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

I know that I cannot go back on that and I know that all I can do now is to try and repair the damage I have done. The first thing is to make sure that Harwell will suffer as little as possible and that I have to save for my friends as much as possible of that part that was good in my relations with them.

This thought is at present uppermost in my mind, and I find it difficult to concentrate on any other points. However, I realize that I will have to state the extent of the information that I have given and that I shall have to help as far as my conscience allows me in stopping other people who are still doing what I have done.

There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life and who trusted me with theirs and I do not know that I shall be able to do anything that might in the end give them away. They are not inside of the project, but they are the intermediaries between myself and the Russian Government.

At first I thought that all I would do would be to inform the Russian authorities that work upon the atom bomb was going on. They wished to have more details and I agreed to supply them. I concentrated at first mainly on the products of my own work, but in particular at Los Alamos I did what I consider to be the worst I have done, namely to give information about the principles of the design of the plutonium bomb. Later on at Harwell I began to sift it, but it is difficult to say exactly when and how I did it because it was a process which went up and down with my inner struggles. The last time I handed over information was in February or March, 1949.

Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left-wing, and affected, to some degree or other, by the same kind of philosophy. Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep-rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from and I don’t think they do, but it is there.

I have read this statement and to the best of my knowledge it is true.

Statement taken down in writing by me at the permission of Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs at the War Office on January 27, 1950. He read it through, made such alterations as he wished and initialled each and every page.

I am grateful to the following people for providing me with information about Klaus Fuchs or his background. They are listed here according to the place of their principal association with Fuchs, although in many cases they knew him at other stages of his career as well.

For convenience, I am leaving out the academic titles of ‘Doctor’ and ‘Professor’ since the majority of people on this list have them. A few other informants have preferred to remain anonymous.

John Burrow, Harry Jones, Sir Bernard Lovell, Sir Nevill Mott, Norman Thompson

Heinz Arndt, Sir Herman Bondi, Gerard Friedlander, Erich Koch, Anthony Michaelis, Paul Streeten

Luis Alvarez, Harold and Mary Argo, Hans Bethe, Norris Bradbury, Mrs Hannah Bretscher, Bernice Brode, David Brode, Martin and Suzanne Deutsch, John de Wire, Bernard Feld, Richard Feynman, A. P. French, Roy Glauber, Edwin and Elsie McMillan, John Manley, Carson and Kathleen Mark, Robert and Ruth Marshak, Nicholas Metropolis, Josef Rotblat, Cyril and Alice Smith, Rod Spence, Edward Teller, Victor and Ellen Weisskopf, Robert and Jane Wilson

Joy Alexander, Henry Arnold, [27] I interviewed Henry Arnold and Mrs Skinner for a radio programme about Fuchs that was broadcast in 1976 and 1977. Both died before I began my researches for this book. Oscar Buneman, Fred Fenning, Lord and Lady Flowers, Otto Frisch, [28] Otto Frisch talked to me about Fuchs in a conversation some years ago, and I have drawn on this at one or two points. He died before I began this book. Mrs Ursula Frisch, James Hill, Alwyn McKay, A. G. Maddock, Sir Michael Perrin, Terence Price, Compton and Marjorie Rennie, Hugh and Jill Roskell, Mrs Eleanor Scott, Henry Seligman, William Skardon, Mrs Erna Skinner¹ John and Marjorie Storey, John Tait, Mrs Elaine Wheatley (formerly Elaine Skinner)

Margaret Gowing, Mrs Gaby Gross (formerly Gaby Peierls), Gordon Hawkins, David Holloway, Nicholas Kurti, Ted Milligan, Sir Rudolf and Lady Peierls.

Much of the information in this book comes from interviews with people who knew Klaus Fuchs at various stages of his career, in some cases several extensive interviews with the same person. These people are listed in the Acknowledgements section.

I first became interested in Fuchs some years ago when I was doing research on some aspects of nuclear weapons, and his name came up in conversations with some people who knew him, and I looked up the details of the case. Then I did a radio programme about him which was broadcast in 1976, in which five people who knew him took part: Henry Arnold, Nicholas Kurd, Sir Rudolf and Lady Peierls, and Mrs Erna Skinner. This was broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC. So I had material to draw on when I began doing researches for this book.

Much of the documentary source material comes from FBI files, although much of this originates in Britain. It was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. British official papers are normally made available to the public after thirty years, but it was announced at the end of 1979 that the papers relating to the Fuchs case would not be released because of what were said to be security considerations. None the less, a small amount of material was available among official papers of the Foreign Office and the atomic energy programme.

The most important single documents from the FBI files are:

The full text of Fuchs’s formal confession, which is printed in the Appendix. The British authorities sent this to the FBI, and it is in the files because the then FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, sent it in a letter to Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, a Special Consultant to President Truman.

A lengthy account of Fuchs’s interviews with FBI agents in Wormwood Scrubs prison, in which he went over details of his espionage activities. Since he was very forthcoming to British intelligence officers, he presumably told these everything he told the FBI men, but no reports of these interviews are available.

Sir Michael Perrin’s report of Fuchs’s account to him of what he told the Russians.

Harry Gold’s confession. I have treated this with caution because of Gold’s record as a fantasist, but everything in it conforms with Fuchs’s own account, apart from one or two minor points that could easily be due to a slip of the memory on the part of one or the other with the lapse of years, and it adds some details.

I also drew on reports of FBI agents’ interviews and letters that were in the FBI files.

I wrote to Fuchs himself a number of times requesting an interview and information, and an intermediary made the same request on my behalf. His only response was to send me a copy of his address to the Moscow meeting of the All-Union Congress of Scientists on Preventing Nuclear War.

Most of the accounts of Fuchs’s behaviour come from more than one source. In most of the notes that follow, I have indicated the source or sources. Where none is indicated, it is either because it is obvious from the context, or because the sources were too many and diffuse to record, or else because it is a matter of public record (e.g. a trial in open court).