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

A right-wing Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir Waldron Smithers, suggested in the light of the Fuchs case that the Communist Party should be outlawed, but this kind of suggestion was expected only from the fringe Right, and it was not taken seriously. A few other Members of Parliament questioned the number and role of Soviet diplomatic personnel in Britain.

Prime Minister Attlee made a statement on the Fuchs case in the House of Commons four days after the trial. It was on the first day of the first session of the new Parliament.

‘It is a most deplorable and unfortunate incident,’ Attlee said. ‘Here we had a refugee from Nazi tyranny, hospitably entertained, who was secretly working against the safety of this country. I say “secretly” because there is a great deal of loose talk in the Press suggesting inefficiency on the part of the security services. I entirely deny that.

‘Not long after this man came into this country — that was in 1933 — it was said that he was a Communist. The source of that information was the Gestapo. At that time the Gestapo accused everybody of being a Communist. When the matter was looked into there was no support for this whatever. And from that time on there was no support. A proper watch was kept at intervals.’

He summarized Fuchs’s career in Britain and the United States, and went on: ‘In the autumn of last year, information came from the United States suggesting that there had been some leakage while the British mission, of which Fuchs was a member, was in the United States. This information did not point to any individual. The security services got to work and were, as the House knows, successful… I take full responsibility for the efficiency of the security services, and I am satisfied that unless we had here the kind of secret police they have in totalitarian countries, and employed their methods, which are reprobated rightly by everyone in this country, there was no means by which we could have found out about this man.’

He said the security services had acted ‘promptly and effectively’, and went on: ‘I say that because it is very easy when a thing like that occurs — it was an appalling thing to have happened — to make assertions. I do not think any blame for what occurred attaches either to the Government of the right honourable gentleman opposite or to this Government or any of the officials. I think we had here a quite exceptional case.’ Linking his own government with that of Sir Winston Churchill, ‘the right honourable gentleman opposite’ (Churchill since his election defeat in 1945 had been leader of the opposition), was a shrewd move to deflect criticism.

In the House of Lords the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, also made a statement exonerating the security services. ‘It may be asked why Fuchs was not detected earlier,’ he said. ‘Look at the facts, my lords. Fuchs had recruited himself. There was no time when he was undergoing training in conspiratorial technique during which our security services might have had an opportunity of detecting him. When he first offered himself to the Russians, he had all the accomplishments of an experienced spy; and for two years of his career he was in the United States, beyond the reach of our counter-espionage services. And he has admitted that for another whole year, 1946, he had made no contact at all with his Russian masters or their intermediaries.’

Jowett said that tracking down Fuchs was ‘a really brilliant achievement’, and he went on: ‘It should be plainly understood both here and abroad that so far from our security services having anything to apologize for in this case, I am quite satisfied that they have every reason to be proud of the work they did and the way in which they did it.

‘There is no reason whatever to fear that secrets which are entrusted to our officers are in the least likely to be broken. A case of that sort might occur anywhere, whatever system is employed, if the man concerned is clever enough and wicked enough.’

It seems that the sentence about ‘secrets which are entrusted to our officers’ was aimed at the United States, for there was concern in Britain at the effect that the case would have on British-American exchanges of secret information. There were good grounds for this concern.

When Sir John Cockcroft sailed off on the Queen Elizabeth the previous November, happy to be turning his back on the painful question of Fuchs’s loyalty, he was on his way to Washington along with William Penney to meet American and Canadian officials, to discuss a new plan to revive wartime co-operation on the production of atomic bombs. The discussions would be in the framework of a meeting of the Combined Development Agency. This and the Declassification Committee were the only institutions left over from wartime co-operation in this area. The agency existed only to organize the supply of uranium, but its meeting was a convenient place to discuss the new plan. Cockcroft had every reason to feel optimistic.

The proposal came from the State Department, although it was something the British Government had wanted for a long time. It would have meant sharing research and development, with the British seconding some scientists to Los Alamos, as they had done during the war.

President Truman gave the plan his backing, and in July, Truman and other Administration officials met with a few senior members of Congress to brief them on the plan and ask for their support. State Department officials pointed out at the meeting that Britain was intending to produce its own atomic bombs anyway, and had the ability to do so. The senators and congressmen were sympathetic on the whole. Some said they were worried about sharing America’s unique knowledge of the atomic bomb with anyone, but this argument was largely stilled when Russia exploded its atomic bomb in September.

The plan was received favourably at the tripartite meeting in Washington in November. The following month, the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, discussed the prospect of congressional approval with Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, in an after-dinner chat. He cabled the Foreign Office: ‘Acheson said it should be possible to get Congress to make the necessary changes in the law, provided that an agreement could be demonstrated to produce maximum results in the most efficient way.’

The British Cabinet discussed the proposals at a meeting on 30 December, and approved them.

Then came Fuchs’s arrest, and cables from the Washington embassy reflected anxiety. One said: ‘We are receiving criticism even from normally friendly quarters for our laxity and “ideological blindness”.’ Sir Oliver Franks cabled a summary of Press comment after Fuchs’s trial and said: ‘This report contains further evidence of the damage done to our prestige by the Fuchs case. Criticism of what is called our “laxity” is widespread. Some responsible newspapers are arguing vigorously against any curtailment of Anglo-American exchanges of atomic information; but it is the mood of Congress that matters most.’

It was indeed. Acheson recorded in his memoirs the outcome of his effort to achieve a new agreement on cooperation in atomic weapons: ‘Then a bomb exploded in London. A British scientist — Klaus Fuchs, who had been working in this country on the Manhattan Project during the war — was arrested, and charged with passing on to the Russians information he had acquired then and later. In due course he was tried and convicted. Also in February, Senator McCarthy began his attacks on the State Department. The talks with the British and Canadians returned to square one, where there was a deep freeze from which they did not return in my time.’

Two months later, Acheson recalled, he visited London and met Attlee and other government leaders. ‘Attlee wanted to know whether there was any way of reviving the talks that had been interrupted by the Fuchs affair… I said regretfully that the effort I had tried so hard to pilot into safe waters had foundered, and I doubted that it would ever rise again.’ [21] Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation , Norton, New York, 1969.