Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  Fuchs is an outstanding scientist, and we attach great importance to his getting the best living and working conditions. On behalf of Walter Ulbricht, I ask you to ensure that Fuchs gets an appropriate house . . . and that trustworthy housekeeping personnel will be hired.

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  On his first visit to the ZfK, Klaus had identified the lack of theoretical input to the experimental research. He struggled with this institutional problem and one of his own, catching up with recent scientific advances. After a while the British prison system had allowed physics books, but he couldn’t keep current. His solution to both was to select talented young scientists, who were primarily “misused” for calculations by the experimentalists, and establish an “independent school” for basic modern theory. Presumably a primer for them as well as for him. His nephew often saw them having discussions in his uncle’s garden.

  But there were intrigues from the start, especially on the part of the scientists now assigned to him who at first resented his insertion. With foreign press reports highly restricted, he was largely unknown to them and introduced with little of his scientific background shared. Or his personal background—a history not discussed by the older scientists who knew. There were too many invisible listeners for those knowledgeable to gossip.

  No celebrations and accolades welcomed him. The Russians wanted no reference to his passing them information. According to them, they had discovered the atomic secrets themselves. Russia’s denial of any connection to him made his past taboo. Even his nephew Klaus had felt the long arm of the KGB. When he applied for admission to Leipzig University in 1956, he included that his uncle had spied for Russia. University officials accused him of lying: Russia didn’t have spies. They forced him to delete the information.

  Staff problems gradually straightened out, but over the next few years rumors swirled about confrontations with the Russians and the East Germans, breakdowns, and recoveries in spas. Some of these stories ended up in Western newspapers; others remained tightly held in intelligence files.

  One reporter manipulatively arranged a telephone interview with him for an article in the Sunday Express in London. Afterward, the reporter admitted that the article was a “garbled version” but thought Klaus came out well in it—“a person determined to refuse to yield to pressure,” referring to accounts that he had had a nervous breakdown because of Russian pressures to do weapons work. Klaus acknowledged to the reporter that he was sick but not seriously and said it was untrue he was going to Russia: “My work has nothing to do with arms—it is pure research.” Declaring the article a “distortion,” he told officials that he would decline future phone interviews.

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  The East Germans kept an eye on him by way of reports from Nitschke and from the maids who cleaned the apartment (with similar cleaning arrangements for Emil in Leipzig). Everyone was a potential informant, even family members. The Stasi made an effort to recruit his nephew Klaus, who reported the overture to Klaus and Grete. Grete said no, not in the family; Klaus agreed with her. No informing on anyone, family or otherwise.

  By April 1960, after nine months in his new country, Klaus was ready for another cure at a spa, this time in Czechoslovakia and with Grete and with benefits and accommodations at the “Party level,” that is, as a VIP. He had a hard entry into the ZfK to recover from and a first-time trip to Russia to prepare for.

  CHAPTER 26

  Expectations, Dresden 1960

  At the end of May, Klaus was part of a delegation to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, an international research facility with 50 percent of its budget from Russia, 20 percent from China, and the remainder from smaller satellite countries. The Russians’ one-sentence consent for the trip painted a backdrop for the bureaucracy that Klaus faced daily in his administrative role at the institute:

  The Central Committee of the CPSU gave consent to invite Klaus Fuchs, Dep. Director of the GDR’s Central Institute for Nuclear Research, through the Chief Administration on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy under the SM USSR as a member of the GDR’s delegation to a conference, in May of this year, of the Academic Council of the Joint Institute on Nuclear Research.

  The system in Russia differed little from that in East Germany, and intrigues and manipulations easily festered.

  From the government’s point of view, the main purpose of the trip was for the KGB to “find out tactfully from K. F. the circumstances of, and possible reasons for, his arrest.” The “circumstances” included why he confessed, how much he told counterintelligence about the information he passed, the reasons for his “failure”—that word signifying an uncovered agent, not necessarily a personal failure of the agent.

  Klaus had his own agenda, which was to make progress toward harvesting and harnessing nuclear power with breeder (fast) reactors to secure the future energy needs of the East Germans. He resisted any pressure to do atomic weapons research, instead pushing his dream for the peaceful use of atomic energy. He hoped scientists in Russia would support his efforts and tilt the politics in East Germany in his favor.

  This breeder reactor—which generated more fissile material than it used and reprocessed the excess to create more plutonium to fuel another reactor—was similar in concept to the one he had worked on at Harwell in 1949. Then he had told John Cockcroft that he wanted to stay in his position until there were test results from it. Presumably, in his heart-to-heart talk with Ulbricht about coming to the ZfK, he had discussed this interest and had received support.

  Klaus saw breeder reactors as the solution that would meet the world’s energy needs for millennia. One of the major drawbacks, though, was that the plutonium created could be removed and used for weapons. Klaus’s answer for this problem was an international disarmament agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons.

  Carrying out plans for the peaceful use of atomic energy at Rossendorf, even with Ulbricht’s support, was a difficult task. The organization wasn’t efficient, and the staff wasn’t trained for the work needed. Klaus could warn that meeting the country’s electrical needs in 1970 depended on building reactors immediately. He knew that without the support of the party nothing would happen.

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  Four days after arriving in Moscow on May 24, Klaus dined for over two hours with two KGB agents in an almost empty Chinese restaurant. KGB memos reported a friendly luncheon where the agents expressed “gratitude” for “the great help he rendered to the Soviet Union.” Sensing that he was “very unsure of himself and guarded,” they treated him carefully.

  Klaus related his conversation with Ulbricht to them, admitting that he had made mistakes. As for his “failure,” which is to say his getting caught, he explained that the British had relied on suspicions from the Americans but not direct evidence. He confessed of his own free will because the influence of “bourgeois propaganda” had led to his losing faith in Soviet policies. He concluded that “the Soviet Union had violated the principles of democracy.” To their question of whom he had identified, he said only Gold, and then only after Gold confessed.

  As to what he told the British of his intelligence activities, he detailed it for them but denied telling the British about passing information on the hydrogen bomb, even though he had done just that.

  It wasn’t a rough interrogation, but Fuchs canceled his activities for the rest of the day. He was sick with a bad cold, and he stayed in Russia for only a week, turning down a twenty-day tour of the country for him and Grete—a KGB arrangement in order to “study him.”

  Informants seemed to be well represented at the conference. One KGB agent spoke with “Hans,” who was the head of the East German delegation and himself an agent of the KGB in East Germany. Hans described Klaus as “closed off and taciturn” and someone who hadn’t recovered from the “moral” trauma of his arrest and years in prison. Klaus, he explain
ed a bit peeved, didn’t even discuss his impression of Moscow, let alone his past. Obviously, Hans’s expectations revealed that he didn’t know Klaus well.

  A Stasi informant reported back that Klaus’s personal scientific agenda hadn’t gone well. When he visited the research center at Dubna, he came as too much of a supplicant, asking that experts on reactors be posted to East Germany for an extended period. In charge of training personnel, Klaus had “fallen behind” with the science, the informant said. Klaus said he would take any “bread crumbs” that fell from the Russian researchers’ table at Dubna.

  The scientists briefed him on their experiments—“published ones of course”—and were deferential with regard to his past, treating him warmly. His “appearance,” they offered, however, “made him look like he was at the end of his power and scientific capabilities and would, therefore, not know how to lead the theoretical work in Dresden [ZfK, Rossendorf] further.” The conclusion in Dubna was that it was senseless to give aid without an embryo to nurture, and the scientists didn’t see one.

  This description undermines a later rumor that Klaus had helped the Chinese develop their first atomic explosion in 1964. Although a Chinese delegation did visit the ZfK, it strains credulity to think that they would seek information from him when China was a significant partner in the Russians’ scientific institute in Dubna and had access to all its scientists. Why would they need Klaus’s ten-year-old knowledge?

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  And there the situation remained. Klaus debated with various SED committees to redirect research efforts at Rossendorf toward the peaceful use of energy, and he wrote articles and went to conferences about it. He complained to the SED Central Committee that he felt constricted by his colleagues, sometimes “cut off dead.” He had few friends in the scientific world, fostering a sense of partial isolation. Whether the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 reinforced this feeling isn’t known. He didn’t record any thoughts.

  Klaus simply didn’t have the government behind him. In 1959, two months after he had returned to Germany, and just as he prepared to start at the ZfK, one top party official had explained to another that he didn’t see why they should expend tight resources on nuclear energy when the country had a cheap and plentiful supply of brown coal. That mind-set held.

  Finally, in January 1964, a man named Werner, the first secretary of a committee on science, called Klaus to a meeting and told him, “No breeder reactor.” Klaus was deeply, deeply disappointed.

  It wasn’t just the East Germans’ lack of interest or their strained economic resources; the Russians wanted to lead the effort. And there was a side issue: his leadership. Werner asked if the months-long debates on nuclear energy derived from “subjective” opinions of some top scientist or from him as the leader.

  Klaus informed Werner that Comrade Ulbricht had expressed no reservations about him during their discussion. On his application for party membership, he had disclosed mistakes, and he was accepted into the party. He saw no reason for there to be protests against him.

  Werner wanted to know if the description in a recent book was true: Had he confessed of his own accord? Klaus acknowledged that he had “turned himself in but not on his own initiative.” Other than that, Klaus said he could speak only to Ulbricht about this question. Werner suggested that the Planning Commission and the Economic Council take up the reactor issue and if that produced no better results, Klaus should speak with Ulbricht again. Such was the dismissal of Klaus’s dreams.

  Klaus did add an interesting aside that Werner included in his report: “For understandable reasons, the SU [Soviet Union] has not confirmed to this day that something had been received from him and had no interest in the fact that there are constant reports in the Western press about him.” A two-part TV movie made the next year by a West German film company, titled Klaus Fuchs: History of Atomic Treachery, must not have sat well with the Russians.

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  A year later, a quick political evaluation recorded Fuchs as being connected to the party, but critical and impulsive: “He exaggerates his criticism that then leads to being disrespectful toward state functions, and he generalizes his critiques too quickly. But he is open and honest.” For the last report in 1973, his minder wrote that his position at Rossendorf between 1964 and 1970 had steadied, and he had become a member of the Central Committee of the SED for the Eighth Party Congress and, in 1972, a member of the Academy of Science of East Germany. Conclusion: his political and scientific stability required no further interviews.

  However upset he was about the cancellation of the breeder reactor, he had held it in check and, as he was wont to do, gone on with his life, taking an interest in science policy and garnering positions on various esteemed scientific committees. But he didn’t forget.

  In an interview a year before his death, Klaus explained that at Harwell his research had been, in part, on the “peaceful use of nuclear power.” And then he added, “It was a research area that at that time—to be sure, I did not know it—was forbidden in Germany. In general, there was little information about processes in the Soviet-occupied area.” As well as confirming his disappointment twenty-three years after his conversation with Werner, was there a tinge of remorse about his return?

  Emil Fuchs died in 1971, a few months shy of ninety-seven, a man whom Klaus loved but couldn’t entirely forgive for past sins, as he had obliquely remarked to his nephew Klaus. Steadfast, ideologically driven, determined, and righteous by his own definition, Emil was the template from which Klaus was drawn. Both father and son fought for the working class, and they worked for a world without weapons. One cited the influence of Marx, the other faith in God.

  Emil held to his pacifism and came to communism once the revolution was over; Klaus held to his communism and came to pacifism once the Nazis were defeated. The intellectual journey wasn’t difficult for either. Like many Social Democrats, Emil subscribed to the social goals of communism without the revolution. As a child, Klaus became a vegetarian in part not to kill animals, a pacifist at heart.

  In Britain, Klaus seemed to repudiate communism and professed an admiration of the British people and their lifestyle. His friends believed he had changed his heart, Rudi Peierls even remarking on the sadness of Klaus’s sitting in jail for something he no longer believed in. Once back in East Germany, they heard that Klaus had reverted to his earlier, firm beliefs. But in his confession and during his time in prison, it may be that he repudiated Stalinism—the implementation, not the ideology. As Klaus said of his father, “He was never a man of the church but of faith.” The same could be said of the son.

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  Since his arrival in the East, Klaus was a sought-after speaker at conferences and on radio shows as well as a regular interviewee in newspapers. A strong priority was lectures to young people, and he was relentless in espousing themes he deeply believed in. What started as criticism of U.S. nuclear tests in the 1960s and early 1970s became a call for both sides to disarm and use nuclear energy peacefully to power the globe. Politics entered too, sometimes directly by his celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of East Germany and the U.S.S.R.’s fiftieth, and more indirectly when he expounded on the joys of a scientist working in a socialist system. Given his own bitter experience in 1964 with the fast reactor, he could not have believed what he was saying. With the exception of his open and perilous resistance to the Nazis, he maintained the same nonconfrontational demeanor affected throughout his life.

  Klaus and Grete experienced life at the VIP party level, enjoying vacations in Russia, Hungary, even faraway Cuba. And then there were their houses and the car and the nice clothing. Grete enjoyed dining in nice restaurants and had no compunction about accepting priority over others in line to secure a table. They mostly socialized with her friends. Klaus’s closest was another ZfK physicist, Max Steenbeck, whom Grete didn�
�t quite approve of. His four children had all gone to the West.

  But the advantages of their party membership couldn’t compensate for smog from the brown coal or lack of hard liquor or missing labels on packages of food when the factories ran out of ink. They still had to squeeze the bags to know if the contents were sugar or flour.

  Unlike Grete, Klaus never used his position for favorable treatment. When Christel needed entry visas to bring her two young daughters, Marianna and Heidi, for a visit, he wouldn’t intercede on their behalf. The task fell to his nephew Klaus.

  Released from Westborough Hospital in the mid-1950s, Christel’s life had come back together. She met and then worked for Albert Holzer, a bookbinder, resuming her connection to an art she had first learned at the Odenwaldschule. They married and moved to Vermont, where she built a life around the peace movement, Quakerism, and environmental sustainability. At age sixty-eight, she walked from Washington to Moscow—both towns in Vermont—as part of the nuclear freeze movement.

  Christel made four family visits to see Klaus, frequent enough for her younger daughter Heidi to decide to study at the University of Leipzig in 1981. Klaus took her in hand and set up her program. Having retired in 1979, he had time, although he probably would have made time even if he were working.

  On weekends, Heidi often visited Dresden, where they walked in the park and chatted or went to a museum, often the Zwinger for its old masters and porcelain collections. One day they saw an art exhibit on Russian social realism, the official art of Russia that portrayed the idealized proletarian worker. Heidi giggled, and Klaus didn’t react much, but she could tell he thought it was silly. Klaus was neither deaf nor blind to ideological shortcomings. He was silent, though.