In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  With a swipe of his long, thin fingers, Fuchs pushed one of the photographs dismissively aside; and Bob nearly let out a sigh of relief. One after another, he dismissed all the other stills except for the three recent surveillance images of Gold.

  Fuchs studied them with concentration. “I cannot reject them,” he told Bob finally. Which, Bob silently rejoiced, was an improvement, however guarded, over the scientist’s definitive rejection of the photograph of Gold the British had shared with him. Nevertheless, the photos were not clear enough for him to state unequivocally that they were of the man he knew as Raymond.

  BUT BOB NOW HAD FUCHS talking. And in time, as Bob searched the spy’s memory in the hope of supplementing the hazy portrait the Bureau had of Raymond, Fuchs shared the operational history of his meets with the KGB courier.

  January 15, 1944, four p.m.—with numbers Fuchs was always precise. A winter’s Saturday on a street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a concealing twilight settled over the city. Fuchs stood in front of the entrance to the Henry Street Settlement House. As instructed by his handler before he’d left London with the contingent of British physicists, he had a green book in one hand, a tennis ball grasped in the other. He waited for a man wearing gloves, yet who would also be holding an additional, solitary glove.

  Raymond, a glove in his gloved hand, approached. Keeping to the prearranged word code, he asked directions to Chinatown.

  “I think Chinatown closes at five p.m.,” Fuchs replied, reciting his line of the script.

  Raymond hailed a cab and they took it north to Manny Wolf’s, a restaurant in the East Fifties. They did not speak much during the meal, the spy and the handler apparently sizing each other up.

  Afterward, they walked toward the East River. It was cold and dark, and the sidewalks were nearly empty. Fuchs explained that he was working on the construction of an atomic device for the U.S. Army. He said it would be the most powerful weapon ever made. It would change history. He would bring reports on his work at their next meet. In two weeks, Raymond suggested.

  That was how it all began.

  ON MONDAY, THOUGH, BOB WAS back in the present, and the Wormwood Scrubs solicitors’ room had been transformed into a screening room. Blackout curtains covered the narrow windows that faced the yard, and another piece of dark cloth had been stretched across the door’s glass panel. A boxy screen had been placed at one end of the room, and just beyond the table, John Cimperman, the embassy liaison, stood by a projector. On Bob’s command, the film started rolling.

  It was the watchers’ film that had been shot only days before in Philadelphia. There was little action and even less plot. Just Gold, a short, dumpy, stooped figure, walking down a city street in his desultory, shambling way; then suddenly coming to an abrupt halt, as if he’d remembered something until, apparently satisfied, continuing on with his journey.

  “I cannot be absolutely positive,” Fuchs announced as the lights came back on. “But I think it is very likely him. There are certain mannerisms I seem to recognize.”

  But after having spoken, Fuchs amended his initial impression. There was something about the man in the film that didn’t seem to fit with his memories of Raymond. You must understand, he added as if making a small apology for his indecision, it had been five years since he’d seen his American contact.

  “Run it again,” Bob ordered.

  When it was over, Fuchs decided he knew what was holding him back from providing a firm identification. There was something about the man’s manner that wasn’t quite right. In the film he was “serious.” The Raymond he had known was jovial, “bombastic . . . as if pleased with the importance of his assignment.”

  “Run it again,” Bob ordered, doing his best to rein in his building impatience. This time, though, he had Cimperman position the projector near the rear wall, increasing the distance from the screen and thus enlarging the image.

  As the movie rolled, Bob focused his attention on Fuchs. The physicist was an impassive audience. His face revealed nothing.

  When the lights came back on, Fuchs hesitated. Then he offered his judgment. “Very likely,” he decreed.

  Which Bob, his stomach sinking, knew was very likely not good enough to get an arrest warrant issued for Harry Gold. Nor very likely to be sufficient to appease the director.

  STYMIED IN THE PRESENT, BOB once again explored the past with Fuchs.

  February 16, 1945. Winter in Massachusetts, piles of snow on the ground, when Raymond arrived at the Heineman home. The courier had purchased a book he thought Kristel would enjoy, a novel about the relationship that develops between a black and a white family. For the Heineman children, he brought candy. As a father of twins, a boy and a girl, he told the Heinemans, he knew what they’d like. But this was more cover. Raymond had no children, nor was he married to the department-store-model wife he bragged about.

  Fuchs was waiting for him in the living room. Kristel soon left to pick up the children from school, and the spy and his guest went upstairs to talk in private. They sat in a room facing a snowy street, a weak wintry sun shining through a window flanked by parted curtains. The scientist had recently returned from Los Alamos, and he had brought with him what he described as “a quite considerable packet of information.” It was a primer for building a plutonium bomb.

  The two men agreed to see each other again in early June, this time in New Mexico, near the top-secret nuclear research compound. Fuchs gave Raymond a folded map. At the top of one side were the words “Santa Fe—The Capital City in the Land of Enchantment.” The scientist opened the map, spread it out on the bed, and pointed to where he wanted to meet. Four o’clock on the first Saturday in June, Raymond agreed.

  Without warning, one of the Heineman children poked his head into the room; they had just returned from school. Raymond said he’d better go, folding the map quickly as he talked, and then putting it into his pocket.

  But after Kristel came upstairs and shooed the curious boy from the room, Raymond was no longer in a rush. He announced there was something else. He had a Christmas present for Fuchs, a gift from Moscow Center. It was a wallet, very thin, the sort that might be used on an occasion that called for formal dress. Fuchs accepted it, looking at it with more bewilderment than gratitude. Raymond said that the Center had also provided something to go along with the wallet. The courier handed his agent an envelope containing $1,500, a munificent sum.

  Fuchs’s face distorted as if he had just experienced an unpleasant smell. Insulted, he returned the envelope to Raymond. He was not assisting the Soviet Union for his own personal gain, he said with a stony contempt.

  Raymond was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

  LEAVING THE PRISON AFTER THAT second long day, Bob and Clegg went directly to Cimperman’s office in the embassy. Each night they had to cable the results of the day’s session to Bureau headquarters—attention, the director. First they would write their report, and then they would use a one-time pad to encipher it. As they worked, Bob couldn’t help remembering that it was the failure to employ a one-time pad correctly, as well as Meredith’s genius, that had allowed him to bring the entire operation this far—to the threshold of uncovering the identity of the courier for a Soviet atomic spy. But at the same time, he knew that the length of the operational road he had traveled would not be any consolation to the unforgiving Hoover. Fuchs had not definitively identified Raymond; and Bob therefore had not accomplished his mission. Bob handed the encoded cable to the clerk in the embassy code room for priority dispatch to Washington, feeling that with its transmission his career, as well as his opportunity to bring about the downfall of a ring of spies, was doomed.

  30

  STILL, IT WAS A WAR fought on several fronts, so even while Bob’s spirits sank in London, across the Atlantic, in Philadelphia, the Bureau’s troops moved forward. Shortly after eight a.m., Philadelphia time, on the same Monday as the inconclusive screening at Wormwood Scrubs, two agents knocked on the front door of Harry Gold’
s home.

  The appointment had been amicably arranged days earlier. On May 17, the two agents—Scotty Miller, who by chance was Bob’s happy-go-lucky buddy from their days together on the SE squad in New York, and Richard Brennan, a hulking, saturnine veteran; their teaming in line with the classic good cop/bad cop tandem the Bureau relished—spent an exhaustive nine hours interviewing Gold. Throughout that marathon session in the Philadelphia field office, both the interrogators and their subject had done their best to project a genial goodwill toward one another. The FBI men conveyed that they were embarrassed by their assignment, just underlings going through the motions to appease their bosses in what they knew would ultimately prove to be a pointless fishing expedition. Gold was magnanimous and composed. A man of the world, he knew too well about wrongheaded bosses, his helpful demeanor suggested. Ask whatever you like; he had nothing to hide. And, no, he didn’t need a lawyer. Only guilty people need lawyers.

  Yet it had all been an act. As the lengthy interview ground on and on, all the players had been determined to give the performances of their lives. The FBI agents were treading lightly because they had nothing substantive to throw at Gold. Their fear was that if they followed their every instinct and attacked, then the chemist would lawyer up and they’d never get the chance to wangle an incriminating admission out of him. As for Gold, whose heart was thumping violently the whole tense time, he wanted to believe that his cooperation, supplemented by his silent prayers, would result in all of the Bureau’s suspicions fading away. But he didn’t trust them, and he knew they didn’t trust him.

  Gold, however, was trapped. The chemist felt as if he had no choice but to take everything the two smiling agents said at face value. So, when they asked for handwriting samples, he cordially wrote out page after page. When they asked if he’d mind if they shot some motion picture footage, he said why not, and found the calm to make a joke about how this screen test could land him a whole new career. And when they asked if they could search his house, he didn’t make some snarky comment, like “Sure, if you have a warrant.” Instead, he suggested they come by the following Monday, when he knew his father and brother, with whom he lived, would not be home. Absolutely, no point in inconveniencing them, the agents concurred brightly. See you at eight.

  Gold had planned to spend the weekend gathering up any hints of his clandestine activities that he might’ve carelessly left lying about. But he never got around to it. He told himself that he didn’t want to explain an unprecedented flurry of housekeeping to his brother and father; they’d only grow anxious. But on some deeper, unarticulated level, Gold understood that his procrastination was illogical, perhaps even a wishful attempt to deny the existence of the sword poised above his exposed neck.

  At five a.m. on Monday, May 22, however, Gold rose from his bed after a restless night and realized he’d better do something. He started looking about for incriminating traces of his secret life and was quickly, he’d later say, “horrified.” The enormity of his mistake became apparent. Everywhere he looked, or so it suddenly seemed in the mad panic that swept over him in the first bright light of the spring dawn, another clue was revealed. The stub of a plane ticket from Albuquerque to Kansas City. The draft of a report on a meeting with Rest in Cambridge. A street map of Dayton, Ohio. Instructions from his control. There was so much material. What had he been thinking? But calling upon the self-protectiveness that every spy learns if he is to survive in his dangerous life, he understood this was not the time for self-recriminations. With manic energy, he hurled himself about, racing from room to room, gathering handful after handful of incriminating papers. He ripped them into pieces, shredded the pieces with his determined hands, and then watched them swirl away as he flushed the traces down the toilet.

  “Yes, I had taken care of everything,” he recalled, rejoicing. And when the knock came promptly at eight, as promised, he had regained all his prior ease. He opened the door, flashed the agents an ingratiating smile, and showed them in as hospitably as if they’d merely stopped by for a morning’s cup of coffee.

  But Miller and Brennan were acting from a different script than the one they had followed the previous week. Before leaving the field office earlier that morning, they had been informed of Supervisor Lamphere’s failure to get Fuchs to confirm definitively that Gold was the agent code-named Raymond. That meant, they had also been advised, the success of the investigation could very well depend on them. And with that knowledge, both agents also felt the sharp edge of a warning. When the two men headed out, they agreed that their pretense of affability had run its course. They would conduct their search with a strict and brisk professionalism.

  They cut off Gold’s cheery questions about their weekend, ignored his offer of breakfast, and proceeded to his bedroom. Rows of books lined the shelves of a tall bookcase—chemical manuals, math and physics textbooks, stray volumes that had been acquired in a lifetime of reading. They attacked them all, riffling through one book after another with a meticulousness that left Gold appalled, and suddenly very frightened.

  “What is this?” challenged Brennan. He had a paperback copy of Microbe Hunters and was pointing to a small tag on the inside cover: “Shibey Curr and Lindsay.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gold answered. “I must have picked it up on a used book counter somewhere.” While in the same instant his memory sharply brought it all back into focus: an impetuous purchase at a Rochester, New York, store as he killed time before making his way to a meet.

  Then Miller spoke up. He held a 1945 train schedule: Washington–Philadelphia–New York–Boston–Montreal. “How about this?” the agent asked.

  “Goodness knows,” said Gold. A pensive beat, and then he added as if its significance had just become clear: “I probably got it when I went to New York to see Brothman.” But he had known the moment Miller had waved it about. He had consulted the schedule on one of his trips to see the Heinemans.

  The agents continued their search, and as one hour passed, and then another, Gold’s confidence returned. He had fielded their questions. They had found nothing he couldn’t explain away. And they would soon be done. He was going to survive. He would not be exposed.

  Brennan had a heavy textbook in his hand, The Principles of Chemical Engineering, and he was going methodically through it, when he noticed something stuck between the pages. It was a folded street map for the city of Santa Fe. The agent removed the map and began to study it with considerable attention.

  How had I missed that? Gold asked himself in silent reproach. He had been looking specifically for this map earlier that morning, but when he couldn’t find it, he’d decided it must have been discarded long ago.

  “You forgot you had this, didn’t you, Harry?” Brennan said. The taunt of triumph in his voice was unmistakable.

  “My God, where did that come from?” Gold tried.

  But for the first time the agents saw the chemist’s alarm. They waited as a heavy silence filled the room.

  “I don’t know how that thing got in there,” Gold said at last.

  But of course he did.

  RAYMOND WAS EARLY. THE MEET had been scheduled for four on this Saturday afternoon, June 2, 1945, and the bus had pulled into Santa Fe hours earlier. He did not think surveillance would be a problem, but being a conscientious professional, he kept to his cover and, like any tourist, went to the city’s historical museum. He tried to show interest in the exhibits, only his nerves were all over the place; he got that way before every rendezvous. At the gift shop he picked up a map, and it was identical to the one Fuchs had given him in Cambridge, a giveaway issued by the Chamber of Commerce. With the map as his guide, he arrived at the appointed spot precisely on time.

  The Castillo Street Bridge arched over the Santa Fe River like a small frown. It was a lonely, isolated spot, and the longer Raymond waited the more he grew convinced that Fuchs’s tradecraft was faulty. He felt very exposed standing on the bridge; there was no logical reason for him to be there if he
were questioned. He kept looking at his watch, wondering if Fuchs would show, if he should abort the mission.

  Fuchs at last drove up in his gray Buick, rolled down the window, and told the courier to get in. They drove across the bridge and continued on for a short while. Fuchs parked in a flat, sandy spot; desert and cactus stretched out toward the horizon.

  They talked for about thirty minutes. The physicist reported that everyone at Los Alamos was “working hard, almost night and day.” The bomb, he said, would be completed soon enough to be used against the Japanese.

  Fuchs handed the courier a thick package, and at the same time emphasized the importance of this delivery. It contained “a sketch of the atomic bomb itself.” It was a diagram of the device that would be tested within weeks at Alamogordo, in the New Mexico desert. The weapon’s dimensions, components, core, and initiator were all precisely indicated. With the information in this package, Fuchs believed, Russian scientists would be able to manufacture their own bomb.

  The momentous package held tightly in his hand, Raymond left the car. He began the long, dusty walk back to town, hoping he could find his way in time to catch the next bus to Albuquerque.

  “I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU’D never been out West,” Miller objected.

  “Give me a minute,” Gold said. Miller rose from the chair where he’d been sitting, and absently Gold took his place. He sank down into it, diminished. He asked for a cigarette, although he didn’t like to smoke. He just wanted to do something other than answer the question.

  All the while, Gold’s thoughts were churning rapidly. The map of Santa Fe, he told himself, wasn’t in itself too incriminating. He could talk his way out of this. But what if Fuchs identified him? And the Heinemans? And Brothman revealed all he knew? He had piled lie upon lie, and as soon as the FBI knocked one loose, the entire structure would come tumbling down. At that unsteady moment, as Brennan stood across from him with the map in his hand, Gold finally grasped the inevitability of his exposure.