Truman couldn’t help himself, though. He continued poking around for information about where all the money was going.
“Truman is a nuisance,” Stimson griped. But nothing the senator did changed Stimson’s position. Knowledge of the atomic bomb was available on a strictly need-to-know basis.
Harry Truman did not need to know.
MAN WITH FOUR GLOVES
ON THE FREEZING AFTERNOON OF FEBRUARY 5, 1944, Harry Gold walked the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. He was wearing gloves and holding a second pair in his hand. This was according to Semyon Semyonov’s directions—the gloves were a recognition signal for the man he was to meet. The other man, Gold was told, would be carrying a tennis ball.
A few minutes before four, Gold turned onto Henry Street. He always tried to get to a meeting spot a little early, just to have a look. He liked what he saw. The narrow street was lined with four-and five-story brick tenement buildings, many of them in the process of being torn down and replaced.
“The place had been very well chosen,” said Gold. “It was beautifully deserted.”
A few blocks away, Klaus Fuchs climbed the concrete stairs of a Manhattan subway station and stepped up onto the streets of the Lower East Side. He pulled out a folded map, took a quick look, and started walking.
As he turned onto Henry Street, he took a tennis ball from the pocket of his long coat. This was according to Ruth Werner’s instructions—before leaving Britain, she had told him where and when to meet his American contact. She told him to carry a tennis ball and to look for a man holding an extra pair of gloves. Fuchs did not know the man’s real name and was not to ask.
Sure enough, as Fuchs approached the designated spot, there was a man with four gloves, pacing the sidewalk to keep warm. The man glanced at Fuchs, and at the ball in his hand. He stepped forward.
“What is the way to Chinatown?” asked Gold.
“I think Chinatown closes at five o’clock,” Fuchs responded.
With this exchange of passwords, each knew for certain he was dealing with the right man.
Gold introduced himself as “Raymond.” Fuchs used his real name, since there was no secret about his identity. They shook hands, then began walking together.
“We strolled a while and talked,” Gold later reported to Semyonov. “He is about five-foot-ten, thin, pale complexioned, and at first was very reserved in manner.”
Gold suggested they get something to eat. Fuchs agreed.
“As I kept talking about myself,” reported Gold, “he warmed up and began to show evidence of getting down to business.”
Fuchs told Gold he was proud to be helping the Soviet Union. He told Gold where he was living, where the British team was working, and who was on it. He described as much as he knew about the organization of the Manhattan Project, saying he’d heard that the bomb design was happening at a secret site somewhere in New Mexico.
They made arrangements to meet again and agreed to a few basic rules. To avoid drawing attention, they would never meet in the same place twice, and “under no circumstances,” said Gold, “were we to wait any longer than four or five minutes at any of the meeting places.”
*
ABOUT A MONTH LATER, they met again on a Manhattan street corner and walked together toward the East River. Gold asked Fuchs for specifics about his work in America.
Fuchs explained that he and the British team were working out the details of how best to separate U-235 from U-238. The actual work was being done at a factory in the Southeast—the Oak Ridge plant, though Fuchs didn’t know that detail yet. Fuchs described some of the complex challenges of separating uranium atoms. With his experience in chemistry, Gold was able to follow the basic science. “At the first opportunity,” said Gold, “I put this material in writing, and later handed it over to John.”
John was a KGB agent named Anatoly Yatzkov. Gold’s long-time contact, Semyon Semyonov, had been under extremely close FBI surveillance lately, making it too risky for him to be closely involved with a source as valuable as Fuchs. Gold’s new contact, Yatzkov, worked as a clerk at the Soviet consulate in New York. Soon after receiving Gold’s report, Yatzkov slipped away from his desk, walked up to the KGB office on the top floor, coded the report, and sent it to Moscow.
Top officials at KGB headquarters were thrilled. Finally, they had a high-level physicist inside the Manhattan Project.
*
JUST AS HE’D BEEN IN BRITAIN, Fuchs was a bit of a loner in New York. He bought a violin and spent his evenings playing music in his apartment. On weekends, he enjoyed hiking on trails outside the city.
Each weekday he went to his office near Wall Street, where he worked with a team of British physicists. The other scientists liked Fuchs and respected his work, but didn’t pay much attention to him. No one noticed him slipping notes and handwritten drafts of technical papers—documents he would have no reason to take home—into his briefcase. “I personally furnished all of the drafts,” he later said, “directly to the individual known to me as Raymond.”
Fuchs and Gold set a third meeting for March on Park Avenue in Manhattan. It was a chilly day, and both wore overcoats. Fuchs and Gold spotted each other and knew what to do.
“We immediately turned into one of the dark deserted side streets,” Gold recalled.
Gold walked up behind Fuchs. Fuchs took an envelope from his overcoat pocket and passed it quickly to Gold, who dropped it inside his coat. They walked together to the next corner, then separated.
“The whole affair took possibly thirty seconds or one minute,” Gold said. That was standard tradecraft—when documents were to be exchanged, meetings should be very short. “Approximately fifteen minutes later,” said Gold, “I turned over the information to John.”
Fuchs and Gold met again in late March in the Bronx. While they had dinner, Fuchs told Gold that the atomic bomb was being designed at a place called Los Alamos. At several more meetings in May and June, Fuchs delivered packages of documents with technical information on his work. Gold took the packages directly to Anatoly Yatzkov.
After one of his pick-ups from Fuchs, Gold arrived early for the hand-off to Yatzkov. “I still had about five minutes,” he said. He felt the large envelope in his pocket. Inside was information about the most closely guarded secret on earth. The temptation was too great. Gold stopped on the street, in front of a drug store. He looked all around. No one was watching. He slipped the envelope from his jacket pocket, reached in, pulled out the papers, and tilted them toward the faint light coming through the store window. He began to read.
“This was in a very small but distinct writing,” he said, “it was in ink, and consisted mainly of mathematical derivations.”
Gold didn’t understand a word of it.
*
IN LATE JULY, Gold arrived at the Bell Cinema in Brooklyn for a meeting with Fuchs. Fuchs never showed.
Their backup meeting was scheduled for a couple weeks later on the corner of Ninety-Sixth Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. Again, Gold waited. Again, no Fuchs.
“On this second occasion I became very worried,” said Gold. “The area is very close to a section of New York where muggings often occur.”
Yatzkov told Gold to try to find out if Fuchs was still in New York. Gold wrote Fuchs’s name and address in a book and took it to the scientists’ building. He was let in by a woman who was cleaning the lobby. Gold showed her the book, explaining he’d borrowed it from his friend, Klaus Fuchs, and was here to return it.
Fuchs was gone, the woman said. He’d left town suddenly and didn’t say where he was going.
Gold passed the bad news to Yatzkov. KGB officials in Moscow were furious. After years of frustration they’d finally gotten a source inside the American bomb project—and now they’d lost him. “A stern warning and reprimand must be made,” Moscow cabled its New York office, “for losing contact with such a source.”
The Soviets never could have guessed that a second s
ource was about to walk in the door.
BORN REBEL
WHEN THEODORE HALL GRADUATED high school at the age of thirteen, he listed his three top career options: comedian, journalist, physicist.
At just fourteen, Hall entered Queens College in New York City. Finding the work too easy, he transferred to Harvard and loaded up on the toughest math and physics courses available. The challenging subjects were “delightful” and “hot stuff,” he told his brother. Physicist jumped to the top of his dream job list.
Ted Hall turned eighteen in 1944. He was about six feet tall and very thin, with wavy black hair. He was about to finish college and assumed he’d be drafted into the army as soon as he graduated. The government had other plans.
One afternoon, Hall was asked to report to a meeting room in the physics lab building on campus. When he walked in he saw that the shades were drawn, the lights dim. There was a long table in the room, but only one man sat at the table. He introduced himself as a physics professor who now worked for the government in Washington, D.C.
“There is a project,” the man told Hall. “It’s doing quite important work, and they need some more hands.”
Hall asked for a bit more detail. The man shook his head, saying only that the project was war-related and top secret.
After the meeting, Hall walked back to his dorm. He talked with a friend from down the hall, a fellow physics student who had also been recruited by the mysterious man from Washington. They took turns guessing what they were being asked to do and where they’d go to do it.
Hall’s roommate, Saville Sax, listened to the whole conversation. Sax was a dedicated Communist, and he knew Hall had shown interest in communism as well.
“If this turns out to be a weapon that is really awful,” Sax said, “what you should do about it is tell the Russians.”
Hall glared at Sax. Sax said nothing more.
*
HALL RODE THE TRAIN to New Mexico and found his way to 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe. He walked through a courtyard, knocked on a door, and entered a small office. There at a desk sat a smiling Dorothy McKibben. She made an ID badge for Hall and a quick phone call. A car came, and Hall was driven to the top of a nearby mesa and through the gates of Los Alamos.
At a brief orientation, Hall was told he’d be helping to build an atomic bomb. He was given a secret little book known as “The Los Alamos Primer,” made up of copies of the lectures Robert Serber had given the year before. He got a white ID badge, giving him unrestricted access to the Tech Area.
After spending a few days studying atomic bomb physics, Hall went to work with a team led by the Italian-born physicist Bruno Rossi. The team was given a tiny amount of pure U-235, one of the first samples to arrive from the Oak Ridge plant. Rossi asked Hall to carefully place the thin uranium strip inside a specially built machine that would bombard the uranium with neutrons. The more senior scientists watched while Hall worked the uranium into place. If he dropped the sample and contaminated it, they’d have to wait weeks for more U-235.
“It wasn’t the easiest gadget to work with,” Hall said later. “As I mounted the specimen, I remember my hands were shaking. I don’t know whether they were shaking enough for anyone else to see.”
Hall got the sample into place, and Rossi’s machine bombarded it with neutrons. They figured out how many of the neutrons hit uranium atoms and caused fission. This was part of the process of determining exactly how much U-235 would be needed to make a uranium bomb.
Impressed with his youngest team member, Rossi recommended Hall for even more important work. And in the summer of 1944, Oppenheimer needed all the help he could get.
*
THE CRISIS BEGAN THAT SPRING, remembered the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Ulam was working in his office when he heard footsteps and turned toward his open door.
“I saw Robert Oppenheimer running excitedly down a corridor holding a small vial in his hand,” Ulam said. “Doors opened, people were summoned, whispered conversations ensued, there was great excitement.”
Ulam ran into the hall and was told that Oppenheimer was holding the first samples of plutonium to arrive at Los Alamos. It was just a few grams, but it was enough to start some important experiments.
The plan for the uranium bomb was to fire one lump of uranium at another inside a gun barrel. Oppenheimer’s scientists assumed this same gun assembly method would work for plutonium. But experiments proved them wrong.
Fission occurred even faster than expected in plutonium, causing a chain reaction to begin more quickly than in uranium. So, in a gun assembly bomb, the chain reaction would start even before the two lumps of plutonium came completely together. Enough energy would be released to blow the plutonium apart—but only with about as much force as a normal bomb. The critical mass of plutonium would not stay together long enough to create a massive atomic explosion.
“The terrible shock, and an inescapable one, was that the gun assembly method could not be used for plutonium,” John Manley remembered. “A gun just would not assemble plutonium fast enough.”
What made this such a serious crisis was that Oak Ridge might be able to produce enough U-235 for one atomic bomb by the middle of 1945. If Oppenheimer was going to make more than one bomb—and Groves was demanding that he do so—the bombs would have to be made with plutonium, which was easier to produce that U-235. The bottom line: Oppenheimer now had to figure out a whole new design for an atomic bomb.
The timing only added to the pressure. Allied forces landed in France in June 1944 and began battling east across French territory toward Germany. The Allies were finally winning the war—but Hitler could still turn it around by winning the race for the atomic bomb.
“The only way we could lose the war,” said physicist Philip Morrison, “was if we failed in our jobs.”
*
STILL EIGHTEEN, Ted Hall was the youngest scientist at Los Alamos. By summer he’d learned the basics of the uranium bomb. Then Bruno Rossi put him to work experimenting with components of the new plutonium bomb.
The challenge of the top-secret work was thrilling. “Living conditions are still poor here and will remain so,” Hall wrote to his family, “but I would be willing to live on whale blubber alone in an igloo at the South Pole for a crack at the same job.”
Hall felt relaxed enough at Los Alamos to be himself, which meant doing things his own way. Once, late at night, a fellow physicist came into Hall’s office to look for some papers. He saw a ten-foot high stack of crates in the middle of the room. On top of the leaning tower sat Hall, cross-legged, lost in thought.
“He was interested in tweaking the system,” said one scientist. “He was a natural-born rebel.”
On Sundays, Hall sometimes went on hikes or played a little Ping-Pong. But he spent most of his time off lying on the bed in his tiny room, listening to classical music and thinking. And not about science.
“I shared the general sympathy for our allies, the Soviet Union,” Hall explained. “After they were attacked, everybody knew that they were bearing the main load in the fight against Nazi Germany.”
It looked like the Germans would be defeated, but what then? Hall tried to imagine what the post-war world would be like.
“I shared a common belief that the horrors of war would bring our various leaders to their senses and usher in a period of peace and harmony,” Hall said. But what if this didn’t happen? What if Americans succeeded in building atomic bombs and they were the only ones to have them? Would the United States be more likely to use atomic bombs, knowing no one else could strike back? Wouldn’t the world be safer if a second major power also knew how to build atomic bombs? That way, neither country would use the bomb—knowing they’d have the bomb used on them.
“It seemed to me,” Hall said, “that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.”
Looking back at his younger self, Hall would later call himself a “rather arrogant” teenager. That helps explain why he decide
d to change the course of history.
“My decision about contacting the Soviets was a gradual one,” he said, “and it was entirely my own.”
TWO INSIDE
IN MID-OCTOBER 1944, Ted Hall left Los Alamos and took the train home for two weeks of leave. He celebrated his nineteenth birthday with his parents in New York City.
The next day, October 21, Hall went to visit Saville Sax, his former college roommate. Ted found Sax at Sax’s mother’s small Manhattan apartment. While his mother ironed in one room, Sax led Hall to another and closed the door. In hushed voices, Hall told his friend about his decision. But, Hall wondered, how does one go about handing military secrets to the Soviet Union?
Sax had no idea. They talked over options and made a plan.
Later that day, Hall walked to the offices of a company called Amtorg, a Soviet import/export business. This was the company KGB agent Semyon Semyonov had worked for; many of the Amtorg employees doubled as Soviet spies. Hall didn’t know this. It just seemed like a good place to start.
Hall entered the building and found himself in a warehouse. He saw a worker stacking boxes and approached him.
“I want to speak to someone about an important military issue,” Hall said.
The worker knew the FBI kept watch on the building. He told Hall to leave immediately.
Hall persisted, asking if there was someone else he could talk to.
The man quickly gave Hall a name, Sergei Kurnakov, along with a phone number. Then he turned back to his boxes.
Hall recognized Kurnakov’s name—he was a Soviet journalist based in New York. Hall had read his articles. Was he also a secret agent for the KGB? Hall didn’t know, but at least it was a lead.
Hall called the number. Kurnakov invited the young man to drop by his apartment.
*
THE NEXT DAY Hall and Kurnakov sat in the Soviet journalist’s living room. As soon as Hall began talking, Kurnakov realized his young guest had “an exceptionally keen mind.”
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