A white-haired man dressed somberly in a gray suit and dark overcoat walked on the hard dirt path of Pergolenweg, in his right hand a small bouquet of Shasta daisies tied with a pink ribbon. He squinted into the sun on a chilly March day at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery. He was searching for something, and upon seeing it, he approached, leaned the daisies against the stone, and knelt down. He was in front of the grave of Klaus Fuchs. He bowed, straightened up, and paused—perhaps saying something to himself—bowed again, straightened up and paused, and bowed once more.
The man, Alexander Feklisov, bowed the first time to acknowledge his gratitude for having met Klaus; the second was on behalf of the Russian people; the third was to reflect the gratitude of all the people of the world. As he wrote in his memoir, “He [Klaus] wished we could live in a safer world and we probably owe him our lives.”
Feklisov was in East Germany so that the director Joachim Hellwig could interview him for the documentary. The next day he drove to Dresden to see Grete Keilson. When he had first communicated with her and said that he knew Klaus in London in the late 1940s, she knew who he was: Klaus’s last handler, the one never identified by MI5. “But why have you come so late?” she asked. Klaus and Feklisov never saw each other after their meeting in April 1949, even though Feklisov was in Russia much of the time that Klaus was in Dresden.
Feklisov didn’t have an answer. In normal KGB procedure, he would have met Klaus in Berlin in 1959 to interview him about his “failure.” When he didn’t receive the order to do so, he assumed that another intelligence officer had been dispatched. In his occupation, one didn’t ask about those things. He didn’t learn of the KGB’s 1960 interrogation of his former agent until after Klaus’s death. At that time, he asked why he had not been allowed to do the interrogation and never received a satisfactory answer.
Feklisov explained that he didn’t make that decision, and she told him, “Klaus waited to see you for some thirty years. Lately, he was saying that no Soviet comrade who had known him was probably still alive.” Feklisov stuttered a few remarks, not knowing how to respond.
Quoting Rabelais, Feklisov recorded in his memoir his final thought on Klaus: “Science without conscience is only ruin for the soul.” For Klaus, his conscience was a solid core at the root of a very complex man.
Someone once asked me if Klaus Fuchs was evil. Over the years, many have weighed in on this question. Some—especially back in the 1950s—thought he was a traitor, clear and simple. Others, mostly his scientific friends, thought him misguided but an honorable person, true to his beliefs—the person with noble ideals who otherwise would not have betrayed country and friends. And others commended him for saving the world—Official Secrets Act be damned.
He had his own answer, which he gave during his 1983 taped interview. As in any of his interviews, he wasn’t emotionally effusive, no baring of the soul to reveal what sustained him. Instead, he offered a simple moral reckoning, his own reflective evaluation:
There have been things in my life that I must admit I would do differently. Looking back at those 72 years I have lived, I can see all the mistakes I made and those I could have avoided. But I am deeply convinced that, in spite of all their mistakes and their negligent behavior, if the line of your life still took you towards the goal you had set once and for all; if you were able to reach that goal, or at least get closer to it, if going in that direction you did not lose yourself, nor squander your strength, committed anything contemptible, humiliated yourself, climbed over dead bodies, nor harmed others to get there; if you were able to maintain the moral course within your soul which in every language is called conscience, you can consider that your life is a success.
Whatever others thought, Klaus Fuchs deemed his life a success, undoubtedly feeling “the moral course” within his own soul. It sprang from his father’s teachings, zealously pursued, on the innate worth of the workingman uniquely blended with the political fire in Leipzig that reshaped the arc of his life. From there on, he never wavered even when his chosen goal compelled him to risk his life.
What does one make of a man whom many considered a hero for fighting the Nazis and whom others considered a traitor for betraying his country?
Fuchs’s actions left most people confused, but what they didn’t see was that his life, circumscribed from within, was consistent and constant to his unwavering set of ideals. He sought the betterment of mankind that transcended national boundaries. His goal became to balance world power and to prevent nuclear blackmail. As he saw it, science was his weapon in a war to protect humanity.
And what of the consequences of his deed?
Most of the scientists at Los Alamos shared his strong feeling that the United States should not have a monopoly on nuclear weapons, that the Russians should take part in the secrets and be partners. They would have their own bomb soon enough anyway, probably by 1951. The information Fuchs provided advanced their timeline by a year or two at most. Their nuclear stockpile of a couple of weapons in 1950 might have kept the United States from dropping an atomic bomb on North Korea. If so, was that a bad outcome? Was the person who made that happen evil or good, guilty or innocent, a traitor or a hero?