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

Most puzzling of all, how could he think of bringing his nephew over from Germany and adopting him? The boy had already had a very disturbed childhood. What effect would it have on him if he came to live with Fuchs and then Fuchs was arrested? Fuchs answered that he had not considered this because he had divided his mind into two compartments, and put all his espionage activities into one compartment, so that they simply did not touch other matters. By way of explanation, he used the phrase he had used in his confession to Skardon (which the Peierls had not yet seen): controlled schizophrenia.

On this and on several other occasions, Fuchs expressed his regret at having deceived his friends, and particularly Henry Arnold. The attachment to Arnold remained, and he assumed that Arnold felt it also. He wrote to Arnold a week after he was arrested:

‘I suppose you must sometimes have felt very lonely during the last few months. If only I had not vacillated at first and made up my mind straight away, everything would have been much easier, and perhaps I might also have saved you some pain. I hope Skardon showed you the document I signed. I wrote it for several people, and you were one of them.’

He went on in the letter to ask Arnold to sell his two cars, the MG and the old car he had driven before, which he had not yet disposed of and which was now being used by someone else at Harwell. He was very precise about details: ‘The new licence for the MG is in one of the pockets beside the dashboard. You might as well go through the various pockets, which contain maps. The Morris may not be licensed, unless Jones has taken one out; if not, it may be necessary to take out a short-term licence. You can of course recover any expense.’

As it happens, a first cousin of Fuchs on his mother’s side, Gisela Wagner, was spending a term at a teacher-training college in Kent, and she visited him in Brixton.

Fuchs appeared in court again on 10 February. This time it was for a preliminary hearing before Sir Laurence Dunne, for the magistrate to decide whether the case would be sent for trial. Representatives of the whole world’s press were present. Fuchs was in the dock, but he was not called upon to say anything. He seemed calm throughout.

By now, he had retained a firm of solicitors, and they had appointed a counsel to defend him, although the defence counsel did not have much to do at the hearing. The prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys, summed up the case against him, drawing on his own confession and the exchanges over the past weeks. Arnold was the first witness. He testified about their recent exchanges, including Fuchs’s admission to him that he had given information to foreign agents.

It was not an interrogation in the normal sense since its purpose was simply to put on the record facts that were known already to the prosecution. Humphreys asked leading questions and Arnold usually gave monosyllabic answers. As:

‘Did you introduce Skardon to Fuchs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were further meetings arranged?’

‘Yes.’

‘On January 26, 1950, did Fuchs see you again before seeing Skardon?’

‘Yes.’ And so on.

The next witness was Skardon. There was the same kind of questioning, with Humphreys asking leading questions, although Skardon talked a little more. The questions covered Skardon’s meetings with Fuchs leading up to his confession, and then Skardon summarized Fuchs’s confession.

At the end of this cross-examination Fuchs’s defence counsel, Thomson Halsell, asked Skardon one question:

‘Would it be fair to say that since lunchtime on January 24th, the defendant has helped you and been completely co-operative in every way?’

‘Yes,’ replied Skardon.

Then Perrin went into the witness box, and was led through the gist of Fuchs’s statement to him about what he had told Soviet agents. The form of this cross-examination was the same as that of Skardon’s, with Humphreys putting the facts into the questions. As:

‘On January 30th, did you meet Skardon and the accused?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he admit that he had passed technology information relating to atomic research to the Communists?’

‘Yes.’

At the end of the hearing, Dunne announced that Fuchs would be sent for trial at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, on 28 February.

Arnold’s appearance in court as a witness for the prosecution did not diminish Fuchs’s affection for him. He continued to write to him, and to regard him as a friend. Nor did Skardon’s appearance diminish Fuchs’s attachment to him.

Just as, when he decided to help the Russians he at first thought he would give them only his own work, and soon dropped that restriction, so now he told the British authorities everything and dropped his refusal to identify his contacts. He was taking it upon himself to give all the help he could to the Western side in the Cold War, as he had once taken it upon himself to give all the help he could to the Soviet Union. In his prison cell he told MI5 men everything he could about his contacts, recognition signals and meeting places, always talking either to Skardon or in Skardon’s presence. He did not know his contacts by name, but he went through photographs with the MI5 men. In this way he identified his first contact, Alexander, as Simon Davidovitch Kremer, of the Soviet Embassy.

Once, when he was not sure exactly where certain meetings took place, Skardon took him out in a car with a driver to the parts of London where the meeting places were, so that he could locate them, and then they went back to Brixton.

He had all his self-control. He was calm and collected throughout this period, and gave no hint to anyone that he thought he faced a death sentence.

Shortly after this, Perrin found himself discussing the details of Fuchs’s crime in the Garrick Club, a gentlemen’s club favoured by senior figures in the theatre, publishing and the bar. Fuchs’s solicitors had retained Derek Curtis-Bennett, a leading criminal lawyer, to defend him. Curtis-Bennett telephoned Perrin and told him that he needed the full text of his confession and his account of what he had told the Russians. Perrin said he could not show him these for security reasons, but he would give him a summary of what they contained. So, in the way things are done, Curtis-Bennett invited him to dinner at his club, and in the oak-panelled dining-room there, festooned with theatrical paintings and drawings, Perrin showed him the parts of the confession to Skardon that were to be made public, and told him roughly what Fuchs had told the Russians. Curtis-Bennett said that since Fuchs had already confessed, he could only advise him to plead guilty, and try in court to minimize his offence.

In the trial at the Old Bailey, the leading figures in the British legal structure took part. The judge was the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, the senior judge in England, a man known among lawyers for his Conservative politics and his belief in retributive justice, a burly figure with rugged features in his scarlet and ermine robes of office. Sir Hartley Shawcross himself prosecuted; the General Election had taken place a week earlier and had returned the Labour Party to office, albeit with a greatly reduced majority, so he was still Attorney-General. The Duchess of Kent was among the spectators. So was Gisela Wagner, Fuchs’s cousin.

Curtis-Bennett conferred with Fuchs in the cell below the courtroom. He told him he would do his best to minimize the offence, but warned him that he might have to expect the maximum penalty. ‘You know what that is?’ he added.

‘Yes, I know. It’s death,’ said Fuchs.

Then Curtis-Bennett realized what Fuchs had been facing these past weeks. ‘No, you bloody fool, it’s fourteen years,’ he told him. ‘You didn’t give secrets to an enemy, you gave them to an ally.’ Whatever relief Fuchs felt at that moment, he did not show it.