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

Fuchs had always kept his views secret. Now he was keeping from his new friends his activities also: his trips to Banbury, and his service to the Soviet state. But the country he was helping was a much-admired ally. He could believe that his friends might disapprove of what he was doing if

they knew, but would not be outraged; that they would only feel that he had broken some rules that, strictly speaking, he should not have broken, that he had gone too far in acting on a feeling towards Russia which, to some degree, they all shared.

Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec in August 1943 and signed a secret agreement on Anglo-American collaboration (along with Canada) on building an atomic bomb. The bomb would be built in America, and Britain would be a junior partner in the project. The Tube Alloys directorate recognized now that building the bomb would be a massive industrial undertaking, and this could not be done in Britain under wartime conditions.

The biggest single task would be separating uranium 235; British scientists had done a great deal of work on this and had a lot to contribute. So it was arranged that a group of British scientists would be attached to the team in New York working on uranium diffusion, and others would join other branches of the project.

Naturally, Peierls was asked to go to New York, and naturally, he asked Fuchs to come with him; Fuchs agreed. As it happens, Fuchs’s name was known to the Americans working on uranium separation because he had written an excellent paper on the control of a particular problem in the diffusion process.

At this point, Fuchs could have let his activities as a Soviet informant drop. He had already given Russia some worthwhile help. His present contact was arranged through his own party, the German Communist Party, but now he was going away and the direct connection would be broken. However, he wanted to continue and he became even more involved; his espionage became more determined, the mechanics more complicated.

At his next meeting with Sonja, Fuchs told her that he was going to New York. She said she would arrange for him to be passed on to a contact in America. The GRU moved quickly, and when they met next she had details of the transfer. They were the stuff of spy fiction, with coded recognition signals. His contact in America would be a man he would know only as Raymond.

As a formality, he had to apply for a non-immigrant visa. On the form he wrote his occupation as ‘government official’, and the purpose of his visit as ‘official duty on behalf of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’. (The DSIR had taken over the project from the Ministry of Aircraft Production.) The application is dated 22 November 1943.

The party of thirty British scientists and some of their wives sailed a few days after this, on the Andes. The crossing was very different from Fuchs’s last journey to the New World. He was travelling as an official of the Government that three and a half years earlier had sent him across the Atlantic as a prisoner. He was travelling with friends, and sharing a stateroom with Otto Frisch. Although it was mid-winter, the sea was calm. The Andes was a cruise liner converted into a troop-ship, but only civilians were crossing the Atlantic in a westerly direction. There was plenty of food left over from the last crossing from America, so that the passengers, coming from a country where food was severely rationed and eggs limited to one a week, were treated to luxuries such as two eggs and bacon for breakfast every day, and meat and fresh fruit in abundance. They discussed their work, but in the main, people’s memory of that crossing is of a short, relaxed interlude, during which they put on weight.

Fuchs never played tennis but, late in the afternoon of a crisp, cold Saturday in February 1944, he was strolling along Henry Street, on the lower East Side of Manhattan, carrying a tennis ball. He was following the instructions that Sonja had given him. The tennis ball was to be the sign by which Raymond, his American espionage contact, would recognize him.

Fuchs saw what he was watching out for: a man wearing gloves and carrying another pair of gloves in his hand, and carrying also a book with a green cover. He was in his mid-thirties, shortish, with a pallid complexion and pudgy features, and large, soulful eyes and heavy eyelids almost hidden behind thick-lensed glasses.

As instructed, Fuchs waited for the other to make the first approach and he did so, with the expected question: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grand Central Station?’ Fuchs shrugged this off with a non-committal reply, and the other said something meaningless. There was a pause; they had both given the right signals.

‘Raymond?’ said Fuchs, and the other nodded. Fuchs introduced himself.

Raymond said he was pleased to meet Fuchs, and pleased to have been chosen for such an important assignment. They walked along together, Fuchs telling him a little about his work in New York and the atomic bomb project, of which the American, in common with most other people, had never heard. They made arrangements for further meetings, with an eye to tight security. They would meet only briefly, allowing just enough time to complete their business. They would never meet in the same place twice. And at each meeting they would make arrangements for the next one, including a time and place. They parted after twenty minutes.

Raymond — and Fuchs never knew him by any other name — was Harry Gold, one of the strangest figures to feature in a major espionage case. In fact he featured in two, because he was to be a key witness in the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple who became an international cause célèbre in the early 1950s when they were sentenced to death for spying for the Soviet Union.

A native of Philadelphia, he came from a poor background but worked his way through college and earned a degree in chemistry. He worked for a chemical company and a hospital laboratory, and from 1936 onwards, according to his own account, he passed confidential information about industrial chemical processes gathered from his places of work to Soviet agents. He had high blood pressure and was unfit for military service. A bachelor, he lived with his parents in Philadelphia.

He had two major eccentricities, both reflecting social inadequacy, which make him an improbable agent of a serious espionage organization.

He was a fantasist, who created stories about himself for their own sake. For instance, he told investigators that his Soviet contact advised him to tell his employers that he was married in order to make himself more acceptable, which in itself seems unlikely. He not only said he was married, but invented detailed storied about his wife’s former lover, in-law troubles, buying a house, and finally a break-up of the marriage which left him deprived of his children (a boy and a girl, twins) and racked with anguish at the loss. He told friends the heart-rending story of how he would sit in his car outside his children’s school and wait for them to come out, and watch them from a distance, and cry silently. He would sometimes break down in tears as he told this story, and the friends listening would be near to tears also. Another story of his family life, which has an obvious unconscious motivation, was that his younger brother, Joe, was in the army and had been killed in action in the Pacific. Gold did have a younger brother called Joe and it would be natural for him to be jealous of him, for as a boy Joe was athletic and popular, in contrast to Gold; he was serving in the army and had been decorated. In the arguments that have gone on about the Rosenberg case since their execution, one of the points put forward in favour of their innocence is Gold’s apparent unreliability as a witness.