by Howard Blum
And with that fiasco, “we went back to square one,” Bob acknowledged in complete and utter defeat.
28
YET LEAVE IT TO MEREDITH to find something fresh to gnaw on. Despite Bob’s petulant outburst at their last encounter, Meredith had not walked away from the hunt for Raymond. And returning to the cables, not surrendering until he could unlock the final recalcitrant block of code, Meredith had made a fresh discovery. Previously he’d determined that Rest had a sister. But now when he went back over this ground, his study isolated a fact that had been overlooked: the courier might very well have met with the sister.
He shared the significant cables, all sent from the KGB’s New York station in 1944 and 1945, with Bob: “. . . I sent Goose to Rest’s sister. . . .” “Goose will travel to Rest’s sister on 26th September.” “On Arno’s”—Goose’s cover name had been changed in one of the Center’s periodic bursts of routine housekeeping, Meredith explained—“last visit to Charles’s sister”—Rest, too, had a new name—“it became known . . .” And on and confirmingly on.
Bob instantly grasped the significance of this new intelligence: someone else had possibly seen Raymond. Fuchs’s sketchy description of the courier might be amended with new eyewitness details.
Two agents from the Boston field office were sent to interview Kristel and Robert Heineman, Fuchs’s sister and her husband, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On Bob’s orders they were instructed to tread carefully; Kristel, who suffered from schizophrenia, had been in and out of mental hospitals. His concern, though, was more pragmatic than humane: he feared that if Fuchs’s sister felt threatened, a potentially promising lead would be shut down.
The agents were all tact, and quickly they reaped the rewards. Both husband and wife had seen Raymond on two occasions, once when he came to meet Fuchs, and also when he knocked on their door without warning trying to find the scientist. He’d introduced himself simply as Raymond, and they had no reason, they said, to press for a last name. But they could describe him: white male, age forty to forty-five, five feet eight inches tall, dark brown hair, broad build, and a round face. Bob now had no doubts they’d met with Raymond; the description tallied with the one Fuchs had shared. Only, he also acknowledged with a renewed frustration, it “could fit any one of several million Americans.” At that low moment, Bob felt like putting down the interview summary and just walking away from his desk.
But he read on. And there it was! As the agents were leaving, Robert Heineman had accompanied them to the street and, away from his wife, grew more talkative. He revealed that in his own conversation with Raymond the visitor had shared a little of his life’s story. He was a chemist, or maybe he was an engineer; Heineman couldn’t be certain. But Raymond had said he’d worked at a firm developing pesticides as well as an aerosol container. His efforts, however, had not amounted to much, Raymond bitterly complained. A partner had cheated him out of his share of the business. Or maybe the culprit was simply a colleague, Heineman had also suggested; his memory of the conversation was shaky.
Armed with these new leads, Bob, working hand-in-hand with the dogged Van Loon, went back to work. The Bureau’s files offered several hundred names of left-leaning chemists or engineers who could fit Raymond’s general description. But Bob, with the wrath of the fifth floor growing hotter each day, wanted to believe he had found his man. Joseph Arnold Robbins was a heavyset, Brooklyn-born chemical engineer—Heineman’s memory was better than he’d realized, Bob felt like telling him—with a Bureau dossier crammed with left-wing affiliations. The finishing touch on the incriminating portrait, in Bob’s mind at least, was that Robbins had graduated from City College in 1941, the breeding ground of Liberal’s network.
A photo of Robbins was delivered by special messenger to London, and the next day it was waved in front of Fuchs. Was this Raymond? he was asked. Fuchs studied it intently. “It might be the man,” he agreed at last. Are you sure? the British pressed. Fuchs, as if back in his old life, once again a scientist weighing the validity of a new hypothesis, announced he had “very fair certainty.”
That was good enough for Bob. Full-time surveillance was placed on Robbins; perhaps, Bob hoped, they could catch him making a pickup from another of the spies in his network. And at the same time the two tactful Boston agents had been dispatched once again to Cambridge. They were to persuade Robert Heineman to travel to New York, where, after observing Robbins from a discreet distance, he could confirm that the target was Raymond.
The trap was nearly ready to be sprung. Bob notified the fifth floor that an arrest was imminent. But just as he was poised to set things in motion, Van Loon came rushing in. The latest background check on Robbins had unearthed new intelligence: Robbins had been in New York throughout the entire summer of 1945. He had not left the East Coast for a single day, let alone the time it would have taken him to travel to New Mexico and meet with Fuchs in either June or September. And the Bureau was also certain he’d never been to Cambridge, never met the Heinemans.
Which meant, Bob understood with a fresh surge of desperation, that Robbins was not Raymond. And he had no other suspect to take his place.
IN 1945, ABOUT 75,000 LICENSE permits had been issued to chemical manufacturing firms in New York City. Just looking at the long list gave Bob a migraine, but he’d resigned himself to the task of going down it one company at a time in the dogged belief that Raymond had to have a connection to one of them. Yet as he was rolling up his sleeves, preparing to go through the mechanical process, Van Loon suggested a shortcut.
He was a newcomer to counterintelligence, not an old hand like Bob, and so when he’d first come to headquarters he realized he had to give himself an education. Conscientiously, he’d worked his way through the files documenting Soviet covert operations in America and while doing so he had read up on the Red Queen, Elizabeth Bentley. In her lengthy confession to the FBI she had disclosed her role as courier making pickups from a chemist, a man who ran the Chemurgy Design Corporation in Philadelphia—Abe Brothman.
Bob completed Van Loon’s thought: So you think Brothman could be Raymond?
Perhaps, his friend concurred. And he had more—another suspect. The grand jury that followed up on Bentley’s accusations had brought Brothman in to testify. The chemist got on the stand and, as Van Loon judged his story, “lied through his teeth.” He claimed he’d only given Bentley and her control, Jacob Golos, information that was “harmless,” industrial processes that were public knowledge. He had no idea either Bentley or Golos was working for the KGB. In fact, they came to his company with sterling recommendations; Harry Gold, a chemist and one of his valued associates, had made the introduction. When Gold appeared in front of the grand jury, he, too, pleaded ignorance. He’d believed Golos was a legitimate businessman and now was shocked to learn differently.
It had been Brothman’s and Gold’s sworn testimony against that of an admitted Communist spy whose reputation was further sullied by her characterization in the leering press as a loose woman. The grand jury decided to believe the two chemists, and the FBI washed its hands of the whole matter.
But as Bob listened to Van Loon resurrect all this recent history, he came around to thinking there might be something there. And, not for the first time, he had a premonition that the loose ends of his past investigations were reaching into his present inquiry.
With resolve, as well as considerable trepidation, he wrote up a memo for the fifth floor. With so much at stake, he posited, the Bureau must throw aside restraint—as well as the law. He wanted the hierarchy to authorize a black bag job. The target—Brothman’s Chemurgy Design Corporation.
Hoover agreed.
The burglars were in and out without attracting attention. And when their booty was examined, it was clear that they’d brought back a prize: a typewritten document “which referred to the industrial application of a process of thermal diffusion.”
Bob read the pages, and when he was done he was convinced he had just been stud
ying a KGB courier’s summary of the classified paper Rest had provided on gaseous diffusion.
Either Brothman or Gold, he felt satisfied, was Raymond. But as the Philadelphia office began its digging into the two chemists and their local company, the full glare of their suspicions quickly shone on Gold. “Many of the details the agents were able to obtain about Gold’s life and travels fit in with the nuggets about Raymond gleaned from Fuchs’s confession,” Bob crowed, ready to open a celebratory bottle of champagne.
What clinched the match was that Gold looked the part. The shortish, balding chemist with a body shaped like a bowling pin was nearly the spitting image of the descriptions offered by both Fuchs and the Heinemans. He had to be Raymond.
With great expectations, Gold’s photo was presented to Fuchs.
The scientist looked at it quizzically. Then he shook his head dismissively. “This is not the man,” he snapped.
THIS WAS THE BAGGAGE, A heavy load of frustrations, dead ends, and anxieties, that Bob carried with him as he walked off the plane in London on that May morning. John Cimperman, the Bureau’s man based at the American embassy, was there to escort Bob and Clegg to MI5 headquarters. As the embassy car drove through the surprisingly cold and dreary city, Bob looked out into the streets and was shocked by what he saw. It was five years since the war had ended, but the effects of the German air raids remained. The rows of smashed buildings lining the pavement like cadavers, the rubble scattered about the street—it all left him feeling as if the war were still on.
With that disheartening thought, his whole mood began to be transformed. It brought him around to reminding himself that a war, in fact, still raged, but in this Cold War the spies and the spy hunters were the soldiers. And now, closer to his prey, he shrugged off all that had been weighing on him. With a renewed commitment to his mission, he continued on through the city. He remained silent, pretending to sleep, but it was the quiet of resolve. Bob now looked forward to the challenge. He considered the opportunity to interrogate Klaus Fuchs “one of the great opportunities of my life.”
29
FLANKING THE STURDY FRONT GATE of Wormwood Scrubs prison in Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London, were two dark towers that tapered as they rose, evoking bishops on a chessboard. Each was decorated with a relief depicting a Victorian-era prison reformer, and when Bob was informed of this curious fact he could not help but think the tribute was all irony. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” he could almost hear the guards solemnly intoning each time the gates swung open and he passed beyond the tall prison walls and into the dank fortress.
He had first arrived at the prison—“dreary, bare, and cold,” was his initial and most lasting impression—on May 20, 1950, unceremoniously huddled with Clegg and Skardon in the back of a darkened police van. Clegg, fearing that the British newshounds would churn out disparaging stories about how the FBI had come to “beat the truth out of Fuchs” (and, worse, that the clippings would make their way back to the director), had insisted on this covert transport in his opening meeting with the British spymasters. MI5 thought such subterfuge excessive, but ultimately, in the interest of keeping the Atlantic partnership floating tranquilly along, acquiesced. So Clegg fired his next shot, and once more British eyebrows were swiftly raised. He announced the interrogation would proceed “right away—tomorrow.” The deputy director of MI5 gingerly explained that wouldn’t be possible; the next morning was a Saturday, as well as the start of the Whitsun holiday weekend. Once again, Clegg remained adamant. He was used to getting his way, unless of course the conversation was with Hoover or Tolson.
Early Saturday morning the police van drove through one, then another of the prison’s huge gates, came to a sudden halt, and the trio climbed out. They were escorted by the warden to a room near the entrance—the “solicitors’ room,” he explained. And from the earnest way the warden spoke the words, Bob had the impression he was being led to a history-steeped wood-paneled chamber, a clubby retreat for the well-spoken, frock-coated British lawyers who inhabited his imagination.
The room was not much bigger than a prison cell, and just as grim. There were two narrow windows, little more than slits, that looked out on the sunless exercise yard, and a small glass panel in the door that offered a view of an officer on constant guard. The walls had once been gray, but the ancient paint had faded to the color of a lingering fog. A round table, surrounded by a circle of metal chairs, dominated the room. And it was cold; nearly the end of May, but Bob felt chilled to the bone.
Then Fuchs was brought in. Like an affable host, Skardon made the introductions, and as he did Bob took measure of his adversary. Fuchs looked, he’d say, as he’d expected from the photographs he’d studied—“thin-faced, intelligent, and colorless.” He was thirty-nine, only seven years older than Bob, but the FBI man felt there could be decades, no, centuries, separating him from the stoop-shouldered, sallow-faced, balding figure he faced. Imprisonment had aged the scientist and left him, Bob judged, vulnerable. But Bob sensed something else in Fuchs’s hard stare—a determination to disguise the fears that raced inside him. Fuchs was well aware he had already lost, but he would refuse to surrender. In defeat, his last resort would be defiance.
They sat around the table, like players settling in for a game of cards. Clegg had a pen in his hand and a pad in front of him. Skardon fussily loaded his pipe. And Fuchs had his hands folded like a man in prayer.
They waited for Bob to begin.
FUCHS, THOUGH, HAD THE FIRST words. He had clearly spent some time in his cell preparing his small speech, and it was made with precision, each word bristling with hostility. He did not, he said emphatically, have a legal obligation to answer any questions from the FBI. Therefore, he wanted some guarantees before he—again the forceful emphasis—decided whether or not to be interviewed. He wanted assurances that nothing would happen to any of the people with whom he’d been associated in the United States.
Fuchs kept his scowling gaze fixed on the two FBI men, but Bob pretended to be unaware of this. And rather than push back, Bob chose to tread lightly. I’m afraid you don’t understand the function of the FBI, he explained in his most reasonable voice. The Bureau simply conducts investigations, not prosecutions. “Only a judge or an attorney general could make a promise not to bring a suspect to trial,” he said, hoping to put an end to the matter.
Fuchs ignored this disclaimer, and his voice once again rose in indignant anger. A vein that angled up from his eyebrow to his temple throbbed as he spoke. This time he was more direct, revealing what was provoking his hard-line stance: he was concerned about the safety of his sister. He wanted assurances that Kristel Heineman would not be prosecuted.
Bob listened, and as he did, Fuchs’s “unspoken words were coming through as loudly as the spoken ones.” Fuchs, he now grasped, was racked with guilt. Bob was not naïve enough to think that the scientist, a true believer, had any regrets about his treason; the West, in his acid assessment, remained bloated, vulgar, and bellicose. Yet locked away in his dismal cell, the prisoner had lived each day and every long night with a torturous fear: that his beloved sister, already sickly, would be punished for his crimes.
From Fuchs’s perspective, Bob imagined in a sudden burst of empathy, it would be logical to assume the FBI must be cut from the same authoritarian cloth as the Gestapo or the Soviet secret police. Fuchs’s tormented mind would have no trouble conjuring up images of jackbooted FBI agents carting a screaming, straitjacketed Kristel off without trial to a detention facility for reeducation, or worse.
After Fuchs had made his demand, a ponderous silence settled in. He cast a questionable glance toward Bob, waiting for him to respond, but Bob refused to acknowledge it. Time, Bob knew, was on his side. He wanted Fuchs to feel the mounting pressure.
Everything, the success or failure of the entire interrogation, Bob intuited, depended on his next move. He could trek up the high road, explain to Fuchs in his considerate, calm government-servant’s voice t
hat America was not Nazi Germany. Innocent people were not carted off. Sisters do not pay for a brother’s sins. Or, he could exploit Fuchs’s fears.
In the end, Bob decided that since Fuchs had offered him the stick, he would use it. “I was not above letting Fuchs conclude that if we were the bastards he posited us to be, Kristel would continue to be in jeopardy,” he recalled, still unrepentant years later. “We knew where Kristel was and would continue to keep tabs on her,” Bob recalled warning Fuchs.
But after the stick, came the carrot. He had “no reason to believe,” Bob went on, “that Kristel had any involvement with Fuchs’s espionage in the United States other than the fact she had been contacted by Raymond. . . . I do not regard this contact as significant,” Bob said.
Yet his implication was clear: the meetings between Kristel and Raymond could become “significant” if Fuchs refused to cooperate.
With the tacit bargain dangling in the air, time was no longer on Bob’s side. He needed Fuchs to make up his mind before the scientist could begin to speculate on whether the FBI’s implied threat was a bluff. He wanted Fuchs to commit now.
Moving quickly, Bob laid out a dozen photos across the table. Some were head shots of men previously suspected to be Raymond. Others were old photos of Gold from the Bureau’s files. And three were recent snaps of Gold. On Bob’s train ride from Washington to New York, two Bureau agents had boarded in Philadelphia with a surveillance movie of Gold shot through the window of a parked car; the photos had been made from the film.
“Do you recognize Raymond?” Bob asked.
In every interrogation there is a moment when all the bets have been placed and the wheel starts spinning. When the decision is made to cooperate, or to refuse. A bolt of anticipation shot through Bob’s chest as he waited to see what Fuchs would do.
