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

He told the story to Fuchs and, knowing that Fuchs had high principles, he expected him to say that he should have taken a strong stand against a colour bar. But Fuchs said he thought he did the right thing, and that it was better to pursue the greater good of uninterrupted work on the bomb project, which might win the war.

Fuchs was also pursuing another goal, of giving the Soviet Union whatever help he could in building an atomic bomb. Most of what he was able to pass on was his own work, but he was no longer restricting himself to this as a matter of principle, as he had before. One factor may have been that he believed what the British and American Communist Parties were saying: that Britain and America were deliberately holding back from invading Europe in order that Germany and Russia might bleed each other to death. In Britain, a ‘second front now’ campaign was mounted, with mass meetings and demonstrations.

He met Gold again about two weeks after their first encounter, at the corner of 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. This was not the peremptory meeting they had decided they would have. It was in the evening, like all their meetings, and they walked across to First Avenue, and then up-town for fifteen blocks or so.

Fuchs had no papers to hand over yet, but he talked about the uranium diffusion programme and its place in the atomic bomb project. He told Gold that two methods of separating the isotopes of uranium were being pursued, gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation. He noted that Gold had some scientific knowledge — he seems to have known about isotope separation, for instance — and guessed he might be a chemist. He also told Gold about the members of the British group working in New York, and about some of the Americans as well. Gold was diligent: he kept this in his mind and wrote it all down as soon as he had left Fuchs. He had acquired a new controller, whom he knew only as John. This was Anatoli Yakovlev, whose official post was Soviet vice-consul in New York. Gold gave Yakovlev his written report of his conversations with Fuchs. Gold used to come up from Philadelphia, a journey of about two and a half hours by train, for these meetings.

The third meeting, two weeks after this one, was strictly business. Fuchs and Gold met by arrangement among the smart, busy, illuminated shops of Madison Avenue in the 70s, and turned down a side street. This time Fuchs handed over an envelope containing several pages, and they made arrangements for the next meeting. That was all.

At the next meeting, they broke all the rules they had set for themselves. They met outside a cinema in the Bronx. It was a chilly, damp evening in April, rain was coming down, and Fuchs had a bad cough. Gold was worried about Fuchs being out in this weather, so at his insistence they went to a nearby restaurant and had dinner. Fuchs told Gold that a big uranium diffusion plant was being built somewhere in the South, possibly Georgia or Alabama. Over dinner, they talked about music and chess. Co-conspirators now, they agreed on a story in case anyone should ask how they met: they would say that they happened to be sitting next to each other at a concert at Carnegie Hall and got to chatting. Gold was even going to go home and look up the Carnegie Hall concert programme in a newspaper so that he would know what was played on a particular day and could make the story convincing.

After dinner, they took a taxi into Manhattan and went to a mid-town bar, and had some drinks. Then they left in two separate cabs, Fuchs for home, Gold for Pennsylvania Station. Fuchs handed over an envelope before they parted.

It must have been a curious evening. Gold never revealed his identity, and Fuchs, knowing that ‘Raymond’ was merely a nom de guerre, disdained to use it. Gold addressed Fuchs as ‘Klaus’. But Fuchs, who rarely talked about his family even to close friends, talked about his brother to this stranger. He had received a letter from his brother Gerhardt, and he told Gold about Gerhardt’s flight to Switzerland, and his poor health. Gold, always eager to be a friend, listened appreciatively.

They met next in the suburb of Queens, and this time it was strictly business again. Fuchs handed over a bulky envelope containing somewhere between twenty-five and forty pages, and Gold took it to Yakovlev. He arrived a few minutes early for his street-corner meeting with Yakovlev, and, curious, he opened the envelope and glanced at the material inside by the light of a drugstore window. He saw pages of handwriting with mathematical derivations, which he did not understand.

These, like all the written material that Fuchs handed over, were reports that he had written himself. He wrote thirteen papers on uranium diffusion while he was attached to the Kellex Company in New York, and he gave copies of every one to Gold. At the office on Exchange Place Fuchs used to write out a draft of each paper in longhand, including the mathematical calculations, and give it to a secretary to type and duplicate, sometimes showing it to Peierls first for approval. The typed and duplicated copies were numbered first for security purposes. A copy was given to him to check, along with the handwritten original, and this copy also would be numbered. He would keep the copy, and give the handwritten original to Gold.

They were highly technical, with titles such as Fluctuations and the Efficiency of a Diffusion Plant, Parts 1-4, and On the Effect of a Time Lag in the Control of Plant Stability. They were useful in the construction of a uranium diffusion plant in America, and presumably would be useful to the Russians as they made plans to construct one.

The security regulations covering the handling of documents were not as tight as they were to be later on. Some of the scientists would take classified documents home to work on them. One recalls that he was told simply never to let these out of his possession, so that when he stopped at an art museum on the way home one day, he had to refuse to surrender his briefcase at the cloakroom, and was not allowed in.

A little while after the meeting in Queens, Fuchs went on another visit to the Heinemans. He found Kristel very troubled. Her marriage was often unhappy; one quarrel on the street was so violent that the police were called. Now she was thinking of leaving her husband and moving to New York with her two children.

Then he showed how strong was his commitment to his role as a Soviet informant. When he met Gold next, near Borough Hall in Brooklyn, he told him about his sister, and said that if she did leave her husband and come to New York, he would like to share an apartment with her. He said he was very close to his sister, and fond of her two children. But first he wanted Gold to ask his superiors whether there would be any objection to this arrangement.

Some more questions about Fuchs’s reports came back, evidently from scientists in the Soviet Union. Before this meeting, Yakovlev gave Gold several small sheets of paper with typewritten questions on them. Gold read them and found it difficult to make sense out of them, mainly because they were phrased in stilted English, like a bad translation. He did not give the questions to Fuchs but relayed them as best he could. At least, he started to relay them, but Fuchs said brusquely that he had already covered all these matters thoroughly, and would continue to do so.

The Soviet programme was not yet in high gear, but plans were being laid and Fuchs’s data were being used. When the Soviet uranium diffusion plant was built at Podolsk, just south of Moscow, it was an exact copy of the plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Fuchs and Gold met next at the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, and because it was a warm evening they strolled in Central Park for a while. Gold told Fuchs that there would be no objection to his sharing an apartment with his sister. He had not consulted anyone before giving this reply, but took it upon himself. In fact, Kristel was not going to leave her husband now; she was pregnant. A third child was born in October of that year.