MI5’s question.

  The next morning, Skardon left London and took the train to Didcot, where Arnold picked him up, then dropped him off in the compound to walk alone on this cold and wet day to Fuchs’s prefab for the 11:00 meeting.

  It was just the two of them. Robertson had dismantled the monitoring system at Newbury, and Fuchs was probably unaware that he was more alone than he had been in months.

  Fuchs and Skardon hadn’t seen each other for ten days. The Fuchs who opened the door was a changed person to Skardon—agitated and extremely pale. Skardon said to him, “You asked to see me, and here I am.” Fuchs replied, “Yes. It’s rather up to me now.”

  A pause followed. Skardon waited, thinking that some uncertainty had unsettled Fuchs. Then Fuchs began to unburden himself. For the next two hours, he told the story of his life, from his days in the underground to his present work, of its importance to him and to Harwell, and of his friends at that institution. He stressed the belief that Russia had made the only sincere effort to defeat the Nazis. Internment had “to some extent” reinforced his view of the British government’s making shameful compromises with the Nazis (as he had explained to Walter Kellermann years earlier).

  This was their fourth interview, and previous ones had revealed much the same details to Skardon. He listened and waited as Fuchs held his head in his hands, looking haggard. Even though there was little new information, telling it seemed to drain Fuchs. There was a different emotional quality this time.

  Finally, Skardon said, “You have told me a long story providing the motives for actions, but nothing about the actions themselves.” Seeing Fuchs’s emotional stress, Skardon counseled that he relieve his conscience. Fuchs replied in a steady voice, “I will never be persuaded by you to talk.”

  Skardon suggested a lunch from a daily food truck, but Fuchs chose for them to go to Abingdon. Once behind the wheel of his MG, he drove fast and recklessly—passing vehicles within inches. At the town’s main hotel, the two men ate a quick lunch mixed with a somewhat strained, gossipy conversation about Harwell. Fuchs was distracted. After coffee in the lounge, he quickly got up, saying, “Let’s go back.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Confession, Harwell, January 1950

  When did it start?” Skardon asked when they arrived back at the prefab.

  “About the middle of 1942,” Fuchs answered, “and it continued until about a year ago.”

  Skardon was startled. MI5’s only evidence came from the Venona messages and exposed activities in New York. But if Fuchs started in 1942, it didn’t require a mathematician to add in the years for Birmingham, Los Alamos, and Harwell nor his intimate involvement in the development of the bomb for Britain and the United States.

  This second half of the narrative went on for an hour and a half, the facts tumbling out so quickly that Skardon said he didn’t take notes. Fuchs began at the beginning: his first meeting in London, which he initiated; the meetings that took place every few months; and the type of general information he passed on, first his own work and later everything he could, including the details for making the atomic bomb, “the worst thing,” he said. He told of questions from his contacts that didn’t arise from material he handed them but gave few details on his contacts whose names he didn’t know. Skardon later wrote that Fuchs understood the risk, that “he was carrying his life in his hands, but that he had done this from the time of his underground days in Germany.” He was compelled by “a duty to the world” to pass information to the Russians.

  He ended at what was the end for him—a belief in communism but disillusionment with its practice in the Soviet Union. In February 1949, he had cut the tie by missing a rendezvous. He wanted to settle in England. His sister, he stressed, knew nothing of his activities.

  At 3:55, Skardon called Arnold to say he was about to leave and had set up another interview with Fuchs for two days hence. He then proceeded to Arnold’s office, where he called MI5 at 4:30 and reported that Fuchs had made a full confession. Because the line wasn’t secure, the conversation was short. His instructions were to inform Cockcroft and return home. He would brief MI5 the next morning at 10:00 in the director general’s office. Arnold drove him to the train station.

  The lights stayed on at Leconfield House late that night as four members of the MI5 team huddled to mull over new surveillance procedures. Their first priority was to reestablish monitoring with Listeners and SF reception equipment in Newbury on a twenty-four-hour basis. The decision on observations they delayed until the next day. They informed the director general and Perrin of all developments.

  With the confession, MI5 could now issue a warrant should Fuchs try to leave the country, a worrisome but unlikely possibility. Immediate arrest wasn’t a priority. MI5 had already revealed its suspicions about his spying in the three previous interviews, and he had not fled. Skardon’s report was crucial for the next decisions.

  Arnold called Robertson at 8:00 that same evening to report suspicious activity. He had earlier noticed Fuchs in his office neatly stacking documents on his desk. “Was Fuchs planning a ‘get-away’?” Arnold wondered. Robertson proposed another interpretation: that he was preparing for his successor. They agreed that Arnold should check out Fuchs’s office if he wouldn’t be detected. The Listeners, quickly put in place, then reported that for the last half an hour Fuchs appeared very occupied with his home fire. On a 10:00 p.m. call, Robertson and Arnold discussed his entering Fuchs’s house the next day, again depending on the risk, to check for burned documents. The next morning Arnold reported a quiet night.

  Robertson called Arnold later to tell him to do no investigating, just maintain the “status quo.” No disturbances.

  * * *

  —

  Skardon’s 10:00 a.m. debrief in the director general’s office lasted one hour. The main decision was to extract as much information as possible and “to maintain FUCHS in his present state of mind, and for this state of mind to be in no way disturbed.”

  Guy Liddell’s full description of the meeting in his diary revealed no shock or hand-wringing. Besides logging in a broad sweep of the details, he pondered about what had finally made Fuchs break, ideas tossed around perhaps with his colleagues. His initial thoughts were prosaic: Cockcroft’s comment to him about his lack of frankness with the MI5 interviewer; open knowledge of his relationship with Erna; discussions with Herbert. Maybe it was all of these, he surmised, combined with Skardon’s undermining of his defenses.

  His list overlooked one key factor, perhaps because, even though MI5 had heavily depended on it all along, they had just as much undervalued it: Henry Arnold. Without Fuchs’s trust in Arnold, MI5’s highly prized confession might never have come about. In Michael Perrin’s view, it was Arnold who, “by slowly working on him and becoming almost his personal friend, got all the information out of him which really led to his arrest.”

  But it was the deeper psychology that intrigued Liddell. In thinking through why Fuchs had confessed, he noted, “In the light of what he said, it is clear that vanity plays a great part. . . . In his conversation he made it perfectly plain that in his view he was indispensable at Harwell . . . and should be retained. He evidently thinks that he can, without too much difficulty, persuade the authorities to retain his services. This is, I think, where his vanity and megalomania come in.”

  No doubt, a vain streak ran through Fuchs, and in that vulnerable moment of baring all, he relied on it to shield himself and to present his case for remaining at Harwell. He had little else to wield. That Liddell labeled it “megalomania” might have spoken more to his own understated personality than to Fuchs’s having an imperious one.

  In addition, Skardon’s offic
ial report made no mention of his promise to Fuchs to stay at Harwell if he confessed nor Cockcroft’s repetition of it, and Liddell was unaware. This factor arose that afternoon when Skardon and Robertson briefed Perrin. Perrin’s perceptive questions brought the key legal issue to the fore: inducement. It appears that Skardon had not disabused Fuchs of this quid pro quo during the confession. In keeping the tone of a comfortable, friendly chat, Skardon had not cautioned Fuchs about his legal rights either. As Robertson pointed out to Perrin when the latter asked about prosecution, “The statement so far from FUCHS had been obtained without a caution, and in circumstances in which it might possibly be argued [italics added] that there had been inducement.” That is, inducement could make legal proceedings against Fuchs invalid.

  MI5 had effectively manipulated Fuchs’s weak spot—his desire to stay at Harwell. It wasn’t the reason for his confession—that was friendships—but his vanity was just potent enough to let him believe what Skardon and Cockcroft told him: if he confessed, he could stay. Cockcroft was surely sincere; he considered Fuchs essential to Harwell. He simply repeated to Fuchs what he had been told. Skardon was anything but sincere.

  Did Fuchs confess? Yes. Did the government gain the confession legally? No, there was inducement. Could it prosecute him? Not under these circumstances.

  Skardon proposed a solution to Robertson and Perrin: to obtain a formal, written statement from Fuchs to use as evidence. With such a statement in hand, they could seriously consider prosecution.