In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  MOSCOW RULES—THE TERM REFERS TO the careful procedures used by spies throughout the Cold War when working in enemy territory—dictate that the handler always provide his joe with a fallback date. If the agent for any reason—the flu, a nagging spouse, an error of memory—fails to appear for the scheduled meet, he knows when the next rendezvous, and even the one after that, is scheduled. Just show up and all will be forgiven.

  In the nearly two months between Skardon’s first conversation with Fuchs and the scientist’s arrest, Sasha waited for Rest on each of the designated fallback dates. He’d return to the Spotted Horse, near the Kew Gardens underground, order his beer, and try to find that consoling mixture of wishful thinking and grand purpose that allows a spy to sustain his covert life.

  “Deep down I knew something had happened to Klaus Fuchs,” he’d plaintively concede, “but waiting there I hoped a miracle might happen: in one minute the door would open and a very cool Klaus, just another respectable gentleman, would be smiling at me.”

  On February 3, 1950, Sasha read the banner headline in the morning paper—“Spy Arrested for Atomic Treason.” It was only then that he realized he would never see “a very cool Klaus” smiling at him again.

  WHILE THE BRITISH HAD SEEMED in no hurry to arrest Fuchs, they were suddenly in a great rush to conclude the legal proceedings. Such high-level treason was an embarrassment to His Majesty’s government. And another reason for haste, the public didn’t know about the facility at Harwell or, for that sensitive matter, the independent British atomic weapons project—and the authorities wanted to keep things that way.

  Fuchs came to trial on March 1 at the Old Bailey courthouse, and the carefully orchestrated show was over in less than ninety minutes. The British attorney general ruled that Fuchs could not be prosecuted for espionage since, other than his rambling confession, there was no independent evidence to corroborate his treason. He was charged with four deliberately vague violations of the Official Secrets Acts. The only witness was Skardon. Fuchs did not testify.

  The scientist sat stoically in the defendant’s cage. He assumed the judge would decree that he should be hanged by the neck until dead. Instead he received the maximum possible sentence for the crime of conveying secrets to a wartime ally: a fourteen-year jail term. When his fate was announced, it was as if his imploding world suddenly came back into focus. “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,’” he’d reflect years later, still amazed to have escaped the hangman.

  AS HIS AGENT BEGAN HIS jail sentence, Sasha planned his own escape. The Center had instructed him to get out of London in a hurry, but he had convinced the spymasters that if he suddenly rushed to the airport, MI5 would realize his role in the case. Why should we assist the opposition? he argued. After all, in the course of his interrogation, Rest had not revealed his handler.

  “How old is he?” Skardon had asked.

  “He’s neither young nor old. Let’s say thirty-five,” Fuchs parried.

  “Is he tall?”

  “Well, yes, rather tall.”

  “How well does he speak English?”

  “Very well. He’s very fluent and has an excellent vocabulary.”

  “But does he have an accent?”

  “Oh yes! He does have an accent.”

  “A Russian accent? Or Slavic?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Possibly Slavic.”

  MI5 deduced that Rest’s London case officer was an “illegal,” as nondiplomatic assets are known. Probably, they decided, a Czech or a Pole who had been living in London for some time, and most likely had become a naturalized citizen.

  Sasha continued as second secretary at the embassy for two months after the trial, making a point to live his cover. He laid flowers on Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery and went to a screening of The Battleship Potemkin the Young Socialists held at Oxford. When he was recalled to Moscow in April 1950, none of the MI5 watchers thought it was anything other than a routine diplomatic reposting.

  BUT THE CASE WAS FAR from closed. For the FBI spy hunters, there remained one lingering mystery. During the course of his interrogation by Skardon, Fuchs had revealed he had an American contact to whom he had passed the stolen atomic secrets.

  He had offered few identifying details. Perhaps this was the cornered agent’s stubborn refusal to share all he knew with the opposition; or, quite possibly he’d never paid much attention. As best Fuchs could recall, the contact was around forty, about five feet ten inches tall, with a “broad build and round face.” He knew him only as “Raymond.”

  When Hoover read the transcript of the interrogation, he quickly realized it was imperative to locate this Raymond. The courier, after all, might still be active, he still could be serving as a go-between for the spies in the field and their KGB handlers. The hunt would be, the director said, “one of the most difficult and important quests ever undertaken by the FBI.” Nevertheless, “there would be no excuses for not finding him,” he decreed.

  He chose Supervisor Lamphere to go to London to interview Fuchs and get the information that would lead the Bureau to Raymond.

  On the thirteen-hour flight, first stop Labrador, and then on across the Atlantic to London, the weather was calm, but a tempest raged in Bob’s mind. He knew he could confront Fuchs with an advantage that Skardon never possessed, yet he wondered if it would be sufficient. He wistfully hoped that the information Meredith had uncovered—the catalogue of Venona secrets that could only be hinted at, never revealed—might succeed in prodding Fuchs’s feeble memory, even perhaps loosen the restraints on his defenses. Yet never once in the course of his long, restless journey did he contemplate the other mysteries that would unravel after he pulled this thread.

  Part III

  Dominoes

  27

  HIS PLANE LANDED UNDER A gunmetal-gray London sky in the early morning, and Bob felt not just jet-lagged, but also in danger of coming completely unglued. From his throne on the fifth floor, the director had pointed his scepter straight at Bob: it was Supervisor Lamphere’s responsibility to get Fuchs to put an actual name to Raymond. “The whole pressures of the world,” Bob would grumble, his nerves stretched taut, “were on my shoulders to get that thing wrapped up.” And as if that weren’t burden enough, the weeks leading up to his departure had only added to the pile of woes weighing on his broad shoulders.

  There had been a whirlwind of preparations—an intense session locked away with Meredith to review one final time all the references to Rest in the KGB cables; a visit to the State Department, where an officious junior staffer shuttled him about with a flattering deference as his diplomatic passport was issued; a mind-numbing lecture delivered by a Bureau lab man who had done some work with the AEC and who now attempted to pass on the rudimentary principles of constructing an atom bomb so that Bob would be able to speak knowledgeably with Fuchs, brandishing an authoritative vocabulary that included such previously unknown phrases as “implosion trigger,” “critical mass,” and “plutonium core”; and, not least in his complex and ticklish world, a heart-to-heart with Sarah suggesting that some time apart might do them both some good. And then, late on a Friday afternoon just thirty-six hours before his scheduled departure, Bob received the phone call.

  It was from “Trout Mouth,” as the rank-and-file agents called the Bureau’s assistant director, Hugh Clegg. The nickname was a tribute to his habit of pursing his lips when he talked, a mannerism that, to hear the headquarters’ catty gossip, left him always ready to bestow a sycophantic kiss on the director’s broad posterior. But it wasn’t just Clegg’s doglike obedience or stream of unctuous praise for Hoover that had gotten under Bob’s and the other agents’ skin. Clegg headed the dreaded Inspection Division, and therefore he sat in stern and constant judgment over supervisors like Bob who were in the trenches doing, they felt with haughty pride, the actual work to catch the bad guys. Clegg wasn’t an investigator; he investigated the inv
estigators, and was, danger of dangers, an empowered critic who had Hoover’s ear. And now Clegg was calling to ask Bob to send him the Fuchs file.

  Bob’s first thought was malicious: this guy is so isolated from the field that he has no idea that the Foocase already ran to nearly forty volumes. Perhaps, Bob tactfully suggested, rather than wade through the entire file, you’d prefer to read the summary brief? Clegg agreed that would be better, and at the same time somehow managed, Bob couldn’t help feeling, to imply that it was his idea.

  It was only after Bob hung up the phone that a panicked question jumped up in his mind: Why the hell does Clegg want the Fuchs file?

  He ran to Al Belmont, the assistant director of domestic intelligence.

  Belmont gave it to him straight: “He’s going to London with you.”

  “Jesus Christ, no!” Bob erupted.

  But it was the director’s order and hence could not be challenged. The most Belmont could do was offer a consoling summary of what had led to this last-minute decree. It seemed someone on Capitol Hill had whispered into Hoover’s ear that a Bureau official with genuine stature, perhaps Associate Director Clyde Tolson, should accompany Supervisor Lamphere to London; the snooty Brits, after all, were sticklers for protocol, and Lamphere was too far down on the Bureau totem pole to impress them. The director, eager to keep the powers on the Hill in his corner, swiftly agreed. Only, he wasn’t prepared to send his number-two man (and, if the rumors had it right, his significant other) out of Washington for what might stretch into weeks on end. So he decided that Clegg could do the job; he was high enough in the pecking order to assuage the British sense of propriety; also, his absence from the fifth floor for an indeterminate period was a loss that Hoover could endure.

  A still simmering Bob and a distant Clegg, unreconciled partners in a shotgun marriage, left Washington on Monday, taking the train to New York where they’d catch the flight to London. But no sooner had their train pulled out of Union Station than the first crisis occurred. Clegg broke his eyeglasses; Bob silently predicted this was just a small harbinger of what was in store now that a lifelong deskman had been sent out into the field.

  Finding his G-man voice and stare, Bob had to convince the conductor to hold the train in Baltimore while a rattled Clegg telephoned his wife with instructions to contact his ophthalmologist and get his prescription phoned in to the supervisor of the New York field office. Then Clegg called New York and, after making sure that it was understood he was on a special mission ordered by Director Hoover, arranged to have a new pair of glasses waiting for him at the airport when he checked in. Throughout the entire comical episode Bob did his best to hold his tongue. “Anything other than the respect due his position,” as Bob later recalled, “would have been a sure way to earn his displeasure.”

  But Bob’s discipline was put to further test on the interminable plane ride across the Atlantic. Clegg had absently inquired if Bob was Protestant. Yes, Bob confessed, just making conversation. Yet once Clegg heard that, he launched into a tirade, one Protestant to another, about “how the Bureau was suffering from an overabundance of Catholic influence in the hierarchy.” This talk of a Papist conspiracy at headquarters left Bob, who had a live-and-let-live attitude toward religion as he did to most personal predilections, “saddened and infuriated.”

  And that wasn’t all that was giving Bob second—or was it by now third?—thoughts about what he’d gotten himself into. While Clegg’s streak of prejudice was appalling, a more immediate concern to Bob was his “lack of knowledge about espionage and counter-intelligence operations.” Clegg had the Foocase summary open on his lap for the entire flight and every few minutes he’d turn to Bob demanding an explanation of one term or another. How was Clegg going to interrogate a long-running KGB spy like Fuchs if he didn’t understand the fundamental rules of tradecraft by which a covert life is lived? Bob fumed.

  Clegg, to his credit, must’ve been asking himself the same question. Because after struggling through the case summary—the references to dead drops, brush passes, and handlers were as intimidating to him as was the nuclear physics that had been dished out to Bob—Clegg threw up his hands in surrender. He’d be present at the interviews, but, he announced, it would be Bob who handled the actual questioning of Fuchs. His job, as he presently defined it, would be to spread good cheer among his brother MI5 officers, to let them see that their American cousins appreciated the courtesy they were extending in letting the Bureau sit down with a British prisoner.

  Bob felt he’d won a small victory. But after Clegg had dozed off and he sat wide-awake in the darkness with his racing thoughts for company, Bob began to wonder if he’d been outsmarted. If there were any disasters, if Fuchs refused to speak, if Raymond could not be identified, there’d need to be a scapegoat. And the head of the Inspection Division, who’d have a ringside seat to the disaster, would place the blame squarely on Supervisor Lamphere.

  ADDING TO ALL BOB’S MOUNTING concerns, and making his mission even more consequential, was the somber fact that as he headed off to London, the Bureau had not been able to make significant progress in its search for Raymond. The director had made it clear that none of the Bureau’s resources would be withheld; neither cost nor manpower would be an issue. Yet so far, Bob conceded with as much stoicism as he could muster while staring defeat in the face, “we were getting nowhere fast.”

  Meredith was the ace hidden up Bob’s sleeve, and in the frenzied weeks after Fuchs’s arrest and circumspect confession, he had done his best to play the Venona card. The two friends sat together in Meredith’s gloomy office much like they’d done when they were first starting out on their hunt; only now, as they were gratified to acknowledge, their once quixotic collaboration had already bagged a Soviet agent-in-place at a British atomic center. With one scalp nailed to the wall, they had the confidence it would be short work to get the next. “The Big Picture,” as Bob hopefully called it, would come into focus.

  Meredith went back over the cables that had been sent between 1943 and 1945 and now when he stitched them together it became clear that Raymond’s presence had been lurking in them all along. Only the KGB, guided by a very cautious tradecraft, had added one more concealing layer of word code to protect their cutout’s identity. In the cables, Raymond had been rechristened as Gus. Or was it Goose? Meredith couldn’t be sure of the precise translation. But there was no doubt that Raymond and Gus/Goose were the same man.

  Bob was a rapt audience as Meredith trotted out example after example to prove his point. On February 9, 1944, a cable sent from the New York station noted: “. . . a meeting took place between Goose and Rest.” Another cable: “When he checked out Rest’s apartment, Goose was informed that Rest had left. . . .” And still another: “. . . Rest did not appear at the meeting and Goose missed the next meeting.”

  Bob quickly conceded that Meredith was correct: Goose and Raymond were one and the same. Yet, he impatiently challenged, where does this get us? One impenetrable code name had simply been replaced by another. One mystery had given way to a new one. And he might just as well have felt like shouting, How does your deduction stop Hoover from breathing down my neck?

  Locked in his doldrums, Bob returned the next day to backtracking over the transcript the British had sent of Skardon’s interrogation of Fuchs. According to his annoyingly superficial confession, Fuchs had met Raymond five times in New York, and, when the scientist had been working at Los Alamos, twice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bob rolled that about in his mind, looking for something to exploit. And little by little, he began to think that maybe he had something. The New York meetings would’ve gone unnoticed; there were countless ways to hide in a big city. But by the same logic, it was a lot easier to attract attention in a southwest cowboy town like Santa Fe. A tweedy scientist with a pronounced German accent and a Soviet courier might stick out. The locals might remember these two strangers sitting in a restaurant or talking in a hotel lobby. It was, Bob had no doubt, a “real long shot.
” But with all “the nagging questions” he “continually received from the Bureau higher-ups,” he decided he’d better try something.

  He instructed the New Mexico field office to dispatch agents to bus stations and airports across the state to see if anyone remembered an “unusual” visitor in the summer of 1945. In response, a flood of nearly five hundred sighting reports piled up quickly on his desk; “unusual” offered the locals room for a good deal of subjective leeway. Bob dove in, but in the end he found no needle hidden in this haystack.

  It was necessary, he realized, to refine his search, to give the agents in the field something more specific to sink their teeth into. But what? As he pondered this problem, he found his thoughts circling back to Meredith’s discovery.

  What if, it suddenly struck him, Gus or Goose was not a code name? What if it were Raymond’s real name? It would be another long shot, arguably even more improbable than his previous theory, but the fifth floor’s constant badgering had brought him to this desperate state. He sent a flash alert to the New Mexico field office ordering a check on hotel registers during that same crucial summer for a guest named either Gus, Goose, or a close enough proximity of the two. He let it be known the inquiry involved the Foocase, but he once more cloaked his source under the veil of a “reliable informant.” Then he sat back and prayed.

  And lo and behold, his prayers were answered. A registration card for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, filled out in June 1945, had been signed by a Gerson Gusdorf. It was, he wanted to believe, too similar to be a coincidence. On his orders, agents began scouring the southwest for Gusdorf, the Soviet courier.

  The manhunt lasted two breathless weeks. And when the dogged agents finally located Gerson Gusdorf, they found a seventy-year-old proprietor of a Taos curio shop. The closest Gusdorf had ever come to any contact with the KGB, the Bureau discovered after a vigorous interrogation, was that he once, maybe twice, he eventually conceded, had downed a shot of Russian vodka.