Norman Moss - Klaus Fuchs - The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

But Fuchs had none of these ties, and there was no framework to break through. He had grown up in a German society in which the outlines were fluid, one that did not command the natural loyalty of all its citizens. Although he had applied for British citizenship, he did not seem to consider himself to be a part of British society. The flag of his native land was now the swastika, which he had every reason to hate. His only national commitment was to a Germany that did not yet exist, the post-Nazi Germany for which he had been told to prepare himself when he left Berlin. His only tie of loyalty was the one he had worked out in his own mind, to the abstraction of Communism; and because of this to a country that was, for him, hardly less abstract, the Soviet Union.

On a visit to London in late 1941, he looked up his old acquaintance Jurgen Kuczynski, and told him that he had some information that could be of value to the Soviet Union. Kuczynski said he would find him someone to pass it on to, and asked to see him again. Presumably, as a GRU agent, he contacted his GRU network. He arranged a contact for Fuchs, a man Fuchs would know only as Alexander. This was in fact Simon Davidovitch Kremer, a member of the military attaché’s staff at the Soviet Embassy.

Now, for Fuchs, politics would be once again a matter of doing something and not just thinking something. He would be an acting Communist again, and not just a believer.

Helping the cause of Communism meant helping the Soviet Union. To a Marxist, the world is divided horizontally into classes; the vertical division into nations is a superficial one. The crucial division is between the working class and the capitalist class. Events that are described conventionally in terms of the vertical division, as relations between nations, are reinterpreted in terms of the horizontal division, as relations between classes, by a process similar to a mathematical transformation in which a formula represented by a line on a graph is rotated through an angle of 90 degrees. When the Soviet Union was the only Communist country, this meant identifying the interests of the working class all over the world, in the horizontal division, with those of the Soviet Union, in the vertical one.

The Soviet Union was the country in which Communist principles were being put into practice, and from which Communism as a liberating force would spread. The Comintern, the Communist International, had declared: ‘Since the Soviet Union is the true fatherland of the proletariat, the strongest pillar of its achievements, and the principal factor in its emancipation throughout the world, this obliges the international proletariat to forward the success of Socialist construction in the Soviet Union, and to defend the country of the proletariat dictatorship by every means.’

Communists were quite open about this. The issue was raised in France in 1949 when the physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie, removed from his post in the French Atomic Energy Commission because he was a Communist, told a meeting of journalists that no honest Frenchman, Communist or otherwise, would deliver national secrets to a foreign power. He was rebuked by the Secretary of the French Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, who said: ‘Every progressive has two fatherlands, his own and the Soviet Union.’ And the party bureau told a Communist newspaper: ‘M Joliot-Curie has committed the error of including the USSR, the fatherland of all workers, in the phrase “any foreign power”. A French Communist should have no secrets from the USSR.’

There seemed to be very little gap between Fuchs deciding in his own mind that a course of action was morally right, and acting on the decision. After all, his father’s teaching to his children was that they should do what they thought was right.

Fuchs typed his reports on the calculations of nuclear fission and uranium diffusion, and made carbon copies, and he took these carbon copies with him when he went to his first meeting with Kremer. This was at a house near Hyde Park, not far from the Soviet Embassy. He gave the papers to Kremer, and they arranged a second meeting. Then Fuchs had a spasm of doubt about whether this man he knew only as Alexander was who he said he was, and whether those papers would really reach the Soviet authorities; so on his next visit to London he went to the Soviet Embassy to find out. Kremer saw him there and reassured him, although he could hardly have been pleased at this breach of security.

Fuchs met Kremer three times during the next six months. Each time he gave him copies of his reports, either typed or handwritten. Kremer gave him some elementary lessons in being a spy, which he did not always accept. He told him to take taxis, and double-back on his route to throw off anyone who might be following. Fuchs remarked prosaically that this would be expensive. Kremer also told him that if he thought he was being followed, he should cross the street and go into an empty building or some other empty place and see if anyone came after. Fuchs suggested they meet in large and busy places, which they did: a station, and a busy shopping street.

In the autumn of 1942, Kremer told Fuchs he was passing him on to another contact, a woman he would know only as Sonja. He would not have to go to London to meet her, but could see her closer to Birmingham. Sonja was, in fact, Ruth Kuczynski, Jurgen’s sister, although of course Fuchs did not know this. Like her brother, she was a long-time GRU agent, serving the cause as a devoted volunteer, and had worked in China and Switzerland. A dark-haired, attractive woman, she chose her lovers and then her husband from the ranks of the Soviet Intelligence network. Now she was living in the village of Kidlington, near Oxford, with her British husband, who was shortly to join the Army, and in the course of time three children. [4] In those days spies were not respectable, and no countries admitted employing them. These are more frank and permissive times, and Ruth Kuczynski, now living in well-earned retirement in East Germany, was allowed to publish her memoirs, as well as some fictional spy thrillers. Her memoirs do not say she was Fuchs’s contact, but this can easily be deduced from them. See the notes at the end of this book. For the GRU it was an advantage that, unlike Kremer, she had no connection with the Soviet Embassy.

For the next eighteen months or so, Fuchs used to meet her regularly in Banbury, a market town some thirty-five miles from Birmingham and ten miles from her home. They did not meet in crowded places but in a country lane, or, on one occasion, at a cafe near the station. Each time he passed over papers he had written.

In the main, he was still operating on the strict Protestant principle that each person is responsible for his own conscience. He handed over only his own work. He would not hand over work by Peierls or anyone else, British or American (for he was seeing American papers); it was up to them to decide what should be done with it. But as background, he passed on verbally the information that this was part of a project to build an atomic fission bomb, that the theoretical work on uranium diffusion was being supplemented by the construction of a model diffusion plant in Valley, Wales, that similar work was going on in the United States, and that there was collaboration between Britain and the United States in this.

This verbal background was probably the most important information Fuchs gave at this stage. For it arrived in the Soviet Union at a time when the Government was being pressed, as the British and American governments had been a little earlier, to take a decision on whether to go ahead with work on an atomic bomb.

Atomic physics was open and international until 1940. Russian scientists read all the papers that were published, and made substantial contributions of their own. They saw as soon as anyone else the possibilities of a nuclear chain reaction, and this was discussed openly. A few physicists were anxious to press ahead and explore the possibility, and in 1940 the Soviet Academy of Sciences set up a Uranium Commission, to plan further research and look for uranium ores. Igor Kurchatov, the head of nuclear physics at the Leningrad Physiotechnical Institute, along with a colleague, sent a proposal to the Academy for a programme of research leading to the construction of an experimental reactor, but the Academy decided that the prospect of results was too remote to justify such an expenditure.