Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy

by Close, Frank

  Bruno’s brother Giovanni also suffered. He not only missed out on Bruno’s promised financial help with his poultry farm; his business was threatened with collapse when the media hounded him during an agricultural exhibition in London, and clients were put off as a result. He later changed his name from Giovanni David Pontecorvo to David Maroni, adopting his mother’s maiden name. Only then was he able to carry on and avoid persecution.

  THE PATENT SAGA

  The patent for the discovery of the slow-neutron phenomenon also became caught up in the Pontecorvo affair, and the Via Panisperna Boys lost their chance to make a fortune. Emilio Segrè was a very astute businessman, and for him, more than perhaps any of the others, the promise of riches from the patents was very powerful. Whether Segrè was right or wrong about Pontecorvo’s motives for choosing Harwell in 1949, the consequences of his intervention with the FBI would prove disastrous—for Bruno as well as for Segrè himself.

  The slow-neutron phenomenon that had been discovered by the Via Panisperna Boys was crucial for both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. The scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project had exploited it. Now, postwar, the ownership of the rights to the discovery became mired in dispute.

  In 1935, the team had received an Italian patent for their discovery. They were not businessmen, and had no idea how to register patents in other countries. Slow neutrons were a good thing, but slowing their research in order to deal with lawyers was not. A lucky break came their way in the guise of Gabriello Giannini, one of Fermi’s first students. Ambitious and eager to make his fortune, Giannini had immigrated in 1930 to the United States, where his quick mind and self-confidence enabled him to succeed, despite the Great Depression. Soon he had gained some legal experience. His former colleagues decided that he was their man, and made a deal with him: if Giannini could register patents in Europe and America for the slow-neutron process, he could become the eighth member of the consortium and receive an eighth of any eventual profits.

  Giannini first won some patents in Europe, and then turned to the United States. In October 1935, “G. M. Giannini & Co.” filed an application for a patent with the US Patent Office. Five years passed before the authorities agreed that the applicants were the inventors of the slow-neutron process. On July 2, 1940, they received their American patent. Within months, their breakthrough had become the heart of the Manhattan Project, and the patent gave the team a financial stake in the technology the US government was using to make plutonium.64 After the war ended, the slow-neutron method became central to another new enterprise—the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Suddenly, all sorts of difficulties erupted around the patents.

  During the war, the Manhattan Project had been a military enterprise, a closed secret. Postwar, the Manhattan Project ended and the civilian Atomic Energy Commission was born. In 1946, the Atomic Energy Act authorized payments to be made for patents that had been used during the war. It looked as if the Via Panisperna Boys were about to become rich, until they learned of a hiccup: Enrico Fermi was an adviser to the AEC. He received no salary, but the government lawyers argued that nonetheless he was a government employee, which meant that he and his coinventors could pursue no claim against the United States.

  There matters rested for four years. Meanwhile, in February 1949, Pontecorvo moved to Harwell. In August of that year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. It soon became obvious that atomic secrets had been passed to the Soviet Union not just by Nunn May in Canada, but also from Los Alamos, and paranoia grew that a communist fifth column was at work in the United States. Against a rising clamor of anticommunist persecution, Giannini resumed his efforts to reach an agreement with the AEC over payment for the use of the patent. On August 21, 1950, without having consulted the “Boys,” Giannini filed a lawsuit against the government for nonpayment of patent royalties and patent infringement.65 The claim, for around $100 million in modern values, seemed outrageous to the scientists; the fact that l’Unità accused the US government of “defrauding Enrico Fermi” inflamed passions even more.66

  Giannini tried to calm his partners. He explained that this was how the game worked; the vast amount was really an imaginary figure used to get the ball rolling, whereas the actual sum would turn out to be very different. But then an astonishing development occurred. On October 21, before any progress had been made on the lawsuit, the news broke that Pontecorvo—one of the inventors and claimants in the lawsuit—had vanished without a trace, probably having fled behind the Iron Curtain. In those feverish times, it hardly mattered whether Pontecorvo was a spy, as the media speculated, or simply a communist “fellow traveler.” Giannini got cold feet. He didn’t want to lead a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of a group containing a communist, who had in all probability defected to the Soviet Union. Giannini soon withdrew the suit.

  Giannini gave up because, according to him, the group didn’t “wish to be associated even remotely with anyone involved or reputed to be involved in any sort of international mystery.”67 Later, in 1953, Giannini reached a settlement with the Atomic Energy Commission for a fraction of the claim. After legal expenses had been paid, each inventor received much less than they had hoped for originally. The British News Chronicle reported in November 1953 that the US government was holding $18,750 for Bruno. The article, whose headline read, “Pontecorvo—here it is,” noted that the money was waiting for the missing scientist, but that “he has to collect it himself.”68

  The Pontecorvo affair created unexpected fallout, whose influence was felt far beyond Bruno, Marianne, and the boys. As for Bruno, he had reached his half-life, slipping from one world to another. It is perhaps appropriate that the term half-life is taken from the realm of nuclear decays; with Bruno’s flight to the USSR, his chances of winning a Nobel Prize decayed also.

  THIRTEEN

  THE MI5 LETTERS

  “DID MI5 GET BACK TO YOU AFTER I FORWARDED THEM YOUR LETTER?”

  The neat, handwritten note, on House of Lords stationery, was brief and to the point.1 When I received it, about two years into my research, I had no idea that it would lead me to solve the mystery of Bruno Pontecorvo’s sudden disappearance.

  MI5 did get back to me, and confirmed what my correspondent had hinted at: that a file of “lost” papers regarding Pontecorvo had been “found.” The documents in question turned out to contain the history of MI5’s interest in Pontecorvo during the months that led up to his defection.2

  The final entry in the MI5 record before Bruno Pontecorvo’s disappearance was a letter received on July 19, 1950, from the British embassy in Washington. The document, which is marked “SECRET,” appears to have had little impact. No action was taken based on its transmission. Years later, however, its contents would embarrass the entire British security apparatus. The question of whether it had truly been lost before my interest was brought to MI5’s attention, or whether it had been “lost” out of convenience, is for conspiracy theorists to debate.3 The lack of action should also be intriguing to those who have argued that Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was in reality a double agent working for the Soviet Union.4 Chapman Pincher, the journalist and veteran spy-catcher, has remarked that Hollis was so reluctant to take action on various occasions that he was either incompetent or deliberately duplicitous. The Pontecorvo file is a notable case in point. Hollis was fully aware of the serious nature of the Pontecorvo case, as he added written comments to the file in May 1950. Yet when the letter from Washington arrived in July, there was no action within MI5. It would, however, lead to action in the Soviet Union. In any event, once I saw the letter, the kaleidoscope of facts began to settle into a clearer picture.

  The significance of the letter will become apparent once we understand certain events that had been taking place in the United States over the preceding months.

  A SECRET WAR

  In the years immediately after World War II, the British embassy in Washington, DC, w
as the weak point of British and Allied security. Unknown to the authorities, it played host to three members of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring. From 1944 to 1948, one of these spies, Donald Maclean, exploited his position as the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets. He was, of course, privy to these secrets, and passed news about development of the atomic bomb and nuclear power to the Soviets. Meanwhile, another member of the group, Guy Burgess, was based in the Foreign Office in London until late 1950. For a period in 1949 and 1950, Burgess forwarded to the KGB information that had originated with Kim Philby in Washington. This continued until Burgess too moved to the Washington embassy.5

  Kim Philby had arrived at the embassy in September 1949. He formal title was First Secretary but his specific (and covert) role was as a representative of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. Ever since World War II, the United Kingdom and the United States have shared intelligence. Thus, one of Philby’s duties was to liaise with the CIA, which meant that he was aware of some American operations, in addition to British ones. At this stage of his outstanding career, many saw him as a future “C”—Chief of SIS.

  In reality, Philby was a traitor throughout his career, from 1934 until his exposure in 1963.6 His autobiography admits that he was a double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union but was paid by the British. Philby himself wrote of his “total commitment to the Soviet Union.” He regarded his “SIS appointments purely [as] cover-jobs” to be carried out only well enough to enable his “service to the Soviet Union to be most effective.”7 Like Maclean and Burgess, Philby was a member of the infamous Cambridge Five ring of traitors, who were groomed at Cambridge University in the 1930s, and who rose to senior positions in the British civil service. His résumé of duplicity includes giving alerts to the Soviets when their atomic spies came under suspicion. In 1945, as head of the SIS’s Soviet counterintelligence section, Philby kept the Soviets aware of developments in the case of Alan Nunn May. As the net closed around the physicist, Philby warned Moscow that MI5 had caught wind of a meeting planned in London between Nunn May and his Soviet contact. As we saw earlier, Philby’s intervention caused the meeting to be aborted.8 Philby used his position to alert the Soviets not only about Nunn May but also about Fuchs. It now seems that he tipped them off about Pontecorvo too.

  Philby was the center of the Cambridge spy ring. Suspicion about him grew after Burgess and Maclean defected to the USSR in 1951, but Philby himself managed to maintain his double life for another twelve years. The fact that Philby evaded detection for so long was due to a combination of skill and good fortune, as well as his powerful position at the heart of British intelligence operations. This privileged role gave him early access to critical information.

  Most significantly, Philby was one of a handful of people who were party to the biggest diplomatic secret in the postwar West: the VENONA project, an American program to intercept and decrypt Soviet intelligence traffic. In the summer of 1949, Meredith Gardner, a lean and gangly American linguist, cracked the Soviet diplomatic codes. Radio messages between Moscow and its Soviet embassies in North America were now open to the West. Philby was briefed about VENONA in September 1949, soon after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. He immediately told the Soviets that their codes had been cracked.

  The decrypts contained references to three scientists who had been working on the Manhattan Project. The message revealed that the trio, code-named CHARLZ, QUANTUM and MLAD, had passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Although we now know that MLAD was Ted Hall, his identity and that of QUANTUM were still a mystery in 1949. Within weeks of his arrival in Washington, however, Philby learned that CHARLZ had been identified as Klaus Fuchs.9 As we have seen, Fuchs was placed under surveillance by MI5 in October 1949. His arrest and imprisonment occurred despite Philby’s best efforts.

  Philby was being ultracareful. The Soviets’ intelligence operation at their embassy in Washington was in a turbulent state, two of their residents having been recalled to the USSR in the months prior to Philby’s arrival in the city. He therefore refused to deal with any Soviet intelligence officers in the US, and for about a year his only contact with Moscow headquarters was via messages sent through Burgess in London.10 Through this circuitous route, Philby alerted Moscow that Fuchs had been exposed, and warned that any Soviet agents who had dealt with Fuchs might be compromised. Philby’s warning was right: Fuchs confessed and was arrested; next, Fuchs’s courier Harry Gold was arrested in the United States in May 1950, and within weeks the US government was pursuing communists—real or imaginary—with a zeal reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany. Two weeks later the US invaded Korea, and up to a dozen “atom bomb spies,” as the headlines described them, were arrested.

  When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a husband-and-wife spy team, were arrested in the summer of 1950, the Soviet network in North America was decimated. Kim Philby’s invaluable work as a double agent in the British embassy in Washington continued undetected, but he was an exception. The Soviets now cut their losses and extricated their agents from North America. In late June or early July, for example, Lona and Morris Cohen were rescued. They were first smuggled out of the US to Central America, and then flown to Moscow later that summer.11 They arrived in the Soviet capital a few weeks before Bruno Pontecorvo.

  Meanwhile, back in the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy continued to rant about a “Red threat.” This Cold War hysteria fanned the flames of political intimidation. In New York, mounted police broke up a protest meeting that was calling for a cease-fire in Korea. Hundreds were injured or arrested. Bruno Pontecorvo feared that right-wing extremism, which he had fled in Europe, was now reappearing in the United States; with the downfall of Joliot-Curie, it even seemed to be spreading to France, and was threatening to come to the United Kingdom.12

  The pace of events quickened that summer. In June, Philby learned of a new breakthrough in the VENONA decryptions: Soviet telegrams from 1945 had revealed the existence of a ring of spies at the heart of British intelligence. However, the information from VENONA was fragmentary. At this stage, they had only partial decrypts. This was just as well for Philby, who immediately understood that this information referred to himself and his colleagues in the Cambridge Five.

  In order to keep abreast of developments, Philby maneuvered to increase his access to VENONA, and arranged for SIS to provide him immediately with copies of any new VENONA material. The official reason for this arrangement, as stated in a letter sent to the director general of SIS on July 18, 1950, by Geoffrey Patterson, the Washington embassy’s liaison with US security, was that it would enable Philby to absorb and analyze new information before he met with the FBI.13 In reality, of course, Philby was simply trying to protect himself. As a result of these maneuvers, Philby learned that VENONA had identified a code name, HOMER, which he recognized as referring to Maclean. This information was passed on to Moscow. The following year, as the net closed, Maclean—along with Burgess, who had also been compromised—would defect to the USSR.

  Tim Marten worked in the British embassy in Washington at this time, and one of his responsibilities involved communications on atomic energy. Tim recalled how these messages “were ultra-secret and therefore went through the MI6 communication channel. . . . So Philby, as head of MI6 in Washington, had direct access to every telegram that I sent or received.” At this memory, Tim gave an ironic laugh. He then continued: “But of course I thought Philby was rather a good egg at the time. He appeared to be . . . quite a wheel, in constant touch with the CIA and state department. He was a very highly regarded person all round and obviously very competent. What we didn’t know at that moment was that he was passing everything on to the Russians.”14

  Philby’s unique access to American and British intelligence enabled him to conduct the espionage orchestra during the critical months of 1950, when the Soviet networks in North America were in danger. In addition to information that affected him di
rectly, or references to the Cambridge spy ring, he kept a careful watch for anything that would interest his real employer, the Soviet Union. In the middle of July, he saw another letter that Patterson had drafted.

  Written on July 13, 1950, and received by the director general of MI5 in London on July 19 (and most probably by Philby’s contacts in Moscow soon after), Patterson’s letter concerned a subject of particular interest for readers of this book: “The FBI inform me that it has been reported to them that PONTECORVO is at present employed by AERE at Harwell. They add that they addressed communications dated February 2nd, 10th and 19th, 1943 to British Intelligence on the subject of PONTECORVO. Presumably they must have written either direct to London or to BSC New York because the local SIS representative cannot trace the correspondence. Many of the BSC files were . . . destroyed [at the end of the War].”

  IMAGE 13.1. Letter from Geoffrey Patterson to MI5, sent July 13, 1950, received in London July 19, alerting them to the FBI’s interest in Bruno Pontecorvo. Note also the reference to Philby on line seven. This was the final entry added to MI5’s file on Pontecorvo before he fled to the USSR. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)

  Patterson then pointed out that Pontecorvo had worked on the Anglo-Canadian atomic energy project during the war, and had also lived in the United States. “The [FBI] now ask if we can send them any information which may be available to us which would indicate that PONTECORVO may be engaged in Communist activities at the present time or may have been engaged in such activities during his residence in the United States.”15

  Patterson’s letter, which explicitly mentions the “local SIS representative” in Washington, shows that Philby was fully aware of these developments.