Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  The most important deletion was “I [Fuchs] was given the chance of admitting it and staying at Harwell or of clearing out.” Humphreys thus avoided the specter of inducement.

  Reporters sent a note to Humphreys to request a copy of the confession. The director of public prosecutions denied it and asked the magistrate to declare it secret, which he did.

  Humphreys called four witnesses: Commander Burt, Henry Arnold, Michael Perrin, and Jim Skardon, the first three, one by one, substantiating the charges by summarizing Fuchs’s admissions to them. Humphreys himself contrived Skardon’s longer statement to emphasize Fuchs’s worry about “the effect of his behaviour” upon friendships at Harwell. MI5 wanted to emphasize the conclusion that Fuchs confessed because of friendships, not because of inducement, which in fact was true.

  Skardon also gave Fuchs’s interpretation of his oath of allegiance; that is, Fuchs took it seriously but qualified it: “He claimed the freedom to act in accordance with his conscience should circumstances arise in this country comparable to those which existed in Germany in 1932 and 1933.”

  Fuchs later remarked to Erna, “What Skardon said was not all true. I think he knows it was a wrong statement.” Fuchs didn’t clarify, although Skardon’s statement closely adhered to Fuchs’s written statement except for omitting the offer to stay at Harwell.

  At the end of the hearing, the magistrate asked Fuchs two questions: Did he wish to respond to the charges? His solicitor answered, “Not at this stage.” Did he wish to call witnesses? His solicitor answered, “Not here.” Fuchs stood, the magistrate charged him, and his solicitor stated that he pleaded “not Guilty.” He was committed for trial at the Old Bailey at the session beginning on February 28.

  As Fuchs left, his solicitor allowed Skardon to speak with him at the back of the courtroom. Skardon showed him selected photographs of possible contacts in the United States and U.K. Fuchs pointed to an image of Simon Kremer, thus confirming “Alexander” as his contact in London. He didn’t admit to recognizing others. A few days later, Skardon made a visit to Brixton with more photographs of Russian embassy staff. All embassy personnel had photographs on file with MI5, Fuchs’s contact Eugene included. If that photograph was among the stack, Fuchs didn’t pick him out. Having seen him only a year before, he certainly would have recognized him.

  At the same time, the governor of Brixton Prison alerted his staff: “It would be advantageous to Russia if anything were to happen to the prisoner before his trial and before he divulged the names of his contacts and other vital information.” They needed to watch for lethal poisons, and ensure this prisoner’s safety. The Russians were ruthless.

  They knew that Fuchs had arrived basically healthy. A full physical revealed the chronic lung problem for which his doctor in London had earlier prescribed him rest, iron, and arsenic. Fuchs confided to the doctor that he had contemplated suicide as a way out but those thoughts were now gone.

  * * *

  —

  On the afternoon of Fuchs’s arrest, Dick White had sent Washington an “emergency” cable so that the FBI could interview Christel and Bob Heinemann before the news broke. MI5 had already reported that Fuchs had not implicated them.

  Two FBI agents found Christel at Westborough Hospital, a psychiatric facility where her husband, Bob, had committed her a year before. She had been seriously depressed, a condition that ran in her mother’s family. The doctors, perhaps mistakenly, had diagnosed her with schizophrenia. Unusual for a schizophrenic, she never had another episode or took medication. In the hospital, the doctors administered electric shock, a treatment favored at the time for depression.

  On that Thursday—and several more—she was perfectly rational and cooperative, although her doctor always stayed near in case questions stressed her. He, in fact, suggested administering a truth serum. The FBI agents said they would not be responsible. Incomplete FBI records leave it unclear what was decided.

  Over the weeks, Christel told them the story of the man who came to their house on Lakeview Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She looked out the window to see a stranger on the sidewalk in front of the house, then heard a knock on the door. Her version differed slightly from others by date and number of visits, but not in its essence. She didn’t know much.

  Christel’s and Bob’s descriptions of the visitor (whom Bob met only once) generally coincided with Klaus’s, that of a stocky man with a round face, which was accurate. They were all off on height. The five-foot-six Raymond must have stood tall. The Heinemanns measured him around five feet eight; Klaus put him at five feet ten, perhaps a deliberate error to throw off the investigators. Same with his age. He was thirty-five, and they estimated him to be in his late thirties or forty. Klaus placed his city of origin as Philadelphia (here he was correct), Bob as Buffalo because they talked about the weather there, and Christel guessing Chicago because he seemed very tired from his trip. The picture didn’t tally well with those on the FBI’s suspect list, which comprised every physicist with leftist proclivities that Fuchs encountered on the Manhattan Project, including Robert Oppenheimer, and anyone tangential to a communist ring in the United States or Canada.

  As the FBI and MI5 knew, a person of interest linked to the 1945 defection of the cipher clerk at the Russian embassy in Ottawa was a professor of mathematics named Israel Halperin. When the police arrested him, they seized piles of documents from his home. One was an address book that contained the names and addresses of Klaus and Christel. At the time, Klaus’s addresses were internment Camps L and N.

  In March 1950, FBI agents interviewed Halperin and found no other connection to Fuchs. MI5 questioned Fuchs, who said he had received journals from Halperin while in internment but had never met him.

  How did Halperin come to send Fuchs magazines and—according to Christel—cigarettes? The most probable connection was the Harvard physicist and Halperin’s brother-in-law, Wendell Furry, also a member of Bob Heinemann’s Communist Party group in Cambridge. More roundabout was Halperin’s association with John von Neumann, Fuchs’s later colleague on the Manhattan Project. Max Born had written to von Neumann, among many others, to send Fuchs reading material. Halperin had been von Neumann’s sole PhD student at Princeton and sufficiently close for Halperin to complete two of his manuscripts after von Neumann’s early death. Von Neumann might have written to him.

  The interest in Halperin’s diary wasn’t its relevance to espionage; it earned a closer look because of its murky provenance. The Canadians assured MI5 that early on they had passed the diary to them and to the FBI. MI5 insisted they had no record of it. In a speech, the lord chancellor had denied they ever received it. Unfortunately, they had, in a way. An MI6 agent, in Canada at the time, was allowed to poke through the piles of documents to extract anything of interest but missed the diary. MI5’s copy ultimately came from the FBI in the fall of 1949. Originating from internment, it wasn’t relevant to the case. It did, however, become a tool for the press to accuse MI5 of poor security clearance.

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  Meanwhile, Hoover whipped up a storm. He had heard a ridiculous story supposedly spread by Michael Perrin and his boss, Lord Portal. Although it was absurd in substance, he believed they had spread it—that MI5 had learned about Fuchs in February 1949 and told Walter Winchell, the American gossip columnist who then told the FBI. Hoover ordered Lish Whitson to tell Sir Percy Sillitoe that Perrin and Portal must stop—or as one FBI memo stated five times, “to put up or shut up.” Otherwise, repercussions would follow. Whitson was to be aggressive and not cowed by “big titles” and to ask Sir Percy if he had any doubt “as to whether the Bureau had broken the Fuchs case.” Hoover remarked, “The sly British are gradually getting around to having unearthed Fuchs themselves!”

  The fact is, the American and British code breakers had wrestled together with the thorny Venona decryption project since 1944. Slogging away in Arlington, Virg
inia, the British analyst Philip Howse unearthed, either alone or with others, the existence of a possible British spy on August 13, 1949, and the British embassy hurriedly telegraphed the news to MI5 and MI6. A month later, the Americans dug up the name “Karl Fuchs” as the author of a document noted in the messages. The British were about a day from finding it, and they fit the puzzle pieces together to prove the rest. Walter Winchell had nothing to do with it.

  When Whitson saw Sillitoe on a Sunday afternoon, as Whitson wrote in his report, Sillitoe agreed emphatically that the FBI had supplied the information in the Fuchs case. He planned to speak with Perrin and Portal the next day. Whitson described an almost fawning Sillitoe, saying that “he would do whatever the Director [Hoover] desired, even coming to the US after the trial if it would help.” Or, perhaps, Whitson was merely soothing Hoover’s ego and rage.

  Liddell spent the next evening dining with Whitson and John Cimperman, the American embassy’s FBI liaison to MI5. Whitson wondered who was to be the scapegoat in the Fuchs drama. Liddell thought neither of them. The Russians, he said, had scored two victories already—gaining the information and eliminating one of the U.K. ’s leading scientists. They should not let them get another by “throwing a spanner into the works of Anglo-American co-operation.” The congenitally diplomatic souls of the British worked hard to keep the peace.

  * * *

  —

  Brixton was a real prison for Fuchs. He walked around the oval path in the yard counting his steps, correlating fewer steps with a better mood. He read. He wrote letters, especially to the Skinners, trying to explain to himself and to them what he had done and why. He had had a few lines from his father. “He won’t ever believe that his children can do wrong,” he told the Skinners. “So, he will be all right. I sent him a message through the Society of Friends to get out of the Russian Zone. That is all I can do.”

  The Skinners came down toward the end of February for a twenty-minute visit, their second. The recording suggested another conversation filled with awkward pauses and stabbing comments, such as Erna telling him that he “looked rotten.” As they left, the tape caught his last remark. Putting it in the third person, the transcription read, “It was strange how he kept his spirits high when he really could not look to the future.” He knew that people went to the gallows for his crime.

  The Peierlses visited on the twenty-eighth, the day before the trial. Then Skardon arrived for one more photo-ID session. Fuchs had examined the dozens and dozens of pictures that flowed in regularly, none of which looked familiar, although one day he picked out a remote possibility if it was a very bad likeness. In his report, Skardon identified that photograph as “the notorious Whittaker Chambers.”

  Throughout the month, Skardon had gently worked on Fuchs for descriptions of meeting places and pulled out a few dribs and drabs of information. A map of New York helped with the first meeting place at Henry and Market streets on the Lower East Side. Another of Kew Gardens, southwest of London near Richmond, let Fuchs identify places involved in reestablishing contact or indicating danger, including tossing a magazine over a fence. Checking out the geography the next day, Skardon found it as Fuchs described.

  Fuchs described the young woman who replaced “Alexander” and with whom he met in the countryside near Banbury; the American he saw about half a dozen times in New York City, once in Philadelphia, and twice in Santa Fe; and the Russian he met in pubs later in London.

  On this visit he gave Skardon a couple of names too: the intermediaries who introduced him to his contacts in Britain. The first was Jürgen Kuczynski, erstwhile promoter of the Left Book Club, co-founder of the Free German League of Culture, very short-term internee, professor at the London School of Economics, possible recruiter for the OGPU (the Soviet secret police) in England, and introducer to Alexander. The other was Johanna Klopstech, German-born, longtime member of the Communist Party, associate of Kuczynski’s, refugee to Britain from Czechoslovakia, and, like Kuczynski, probable good friend of the Fuchs brothers from the Berlin underground days. Both had already returned to Berlin, Kuczynski for a time employed by the U.S. military with a rank of lieutenant colonel working for the Strategic Bombing Survey.

  Before the trial, Fuchs’s attorney Derek Curtis-Bennett, a well-known criminal defense lawyer, visited him to discuss the case. Curtis-Bennett persuaded him not to mention inducement, even though, as Fuchs later wrote, it “should have been of great value in a plea for mitigation.” The prosecution for the Crown had told his lawyer that revealing it could be “prejudicial to the country.” Fuchs consented with this decision. Fuchs’s confession certainly proved his willingness to acknowledge his guilt and not to blame others.

  His lawyer also said that he should expect the maximum sentence. To qualify this statement, he asked Fuchs if he knew what that was, and Fuchs simply said, “Yes, I know. It’s death.” “No,” said Curtis-Bennett. “It’s fourteen years.” Charges under the Official Secrets Act did not carry a death sentence. Russia had been an ally during the war, and its present designation was “friendly nation.” He wasn’t to be tried for treason.

  Fuchs later said, “Strangely enough at that instant I felt nothing. I was convinced I would get capital punishment and was ready for it. That was my mistake: a real secret agent should fight for his life until the end. Then I felt what someone who is on death row must feel when he’s told, ‘You will not be executed; you’re going to live.’”

  * * *

  —

  Wednesday, March 1, 1950, was the date for Fuchs’s trial in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, the 275-year-old institution in the heart of London near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Many famous trials had been held there, including the fictional proceedings against Charles Darnay, tried for treason in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. Fuchs, in the midst of reading it, wrote to Henry Arnold that its opening sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” had completely “knocked” him out.

  The bewigged attorney general, Sir Hartley Shawcross, with Christmas Humphreys in attendance represented the case for the Crown. Derek Curtis-Bennett represented Fuchs. The lord chief justice, enrobed in scarlet, was Lord Rayner Goddard, who cast himself as “an avenging enemy of criminals and a vigilant lord protector of society.”

  On this morning, Fuchs entered directly into the dock, climbing the stairs from cells below the chamber. In the audience were reporters from eighty-one international news agencies, including the Russian news agency TASS, and special guests, such as the Duchess of Kent, in the distinguished visitors’ seats.

  Since the hearing, the charges against Fuchs had doubled, with transgressions added from Birmingham in 1943 and others in New York City from December 1943 to August 1944. To all of these accusations, Fuchs said in a low voice, almost a whisper, “Guilty.” After this plea, the purpose of the trial shifted to determining the sentence.

  Absent Humphreys’s inflammatory rhetoric, Shawcross opened with Fuchs’s motives, interspersing long excerpts from Fuchs’s original statement. This time Shawcross read the inducement sentence: “I was given the chance of admitting it and staying at Harwell or of clearing out.”

  Lord Goddard jumped on this: “Does he mean this was in his own mind?” Clearly anticipating him, Shawcross dissembled with ease: “My Lord, that is what he seems to have understood. It is not a correct account of what happened but that is what he appears to have understood. What he was being confronted with were the incidents in America. His whole course of conduct had not at that time been discovered.”

  Next Shawcross stressed Fuchs’s desire not to leave a shadow over his friends. And with that, having called no witnesses, Shawcross closed his case.

  Shawcross’s portrayal of Fuchs hinted at his being a victim of unfortunate circumstances, a depiction that Curtis-Bennett embraced for his defense. His first act was to call Skardon to the
stand as a witness, who reinforced that Fuchs had made his confession as “a free man, quite patently acting on his free initiative.” Curtis-Bennett didn’t challenge him on the now open secret of inducement. Instead, he calmly stressed that Fuchs was a known communist.

  Startled, Lord Goddard questioned him closely on this point. Curtis-Bennett said that Home Office records indicated he was a member of the German Communist Party and “never pretended he was anything else.” Shawcross interjected that at the enemy alien tribunals in 1939, Fuchs was a refugee from Nazi oppression because he was a communist.

  Curtis-Bennett produced no document from the Home Office or from MI5 files. Max Born’s official reference letter for Fuchs at the tribunal stated that he had been a Social Democrat. Notes from the tribunal had long since been destroyed. There was no evidence of the word “communist” mentioned. It was, however, catnip for the press.

  Curtis-Bennett stated his intent “to build before your Lordship his state of mind at the time of the various periods of the indictment.” Lord Goddard interrupted and sputtered that he had read “this statement several times and I cannot understand this metaphysical philosophy or whatever you like to call it. I am not concerned with it. I am concerned that this man gave away secrets of vital importance to this country. He stands before me as a sane man and not one relying on the disease of schizophrenia or anything else.”

  Hoping to soften Fuchs’s sentence, Curtis-Bennett continued on with a defense centered on Fuchs’s state of mind and the wartime fate of the Russian allies who had suffered something on the order of twenty-five million deaths, along with the devastation of their eastern territories, as they turned the tide that led to Hitler’s defeat.

  At the end, Lord Goddard asked Fuchs if he had anything to say. Fuchs stood, holding a piece of paper. His voice barely audible, he read five sentences that acknowledged his guilt and thanked the government for a fair trial and the staff at Brixton Prison for their courtesy. He noted his own failings by deceiving his friends.