After one meeting with Fuchs, Kremer recalled: “He gave me a large notepad, of around 40cm by 20cm in size which was full of formulations and equations. He told me: ‘Here is all that is necessary for your scientists to know how to organize production of nuclear weapons.’ All the material was sent to Moscow and an instruction was received back not to lose contact with Fuchs. But, as usual, there wasn’t anything said about how useful the material was.”
The material was not just useful; it was priceless. In August 1941, another spy for the Soviet Union, the British civil servant John Cairncross, gave his handler a copy of the Maud Committee report outlining the aims of the nuclear weapons program. Fuchs provided the detailed reality of the bomb’s development, step by experimental step: the designs for a diffusion plant, estimates of the critical mass for explosive U-235, the measurement of fission, and the increasing British cooperation with American nuclear scientists. At the end of 1941, Fuchs co-authored two important papers on the separation of the isotopes of U-235—and passed the findings to Kremer.
But in the summer of 1942, just as suddenly as Kremer had appeared in Fuchs’s life, he disappeared from it, without warning or explanation. The Soviet officer abruptly returned to Moscow and then resumed command of a tank brigade on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded twice and eventually promoted to the rank of major general. Bizarrely, neither Kremer nor Moscow made any provision for maintaining contact with Klaus Fuchs. The reason for this mysterious hiatus has never been adequately explained. Kremer was itching to return to conventional warfare and getting on badly with his colleagues at the embassy. He may simply have quit in a fit of pique. But whatever the reason, Fuchs was left stranded without a handler at a crucial moment: he and Peierls had just made an important breakthrough in calculating the time required to produce enriched uranium and he wanted to tell Moscow about it. Once again, he turned to Jürgen Kuczynski, who this time decided to bypass the embassy. Instead, he informed his sister.
At a family gathering in Hampstead in July, Jürgen took Ursula aside and told her “a physicist by the name of F. had lost contact with a representative of the Soviet Embassy’s military department, who called himself ‘Johnson.’ ” That evening, back in Kidlington, she sent a message to Moscow requesting instructions. Possibly realizing that it had narrowly avoided a cock-up of historic proportions, the Center responded: “Make contact with Otto.”
Ursula, as it happened, was already in the atomic secrets business, through a family friend.
Melita Norwood’s espionage began in 1937. The daughter of a Latvian father and a British mother, Letty Sirnis was brought up in Bournemouth and joined the Communist Party at the age of twenty-five. Following her father’s early death, the family moved to Hendon. Her sister had been a student of Robert Kuczynski’s at the LSE, and her mother, Gertrude, helped the Kuczynski family find their first permanent British home in Lawn Road. In 1932, Letty became a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BNFMRA), a semipublic company conducting metallurgical research. Five years later the NKVD recruited her as an informant. She married a communist mathematics teacher, Hilary Norwood, and moved to a semidetached house in Bexleyheath, where she raised a family, read pacifist literature, and made her own jam. After the purges left the KGB short-staffed, she was transferred to Soviet military intelligence. Melita Norwood, code-named “Hola,” may have been the longest-serving Soviet agent on British soil, but she was also, for many years, the dullest. That changed in 1942 with the establishment of Britain’s atomic weapons program. Much of the research into the properties of certain metals, including uranium, was carried out by BNFMRA, and suddenly Norwood, “the perfect secretary” in the estimation of her boss, had access to some very valuable secrets. In August 1941, Churchill became the first world leader to approve a nuclear weapons program, and within weeks Norwood made her first information drop to Soviet intelligence, a paper on the behavior of uranium at high temperatures. From then on, she supplied a steady stream of top secret information on the atomic project, supplementing, confirming, and in some cases expanding on the torrent of intelligence provided by Fuchs. Her motivation was remarkably similar to his—“I wanted Russia to be on an equal footing with the west”—as was her self-image, and self-delusion: “I never considered myself a spy.” The Times later reported: “She would remove files on Tube Alloys from her superior’s safe, photograph them with a miniature camera, then pass them on to her Soviet controller, whom she would meet incognito in the suburbs of southeast London.” The controller was Ursula Beurton.
Since the Norwoods had long been friendly with the Kuczynskis, the two women always had a cover for meeting and could do so “even at each other’s homes.”
The Center was increasingly reliant on Agent Sonya, “our illegal station chief in England,” whose high-grade intelligence came not just from individual informants like Norwood, but indirectly from the upper reaches of the British establishment. The Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps was a close friend of Robert Kuczynski’s and a trusted member of Churchill’s War Cabinet. In 1942, recently returned from a two-year stint in Moscow as Britain’s ambassador, he was particularly well informed about Anglo-Soviet relations and privy to important state secrets. With his academic German friend he was also extremely indiscreet. Kuczynski passed on to his daughter whatever he gleaned from Stafford Cripps and others, and she sent it all to Moscow.
In her other, parallel life, Ursula was fast becoming a British housewife. The children adapted effortlessly to their new environment. Michael attended the local primary school in Kidlington. In his short life he had learned German, Chinese, Polish, and French. Now, almost overnight, he learned English, with an Oxfordshire accent. When Ursula was away, Nina was cared for by neighbors. Villagers can be inquisitive and intrusive, but with so many strangers flooding into the countryside, including numerous refugees, no one paid much attention to the single mother living quietly on the Oxford Road. Her English was so good, and her accent so faint, that most people were unaware she was German and assumed her to be British or, at worst, French. The only problem, from the locals’ perspective, was her name. “Beurton” looked suspiciously foreign, which, of course, it was. So they called her “Mrs. Burton” and refused to call her anything else. In a way, it was a mark of acceptance.
The two sides of Ursula’s life, domesticity and espionage, the open and the secret, merged in a way that had never happened before. As Mrs. Burton from number 124 she had a settled home, contented children, friendly neighbors, and a supportive family; as Agent Sonya she had a camera for producing microdots, a network of subagents, a helpful and appreciative Soviet handler, and an illegal radio transmitter in her bedroom cupboard. She also got back her husband and fellow spy.
On July 30, 1942, the plane from Lisbon landed at Poole airport, and a tall, spare man with a British passport identifying him as John William Miller climbed down the steps onto the tarmac. True to his word, Victor Farrell of MI6 had provided Len Beurton with the means of escape; his journey from Geneva to Britain had proved, in the end, remarkably easy. The Swiss, French, Spanish, and Portuguese authorities waved Mr. Miller through without demur; the British did not. At Poole, his luggage was thoroughly searched and Len was subjected to an even more rigorous interrogation than the one Ursula had undergone.
Len Beurton blithely admitted the British passport was false, as was a second, Bolivian passport, found in his suitcase, in the name of Luis Carlos Bilboa. The rest of his statement was an elaborate tissue of lies. He claimed he had gone to Germany in 1939 “to try to sell certain property belonging to one Herr Rudolf [sic] Kuczynski, a refugee since the advent of Hitler to power, now professor of demography at London University”; he said he had left Switzerland because “things seemed to be blowing up a bit.” When quizzed on how he had survived financially for three years without a job, Len “claimed to have inherited £20,000 from some French relatives” while working in J
ersey before the war and had lived on the cash ever since.
The authorities smelled something fishy. Len made no mention of the tuberculosis that, according to Ursula, had prompted him to come to Switzerland in the first place; his father had been a penniless French waiter, so it seemed unlikely his relatives would amass £20,000, let alone leave it to a distant English cousin; he exhibited a distinctly “shifty manner in answering questions put to him.” Quite how he had obtained his false passports required further investigation. “The interrogator admits himself quite incapable of forming a definite opinion about Beurton…he behaves somewhat suspiciously whenever confronted with any constituted authority (especially military) for which he seems to have an inherent antipathy and suspicion.” Len was already on the security blacklist, and his answers suggested he should stay on it. He was released, but not before MI5 ensured he could not leave the country: “Would you ask the Passport Office not to grant an Exit Permit for Leon Beurton without reference to us?” Reflecting the ingrained sexism of the time, MI5 saw the male of the couple as the main potential threat, when the real focus of suspicion should have been his wife.
Ursula and Len had not seen each other since 1940. Their reunion was joyful and passionate. Len marveled at the way the children had grown in his absence, at Nina’s grasp of toddler English and Michael’s burgeoning interest in cricket. He had come to regard the children as his own. Family life resumed, almost as it had before, but with the dramatic alpine scenery exchanged for the verdant, rolling landscape of rural Oxfordshire. During long walks in the country around Kidlington, Ursula outlined her continuing espionage for the Soviet Union. She showed Len the radio hidden in their bedroom. She did not go into the details of her clandestine work, and Len did not ask. Even inside their marriage, Ursula operated on a need-to-know basis, and there was much that Len still did not need to know.
Three days after Len landed in Britain, a letter from the British government arrived demanding repayment for the cost of repatriating him from Spain in 1938. The bill sent a clear message. “It told us that the authorities had taken note of Len’s return.” Len wrote: “We started under a cloud, and so it remained.”
On his arrival in Poole, Len stated that his purpose in coming to Britain was “to re-join his wife and report for [military] Service.” With the first aim achieved, he now felt compelled to fulfill the second: Len volunteered to join the Royal Air Force.
While Len awaited his call-up papers, Michael studied the art of spin bowling, Nina learned to count, and Ursula, like every other housewife in Britain, made do on meager wartime rations (with some financial help from the Soviet Union), tended to her children, and chatted over the fence with the neighbors about the progress of the war. To all outward appearances, here was another ordinary family, happy to be reunited. Except that every few weeks, Ursula left her family, climbed on her bike, and secretly pedaled to a different part of the English countryside to walk arm in arm through the fields with another man.
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1942, a man and a woman, both refugees from Nazi Germany, sat in the café opposite Snow Hill railway station in Birmingham, deep in conversation. An eavesdropper would have heard nothing out of the ordinary. They chatted about books, films, and the war, initially in German, then switching to English, which both spoke fluently. They arranged to meet again in a month’s time.
As they rose to leave, the man handed over a thick file, containing eighty-five pages of documents, the latest reports from the Tube Alloys project and the most dangerous secret in the world.
“It was pleasant just to have a conversation,” Ursula wrote of this momentous first meeting with Klaus Fuchs. “I noticed, that very first time, how calm, thoughtful, tactful and cultured he was.” In fact, Fuchs had arrived at the meeting in a state of acute anxiety, but was soothed by the “reassuring presence” of the woman who introduced herself as Sonya. Kremer had been aloof and businesslike, but here, he felt, was someone with whom he could “discuss his feelings.”
Birmingham railway station was too public for a regular spy rendezvous. From the train window on the way home, Ursula spotted somewhere more appropriate.
The quiet market town of Banbury, midway between Oxford and Birmingham, was a place notable for being almost wholly unremarkable. An ancient nursery rhyme records the only event of significance to have taken place there.
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.
Over the ensuing eight centuries, little had happened to disturb the somnolence of this little town, which made it ideal for Ursula’s purposes.
A month later, she met Fuchs near Banbury station and they strolled into the countryside, arms linked in accordance with “the old-established principle of illicit meetings,” to outward appearances lovers on a secret tryst. The first task was to establish a dead-letter box, a secure hiding place to leave messages and arrange future meetings. A path led across empty meadows to some remote woodland out of sight of the road. Ursula had brought along a small trowel, and in the undergrowth, between the roots of a tree, she dug a hole. “Klaus stood beside me, and watched me through his spectacles.” He made no offer to help, looking on with an expression of intense concentration, as if observing an experiment. “I thought this quite alright. I was more of an ordinary person and more practical than he. I looked up at him once and thought ‘Oh, you dear, great professor.’ ”
For the next year, every few weeks, on a weekend morning, Ursula would catch a train to Banbury and leave a written message at the dead-letter box, stating when and where to meet that afternoon. Fuchs caught the afternoon train from Birmingham. Their meetings were always in the “country roads near Banbury,” never in the same place twice, and each lasted less than half an hour. “It was more difficult to tail us in the open countryside,” she wrote. And “it would arouse less suspicion if we took a little walk together.” Besides, she enjoyed his company.
Fuchs knew nothing of Ursula’s background and experiences, and she understood little about nuclear physics, but they shared a past, an ideology, and a secret. “No one who did not live in such isolation can guess how precious these meetings with a fellow German comrade were,” she later wrote. “Our common involvement in trading in danger also added to our feeling of closeness.” Fuchs seemed “sensitive and intelligent,” but also unworldly, detached from reality, lonely in his duplicity. A bond formed swiftly.
Ursula claimed Fuchs was unaware that “the girl from Banbury” (as he later described her) was the sister of Comrade Jürgen Kuczynski. He was careful not to ask her real name, or where she lived. Jürgen had brought them together, but the siblings never discussed Fuchs. “Though my brother and I got on so well, I stuck strictly to the rules.” Ursula did not yet realize the historic significance of the information she was passing on to the Center. But Moscow’s response—enthusiastic, grateful, and increasingly demanding—left her in no doubt that she was playing the biggest fish of her career. Soviet military intelligence did not go in for flattery, but the responses to her messages were more effusive than anything she had received before: “Important”; “Very Valuable.”
Fuchs’s transfer of scientific secrets to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943 was one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history, some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams, the designs for uranium enrichment, a step-by-step guide to the fast-moving development of the atomic weapon. Much of this material was too complex and technical to be coded and sent by radio, and so Ursula passed the documents to Sergei through a “brush contact,” a surreptitious handover imperceptible to a casual observer. If Ursula needed to pass on urgent information, or bulky files, she alerted Aptekar by means of an agreed “signal site”: “I had to travel to London and, at a certain time and i
n a certain place, drop a small piece of chalk and tread on it.” Two days later she would cycle to the rendezvous site, a side road six miles beyond the junction of the A40 and A34 on the road from Oxford to Cheltenham; Aptekar would drive from London in the military attaché’s car and arrive at the pickup site at an appointed time for a swift handover. At one of these meetings, the Soviet officer presented her with a new Minox camera for making microdots and copying documents, and a small but powerful transmitter measuring just six by eight inches, a sixth of the size of her homemade radio and easier to conceal. She dismantled her own equipment, but kept it in reserve “for emergency use.”
Fuchs was privy to the innermost workings of the atomic project and he held nothing back. In the first year, he and Peierls wrote no fewer than eleven reports together, including seminal papers on isotope separation and calculating the destructive power of the bomb. According to his latest biographer, “it was via Fuchs and Sonya that Moscow received news of effectively all the scientific data produced by the Tube Alloys project for over a year.” The GRU had been slow to appreciate Fuchs’s value; with Sonya as his controller, the case moved into the highest gear, and the nuclear weapons project was awarded a Soviet code name that reflected the rising excitement in Moscow: “Enormos.” Fuchs’s request that his information should pass straight to Stalin’s desk was fully realized. Fuchs and Sonya were now firmly on the Soviet leader’s radar, which, as anyone close to that capricious murderer could attest, was not necessarily a comfortable place to be.
Agent Sonya Page 26
