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

He became very close friends with Herbert Skinner and his Romanian-born wife Erna, and he was often in their home, so often, in fact, that their teenage daughter Elaine came to resent his presence, unlike the Peierls children. He told the Skinners about his mother’s suicide, something he did not tell anyone else. Because Herbert Skinner served as Cockcroft’s deputy, the Skinners had one of the few proper houses that Harwell had inherited from the RAF. They furnished it in modern style with tubular furniture. Politically, Skinner was a Conservative.

Their home was a social centre at Harwell, and distinguished scientific visitors, of whom there were many, were usually entertained there. Erna was a good hostess, intelligent — she had an academic background — and charming. She had somewhat exotic features, with dark hair and sparkling brown eyes, and a Renoir figure. She was highly strung and she hated to be alone, and she rarely was, for the Skinners had a resident cook-housekeeper.

Erna was also one of those attractive, flirtatious women who need constant attention, particularly from men. Herbert Skinner seemed content with this. Unlike most women of this kind, Erna Skinner was not only a man’s woman; she made good friends with other women also, and she got along with children. When a formal reception was held for senior staff, she got a hairdresser in from Oxford beforehand and invited the other wives to come to her home to have their hair done, and this was appreciated. One neighbour’s child at Harwell went to the Skinners’ home to play with their daughter, Elaine, and came back and told her parents delightedly how they had found a mouse in the kitchen, and Mrs Skinner had fed it bits of cheese.

When Fuchs seemed to be joining the company of men around Mrs Skinner, Mrs Peierls, who knew her well and was fond of her, upbraided her during a visit to Harwell. She said Fuchs had special qualities, and should not be treated in the frivolous way in which Erna was wont to treat men. ‘If you must blow soap bubbles, don’t use scented soap,’ she said. This metaphor tickled Mrs Skinner, and she repeated it to her friends.

The winter of 1946-7 was memorably grim in Britain, with phenomenally cold weather aggravating severe shortages of food and fuel. The Peierls decided to take a break from its rigours with a skiing holiday in Switzerland. They invited Fuchs to join them, and he agreed. They took a villa at Sassfee. They enjoyed together everyday luxuries that were absent from Britain, as from most of Europe, such as coffee with cream in it and bread with any amount of butter.

Fuchs’s brother Gerhardt lived in Davos, and he came over to Sassfee to see him. He was overweight and sickly, still suffering from tuberculosis. The two brothers had not met for nearly ten years, and they spent two days talking together. Gerhardt was still an ardent Communist. Shortly afterwards, he would go to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany; he died there two years later. After he left, Fuchs came down with one of his dry coughs. Mrs Peierls had seen this before, and she did not worry about it as much as she had in the past. But it kept him in for two days, while they were out enjoying themselves.

Apart from that, he was a good holiday companion and a good friend, as always. There was one cross-country skiing trip when the Peierls’ ten-year-old son Ronald was trailing behind and complaining; his parents were unsympathetic and told him to shut up and hurry along, but Fuchs hung back with him, and was patient and encouraging. Their daughter Gaby was skiing by herself one day, singing with sheer pleasure, when she suddenly saw him smiling at her, happy because she was happy. She always remembered that moment; it seemed to show his unselfish affection for the whole family.

He was a good friend at the end of the holiday also. He and Peierls returned to their jobs after two weeks, but Mrs Peierls and the children remained for another two. The weather was bad when they came back, and they had a rough Channel crossing, arriving at Dover wretched and tired. There was Fuchs at the dockside, with his car, waiting to drive them back to Birmingham.

When he came back to England after that holiday, Fuchs decided to start giving information to the Russians again. Perhaps he felt that he still owed it to the cause; his conversations with Gerhardt might have acted as a spur, and the dry cough indicates that it may have been on his mind: perhaps he found that his life was lacking a certain excitement, with that hidden compartment empty.

He assumed that the arrangement made in America involving a monthly appearance of a Soviet contact at Mornington Crescent station had lapsed, so he set out to contact Jurgen Kuczynski again. But Kuczynski was back in Germany, an official in the Soviet occupation zone. Soon, the German Democratic Republic was set up in that zone, and Kuczynski became a member of the Volkskammer, the East German Parliament. Fuchs looked up another émigré member of the German Communist Party, a woman he had known before the war, who he thought had been in touch with the underground organization. She came from Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. He went to see her, and told her he had ‘lost contact’, and wanted to be put in touch with whoever had taken Kuczynski’s place in England. She caught his meaning, and was able to put him in touch with a Soviet intelligence agent. He was to go to a pub called the Nag’s Head in Wood Green in north London, carrying a copy of the magazine Tribune, and look for a man carrying a red book. The other man would make some comment about a drink. Fuchs carried out these instructions, and the contact was made.

This man, who was Fuchs’s contact during his next phase of espionage, was a stocky, fair-haired, well-dressed man of about thirty with a slight foreign accent that could have been Russian, who always drank beer when they met in a pub. He has never been identified. At that first meeting, he began by reprimanding Fuchs for contacting the woman, because she was known as a Communist. Then he gave instructions for further meetings in London. They were to be at one of two places: in a pub called the Spotted Horse, in Putney High Street, or outside Kew Gardens tube station. If a rendezvous was not kept, they would try to meet precisely a month later at the other location. When they met in the pub, they would not acknowledge one another, but would each have a drink and leave, and they would meet in the street outside. (Ruth Kuczynski, Fuchs’s contact before he went to America, was still living in Kidlington, which is only twenty miles from Harwell, but she had already been interviewed as a suspect by MI5 so no attempt was made to put him in touch with her.)

He was told of a way of restoring contact if it were somehow broken off. He was to go to a house at 166 Kew Road, Richmond, and throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over the garden wall, first writing instructions for the next meeting on page ten. He was then to go to another place and make a chalk mark on the wall. Fuchs went along there once and tossed the magazine over the wall, but he did not write any message in it. It was only to see whether the communication link worked, like testing a telephone line. His contact told him at their next meeting that the magazine had been received.

As it turned out, these meetings were very infrequent.

They were arranged for about every two months but Fuchs missed a few, sometimes because he could not get to London at the appropriate time, sometimes because he was not well. Fuchs and his contact met only six times in the next two years. When they did, Fuchs would hand over written material, and the fair-haired man would go away for a few minutes and then come back; apparently he was giving the reports to someone else. At one point he suggested to Fuchs that he go to Paris to meet someone who could better deal with the technical information he was handing over. Fuchs did not go, but he remembered the name and address: Vassily Soukhomline, 2 rue Adolphe Bartholi.