In Switzerland, Alexander Foote picked up the first message from Moscow after Operation Barbarossa: “Fascist beasts have invaded the Motherland of the working classes. You are called upon to carry out your tasks in Germany to the best of your ability. Director.” Sandor Radó immediately expanded operations. For the next two years, from an apartment in Lausanne, Foote sent hundreds of messages to Moscow, distilled intelligence from spies inside Nazi Germany that provided astonishingly detailed insight into German military planning. As Foote put it, Moscow’s generals were “virtually fighting their war on the material.”
Len Beurton, by contrast, gradually lost interest in working for the Rote Drei and then fell out with Radó, who stopped paying him. “Len had only one desire,” wrote Foote. “To return to England and rejoin Sonya.” The corrupt Bolivian consul who had issued Ursula’s false passport agreed to do the same for Len, in return for another 2,000 Swiss francs. The French consulate, however, spotted the fake in the name of “Luis Carlos Bilboa” and refused to issue a French transit visa. In Britain, Ursula enlisted the International Brigades Association to lobby the government to help Len get out of Switzerland, and wrote to the Labour MP Eleanor Rathbone, whose efforts on behalf of German exiles earned her the nickname “Minister for Refugees.” Even Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, was made aware of Beurton’s plight. Nothing seemed to work.
“Inactive, missing his wife, short of money, down on his luck, and desperate to get back to the UK,” Len was miserable. But the new alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union suddenly offered a glimmer of hope. The British consulate at Quai Wilson was just a few hundred yards from his apartment on Lake Geneva. Len popped in for a chat.
Victor Farrell was passport control officer. The fact that he was also an MI6 officer prepared to issue passports to deserving fugitives was “one of the best known ‘secrets’ in Geneva.” Beurton offered to provide Farrell “with useful intelligence information,” if the MI6 man helped him get back to Britain. Exactly what information Len passed to MI6 is unknown, and the relevant passages have been redacted in declassified documents. He revealed nothing about Ursula’s activities and his own work on behalf of Soviet intelligence. But he certainly identified at least one of Radó’s agents, a Chinese journalist named L. T. Wang accredited to the League of Nations. A frequent guest at Wang’s home was General Alexander von Falkenhausen, a former military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in China, who was now the Nazi governor of occupied Belgium. Wang was secretly spying on Falkenhausen and passing on information to Radó. Len introduced the Chinese journalist to Farrell, who found Wang “friendly and inscrutable” but also, in time, a rich source of intelligence. Since Britain and the Soviet Union were now allies, Beurton felt no qualms about passing Wang on to MI6. In return, Farrell agreed to furnish Beurton with a forged passport.
The plates of loyalty were shifting beneath the new political landscape. Ursula and Rudi were spying on Britain, Moscow’s ally; a British intelligence officer, Victor Farrell, was using Soviet assets to spy on Nazis in Switzerland; Len, still a Soviet intelligence agent, was secretly aiding MI6, without telling Moscow. They might all be united in the wider battle against Nazism, but the Allies were spying on each other, as allies always do.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union had one more momentous repercussion, by driving one of the most important spies in history into Sonya’s net.
KLAUS FUCHS LIVED BY TWO sets of rules: the immutable laws of physics, through which he would help to unleash a new science of terrifying power, and a second group of sociopolitical laws, in which he believed no less profoundly, leading to the inevitable triumph of communism. The combination of these two parallel bodies of ideas, scientific and ideological, set off a chain reaction in Fuchs that turned him from a brilliant physicist into the world’s most dangerous spy. In 1951, a U.S. congressional committee would conclude: “Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations.”
He really didn’t mean to.
Fuchs was the third of four children born to a Lutheran pastor in western Germany. His father, Emil, was a man of great courage, outspoken opinions, and towering moral arrogance, who taught his children to follow the dictates of private conscience regardless of consequences. Four years younger than Ursula, Fuchs had also come of age amid the political and economic chaos of Weimar Germany. Like the Kuczynskis, the Fuchs siblings embraced communism, joined the KPD, and hurled themselves into the increasingly violent student and street battles of the 1920s. Klaus was nicknamed Der rote Fuchs, the Red Fox. Returning home after an anti-Nazi meeting he was ambushed by brownshirts, badly beaten up, and thrown into a river with his front teeth shattered. The young physicist was studying at Kiel University in 1931 when his mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid. His father was arrested two years later for speaking out against Hitler. His brother was imprisoned and driven into exile along with his younger sister, while his older sister was hounded by the Nazis and eventually committed suicide by throwing herself under a Berlin train. Klaus Fuchs understandably believed that fascism had destroyed his family. He saw politics as he understood science, an equation with only one correct solution, a world of black and white: “There were no half-tones…you had to be either a Nazi or a Communist,” he said. Marxism replaced the religion he had grown up with.
Already a prodigiously talented scientist, at the age of twenty-two Fuchs enrolled at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, but by now he was a marked man, a communist agitator liable to be arrested at any moment. At a secret meeting, the KPD leadership urged him to get out of Germany, continue his studies abroad, and await the revolution that would surely destroy Hitler. Fuchs arrived in Folkestone in September 1933, “white faced, half-starved, with a bundle of dirty linen in a canvas bag.”
Like many academics fleeing Nazism, Fuchs was welcomed warmly by Britain’s scientific community. The physicist Nevill Mott took him on as research assistant at Bristol University and in 1937, after obtaining a doctorate in physics, Fuchs moved to Edinburgh University, where he worked under another German refugee, the distinguished physicist Max Born, investigating electron behavior and electromagnetic radiation. A cursory investigation by MI5 concluded that he posed no security threat.
Fuchs was eccentric, even by academic standards. He occasionally socialized with others in the German exiled community, and met Jürgen Kuczynski at the Free German Club in London. But he remained a largely solitary, enigmatic figure, a chain-smoker and self-taught violinist, ferociously punctual, occasionally drunken, tall, myopic, gangling, with “a sensitive and inquiring face, and a mildly lost air.” One colleague composed a clerihew:
Fuchs
Looks
Like an ascetic
Theoretic
The young German appeared to be the “perfect specimen of an abstracted professor.” He never discussed politics, or much of anything else outside physics. People wondered what was really going on behind the thick round spectacles but no one doubted, least of all Fuchs himself, that here was a major scientist in the making. He had inherited his father’s rigid sense of moral rectitude, and later remarked: “From time to time there have to be individuals who deliberately take on the burden of guilt because they see the situation clearer than those who have the power.”
In 1939, on the eve of war, Fuchs applied for British citizenship, but before this could be granted he was interned, along with other German enemy aliens, first on the Isle of Man and then in Canada at a camp outside Quebec. He felt no bitterness at this treatment and continued to collaborate, long-distance, with Max Born, who pleaded for his release, insisting his colleague was “in the small top group of theoretical physicists in this country.” The lobbying paid off and on January 11, 1941, two weeks after his twenty-ninth birthday, Fuchs landed back at Liverpool, wh
ere Ursula would arrive a month later.
On April 3, Jürgen Kuczynski hosted a party at 6 Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead to “celebrate Fuchs’s return to the United Kingdom.” The gathering included several German and British notables, a large number of communists, a few scientists, and a fair sprinkling of spies. Among the guests were Brigitte Lewis, now working as a secretary at the LSE, and the German communist Hans Kahle, who had struck up a friendship with Fuchs when both were interned in Canada. As well as providing intelligence for Ursula, Kahle was “a talent spotter for the Soviet Intelligence services.” The party for Fuchs may have been his idea. The drink flowed, and the guest of honor fully partook. At one point, Jürgen introduced Fuchs to “a courteous, intelligent man, with perfect English [and an] interest in science,” who introduced himself as Alexander Johnson. Their conversation turned to “the possibilities of atomic energy.” Back in 1938, German scientists had discovered that fission in uranium liberates both energy and neutrons, enabling future fissions and potentially causing a chain reaction. The Danish atomic theorist Niels Bohr had established that fission occurs in the rare isotope U-235, a breakthrough offering the prospect of a new energy machine (a nuclear reactor) with, as Fuchs put it, “a long term possibility for the production of power.” At the end of the evening, Fuchs agreed “to prepare for Johnson a short account about the possibilities of atomic energy.” He then weaved off into the night and missed the train back to Edinburgh.
“Johnson” was really Colonel Semyon Davidovitch Kremer, an officer in Soviet military intelligence with the code name “Barch.”
A year earlier, two more exiled German physicists working at Birmingham University, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, had drawn up a secret scientific paper that would change the world and eventually threaten its existence. The Frisch-Peierls memo was a terrifying leap forward in nuclear science: the first practical exposition of how to build a nuclear weapon, a “super-bomb” that could harness the energy in atomic nuclei and unleash an explosion at “a temperature comparable to that in the interior of the sun.” The initial blast “would destroy life in a wide area,” the scientists concluded, and the subsequent cloud of radioactivity would kill many more.
Peierls recommended that the atomic bomb be developed as a matter of urgency. “While there is no evidence that the Germans realise the potentialities of a U-235 bomb,” he warned, “it is quite possible that they do, and for all we know they may have completed its production.” The British government set up a top secret committee, code-named “Maud,” to explore the feasibility of building such a weapon. This would lead to the establishment of the “Tube Alloys” project (another deliberately misleading code name), an industrial program involving dozens of scientists at various British universities, to research and develop the bomb.
On May 10, a month after the party in Hampstead, Peierls wrote to Fuchs inviting him to “take part in theoretical work involving mathematical problems of considerable complexity.” He added: “I cannot disclose the nature or purpose of the work.” The British government later justified the decision to recruit Fuchs into the atomic weapons project: “The very finest brains available were needed to assist in that research and such brains as Dr. Fuchs possesses are very rare indeed. He was known as, and has proved himself to be, one of the finest theoretical physicists living.” Knowing that Fuchs had been “an active member of the Communist Party in Germany,” MI5 debated the wisdom of granting him security clearance, but finally decided to “accept such risk as there might be.” Fuchs guessed this secret new job was “in relation to atomic energy research,” but it was only after he arrived in Birmingham and moved in with Peierls and his wife that he discovered the true nature of the assignment. Peierls had rightly surmised that Fuchs would “welcome an opportunity to participate in a project that was intended to forestall Hitler”; the use Fuchs would make of that participation was something Peierls never imagined. In June, Fuchs began working on the atom bomb. A few days later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
On the surface an unworldly boffin, Fuchs remained a dedicated secret communist and a fierce anti-fascist. Like Ursula, he had recoiled from the Nazi-Soviet agreement, but “explained this away by reassuring himself that Russia had signed the pact simply to gain time.” Britain was now rushing to develop the most powerful weapon the world had ever known, without informing Moscow. That struck Fuchs as unfair, a dereliction of the new Anglo-Soviet alliance. He later wrote: “I never saw myself as a spy. I just couldn’t understand why the West was not prepared to share the atom bomb with Moscow. I was of the opinion that something with that immense destructive potential should be made available to the big powers equally.” Fuchs had been taught to follow his conscience, and, in the monochrome moral universe he inhabited, informing Moscow about the new weapon was not an act of treachery to Britain but an expression of communist solidarity and an opportunity to contribute, personally, to the destruction of Nazism. The British authorities would later condemn Fuchs’s actions as “the inward and convinced arrogance of a genuinely introspective mind,” but Fuchs saw himself as a secret hero, as many spies do. “I had complete confidence in Russian policy [and] I therefore had no hesitation.” The German attack on Russia galvanized him to work in secret for the Soviet Union: “I established contact through another member of the communist party.”
The comrade in question was Jürgen Kuczynski.
In the summer of 1941, Fuchs visited Kuczynski in Hampstead and “informed him, with the most general expressions, about the type of my information.” In his memoirs, Jürgen wrote: “Klaus naturally came to me as I was the political leader in England.” Jürgen understood nothing about nuclear physics, but he knew how to seize an opportunity. He immediately contacted Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain and a personal friend. Maisky was embroiled in an office feud with Anatoli Gorski, the NKVD rezident, and so instead of alerting him, he passed the information to General Sklyarov, chief of Soviet military intelligence in London. Sklyarov cabled the Center, which “instructed him to recruit Fuchs,” a task he delegated to his deputy, Colonel Semyon Kremer.
Kremer had served as commander of a Red Army tank corps before being seconded to military intelligence and sent to Britain in 1937 with the cover job of Soviet military attaché. MI5 put Kremer under surveillance; he was spotted “walking up and down the Charing Cross Road, buying the latest edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships and every book on modern military tactics he could lay his hands on.” But MI5 was not watching him on August 8, 1941, when Kremer entered “a private house to the south of Hyde Park.” Fuchs arrived a few minutes later and knocked on the door, which was opened by Alexander Johnson, the man he had met at the party in Lawn Road four months earlier. Kremer gave the recognition code: “Greetings from Kuczynski.”
By this time, Fuchs had been working with Peierls for two months, tackling problems of gaseous diffusion and designing a plant to produce enriched uranium, the critical component of a nuclear weapon. Fuchs handed Kremer six pages of notes summarizing what he knew about the building of the atom bomb, including the essence of the Frisch-Peierls memorandum and the uranium enrichment process. It was the first installment of an intelligence cornucopia.
“Why did you decide to transfer this information to the Soviet Union?” Kremer asked him.
“The USSR should also have its own bomb,” Fuchs replied, adding that he wanted no payment and asked only that the intelligence be “placed on Stalin’s desk.”
Sklyarov dispatched the notes to Moscow in the diplomatic bag and sent a coded message to the Center marked “Urgent. Most important.”
BARCH conducted a meeting with the German physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who is in a special group in Birmingham University working on the theoretical aspects of creating a uranium bomb. Assuming that at least one per cent of the atomic energy of uranium explosive is released, a ten kilogram bomb will be equal to 1000 tons of dynamite. BRION.
Moscow responded immediately: “Take all measures for obtaining information about the uranium bomb.” Fuchs was code-named “Otto.”
Soviet military intelligence had recently acquired a new name, and a new boss. By order of Stalin, the Fourth Department was now known as the Main Intelligence Directorate, or the GRU. The new chief of military intelligence, General Aleksei Panfilov, offered his assessment of the material coming from Britain. If the new weapon worked, it “would put humanity on the road to hell.”
Over the next six months, Fuchs handed over swaths of scientific secrets to Kremer, some two hundred pages of information from the heart of Britain’s atomic weapons program. Usually they met during weekends at a busy bus stop, climbed on the same bus, and sat wordlessly on the top deck, side by side. Fuchs would alight first, leaving behind a package on the seat. Sometimes they caught a cab together and conducted business in the back. Fuchs had a slender understanding of spycraft. In complete violation of the principles of konspiratsia, he called Kremer several times on his office telephone, and according to a Russian source he once even appeared without warning at the Soviet embassy, carrying “forty pages of notes.” Kremer’s understanding of espionage protocol was not much better. He kept scanning behind them, looking for a tail—a sure way to arouse suspicion. “He irritated Fuchs by his insistence on taking long rides in London taxis, regularly doubling back in order to throw off anyone trying to tail them.”
Kremer had little appreciation of the intelligence he was gathering; he would rather have been fighting in a tank than meeting this odd young scientist on the top of London buses. Much later, Fuchs referred to Jürgen Kuczynski’s home as “my secret residence,” suggesting he was a regular visitor to Lawn Road. The Soviet embassy was under surveillance and its telephones were bugged; the Kuczynskis were being watched; Kremer was a known Soviet intelligence officer. MI5 had numerous opportunities to spot what was going on and took none of them.
Agent Sonya Page 25
