Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Fuchs called Henry Arnold too, requesting to see him. Arnold in turn called MI5 once again and was told to “plead ignorance.” Fuchs “does not suspect any punitive action against him,” Robertson said. And he had no reason to. His life rolled on exactly as promised. Arnold reminded Robertson that Fuchs and Skardon had arranged a meeting for the next afternoon at 3:30 at Harwell. Arnold needed to know if he should make any arrangements. Robertson confided that Skardon might not come.

  When Arnold and Fuchs met in mid-afternoon, Fuchs asked if he had seen Skardon’s report, and Arnold pleaded ignorance as ordered, even, as he put it to Robertson afterward, “feigning lack of understanding of FUCHS’ question.”

  At Harwell, the tension was filled with secrets.

  CHAPTER 21

  Arrest, London, February 1950

  February 1 was a scramble at MI5. They planned for an imminent arrest but were nagged by second thoughts. The most vexing question had moved from “Can we get a confession?” to “Will inducement scuttle a prosecution?” The legal issue was whether Fuchs’s confession was truly voluntary.

  MI5’s legal adviser, B. A. Hill, declared there was a prima facie case for prosecution. In a meeting that day with the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, Commander Leonard Burt from Scotland Yard, and Skardon, Hill outlined the evidence and the inducement problem, specifically Skardon’s quid pro quo on December 21 and Cockcroft’s on January 10, the only ones documented. Although requiring the attorney general’s approval, Sir Theobald stated assuredly that these inducements “would not prevent the voluntary statement being admitted in evidence.”

  That afternoon, Hill and the others met with the prosecuting attorney Christmas Humphreys, an esteemed barrister and the founder of the Buddhist Society of England, whose tall, lanky profile was a valued asset in the courtroom. Humphreys would present the formal charges for the Crown after Fuchs’s arrest.

  In the meantime, Fuchs, unsuspicious, kept his schedule at Harwell. Or so they hoped. The worry persisted: Would he flee? With Skardon’s assurances that Fuchs had no such intentions, Scotland Yard left well enough alone. It was legally in charge of the actual arrest, not MI5.

  * * *

  —

  The setup began early on February 2. Perrin called Fuchs in the morning to ask him to come to London for a 3:00 meeting at Shell Mex House. Fuchs told him that he had a full day planned but said if it was urgent, he would do so. Perrin assured him that it was.

  MI5 used that morning to settle the charges against their confessed spy. Hill consulted with the director of public prosecutions at 11:45, and they laid out two counts: one of espionage in the United States in 1945, and one of espionage in Britain in 1947, both contrary to the Official Secrets Act. The one related to the United States, they decided, required approval from the Foreign Office or the prime minister. Hill immediately called Dick White and Guy Liddell, who rushed from Leconfield House to the Foreign Office to meet with Michael Perrin and Roger Makins, a top official there. Time was getting on.

  Neither MI5 nor the Foreign Office wanted the U.S. charge included: MI5 because of possible embarrassment to the FBI, the Foreign Office because of the appearance of political maneuvering. Perrin carried a contrary point from his boss, Lord Portal, that if not included,

  it was certain that the arrest of FUCHS in the U.K. would cause an outcry against British security, and that even though subsequent disclosures would make it plain that the major leakage took place from Los Alamos, a good deal of the original mud was likely to stick.

  Portal’s point overrode the objections. At 2:35, White and Liddell called Hill at Leconfield House. When they arrived back about fifteen minutes later, they heard that Sir Theobald was still leery of the American charge. Hill enlisted Liddell to convince him.

  Fuchs arrived at Shell Mex just after 3:00 p.m. to see Perrin. He strolled through the long marble lobby and climbed into the rickety lift that took him to the fourth floor. Being in a restricted area, he passed through the Bostwick folding security gate, the so-called cage. In Perrin’s anteroom, he sat and waited.

  Perrin was at Shell Mex by 2:30 and expected Commander Burt with a warrant. When he didn’t arrive, Perrin anxiously made a few calls, unaware of the wrangling over the charges.

  At 3:45, Burt finally showed up in Perrin’s office. Perrin called Fuchs in, introduced him to Burt, and slipped quietly out the side door. He had insisted beforehand that he did not want to witness the arrest.

  As Fuchs stood there, Burt matter-of-factly read the charges, cautioned him, and arrested him. It was over in a couple of minutes. Fuchs, making no reply, slumped into Perrin’s chair, astounded. As he had said earlier to Erna, he thought he had it under control.

  He told Burt that he wanted to speak to Perrin—“the smooth Perrin [who] got me unsuspecting,” as he put it later—who opened the door for him to face the police and disappeared without a word.

  When Perrin stepped back in, Fuchs said the first thing that came to him: “You realise what this means?”

  “I realise it means that we shall be deprived of your services at Harwell,” Perrin answered.

  “It means more than that,” said Fuchs. “Harwell will not be able to go on.”

  He later said of the remark, “Silly, isn’t it?” It was silly, but his ego was a useful protection at that moment.

  * * *

  —

  On that rainy afternoon, Burt marched Fuchs, ashen and dazed, off to the Bow Street prison, where he was formally charged and processed. Police took away his eyeglasses and personal ID papers. The magistrate asked him if he needed help with legal representation, and in a low voice Fuchs replied that he didn’t know anyone. He spent the night in a cell, talking to an “old hand” whose petty offenses had occasioned multiple arrests. Recalled Fuchs, “In spite of his long experience, . . . he seemed much more shaken by the Court than I was.”

  Burt traveled on to Harwell, where he searched through the prefab, the office, and the safe for an hour and a half removing possible evidence. Robertson collected his own cache of papers there the next day.

  A master of understatement, Liddell wrapped up the day with a line in his diary: “According to what we heard from Burt afterwards, FUCHS was not in any sense in a communicative mood: he seemed stunned by events.”

  The next morning, February 3, Fuchs was remanded into custody before the Bow Street magistrate under his full and proper name, Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs. The judge asked Humphreys, the prosecutor, whether the defendant could afford representation and was assured that he could. The magistrate asked that Fuchs bear this in mind because come next Friday, when the case would be heard, neither the magistrate nor Humphreys wanted to hear that he didn’t have an attorney. Fuchs’s only response was to request his glasses and his money. And then it was on to Brixton Prison until his hearing in a week.

  Fuchs had spent most of the last ten years inside a fence—from imprisonment in internment, to the confines of top secret research at Los Alamos and Harwell—but this new one was the least forgiving.

  The morning’s short court appearance made Fuchs’s arrest public, the information limited to the charges of two counts of espionage, but no details. MI5 expected calls from the press. MI5’s legal adviser, B. A. Hill, worried about John Cockcroft’s making a statement and asked Perrin to tell him to say only that the “case was now sub judice,” meaning under judicial review and therefore off-limits for discussion elsewhere. Hill similarly advised all other personnel.

  When parsing the charges against Fuchs, Lord Portal at the Ministry of Supply had warily evoked the noxious element “blame.” The same dread of facing up to who was responsible for this egregious breach had consumed Guy Liddell, Dick White, and their friend Roger Makins from the Foreign Office the day after Fuchs’s confession. That evening, they pondered how they had overlooked Fuchs, and they fixed on the vetting in 1946 when he arr
ived at Harwell. They recalled “the considerable amount of argument” from the junior officers, but that the information against Fuchs didn’t “add up to anything positive.” In fact, the officers had urged “divorcing” Fuchs from contact with atomic energy, while those at the top had concluded that “the security risk is very slight.”

  But the “blame game” was about to take on an international dimension.

  Within a day, the Fuchs case was front-page news in every city and town in America, feeding off brief reports from London and the FBI’s seemingly innocuous two-line news item: “A case involving Dr. Fuchs was developed by the British on information originally furnished to them by the F.B.I. The F.B.I. has been co-operating very closely with the British on this case.” The New York Times carried a lead story that juxtaposed the FBI’s rapid exposure of Fuchs’s long-held communist sympathies against ostensible British ineptitude. A senator “declared himself unable to throw light on the fact that the British apparently had not learned of this background, while Dr. Fuchs worked for years in atomic matters.” Another said, “It is re-assuring to note that our own F.B.I. has uncovered this information of the alleged disclosures.” The hoopla built the case for placing the blame exactly where the British had feared that it would land. The verdict: the Brits had been lax with security.

  An American lawyer, writing to a British colleague after reading the article, feared “irreparable damage to Anglo-American relations,” with “misguided people” using it to cut off international collaboration, even with trusted allies.

  * * *

  —

  When the news broke, the Skinners’ maid Grace could do little more than answer the waves of phone calls and fend off news reporters. She coped alone. The Skinners had left for Liverpool the morning before to set up for their move. On hearing the news, Herbert phoned to tell her to say nothing to anyone “about anything that everybody doesn’t know.” They would be home sometime the next day.

  By the time the Skinners arrived in Harwell the next afternoon, Rudi Peierls had already made his way to London and entered the high redbrick walls of Brixton Prison on the south side of the Thames. He found Klaus, No. 994, lodged in the hospital, not because of illness, but because, according to the warden, it offered better accommodations than a dismal cell. The more probable reason was a suicide watch.

  The night before, Rudi had called Scotland Yard, talked with Commander Burt, Fuchs’s arresting officer, and asked to visit Fuchs. Burt, with MI5’s consent, agreed, requesting Peierls to speak with him first. For an hour, Burt interviewed Peierls, the latter professing shock and disbelief, a Harwell-wide reaction. He ran through his background with Fuchs, including a sense—not sure from where—that Fuchs undertook anti-Nazi activities in Birmingham. Peierls considered Fuchs’s politics “no different from that of the general run of his colleagues.” To Burt’s question whether he would help them, Peierls deferred. He recognized that the authorities must have good evidence to take this course, he told Burt. He wanted to make his own determination of Fuchs’s guilt first. If he agreed, he would help.

  Burt relayed to MI5 that Peierls’s sincerity and candor impressed him. He also said Peierls’s description of Fuchs offered nothing they didn’t already know.

  After the interview, Peierls saw Fuchs in the room of the deputy governor for the allotted fifteen minutes. An MI5 officer, a Scotland Yard policeman, and the deputy chief warden stayed with them. Smith, the policeman, took notes on tidbits he gathered from the softly spoken conversation. There was the functional: need for underwear and books; a woman wanting to visit (Erna); Herbert’s offer of financial help. And there were the difficult questions. Peierls asked Fuchs why he had spied. He answered, “Knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind.”

  Peierls pressed him to tell the authorities all he could, and Fuchs said he had told them a good deal.

  Smith noted that the conversation sounded “a trifle embarrassed” and twice used “indifferent” to describe Fuchs’s response to offers of help. He mentioned no other emotional responses. In Smith’s eavesdropping account, the characteristically quiet Fuchs now seemed numb.

  Within a day or so, Scotland Yard installed a microphone in the visiting room.

  Peierls’s phone call that night with the Skinners described a Fuchs who was depressed at the beginning of the visit and upset at the end. The three of them reviewed whether Klaus wanted to see Erna and whether the Skinners should go. That was one of Rudi’s questions that Klaus had met with indifference. The Skinners thought they might go after the weekend, and Rudi assured them, “I don’t think you can do any harm to him whatever you do.”

  The Skinners had yet to comprehend the maelstrom that would soon overwhelm them: constant phone calls and knocks on the door from reporters, rumors about themselves, queries from people who wanted to make movies—and jarring realizations of betrayal.

  It seems that Klaus had told Erna details of his passing information on diffusion. The day after they returned home, Herbert claimed to a friend, “I know everything about it; we have been through hell for the last two weeks.” They thought they knew the full story. They felt the hurt and betrayal as more secrets tumbled out.

  The following day, Peierls wrote Commander Burt a letter that began, “I want to say first of all that I can now undertake to help you in any way you wish without reservations.” He wondered, though, if Klaus had “cracked up” and imagined what he confessed. Klaus’s work pressure for the last two years had been extreme, and he had been seriously ill. Should one believe everything in his statement?

  Peierls admitted confusion too. When he had asked Klaus whether, during their time in America, he really believed in the superiority of the Russian system, Klaus said that he did. He added, he would have stood up and said what was wrong with communism once it had taken over. Peierls thought this remark too foolish and naive to fit the Klaus he knew.

  The letters Peierls wrote to Hans Bethe and Niels Bohr restated much of what he had written in his letter to Burt. Did Klaus have “hallucinations”? To Bethe, Peierls also worried about the political atmosphere in the United States with the “anti-British outburst in the American Press. . . . Tough times ahead for everyone.” To Bohr, he wondered if it was possible to maintain secrecy without “creating the atmosphere of a totalitarian country in which everyone is ready to suspect his best friend of being an informer.” At what point does the price of security exceed the value of having it? he asked.

  Peierls’s prediction of “tough times ahead” was hardly overstated, given the atmosphere. Anyone who had worked with Fuchs during the 1940s came under scrutiny and was considered unreliable, including Oscar Buneman and Derek Behrens (Mary’s cousin). Oscar was the subject of an active MI5 investigation, as was Derek. Henry Arnold wrote to Oscar that “his position in Harwell also could no longer be guaranteed.” Oscar soon left, and Derek was transferred to an administrative position. MI5 put mail and/or phone warrants on Peierls for years without a hint of suspicion ever arising. Frank Kearton, one of the four at the British mission in New York, called 1950 “the worst time in my life.”

  Peierls tried to reconcile the Fuchs he had known with the communist dogmatist he now heard. He settled on a “psyche of overwhelming importance concealed under that cloak of self-effacing modesty.” Peierls didn’t reckon with the self-assurance of the true believers, those select few who know “the Truth.” He needed to look no further than all the religious wars throughout the centuries that had championed a “truth” that made devastation, widespread suffering, and bloodshed acceptable to those who inflicted it. For Klaus the Truth was equality and social justice. It had blinded many besides him to the millions murdered by way of Stalin’s show trials, gulag, and cruel policies that led to mass starvation.

  To Genia Peierls, it seemed that Klaus had taken the fate of t
he world on himself.

  * * *

  —

  And so the time slowly rolled on to the hearing on February 10. Brixton meted out Fuchs’s perquisite of one visitor a day within specified hours. A list formed: the Skinners; his former hosts in Bristol, the Gunns (though separately, because they had divorced); a cousin who was a refugee; Corder Catchpool, a Quaker who sent Emil Fuchs updates; and Erna’s friends Vera Pohle and Tatiana Malleson. They all received their twenty or so minutes with the prisoner, which left far too many hours vacant for him to fill. No other close friends from Harwell came, and he heard that they said they didn’t want to intrude. He interpreted that as people were waiting until after the trial to decide about him.

  After a bit of high drama with Erna’s making a midnight call to Arnold, asleep and exhausted, the Skinners went to Brixton on February 8, the warden allowing them to visit in tandem for twenty-five minutes. The bug didn’t capture much except for Erna’s tears mixed with a desultory conversation about finances, lawyers, doctors, and her mother’s cable from New York City that her father was in the hospital, very ill. Erna was unable to go there because of the Klaus “cloud.” She did ask him “what had happened at the finish” but didn’t get an answer.

  She asked the warden for a glass of water. At the end of the visit, when the warden asked her if she wanted more water, she said she needed a stiff drink.