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

While they walked, Fuchs told him a few more titbits that he had picked up about the Manhattan Project, as the atomic bomb project was now called. He told him that Niels Bohr, one of the giants of twentieth-century science, had joined it. He had been smuggled out of German-occupied Denmark to Sweden, and had now been brought to the United States under the name Nicholas Baker, as Fuchs informed Gold. Fuchs also told him an item of news about himself: he said he expected to be transferred away from New York to somewhere in the south-western United States later in the year or early the following year. He gave him his sister Kristel’s address, and said that if they lost contact he could leave a message for him there.

He explained that work on the Manhattan Project was compartmentalized, so that no one knew much about what was going on in other branches. He gave Gold another envelope just before they parted. If they spent some time together, he would always wait until the last moment before handing over the papers, so that if they were caught together Gold would not have classified papers on him.

During some of this time Fuchs was sharing an office at Exchange Place with Nicholas Kurd, a dapper Hungarian physicist and bon vivant who had worked for Tube Alloys at Oxford, and they became friends. Kurd was one of the first to notice Fuchs’s growing concern with security. Several atomic scientists knew that the writer Harold Nicolson had made an uncannily accurate forecast of an atomic bomb (although purely by chance) in a novel published in 1934, Public Faces, Fuchs was distressed to find it in the little library at the Barbizon Plaza, among the books available to residents. ‘Couldn’t the book somehow be taken out of circulation?’ he asked Kurti anxiously.

Kurd’s view of him at this time is interesting. Their friendship was limited: Kurti did not feel that he could overcome Fuchs’s reserve sufficiently to have an intimate relationship with him. But he says he saw in him a rare quality of integrity. As he explains: ‘I somehow had the feeling that if I got into difficulties of some kind, I could go to him for advice, and could be absolutely certain that he would not betray my trust, and that he would do everything he could to help me.’ Nothing that has happened since has altered Kurd’s view.

What Kurti sensed were Fuchs’s decent instincts which were beginning to come through in his responses to other people, and also the integrity he learned from his father, the same integrity that was leading him now to the removal of confidential papers and secret meetings with Gold.

Fuchs was by now operating on two planes which were quite separate from one another, the political and the personal. He was being, more and more, a caring friend and an honest one, albeit with a certain emotional reserve; but on a political level he was committing acts of betrayal. He was like the married man who carries on an affair while telling himself that he still loves his wife, and that the affair has nothing to do with her and does not affect their relationship.

The moat between his emotional life and other people which he had dug when he left Germany was still there, but he had thrown bridges across it. He was developing human ties, human friendships, and expressing human decencies, things he had given up when he left his homeland for a strange country and withdrew behind his defences.

He described years later, in his confession, the process that was clearly well established by this time:

In the course of this work I began naturally to form bonds of personal friendship… I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments. One compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be and the kind of man which, in personal ways, I had been before with my friends in or near the Communist Party. I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point. I could forget the other compartment and still rely on it. It appeared to me at the time that I had become a ‘free man’, because I had succeeded in the other compartment to establish myself completely independent of the surrounding forces in society. Looking back at it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it a controlled schizophrenia. [7] Fuchs was using the word ‘schizophrenia’ in a way that it is used often, and inaccurately, by laymen, to mean a division into two distinct personalities, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde being the classic example. Used correctly, it means a psychotic disorder involving complete emotional disorientation.

The confession was written in 1950, and that phrase ‘a free man’ seems to echo the existentialist literature of the time (although it is unlikely that there was a direct literary influence: Fuchs did not read a great deal outside his professional field). The kind of freedom he describes is emotional autonomy, an absence of any obligations or commitments imposed by the social environment, or by ties to others, or by other people’s expectations. It is the freedom of Albert Camus’s Outsider, and of the psychopath. It is quite un-Marxist. The Marxist views man as being first and foremost a social animal, and would regard the state of being ‘independent of the surrounding forces of society’ as being neither possible nor desirable.

It is also interesting that when he describes himself as having been helpful and a friend in the past, it was with other people ‘in or near the Communist Party’. Friendship still seemed inseparable from political alignment.

Fuchs had the necessary mental equipment of a spy: the emotional self-reliance, the ability to do without the approval of others, the ability to live on two planes at once, being one thing on one plane and quite a different thing on the other. One thinks of Kim Philby, who was a husband, lover, hard drinker and a valued and highly competent British intelligence agent, and was also, in a part of his life known to none of his friends and colleagues, an agent of the KGB. It was fortuitous that Fuchs had this ability. For Fuchs, unlike Kim Philby, unlike George Blake, the other double agent in the British intelligence service, and several Americans who were found more recently to have served the KGB, did not set out to be a spy. He became one by chance, simply because he came across some very important information, because, in fact, he was a physicist at a time when the application of physics turned out to be the most important thing happening in the world.

Fuchs’s next meeting with Gold after their stroll in Central Park was to be outside the Bell movie theatre in Brooklyn, in July. Fuchs did not turn up. This was the first meeting he had missed. Gold reported this to Yakovlev and returned to Philadelphia. He went to the next alternative rendezvous a short time later, on Central Park West in the 90s, and again Fuchs did not appear. This was a high crime area, and Gold was worried that Fuchs might have been mugged.

In espionage, unlike most other crimes, there is very rarely an act of violence or theft. The crime is the transmission of information. Often, the crime is perpetrated simply by the meeting of two people. Such a meeting may point to the crime, and so the spy goes to great lengths to keep secret the links in the chain which lead from the source of the information to the ultimate receiver. Gold could not simply telephone Fuchs to ask why he had not turned up and when they could meet, since this might attract suspicion. Fuchs had never even told him his address. Two failed meetings in a row meant a severing of contact.

He reported back to Yakovlev and they had a long discussion, going over various possibilities. Yakovlev went away to consult a superior or else think it over. They met again on a Sunday morning near Washington Square. Yakovlev told Gold that he now had Fuchs’s address, and he told him to go to the apartment.