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

In his office, he told Peierls that Fuchs had already confessed. He said that he had so far refused to name anyone who was engaged in these activities with him, and asked Peierls to try to persuade him to do so, as a good friend. Peierls said he was amazed. He said he knew that Fuchs had been left-wing when he was young, as many people had been, but he did not think it went beyond that. Burt said understandingly that his own son was left-wing.

When Peierls went to Brixton that afternoon, Fuchs told him that he had indeed been passing secrets to the Russians, because he believed in Communism. But, he said, over the years he had come to appreciate the values of the British way of life, and had realized that he had been wrong to do what he did.

Peierls said he was surprised that Fuchs would have swallowed Communist orthodoxy. ‘You must remember what I went through as a young man in Germany,’ Fuchs told him. He also said that ‘when I have helped the Russians take over everything,’ as he put it, he would tell the Soviet leaders what was wrong with the Soviet system. Peierls reflected that with this, the arrogance that he had occasionally noticed in Fuchs came near to megalomania.

Then Peierls told him that he should tell the police who his contacts were. He said a schoolboy code of not sneaking on others was not appropriate here. He pointed out that if he did not name his contacts, then everyone who worked with him would be under suspicion, particularly, perhaps, foreign-born scientists. [19] Certainly the case cast a shadow of doubt over the foreign-born scientists who had done secret war work. The wife of one of these said years later, ‘I must admit I was secretly pleased when Burgess and Maclean and Philby turned out to be spies. They were not foreign, they were not Jewish, they were true-blue British and had been to the best schools and to Cambridge.’ And if this were true in Britain, it would be still more true in America, where illiberal and sometimes hysterical anti-Communism was emerging, with many intellectuals being accused on flimsy evidence of having Communist sympathies, which was held to be tantamount to treason. Fuchs’s only comment on this was that he did not want to appear to be currying favour in order to get a lighter sentence.

Erna Skinner went to visit him, and was upset at seeing him in prison. ‘Where are you sleeping?’ she asked. ‘What are you getting to eat? What’s it like?’

‘It’s not bad,’ he replied. ‘Old — [naming a mutual acquaintance who had luxurious tastes] would have died a thousand deaths. But it’s not bad.’

During those weeks in Brixton Prison, Fuchs had an air of calm and well-being that others noticed. He was at peace with himself as he had not been for a long time. His feelings were no longer in conflict with the life he was leading, and he could allow them to emerge, and accept them. He had adopted a rigid emotional posture when he left Germany as a young man, and now he could abandon it. He had to pay a price, but this was a price to be extracted by the law for what he had done, not a price to be paid by his conscience.

If he died, he would die a whole man. For in his own mind he faced the death penalty. Although he never mentioned this to anyone, it can hardly have been absent from his mind during these weeks. Actually, he could not have been sentenced to death; he was not charged with treason, which could be a capital offence, but with breaches of the Official Secrets Act. But he did not seem to realize this.

Peierls came away from the visit badly shaken by Fuchs’s revelations. He had given up smoking, but in the next few weeks he started again. To Genia, the revelation that Fuchs had been giving secrets to the Russians since the days when he worked with her husband in Birmingham and lived in their house was painfully wounding. She recalled that growing up in Stalin’s Russia, she had not trusted anyone except her mother and father and sister. During the years since she left Russia, she had learned to trust people.

She sat down and wrote a letter to Fuchs that was heartfelt and reflected hurt. She was literally crying with emotion when she wrote it, so that her tears fell on the paper and dampened it, and Peierls typed out a fresh copy for her to send.

She said in the letter that if he had intended to be a spy, he could have kept himself apart from other people. He did not have to become such close friends with his fellow scientists, to drink with them, dance with them, play with their children. By doing this, he had betrayed them. She said he had done damage to the freedoms they all enjoyed, in two ways: directly, by helping the Soviet Union, as was his intention; and also indirectly, by creating a climate of suspicion. Perhaps he had not thought of what he was doing to his friends.

He must now tell the security authorities who his contacts were, she said, to remove suspicion from other scientists, it is awfully hard, perhaps the hardest thing of all to do,’ she wrote. ‘But you went all the way in one direction, don’t stop half-way now. You are not soft, and not one for the easy way out. You are a mathematician. This problem has no rigorous solution. Try to find the best approximation.’

Her next paragraph was harsher still. She said he could escape by committing suicide, but that would be to leave the mess behind him. His fate did not matter compared with his responsibility.

She concluded: ‘You have burned your God. God help you.’

He replied quickly, writing with a scratchy pen on poor quality prison paper, so that there were blots and smudges. He admitted that he had not thought about the harm he was doing to his friends. ‘I didn’t, and that’s the greatest horror I had to face when I looked at myself. You don’t know what I had done to my own mind. I think I knew what I was doing, and there was this simple thing, obvious to the simplest decent creature, and I didn’t think of it.’ As for suicide, he said he had contemplated it as a way out, but had given it up by the time he was arrested.

He said he had learned to love again, and she had helped him.

His concluding paragraph was on a lighter note: ‘I suppose you would almost enjoy the kind of thing I am learning about here. All these people in their way are kind and decent. Even the chap who apparently made prison his home, with occasional excursions to pick up a few hundred pounds and have a few riotous weeks on them. He grew quite sympathetic when I admitted that I hadn’t made any money out of it. Nothing could shake him from the belief that I had been double-crossed.’

Erna Skinner wrote to him, and he replied, asking the Skinners to try to understand his point of view. These letters have been destroyed — Elaine Skinner burned them after her parents died — but one sentence from Fuchs’s letter to Erna Skinner remains: ‘Some people grow up at 15, some at 38. It is more painful at 38.’

She was shattered by the discovery of what he had been doing, and this undoubtedly contributed to the decline which led to bouts of heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown. When she talked about it, it was in the terms of someone whose world has suddenly been swept away. Once, she said: it was as if a series of horrible murders were committed in a community, and you suddenly found that it was your husband, or your neighbour, or your son, or somebody you trusted just like yourself. It was so unbelievable that once you grasped it, you looked at the world completely differently.’

Then the Peierls went to Brixton together to see Fuchs. They decided beforehand that there were three specific questions to which they wanted answers, and they dropped these into the conversation.

Why had he brought back Kravchenko’s book I Chose Freedom from America as a present for Mrs Peierls? He said he was just curious to know what she would think of it. Why, since he was a spy, did he drink so much, and take the risk of giving away his secret? He said he was sure he could retain his self-control no matter how much he drank.