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

So the following morning, Thursday, 2 February, Perrin telephoned Fuchs at Harwell and asked him whether he would come up to his office that afternoon. Fuchs agreed. He said he would take a train from Didcot that arrived at Paddington Station at about 2.30 in the afternoon, and should be at Shell-Mex House in the Strand a quarter of an hour or so after that. Burt arranged with Perrin to be there at 2.30.

But Burt did not arrive on time. Perrin did not know it, but he was held up because the Fuchs case had already become an international issue. The Foreign Office wanted the US Government to agree to the precise wording of the charge before Fuchs was arrested, and American approval had not yet come through.

Burt was still not there when Perrin’s secretary told him that Fuchs had arrived and was in the anteroom. Perrin was embarrassed, and he told her to say he was delayed at a meeting, and to ask Fuchs to wait. Burt arrived at 3.20. Then Perrin told his secretary on the telephone to ask Fuchs to come in. He slipped out into the corridor, and went into the anteroom as Fuchs left it.

Fuchs had been waiting patiently in the anteroom. He walked into Perrin’s office and found a stranger there. The stranger introduced himself as Commander Burt, a police officer. He told Fuchs that he was being charged with communicating information that might be useful to an enemy in violation of the Official Secrets Act on two separate occasions, and was under arrest.

Now the reality that had been outside Fuchs’s field of vision all along burst upon him. He turned pale, and slumped down in Perrin’s chair. After a while, he asked whether he could see Perrin.

Burt went to the door leading to the anteroom and told Perrin, ‘Dr Fuchs would like you to come in and see him.’

Perrin found an ashen-faced Fuchs sitting at his desk.

Fuchs looked up at him and said, ‘You realize what this will mean to Harwell?’

Fuchs was taken to Bow Street Police Station and spent the night in the cells. The next morning, as required by law, he was brought before a magistrate, Sir Laurence Dunne, at Bow Street Court. Commander Burt testified that he had arrested Fuchs the day before, and stated the charges. Dunne asked Fuchs, as he customarily asked a prisoner: ‘Is there anything you want me to do for you in the way of legal representation?’ If a prisoner cannot afford to hire a lawyer, he is entitled to a court-appointed defence counsel. Fuchs answered, I don’t know anybody.’

A senior crown prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys, had already been appointed to prosecute Fuchs. He was present, and he assured Sir Laurence that Fuchs earned a substantial salary and could afford to pay for legal representation. Sir Laurence remanded Fuchs in custody for a week, and he was taken to Brixton Prison to await trial.

At about the time that Fuchs appeared in court, Perrin was going over Otto Frisch’s radio script with him, in the office at Shell-Mex House where Fuchs had been arrested the day before. Perrin altered two words because their use would have constituted a minor technical breach of security. He did not tell Frisch that he was dealing with a gaping wide hole in security, and that it had been knocked through by a friend of his.

From Shell-Mex House, Frisch went off to the BBC to record his talk, which was to be broadcast that evening. He had arranged to meet his fiancée, Ursula Blau, in the lobby afterwards for lunch. She told him that she had just heard on the lunchtime news on the radio that his friend Klaus Fuchs had been arrested for spying. Frisch said that was absurd, that if Fuchs was arrested it must have been for something minor, like a driving offence. She said she was sure the radio had said something about spying. They went outside and he saw a headline in the afternoon newspaper: ‘Atom Scientist Arrested’.

Now that Fuchs had appeared in court, the news was out. Everyone who knew him was dumbfounded. Reporters went down to Harwell, and talked to anybody they could find, asking about Fuchs. Many people there learned of his arrest for the first time in this way. A reporter knocked at the Rennies’ door, a few houses away from Fuchs, and told Marjorie Rennie. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘Then listen to the news on your radio,’ he replied.

Fuchs's close friends reacted as if they were members of the same family. Peierls learned the news from an Evening Standard reporter who telephoned him. With a scientist’s instinct for getting the facts right first, he declined to comment but asked the reporter to read out the full report to him, which the reporter did. Then he told Genia. They were both bewildered. They speculated that Fuchs might have had some kind of mental breakdown and exaggerated the importance of a security slip he had made. Peierls noted that Fuchs had said in court that he did not know a lawyer, and said they must at least make sure that he had one to represent him. They decided that he should go and see Fuchs in prison immediately.

The Skinners were house-hunting in Liverpool. They were using an office in the university as a base and they separated at one point, and Erna got back to the office first. A secretary told her there was a message for her husband to telephone Peierls in Birmingham urgently. Since it was urgent she telephoned herself, and said, ‘Rudi, what’s all this about?’ He said, ‘My God, haven’t you heard? Klaus has been arrested.’ Both the Skinners took the midnight train back.

At Harwell, Cockcroft asked Skinner to say a few words to Fuchs’s staff in the Theoretical Division. Skinner called them together. He was near to tears when he addressed them, and clearly still shocked. He reminded them of how much Fuchs had done to build up the division, and how much its work meant to them. He admitted that he did not understand what had happened, and stressed that Fuchs had only been charged, and had yet to come to trial.

The American Physical Society, the professional society of physicists, was holding its annual meeting in New York, and the news was received there with astonishment. People who had known Fuchs at Los Alamos sought out one another to discuss it. Teller, who had pondered often on Fuchs’s taciturnity, said, ‘So that’s what it was!’ Always ready to ascribe malign motives to the Russians, he told people that he believed that they had deliberately betrayed Fuchs in order to throw a wrench into US — British co-operation in atomic energy.

Martin and Suzanne Deutsch had a similar reaction to Teller’s. They had decided long ago that Fuchs’s reserve concealed something, that he was holding something back. They were amazed to find out what it was.

Four Los Alamos wives who accompanied their scientist husbands to New York were having a reunion lunch at the Museum of Modern Art, Ellen Weisskopf and Else Placzek among them. All four had known Fuchs; these two had known him well. One of them arrived late with an afternoon newspaper carrying the news of Fuchs’s arrest in a banner headline. They were all aghast. ‘I’d have given my right arm for Fuchs,’ said Else Placzek. They speculated that Fuchs might yet be found innocent, that there might be some other explanation.

Edward Corson, Fuchs’s friend from Edinburgh University days and New York, wrote immediately to Cockcroft asking what help he could give, and he cabled Fuchs: ‘Naturally do not believe accusations. Stop. If I can be of any service call on me.’ Fuchs cabled back: ‘Thank you. Stop. There is nothing you can do. The evidence will change your mind.'

Peierls went to London and telephoned Scotland Yard to ask if he might visit Fuchs in Brixton Prison. Actually, as a remand prisoner, Fuchs was entitled to receive visitors at any time, but Peierls did not know this. Commander Burt asked Peierls if he would come and see him first.