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

by Close, Frank

  Philby was the overall SIS chief in Washington. He discussed atomic affairs on a regular basis with the embassy’s specialist on atomic matters, Dr. Wilfrid Basil Mann. Their offices in the embassy were next to each other. Judging from Tim Marten’s testimony on Philby’s access to material, and the assessment of others who were familiar with his style and the workings of the Washington embassy at the time, it is most improbable that Philby was unaware of Patterson’s letter. As he had done with Alan Nunn May, and then Klaus Fuchs, he now had to tell Moscow of the West’s interest in another atomic scientist: Bruno Pontecorvo.16

  As stated by Patterson, the British intelligence team in Washington was unable to locate the 1943 letters from the FBI, even when the letters’ existence was brought to their attention. Given Philby’s reputation, one might imagine that the failure to find the letters occurred because he had destroyed the evidence.17 However, it seems more likely that, on this occasion, Philby was acting in good faith: the 1943 correspondence was indeed lost, possibly when the British Security Coordination closed at the end of World War II and many files were destroyed.

  The FBI subsequently forwarded copies of the letters to MI5.18 They showed evidence only of Bruno’s communist associations. They did not show evidence that he was a spy. Their resurrection in July 1950 suggests that they were part of a fishing expedition conducted by the Americans, inspired by McCarthyism and a desire to undermine the Via Panisperna Boys’ lawsuit against the US government.19 If Philby had seen these letters, they would have raised little alarm. However, it seems he did not. All he knew was that the FBI was interested in an atomic scientist named Bruno Pontecorvo, that they had written not just one but three letters about him within seventeen days in 1943, and that VENONA had revealed the existence of two still-unidentified spies at the heart of the atomic project, code-named MLAD and QUANTUM.

  As the reader knows, MLAD would eventually be identified as Ted Hall, a brilliant young physicist who was arguably the most successful of the “atom spies.” QUANTUM remained an enigma until 2009, when KGB files identified him as Boris Podolsky, a US-born Russian physicist.20 None of this was known to Philby in 1950. We have no hard evidence that Philby warned Moscow about the FBI’s interest in Pontecorvo, or what the warning might have consisted of, but it is most improbable that a warning was not transmitted.

  BUT WHAT ABOUT LONDON? WHAT REACTION DID PATTERSON’S LETTER cause there?

  A deafening silence, it would seem. The receipt date on the letter is Wednesday, July 19, less than a week before Pontecorvo left the United Kingdom, never to return. There is a penciled note reading “See Lumes” (although the script is hard to decipher), but no further mention of the letter in Pontecorvo’s file, nor any record of action being taken. Indeed, this is the final entry in the file before news of Pontecorvo’s disappearance erupted.

  The personal diary of Guy Liddell records the inside story of MI5 that summer. At the time, there was a lot of concern about the possibility of the British getting involved in a war; the Korean War had begun in June, and the recent news that the Soviets had the atomic bomb worried everyone. His diary also reveals tensions between MI5 and the FBI, which have relevance to the Pontecorvo case.

  On July 29, just ten days after Patterson’s letter arrived from Washington, Liddell recorded, “Hollis is worried about the nature of enquiries we are receiving from the FBI.” The FBI had recently asked MI5 to place two people under surveillance, and had followed up by seeking information about a third person, who McCarthy had asserted was a spy, without any evidence. Even President Truman denounced McCarthy for this behavior, and MI5 was concerned that if they started making inquiries on behalf of the Americans, they would get bogged down in “this mud surrounding Senator McCarthy.” Liddell continued: “Unfortunately [J. Edgar] Hoover is taking a personal interest, since he doubtless wishes to have a dig at the State Department.”

  It is clear that there was a history of tension between the two intelligence agencies. Liddell said his primary aim was “not to exacerbate the rather strained relations between [MI5] and the FBI.” Ever since Fuchs’s arrest, the FBI and Hoover had put pressure on MI5, given the British media information that was detrimental to MI5, and blamed the UK authorities for having been lax. In London patience had worn very thin. Liddell recorded this sorry saga in his diary throughout the spring and early summer. He also suggested that MI5 should “politely” point out to the Americans that “we are not one of their field offices.”21

  Under these circumstances, it is possible that the UK’s lack of interest in Bruno Pontecorvo’s possible “Communist activities” was a case of the FBI having cried wolf too often. Even so, given that MI5 had been interested in Pontecorvo for several months, one would expect some response to Patterson’s letter. Although Liddell’s diary mentions three subjects of particular interest to the FBI, none of these relate to Pontecorvo. Given Liddell’s suggestion that MI5 was being treated as a “field office” of the FBI, it’s possible that the British agency could have regarded the wording of Patterson’s letter as presumptuous and thus not given it high priority. Hollis conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, might add this to their list of his “unfortunate oversights.”

  Unaware of Philby’s duplicity, the security chiefs in England took their vacations, or passed afternoons at the Oval cricket ground that summer, watching the magical West Indian spinners, Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. It was a more relaxed era than today, the Cold War notwithstanding; a fortnight-long holiday was standard. Liddell, for example, went to Ireland for the last two weeks of August.

  Even if MI5 had taken an interest in the FBI’s letters, it could not have told Pontecorvo’s superiors anything more damning than “we have reports that Pontecorvo and his wife have expressed communist opinions.” Although this would be a serious matter for an intellectual in the United States, where anticommunist paranoia was rife, it was no crime in the United Kingdom. For Pontecorvo it would have simply meant that he was a security risk. But that was old news, of course: the transfer to Liverpool had already provided a pragmatic solution to that problem. Even taking into account the new information, MI5 had no evidence that would have justified a “purge” (prosecution) of Bruno Pontecorvo.

  So it is unlikely that the inquiry by the FBI would have radically altered Pontecorvo’s prospects in the United Kingdom. However, that conclusion could only be drawn by someone who was conversant with the state of knowledge about Pontecorvo in MI5. For Philby in Washington, deeply connected to VENONA but remote from the minutiae of MI5’s London office, let alone Harwell security, the reference to the “Communist activities” of a nuclear physicist, who might have been MLAD or QUANTUM, demanded action.

  Assuming that Philby passed on this information to Burgess for transmission to Moscow, which was his normal modus operandi at the time, there would have been little time for them to act before Bruno left on vacation. The story about the man who interrupted the tennis match might have some sinister significance, but it is hard to square this with Bruno’s relaxed attitude, which continued until his final days in Italy.22 There was a story in the media that two men had contacted Bruno in the Alps, during August, but no source was ever provided.23 Bruno was camping and on the move; thus the earliest opportunity for the Soviets to make contact with him would have been late in his vacation, through mutual friends in Italy. This fits with his sudden change of behavior during the last week of August. If the Soviet embassy in Rome gave Bruno money to pay for his airline tickets, as was suspected by MI5, this would have been a logical response to Philby’s alert. Emilio Sereni, his cousin, the good communist and activist, would have been a convenient liaison in the Soviets’ quest to make contact with Bruno.

  As for the decision to flee, Bruno’s son Gil told me, “It looked to me like a sudden decision. [Whatever] the reason, it was [made] quite late.”24 Today it seems probable that the letter from Washington was a key—perhaps the key—to his unpremeditated flight.

  EARLY IN SEPTE
MBER 1950, BRUNO WAS CROSS-EXAMINED IN MOSCOW by the KGB.25 According to one account, his interrogators included Stalin’s enforcer, Lavrenti Beria himself.26 We do not know the actual date of this interrogation, but there would be no advantage to delaying it. It probably occurred before the following event.

  On September 12, when no one in the West yet realized that Pontecorvo had disappeared, Philby—who happened to be in London—dropped by to see Guy Liddell, the deputy director general of MI5. Philby, of course, was a high-ranking member of MI6, also known as SIS. Liddell’s diary records what happened next.

  “I had a long talk with Kim Philby. . . . I thought I discerned a fly thrown over me in the form of a suggestion that it was really unnecessary for us [MI5] to have a Washington representative [Patterson], and that he [Philby] could carry the whole business. . . . I told him that whatever the flow of information I was quite convinced that [MI5] ought to have a man in [Washington].”27

  The reference to a “fly being thrown” is an idiom from fishing. The fly is a lure, typically when fishing for trout. The moment the fish takes the fly into its mouth, the angler jerks the line so that the hook penetrates the fish’s mouth and captures it. In this scenario, Liddell is the fish; Philby the fisherman.

  Philby’s suggestion could be perfectly innocent but this is unlikely: Philby calculated everything with a view toward his personal safety. His colleague Donald Maclean was already under suspicion, and, in the memory of Lorna Arnold, “looked like he had ants in his pants.”28 If, as seems probable, Philby’s actions had led to Pontecorvo’s flight, there was a potential danger for Philby that he needed to guard against. Given his role in MI6, Philby could be reasonably certain there was no British double agent planted within the KGB, but he could not be sure the same was true of the Americans. If Philby’s role became apparent during Bruno’s cross-examination by the Soviets, this hypothetical double agent might hear of it. Philby wanted total control over the flow of information between Washington and MI5.

  As it turned out, Philby had no need to worry about any such double agent. No one in the West knew what had become of Bruno Pontecorvo and his family for five more years. By that time, Philby’s partners in crime, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had both defected to the USSR, and suspicions about Philby had also come to a boil. On September 12, 1950, however, Philby had little to worry about. He had done his job well; no one suspected that he had played any role in the Pontecorvo affair.

  SECOND HALF

  “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.”

  —Dante’s Inferno

  FOURTEEN

  IN DARK WOODS

  EVEN TODAY, FINLAND IS A LAND DOMINATED BY FORESTS, WHICH stretch for hundreds of miles.

  In 1950 these dark woods extended from the outskirts of Helsinki into the Soviet Union. That September, two cars sped along empty forest tracks toward the Russian border. One contained Marianne and her three sons; the other contained Bruno hidden in its trunk.1 Gil Pontecorvo, who was twelve at the time, did not know who the drivers were, but he laughed wryly as he told me, “They were Russians for sure.”

  Gil had no idea where they were. After the idyllic weeks at camps in the mountains, and the long, sunny days by the warm Mediterranean, in the company of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, everything had changed.

  When the family left Italy for Stockholm, Gil “thought these journeys were all part of their holiday. I had no idea that we were not going back. We didn’t have much luggage [and] had left lots at home.” But he realized something strange was going on when the family failed to visit his maternal grandmother, who lived near the airport, and instead flew on to Helsinki, to be met by strangers. “We spent one or two nights there,” he recalled. So it would have been on the third or fourth of September that they made their drive through the woods. Six decades later, Gil remembers this episode clearly: the forest “went on for mile after mile, seemingly without end.” For entertainment, he “had a book by Jack London to read.” As for his father being in the trunk of one of the cars: “I knew something was up.”2

  At the time, some Western reporters imagined that the Pontecorvos had been taken to Porkkala, twenty miles from Helsinki, where a long bridge spanned a creek separating Finland from an area that in 1950 belonged to Russia. There were no guards on the Finnish side, as no Finn “in their right senses” would want to cross; the media saw this as an explanation for the fact that the Pontecorvo family had vanished without trace. At the Russian end of the bridge, sentries from the Red Army supposedly welcomed the party. This, however, is one of the many myths about their flight. In reality, they had driven eastward, eventually reaching the USSR at Vyborg, which had been part of Finland until it was lost to the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939–1940. Only now, inside the Soviet Union after more than one hundred miles on the road, was Bruno able to come out into the open.3

  Another eighty miles brought them to Leningrad (formerly, and again today, known as Saint Petersburg).

  Their KGB guards politely refused Bruno’s request to look around the city, explaining that there would be plenty of opportunities to see it once he was settled in the USSR.

  During his time in the car trunk, Bruno had been preparing a statement. Years later, he claimed that, for him, the die was already cast and the future lay in the USSR. He wanted to send a message to family and colleagues in the West, explaining his actions: the Soviet Union was a peace-loving nation whose ideals he believed in. Exhausted, the family sat down to their first meal in Russia, all the while under guard, and spent a night in an “anonymous apartment but no one slept very much.”4

  THE NEXT MORNING A MAN AND WOMAN CAME TO THE HOTEL TO accompany the family to the railway station and onto the train to Moscow. The man had short hair and was about Bruno’s age; the woman younger. She carried a bunch of flowers, which she presented to Marianne.

  Upon arriving in the capital, the Pontecorvos were met by a small delegation. A “tall and elegant man,” who stood out as the leader, greeted them with pleasantries. He asked Bruno in English if they’d had a good journey and whether they needed anything. Bruno replied that he had prepared a statement that he wanted to read out on the radio, directed to his colleagues in the West, explaining his support for the Soviet Union. The first hint of the restrictive nature of life in Stalin’s fiefdom now showed itself, with the man’s polite but firm refusal: “There will be plenty of time to do so in due course.” Bruno acquiesced.5

  The party got into a pair of black cars, with gray curtains drawn across the windows. Bruno rode in one car, with the senior KGB man, while Marianne and the children rode in another. Separated from Bruno for a while, they tried to sneak peeks at Moscow.

  During his time at school in Abingdon, Gil had gotten the impression that Moscow was essentially a Wild West town made of concrete, where the rule of law was marginal and unwary travelers were at risk. However, when he saw the city in person for the first time, it appeared no different from the other major cities he had passed through that summer: “My first shock in Moscow was to discover that it was Moscow!”6 The one exception was the traffic: there were very few cars, many old buses, and lots of open trucks containing men dressed in army fatigues, standing shoulder to shoulder. For Bruno, his arrival in Moscow induced profound emotion: “I felt like the Jew who found the Promised Land.”7

  The car stopped in front of a huge apartment block on a wide boulevard—Gorky Street—not far from the Kremlin. The building had been built just three years before, and one of its luxury apartments had been prepared for the Pontecorvos’ arrival; it would be Bruno’s Moscow base for the rest of his life.

  Their apartment was large, and located on the seventh floor. There were three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a study, all filled with traditional furniture. The ceilings were high, embossed with stucco, and the living room had large windows, draped with white curtains that reached the ceiling. Bizarrely, the apartment contained
a set of classic French books.

  Bruno spent many hours reading the French classics to fill the time between Russian language lessons, as the family was effectively “locked in the house” for several weeks.8 Their entire existence was now under state control.

  A young KGB officer had been assigned to watch over them. To Bruno’s surprise, the man asked him for news of the war in Korea. In the afternoon a copy of the state newspaper, Pravda, arrived, along with an interpreter, who was also eager to hear the headline news from Bruno personally.9 Already Bruno was starting to realize how news was controlled under Stalin’s rule.

  On the day after their arrival, the KGB officer explained that it would be best if Bruno postponed the release of the public statement he had prepared. Bruno was surprised, as he felt that it would benefit the Soviet Union if he explained his decision to his friends and colleagues in the West. The Soviet leaders, he was informed, viewed things differently. He could release his statement “all in good time.” In reality five years were to elapse before the time was deemed appropriate, two years after Stalin’s death. The officer explained that it was necessary for the Pontecorvos to stay indoors “for vigilance,” as “no one must know” they were in the USSR; for some unexplained reason, this secrecy was deemed vitally important.

  The most urgent task for the Pontecorvos was to learn Russian. They were provided with a teacher, who spoke English perfectly. First they learned to read the Cyrillic alphabet; then they learned a few basic words, spelling them out in the strange script. This required concentration, discipline, and time. There was no shortage of the latter, and Bruno and Gil set about the task enthusiastically. Marianne, however, did not. Despite the insistence of the teacher, she gave up after a few lessons, complaining that the Russian language was too difficult, and that studying it gave her headaches. That, at least, is what Bruno recalled years later in interviews with Miriam Mafai. Gil’s memory of that time differs, however. He recalls his mother as a good linguist.10 In any event, cut off from her family in Sweden, and from her friends in the West, Marianne was now isolated in a strange land.