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

The other eccentricity was a desire to please which went to extraordinary lengths. As a student, Gold used to help others with their work to the detriment of his own. He was always eager to perform a service for someone else, no matter how inconvenient. He would lend money to anyone, even when he was in financial difficulties himself and in debt, and when the borrower paid him back he always had to argue with Gold to get him to accept the money. He was an ideal employee, doing more than was asked of him and always ready to do any amount of overtime work. When he himself was placed on trial for espionage, his defence counsel told the judge: ‘Harry Gold is the most extraordinarily selfless person I have ever met in my life.’ But Gold’s behaviour was not simply selfless: it was pathologically self-abnegating.

It appears to be this trait that led Gold to agree to the suggestion of someone he met that he hand over confidential information from the laboratory where he worked to be passed on to the Soviet Union. Seeking to explain this later, he said he did it at first out of gratitude to someone who helped him get a job, and later out of sympathy for the Russian people. He seems to have had no Communist convictions (he was a registered Democrat) and he was not paid for his services. He was just a man who could not say ‘No’.

After 1941 Gold had no useful information to give, and he acted as a courier for a Soviet official, collecting papers for him at various times in secret. In February 1944, this official told him that he was to drop everything else he was doing for him and take on some work that was very important, and that he must keep this absolutely secret. This was to begin when he met a visitor from England in downtown Manhattan.

Fuchs had arrived with the others on the Andes on 3 December, landing at Newport News, Virginia. The ones who were going to New York left by train right away. They were paid a living allowance which for Fuchs, as a bachelor, meant a substantial rise in his standard of living. On his arrival in New York, he went with most of the others to stay at the Taft Hotel near Times Square, and then moved to the Barbizon Plaza, a comfortable and fairly elegant hotel in a smart location overlooking Central Park. After two months there, he rented a furnished apartment at 128 West 77th Street, in a four-storey converted brownstone house. He took it over from another scientist with the British mission who was returning to England.

In every way, life seemed to be getting better for Fuchs. Soon after his arrival he had a reunion with his younger sister, Kristel. She was married to a man called Robert Heineman, who had an income derived partly from a small business he owned. They lived in a neat suburban-style house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had two children, a boy of three and a one-year-old girl. Fuchs spent Christmas with the Heinemans. Heineman told friends that he found Fuchs stand-offish, but he made him welcome in his home, and Fuchs went up to visit them twice more during his stay in New York.

Quite apart from anyone having more money, life in New York was much more abundant than life in wartime Birmingham. There was some rationing in America, and a ‘brown-out’ in coastal cities which restricted street-lighting, but compared to any British city at this time, where life was austere and the streets were blacked out at night, New York was a glittering cornucopia of food and drink and the material good things of life. People had money to spend and the city thronged with servicemen on leave. The Broadway theatre was flourishing. Restaurants and night-clubs were packed. But somehow, all this did not make a great impression on most of the British scientists, who were preoccupied with the work they had come to do.

For the war overseas was in the minds of most people in America, and probably more prominently in the minds of the British visitors, who had come from a war zone. In the newspapers and on the radio the constant news for Americans was of other Americans struggling and dying, and, by 1944, purchasing victories with their suffering. It was of Allied servicemen inching their way painfully up the Italian peninsula, fighting terrible battles against well-dug-in Japanese troops on one Pacific island after another, dying in the sky in the massive air raids on German cities, and then, in June of that year, wading ashore in Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe. Much of the attention of the people back home was focused on these men and what they were doing. People tried to help, by buying war bonds, or giving blood. The scientists working on the atomic bomb were engaged in the same titanic effort, and they were aware that they might be able to shorten the war and the suffering. It was not only a question of shortening the war; they knew what the newspaper-reading public did not know: that the possibility of an atomic bomb existed, and that German scientists might somehow produce one.

Fuchs liked music and occasionally went to a concert, usually alone. He had acquired a violin, and sometimes played. He also went out with a few others and climbed on the Pallisades, the cliffs in New Jersey facing New York across the river. He liked climbing. Apart from this, he had little recreation.

The Peierls brought their young son and daughter from Toronto to live with them. Their daughter Gaby, reunited with her parents at the age of twelve after an absence of two and a half years, was quiet and withdrawn for a while, so that her mother said, ‘Oh, she’s just like Klaus.’ So Gaby was curious to meet Fuchs. When she did she took to him, and came to like him more over the years. He paid attention to her, and she found quickly that he was kind, in a quiet way.

The fifteen scientists in the Tube Alloys team in-New York came under the aegis of the British Ministry of Supply, and they worked in a set of offices taken by the Ministry in Exchange Place, near Wall Street. The theoretical work on uranium diffusion had been done at Columbia University, and the theory was now being put into practice with the construction of a huge uranium separation plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which in terms of cost and manpower was to be the biggest part of the atomic bomb programme. Its location was a secret even from the scientists working on diffusion in New York. These were doing mathematical calculations in connection with the plant, which was being built by the Kellex Corporation, a corporation created just for this task by Kellogg’s, the big engineering firm.

Most of the Britons went home in the early months of 1944 but Peierls and Fuchs remained, and also another assistant of Peierls who had come with them from Birmingham, Tony Skyrme. Skyrme was younger than Fuchs and had an Eton and Oxford background and the kind of English accent that goes with it. This accent was so pronounced, and so alien to Americans, that when he went for a walk in Central Park in his shirtsleeves one warm evening without any papers on him, he was arrested and told by police that they suspected him of being a Nazi spy. This was something that never happened to any of the German-born members of the British mission. All the Britons who remained were listed officially as consultants to the Kellex Corporation.

As Fuchs was foreign-born, one of the directors of Tube Alloys asked M15 at this point for a summary of anything that was known about him, since it was proposed now that he should remain in America working with the Americans. MI5 reported that he had not been active politically and there was nothing objectionable about his behaviour in Britain.

One of the American scientists involved in the diffusion project in New York was Edward Corson, Fuchs’s old friend from Edinburgh, but somehow they did not see much of each other out of working hours.

At one point, Peierls encountered a difficulty of an unexpected kind. The British group wanted to hire someone locally to help with some mathematical calculations and he called Hunter College, a college in New York (a university by British standards), that was then a women-only institution. The Hunter office said they would send along a young woman who was black (the word used in those days was ‘coloured’): would this present a problem? Peierls consulted a senior official at the Ministry of Supply office in New York, who said that some people might object if he hired a coloured girl. However, this person said that in order not to offend American anti-discrimination laws he should interview the girl and then turn her down. Peierls was angry at this but decided that making an issue of it would interfere with work on the project, which was of overriding importance. However, he refused to practise deception, and told Hunter College that he was not allowed to hire a black girl.