The war’s end brought sweeping change for the British Isles. Not two months after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the government called new elections, the first in ten years. Fuchs, who was still in America, gave Max Born his proxy vote for the Labour Party, Born’s choice as well. In a landslide, voters sent the indefatigable Winston Churchill, savior of king and country, back into retirement. The detritus from the war years—food shortages, strict rationing, and lack of housing—was too strong a reminder of the misery of the 1930s depression under Churchill’s Conservatives. Even Born’s district in Edinburgh, always Tory by a large margin, swung left. The people’s choice was the quiet, contemplative leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, who had been deputy prime minister in the coalition government during the war.
The election took place during the Potsdam Conference, where Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met to discuss the shape of postwar Europe. Midway, Attlee arrived to take Churchill’s chair at the table. Tellingly, the only veteran leader in the triumvirate was Stalin.
After six uncertain years, British scientists were eager to bring the benefit of the research they had conducted back to their home country.
In two world wars, Britain’s victory had depended on the newly emerging global power of the United States. The Soviet Union, having shown its strength in defeating the Nazis in the East, was now challenging the old order in Europe by retaining control over the lands it had occupied. The Atlantic Charter, initiated and signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, had advocated decolonization. The new United Nations reinforced that dictate by guaranteeing an international platform for emerging nations, put to the test by India’s declaration of independence in 1947.
Britannia still ruled many a wave, but the lands they washed upon were breaking free, and Britain’s stature was declining. Having an atomic weapon would free the U.K. from being dependent on the vicissitudes of the Americans for protection. It would also secure British authority and influence in the evolving new world.
As the British mission straggled home from America, the government requisitioned a surplus Royal Air Force base near the village of Harwell as a research facility. Appointed director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment—the official name with Harwell the colloquial one—was the eminent physicist John Cockcroft, very much in the reserved and thoughtful mold of so many other British men of science. Fuchs was one of his first recruits.
During his two years on the Manhattan Project, Fuchs’s brilliance had matured. While still at Los Alamos, the young German was named to head the Theoretical Physics Division of the British nuclear research effort. He accepted the offer but requested that it be a temporary one. He didn’t explain why he wished to maintain this flexibility. Perhaps he wanted the option of a more traditional academic career, or perhaps he thought of his long ago promise to return to Germany and help build a new country. Many of his refugee friends in London made the trip back during 1945 and 1946.
While details were being worked out, Rudi Peierls, who had returned to the University of Birmingham, advised Fuchs on staff possibilities and the scope of the division.
“Harwell” was a new word in everyone’s lexicon. Curious, Peierls visited it and sent “Klaus” his impressions. With an informality and comfort emulating the Americans, they now used first names in the salutations of letters, especially with colleagues who had shared the Los Alamos years. No more of the stiff British and Continental tradition of “Dear Fuchs,” “Dear Bethe,” “Dear Frisch,” and so on.
The location of the place is very nice. It is about 15 miles almost due south of Oxford with lovely country around, but few amenities other than those provided by the place itself. Such buildings as are there now are all still the permanent buildings of the [RAF] and they are very nice. For instance, the Skinners’ house is a lovely house, although not quite of the standard of their house in Bristol. The officers’ mess has lots of clubrooms which compare very favorably indeed with Fuller’s or the Big House [at Los Alamos], both in space and standard.
Throughout the war, bombers took off from three runways, casting silhouettes on the town of Harwell a couple of miles away, rattling its thatched-roof houses. Prior to that, cherry orchards and cornfields had interlaced green meadows, horses and sheep grazing on the undulating hills of the chalk downs. Millennia ago, the Druids offered prayers and sacrifices in mystical rituals. One of their legacies was the “White Horse,” a sleek minimalist graphic dug into the earth and outlined in white on the top of a chalk down. The graceful beauty of its striding form flowed seamlessly from the Iron Age into the Atomic.
The similarities with Los Alamos were obvious: isolated and self-contained, with older buildings reuseable for laboratories, atomic piles, housing, and dining, and a secluded setting for top secret research. For Director Cockcroft, other characteristics were useful: a runway on which his five children could ride their bikes, and the Downs where he could stroll along the pre-Roman road that ran along the crest.
At the request of a U.S. government eager to retain his services, Fuchs remained at Los Alamos for six months after the British mission departed. He compared the density of the ball of fire for the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki explosions, examined the blast wave, optical data, and blast measurements at Trinity, and calculated the effect of the A-bomb on ships. When Hans Bethe stepped down from the Theoretical Division, he inherited the production of his volume on blast waves, the pressure emanating from the bomb’s core that toppled buildings and bent steel.
Also while still in New Mexico, Fuchs advised the British when conflicts with the Americans arose. Acknowledging their past cooperation, the U.K., Canada, and the United States were trying to reach a cooperative agreement to formulate rules for declassifying some of the wartime research. At the same time, the McMahon Bill to oversee and restrict the availability of future atomic research gained momentum in Congress.
On Sunday, June 16, Fuchs set out for Washington, D.C., to see British officials. Afterward he visited Christel in Cambridge, where he showed slides he had taken of the Trinity test—the expansion of the ball of fire from six milliseconds to thirty seconds as it ascended into the sky, its skirt of dust on the ground, its radioactive glow. He borrowed a car from a friend, and the two drove to Cornell to see Hans Bethe. Then it was home to England.
Administrators preferred that he travel on the Queen Mary, a two-week ocean voyage, but Harwell was impatient. He flew by bomber from Montreal on June 28 and, as requested, arrived in Harwell on July 1 to attend Cockcroft’s steering committee meeting at 9:30 a.m.
One of his first “duty calls” as division director was to Oscar Buneman and his wife, Mary. They had moved back from Berkeley, California, and the component of the Manhattan Project there a few weeks before. Klaus found them unpacking boxes in the run-down, semidetached home assigned to them.
Oscar was a theoretical physicist who worked under Fuchs and was almost Fuchs’s doppelgänger: a German physicist who grew up in a non-Jewish, socialist family, was sent to jail by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi flyers, and left Germany in the early 1930s. He gained entrance to Britain as a political refugee to finish his studies. Mary was a pretty, vivacious hostess who developed a sweet spot for Fuchs, whom she had met in 1944, in New York, as she and Oscar traveled to Berkeley. At that time, he had been a pale, quiet man in a somber suit. Now she hardly recognized the confident and keen Fuchs, his pallid complexion bronzed by the New Mexico sun, his clothes more stylish—so changed. She also noticed that he walked with a new air of authority.
Now thirty-four and a naturalized British citizen, Fuchs was widely recognized as one of the top atomic physicists in the world. The refugee years, internment, poverty, and lower-status jobs faded as the auspicious future offered at Harwell lay before him.
Even so, one administrative matter still needed sorting out. The war’s end had strengthened the government’s attitude on security. In the fall of 1946, the “Standard Conditions of Government Contracts” was revised to stipulate that hiring naturalized citizens for classified work now required a more extensive background check by MI5. Straightaway, the counterspies opened an investigation on Fuchs. They were already mindful of their long-standing hesitancy over his past—in particular, the 1934 statement by the Gestapo on his communist activities and his friendship with Hans Kahle during internment. Peierls faced the same scrutiny. He had visited Russia in 1937, after all, and still had a Russian wife.
After heated wrangling within MI5 on past and present governmental attitudes toward security, the deputy director ordered mail inspections on both men, but they discovered nothing untoward. In early 1947, MI5 sent their security files back to the Registry in the basement of Leconfield House.
If MI5 had done more than a mail inspection—surveillance, bugs, or phone taps—it would have come up with nothing. Fuchs didn’t follow through with the arrangement he and Raymond had made back in Santa Fe for contact in London. The risks were simply too great. For almost a year, tales of Russian spies had rocked three countries: in September 1945, in Canada, the defection of the Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko; in November 1945, in the United States, the defection of American spy, Elizabeth Bentley; and in March 1946, in Britain, the arrest of the physicist Alan Nunn May for passing nuclear secrets, implicated by Gouzenko’s documents. With the security agencies on high alert, Fuchs waited a full year before making contact in England, which was almost two years after his last meeting with Raymond.
By the summer of 1947, when Fuchs felt that it was reasonably safe to make contact, both his former liaison Jürgen Kuczynski and Hans Kahle had left for Germany. He managed to connect with Johanna Klopstech, an old friend probably going back to the Berlin underground days and someone he had worked with in the KPD ranks in London. On July 19, 1947, they walked through three-hundred-year-old Richmond Park, a famous red deer habitat established by King Charles I. Under the ancient, spreading oaks, on the sunny summer afternoon, Johanna gave Klaus the date, location, and signals for a rendezvous with a new agent.
The location was the Nags Head pub across from the Wood Green tube station, a distant suburb of London. On September 27, 1947, at 8:00 p.m., Fuchs was to meet his new handler, “Eugene.” To be sure there was no surveillance, Eugene checked out the location a few days before. To reach Wood Green, both men traveled in the opposite direction, then doubled back by bus and underground. As the fog rolled in, Eugene exited the tube station a few minutes early and waited by a bus stop reading a newspaper. He kept an eye out for the man who could be Fuchs. He saw someone tall and thin, with “his head held high,” come around the corner and go into the pub. Surely it was Fuchs. He continued to watch for anyone who could be following him, and once assured that he was not being watched, he opened the door to meet the aromas of beer and tobacco in the pub.
Klaus was on a stool at the bar, drinking a beer and reading a newspaper as prescribed; Eugene carried the agreed-upon red book. He sat farther down the bar and ordered a beer. They exchanged the conversational passwords. Soon, Klaus finished his beer and left, and after a minute Eugene followed, barely having enough time to enjoy the warmth of the pub. When Eugene caught up with the slow-walking Klaus, they exchanged names and started to get to know each other. Klaus handed Eugene some documents on the production of plutonium, and Eugene handed him cigarette paper (easily swallowed if necessary) with a list of questions, which Klaus read, memorized quickly, and handed back.
At this meeting, Eugene offered him two hundred pounds as gratitude and as extra cash because Moscow knew he was now financially responsible for his father, his brother in Switzerland, and his nephew. Klaus would accept only a hundred pounds and later said he took it to prove his “loyalty.” Other than travel money early on, it was the only money he ever accepted.
They then set up the next meeting. This would be their routine: about every three to four months, 8:00 p.m., second Saturday of the month. If one of them missed a meeting, the backup was a month later. Throughout, Klaus never asked Eugene for his real name or any personal information.
MI5 had undertaken its security review of Fuchs without appreciating the expanding scope of the research at Harwell. The public objective, and what MI5 knew, was to harness nuclear energy for domestic use. Harwell had an in-house pile (or nuclear reactor) to experiment with producing plutonium for this purpose. This pile had another use as well: plutonium harvested for energy production could just as well be harvested for use in an atomic bomb. Prime Minister Attlee kept this program a deep secret for years.
The British thought they had secured access to American scientific technology through the 1943 Quebec Agreement. Signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, it promised that the two countries would share in “full and effective cooperation.” Under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, research conducted with this open-access policy created an atomic bomb against high odds. The British scientists, instrumental in the ultimate success, had paid for the access by waiving all patent rights.
But the U.S. Army now had another objective—to preserve its monopoly on atomic energy. And with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the U.S. government easily relegated the Quebec Agreement to the past. It ordered a report on the extent of the British physicists’ knowledge, the September 1945 report concluding,
The extent of the technical knowledge of the Project by British personnel cannot readily be determined. . . . It is safer to assume, and more nearly correct, that everything which is common knowledge in this laboratory is known also to the British. . . . This full knowledge of the local project cannot be doubted [because the British mission had] general access to (1) the Document Room, (2) the various local sites, and (3) the organized meetings of the local project.
In August 1946, Congress enacted the McMahon Bill to reshape the future. A colleague in the United States wrote to Fuchs of the demise of the collaboration between the allies:
As a result of the passage of the McMahon Bill, there has been a considerable tightening up of all access to information relating to Atomic Energy. For instance, the few people remaining at Los Alamos will only be allowed access to the material previously available to them, but they are not to be allowed access to new material. This, of course, is not really serious at present, but it indicates the way things are developing.
The new U.S. policy meant that the British scientific program would require more effort than appreciated at first. Nonetheless, buoyed by wartime wisdom and peacetime enthusiasm, the British moved forward on their own to initiate what would prove to be a huge industrial endeavor: reactors, diffusion plants, and high-speed centrifuges and compressors. Harwell was one of three main divisions in the section for atomic energy under the Ministry of Supply.
Fuchs’s Theoretical Division with its fifteen to twenty physicists was integral to the success of the overall effort. They solved whatever theoretical problems arose, worked on the diffusion plant under construction, and pursued fundamental research on nuclear reactors for the peaceful use of atomic energy. He committed himself to running the division.
As he had done at Los Alamos, he took a personal hand in every dimension—“ubiquitous,” one person labeled him—from committees for the design of the Windscale Piles, to the diffusion plant, to nuclear power. Construction of the actual bomb was assigned to another division in the Ministry of Supply, and Fuchs was the only Harwell scientist deeply involved with that effort. He kept his ties to American scientists as well, through declassification conferences for which he was a “responsible reviewer,” making the initial determination on what research from the Manhattan Project to declassify, a job involving no review of current research.
But when he traveled to the United States for a declassification conference in 1947, new information was part of his mission. Someone had asked him to glean what he could about American progress on reactors and bombs. He brought back invaluable intelligence for the British—and for the Russians: the latest developments in producing the hydrogen bomb.
Fuchs’s approach to running the division earned mixed reviews. One physicist in the division, Derek Behrens (Mary Buneman’s cousin), saw him as encouraging researchers to develop their ideas rather than simply carrying out specific tasks, the same sort of “curiosity-oriented research” Oppenheimer had promoted at Los Alamos. Another one, Brian Flowers, who eventually took over the Theoretical Division, turned Behrens’s opinion upside down: “very authoritarian over silly things; bit of a megalomaniac. He took interesting problems for himself, he thought he alone could do something. He thought he was better.” Rudi Peierls, observing from Birmingham, saw a director who energetically intervened if a staff member was treated unfairly or, on the other hand, not working efficiently.
As far as we know, Oscar Buneman never recorded his judgment, but Mary did. She saw none of the “opinionated conceit” noticed by colleagues like Flowers.
But all of the disparate assessments had some element of truth. Fuchs was kind and unselfish with friends and colleagues. At the same time, with ideas, he could be rigid and intellectually arrogant, and in this context generosity did not always hold. Rudi advised him to be less aggressive and more polite in his critiques.
In 1948, Rudi Peierls and John Cockcroft weighed in on Fuchs as a researcher by proposing him for membership in the Olympus of British science, the Royal Society. They cited his contributions to quantum theory as well as his pioneering work on atomic energy, stating, “There is hardly a theoretical problem in the atomic energy field in which our knowledge has not been widened considerably by his work, or by work done under his guidance and inspiration.”
In May 1948, three junior researchers at Harwell were fired because of links to the Communist Party. At the same time, Klaus missed his first meeting with Eugene, who had sat on a bar stool, sweaty and anxious, waiting. He missed the backup a month later too. Moscow Center attributed it to the firings and alerted London that Fuchs could be under surveillance and might even have been interrogated. Rather than possibly lose him, Moscow began plans to “remove” him to Russia to do research there.
He did arrive for the meeting that October and excused his absences by citing the need to be at Harwell, where the work had focused on readying the launch of a new reactor. He missed another too, and Eugene suffered again. Eugene decided to try a new system for rescheduling a meeting. He identified a house in Kew on a corner across from Kew Gardens where Klaus was to throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over a fence between the second and third of four trees. On the tenth page, he would mark a new date for a meeting if an interruption had occurred. Klaus tried it out once to make sure it worked. He never used it, because Eugene decided it was too risky. The owner of the house belonged to another network, and it was against the rules to mix separate networks.
Geographic remoteness, along with the gas rationing that lingered into peacetime, meant that those living and working at Harwell played out their life’s dramas largely within the enclosure. Squabbles, promotions or being passed over, and suspected affairs buzzed around the place as the pressures mounted. Relief valves for the increasingly close community were the drama society, band, orchestra, and choir, which made the most of the exceptional degree of musicality among the physicists. The wives, largely minding children, hanging out the wash, and finagling to stretch ration coupons, organized dances, plays, musical events, and “beer nights.” Brushing aside Mary’s nudge for him to play the violin, Klaus confined his rhythm to the dance floor.
But unlike his remoteness at Los Alamos, where he was mostly a social tagalong, at Harwell he made friends. He often stopped by the Bunemans’ for a drink and sometimes stayed for dinner, expressing great fondness for Mary’s cooking. The younger Buneman son, Micky, remembered him as “kind, generous, quiet, tall, slim, underfed and very intellectual.” Mary remembered a hesitant Klaus, reluctant to leave, stifling yawns, then admitting, “I had better be getting along.”
Mary’s cousin Derek Behrens, who was more like a brother to her, would often stop by as well. The two men became good friends, so much so that Klaus served as best man at Derek’s wedding.
In 1945, when friends had gone to Europe to scour for scientists and secret facilities, Klaus asked them to search the concentration camps for his father and his nephew and namesake. As he left Los Alamos in 1946, he learned they were alive, both living in Frankfurt in the American military zone. He wrote to officials in London about their coming to England. He hadn’t seen his father in thirteen years, and he had never met the boy.
For non-Jewish nationals to exit Germany was almost impossible. The Allied military governments examined everyone for a Nazi stain, and Emil’s file stated that he had belonged to an organization that assisted Nazi families. What it was and what he had done weren’t clear, although the military government later wrote that it had wrongly classified him. Nevertheless, correcting the record so that he could gain permission to leave was a Herculean task.
Klaus made up some work-related justification for a trip to Germany in May 1947. The British were wary that the Russians might kidnap a top scientist, so he traveled under the assumed name of Strauss. He reported back that his father wasn’t in Frankfurt, seeming to imply that he didn’t see him. He didn’t report that he saw his brother in a TB sanatorium in Switzerland, or that he met Emil while his father was in Bad Pyrmont for a Quaker meeting. Emil remembered Klaus dressed in an American army uniform—the reason for the uniform or its origins unspecified. But with Pyrmont only about fifteen miles from the East German border, maybe it was a safety precaution on Klaus’s part. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Surviving the war—evading the Gestapo, dodging bombs in Berlin, and eking out a living by selling (illegally) his interpretation of the Bible—had taken all of Emil’s grit. With no other family around, he and his six-year-old grandson stayed with friends. Given that his friends were often targeted and arrested by the Gestapo, they had moved every few months. When the bombs fell on Berlin, the diminutive sixty-six-year-old pastor had to prod the robust and resistant boy to the basement shelter.
Eager to find safety, in 1944, Emil answered a newspaper ad for free room and board in an Austrian village.
Gortipohl, five hundred miles to the south of Berlin, sat nestled in a long valley dotted with hamlets and surrounded by ten-thousand-foot alpine peaks. With the local men at the front, the old farmers needed field hands, so grandfather and grandson made their way. While Emil traveled back and forth to Berlin, the boisterous, by now ten-year-old herded cows on the mountainside during the summer and attended a one-room school during the winter while also tending a small plot of potatoes.
It was a harsh life, and the isolated location, which should have suggested safety, actually presented a danger. Gortipohl was only twenty kilometers from the border with Switzerland, and the underground resistance led by a shoemaker from a nearby village smuggled Jews and political victims across the border. Young Klaus climbed up the mountainside with food for those hiding and waiting in a cattle hut. Twice he guided a family to the border when the regular smuggler didn’t show up.
In the spring of 1945, German soldiers rolled in to wipe up resisters and blow the dam of a large reservoir, assuring a flooded valley to block a thrust by Allied troops. The resistance stripped out the explosives, though, allowing French Moroccan troops to invade. Capping the final moments of his wartime experience, young Klaus escorted a Nazi official at gunpoint to the resistance leaders.
The boy and his grandfather survived, but with most rail lines nonfunctional it took them six arduous months—including thirty-six hours crammed in a cattle wagon—to make their way to Frankfurt. What they found was a city of skeletal buildings, mountains of rubble, and little food, shelter, or clothing.
Emil suffered from exhaustion and starvation, and his friends feared that if he couldn’t get away from Germany for a rest, “it will be the end.” Nevertheless, he found a niche lecturing to labor unions on religion while he persistently applied for visas to visit Gerhard, still in a TB clinic in Switzerland, and Klaus, now working in England. As was his wont, he succeeded with both, spending a couple of weeks with Gerhard and four months with Klaus in the fall of 1947, much of the time teaching at a Quaker center near Birmingham.
Emil’s ultimate objective was America: to lecture and to see Christel and her three children. Unfortunately, the U.S. stance in 1948 was “Immigration for Germans is not yet open.” A special U.S. education program provided a visa for Emil only, but he refused to leave young Klaus behind. Eventually, they both received visas, and, in 1948, the two traveled to England and then to New York, with Klaus paying all their travel expenses.
Before Emil left, the University of Leipzig in the Russian zone had offered him a position as a professor of religion, but he declined, saying that he wasn’t willing to separate from his children, all of whom lived outside Germany. The success of his lecture tour made Emil contemplate trying to immigrate to the United States with his grandson. He told friends that Klaus was thinking of it too, to be near Christel and her children.
But during Emil’s visit with his daughter at Christmas, a letter arrived from Leipzig, saying that the university wanted him anyway. Here was an opportunity to do reconciliation work through religious teachings in the Russian zone. He told friends that he would never be satisfied if he didn’t grab the offer. By mid-June, Emil had firmed up plans to become professor of Christian ethics and the sociology of religion in Leipzig.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had watched as Christel sat despondent for long periods gazing out of the window. Eventually, her husband committed her to a psychiatric hospital for what Emil described as a “nervous breakdown.” He worried that his being there had awakened painful memories of the prewar and war years. She hadn’t suffered as the other family members had, but she had the frustration of failure when she had tried to save them.
From 1947 to 1949, Klaus and Eugene met about six times. During that period, Klaus handed Eugene ninety documents on such highly sensitive areas as the theory behind the hydrogen bomb, the plans for an isotope separation plant, and the blueprints for nuclear reactors. Most of the time their meetings were short, with little time to talk. One cool and cloudy Saturday in February 1949, they sat on a bench in Putney Bridge Park near the Spotted Horse pub—keeping a stranger’s distance between them—and chatted a bit about personal matters. Usually Moscow Center had more questions for Eugene to ask than time allowed—nothing but business. But Eugene wanted more and initiated the conversation.
When he asked Klaus why he had never married, Fuchs told him, “I think about it from time to time. But you know I’m walking through a minefield. One false move and it will all blow up. I can accept the worse-case scenario but I can’t involve a wife and children.”
Then he added, “Furthermore, to have a family in England is not part of my plans for the future.”
Then he added with a smile, “I’d like to help the Soviet Union until it is able to test its atomic bomb. Then I want to go home to East Germany where I have friends. There I can get married and work in peace and quiet. That’s my dream.” His comments to Eugene certainly suggested that his future plans centered on Germany.
Klaus and Eugene met again soon, at the beginning of April. They ended the meeting by setting up the next one for June 25, and a backup on July 2. Klaus then left for the Mediterranean coast on vacation with his boss Herbert Skinner and wife, Erna, with whom he had become very friendly. While there, he developed bronchial pneumonia—certainly exacerbated by asthma and heavy smoking—and struggled to recover. He spent most of June in bed, nursed by Erna Skinner at her house.
With the three junior researchers fired from Harwell a year earlier for communist ties and spies exposed in Canada, the United States, and Britain, all of which had been covered in the press, Fuchs was wise to lie low. Another reason for increased caution had reached the KGB by way of William Weisband, a naturalized American and double agent who spoke fluent Russian. He worked in the decoding unit for Venona in Arlington, Virginia, and advised on translations. He had passed details of Venona to Moscow Center early on. By late 1948, he could tell them that the decoders were making progress. No specific names yet.
At the same time, KGB records indicate that it worried about the possible arrest of Raymond, Klaus’s contact in New York, who knew his real name and background. Raymond had been increasingly exposed since the summer of 1947, when he appeared before a grand jury in connection with the confession of the spy Elizabeth Bentley. The FBI questioned him again a year later. Now the KGB was pressuring Raymond to leave the country illegally. But he wouldn’t; he had fallen in love.
Toward the end of July 1949, Fuchs’s father and nephew arrived at his new prefab at 17 Hillside Drive, the last house in the row, just as Klaus was moving in. He entertained his family with picnics and dinners with friends, but these occasions made Klaus nervous, especially when Henry Arnold, Harwell’s security chief, was a guest. Mary Buneman was there, and she sensed the tension, which was for good reason. Emil was not particularly circumspect, and Klaus was never sure what tales of the Nazi times and Klaus’s alignment he might tell.
The conversation within the family was mostly about the future, though. Emil realized that if young Klaus came with him to Leipzig, he might never be able to get him out again. The boy’s schooling was an issue, especially after a very spotty education at thirteen different schools during the war. One option was a British boarding school, with Uncle Klaus becoming in loco parentis and covering the costs, something his thrifty lifestyle would make possible.
The three visited some schools, and on the way back to Harwell from one of them, Emil decided that they were too rigid. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Emil lectured, young Klaus had lived with Aunt Christel and, along with her children, had attended the progressive Shady Hill School, where he had thrived. They would both go back to Germany, perhaps with young Klaus attending the denazified Odenwaldschule. Sitting in the backseat, the boy saw his uncle’s shoulders immediately relax. Something about caring for his young nephew had made Klaus very tense.
Emil had another concern and wanted Klaus’s opinion: Would his move to Leipzig be a problem given Klaus’s position at Harwell? Klaus said he didn’t think so, but he would speak with Henry Arnold. The next evening, Klaus reported that Arnold saw no difficulties with Emil’s move to the Russian zone.
Time and events showed this response to be peculiar. Klaus brought the same news to Arnold three months later. On that occasion, Arnold advised that they both think about it and then meet again, at which point Arnold quickly informed MI5.
Did Klaus really ask Arnold in July? This leaves the question of why he asked him again in October. Or did he simply give the answer that his father wanted to hear, knowing that Emil had his mind set and could stir up problems?