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

The indictment contained four counts. The exchanges with the American Government on the charges to be brought that delayed Commander Burt had evidently ruled out the specific charge of passing secrets of Los Alamos in Santa Fe, perhaps because it was thought that it would be embarrassing to air this; at any rate, these four were quite sufficient to establish the crime of treason.

The four counts were:

That on a day in 1943 in the city of Birmingham for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State he communicated to a person unknown information relating to atomic research which was calculated to be, or might have been, or was intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy.

That on a day unknown between December 31, 1943 and August 1, 1944, he, being a British subject, in the city of New York, committed a similar offence.

That on a day unknown in February, 1945, he, being a British subject at Boston, Massachusetts, committed a similar offence; and that on a day in 1947 in Berkshire, he committed a similar offence.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, in the opening speech for the prosecution, said the case was as serious as any that had ever been prosecuted under this statute. Then he set out to quell in advance the kind of objections that were made to a heavy sentence in Nunn May’s case. He said there was no doubt that the information communicated was likely to be of the utmost value to an enemy. The country to which the information was conveyed need not be an actual enemy. ‘It is enough that the foreign country concerned should be a potential enemy, one which, owing to some unhappy change in circumstances, might become an actual enemy, although perhaps a friend at the time that the information was communicated. That country might never become an enemy. In this case, information was in fact conveyed to agents of the Soviet Union.’

Sir Hartley then said that strictly speaking, there was no need for him to go into the prisoner’s motives. However, he went on, in the statement by Fuchs which formed the basis of the prosecution, the questions of motive were so inextricably mixed with questions of fact that in fairness to him, and as a warning to others, it was right to say some word about motives, which would explain some of the facts.

‘The prisoner is a Communist,’ he said, ‘and that is at once the explanation and indeed the tragedy of this case. Quite apart from the great harm that the prisoner has done to the country he adopted and which adopted him, it is a tragedy that one of such high intellectual attainments as the prisoner possesses should have allowed his mental processes to become so warped by his devotion to Communism that, as he himself expresses it, he became a kind of controlled schizophrenic, the dominant half of his mind leading him to do things which the other part of his mind recognized quite clearly were wrong.’

He then gave a picture of monolithic international Communism, as it was at the time:

‘In this country the number of Communists is fortunately very few, and it may be that a great number of those people who support the Communist movement believe, as the prisoner at one time apparently believed, misguidedly if sincerely, that that movement is seeking to build a new world. What they don’t realize is that it is to be a world dominated by a single power and that the supporters of Communism, indoctrinated with the Communist belief, must become traitors to their own country in the interests — or what they are told are the interests — of the international Communist movement.

‘My Lord, it is because of these facts that this brilliant scientist, as he is, now undoubtedly disillusioned and ashamed, came to place this country and himself in this terrible position.’

Sir Hartley went through Fuchs’s career in some detail, illustrating it with readings from the confession he made to Skardon, in particular his explanation of why he went to the Russians in the first place, of how he divided his mind into two compartments, the ‘controlled schizophrenia’, and his doubts during the past years. Sir Hartley pointed out in conclusion that Fuchs had made the confession voluntarily while he was a free man, and since then had given the authorities all the help he could. (Those parts of the confession that were not read out in court were classified by the British authorities, although it is difficult to see why. They remained classified, along with other official papers concerning Fuchs, even when most official documents of that time were released to the public in 1980 under the thirty-year rule.) [20] I obtained a copy of the full confession from the FBI files in Washington DC, and used it as source material. It is reprinted in the Appendix. This is the first time it has been published in Britain. — NM

Skardon was called as the only defence witness. Curtis-Bennett got him to confirm that until Fuchs confessed there was no evidence on which he could be prosecuted, and that he had acted on his own initiative in making the confession.

Curtis-Bennett, in his defence speech, began by recalling the desperate political background of Fuchs’s youth in Germany, leading up to the burning of the Reichstag. ‘This scientist, this scholarly man, read the news in the newspaper on the train the morning after it happened,’ he said. ‘He went underground, scarcely saving his own life, and came to this country in 1933 for the purpose of continuing his studies in order to fit himself out to be a scientist to help in the rebuilding of a Communist Germany, not to throw atom bombs at anybody, but to study physics… He pursued his peaceful studies, and had not the war come, he may have been a candidate for a Nobel Prize or a membership of the Royal Society rather than for gaol.’

Curtis-Bennett was apparently inadequately briefed, for he then said that Fuchs had never pretended that he was not a Communist. Lord Goddard pulled him up on this. ‘1 don’t know whether you are suggesting that that was known to the authorities,’ Goddard said.

Curtis-Bennett: ‘I don’t know, but he made no secret of the fact.’

Goddard: ‘I don’t suppose he proclaimed himself as a Communist when naturalized or taken into Harwell, or when he went to the USA.’

Curtis-Bennett: if I am wrong, the Attorney-General will correct me. It was on his records in this country at the Home Office that he was a member of the German Communist Party.’

Sir Hartley intervened: it was realized when he was examined by the Enemy Aliens Tribunal at the beginning of the war that he was a refugee from Nazi persecution because in Germany he had been a Communist. All the investigations at that time and since have not shown that he had any association whatever with British members of the Communist Party.’ (Actually, there is no record that any official body in Britain knew that he was a Communist in Germany.)

Curtis-Bennett went on to say that anyone who knew anything about Communism would know that a Communist coming into possession of valuable information would always put his allegiance to Communism above all else. Then, of Fuchs:

‘He had a sort of sieve in his mind about the information he would or would not give, and in count one, 1943—’

Lord Goddard interrupted him: ‘I have read this statement with very great care more than once. I cannot understand this metaphysical philosophy or whatever you like to call it. I am not concerned with it. I am concerned that this man gave away secrets of vital importance to this country. He stands before me as a sane man, and not relying on the disease of schizophrenia or anything else.’

Curtis-Bennett: ‘If Your Lordship does not think that the state of mind a man acts under is relative to sentence—’

Lord Goddard: ‘A man in this state of mind is one of the most dangerous that this country could have within its shores.’