‘Fear is a demoralising emotion,’ as David Footman knew. The cruel, bloodthirsty hunt for imaginary traitors during the Stalinist purges of 1936–8 daunted the next generation of Soviet intelligence officers. They used cloddish methods, shrank from responsibilities, wanted quick results in order to deflect criticism from Moscow and violated simple precautions. Ivan Ilichyov, who took effective control of Soviet military intelligence in 1942, had made his career on pre-emptive denunciations of colleagues: he regarded all established intelligence officers as potential ‘enemies of the people’, said another member of the GRU directorate, ‘and the agent network created by them as wholly hostile and therefore subject to liquidation’. All Soviet officials sought authority from Moscow before taking even minor decisions, Alan Roger, MI5’s Defence Security Officer (DSO) in Tehran, reported in 1944 during wartime cooperation with them. ‘Throughout our dealings so far we have found a complete unwillingness on the part of any Soviet department or authority to act in concert with another locally, even when some of the persons live inside the same Embassy compound.’ Instead of the Poles, Latvians and Germans who had predominated in successful Soviet espionage before the purges, Moscow in the 1940s sent Russians, who were functionaries rather than ideologues, and had been chosen because they left families in the Soviet Union who were hostage-guarantors of their mindless loyalty. They knew few foreigners, and were untutored in western languages, attitudes and practices.1
Sometimes, in a literal sense, they did not know where they were going. Igor Gouzenko, the young Ukrainian who was posted as a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1943, thought, when he was sent abroad, that he was destined for south-east Asia until he arrived in Canada. Two years later, grateful for western comforts and resentful of his boorish bosses, he decided to defect. The Cold War began on 5 September 1945, when Gouzenko stashed 109 documents on Soviet espionage in Europe and America and fled. His defection nearly failed, for embassy thugs tried to snatch him with his wife and baby from their apartment; but Canadian neighbours showed unshakeable decency in protecting them from abduction.
By the time that Canadian politicians had agreed to Gouzenko being protected and debriefed, Cyril Mills, who had been (in his words) ‘a sort of one-man miniature MI5 in Canada’ since 1942, had embarked on a trans-Atlantic ship with two members of the royal family, the Earl and Countess of Athlone, on their return to England after the Earl’s five years as Governor General of Canada. Unknown to Mills, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wished to recall the ship to Canada, so that he could disembark and handle Gouzenko; but the rank and priority of the Athlones made this impossible. It was only when Mills reached London that he heard about Gouzenko. Hollis had meanwhile been flown to Canada to manage the debriefing that would otherwise have been Mills’s responsibility. Mills regretted missing the excitement.2
Gouzenko was codenamed CORBY. He revealed wartime Soviet espionage, spies in the atomic-bomb programme and a Soviet spy codenamed ELLI in London counter-espionage headquarters. Attlee and Bevin, Labour’s Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary since July 1945, wanted an immediate confrontation with Moscow on these espionage activities, but the need to conciliate the Americans, and to concert a united Anglo-American response, slowed this process. Menzies passed the ELLI warning to his chief of security, Vivian, who delegated it to the chief of SIS counter-espionage and real-life ELLI, Philby. Moscow was therefore kept informed of CORBY developments throughout. Tim Milne, whom Philby asked to handle ELLI inquiries, decided with Menzies that ELLI was inside MI5 rather than in SIS.3
Among the ring of five the CORBY ramifications had most impact on John Cairncross, who had in June 1945 been appointed Principal in the Treasury section handling War Office estimates. This gave him access to confidential material, and made him the recipient of indiscretions: ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale of SIS told him, for example, that the Soviet air force ciphers had been broken by exiled Poles, and that the British knew of the Soviets’ atom-bomb testing-site north of Yakutsk. But this flow of information halted after three months: following Gouzenko’s defection, Moscow severed all contact with Cairncross until 1948.
The Canadian government appointed a Royal Commission to investigate the betrayal of state secrets to foreign agents by persons in positions of trust. Its interim report in March 1946, and final report in August, were highly informative about Soviet espionage, which had been running a member of the Canadian parliament and nearly twenty officials as informants or agents. Sir Peter Clutterbuck, the High Commissioner in Ottawa, reported that sixteen members of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa had been withdrawn at Canada’s request, while the Ambassador and Military Attaché were summoned to Moscow, where the latter was believed to have been liquidated. ‘Many people see little difference between the Russian methods of today and the German methods we have fought two wars to eradicate,’ Clutterbuck continued. ‘Though there is a general hope that the Russians merely want educating and will settle down in time, a deep disquiet inevitably remains.’ When Cabinet ministers in London mooted giving official publicity to the Royal Commission’s findings, including Gouzenko’s statement that the Soviet Union was preparing for a third world war, Denis Healey, the pre-war Oxford communist who was running the International Department of the Labour party, gave decisive advice that ‘it would be damaging to the Party’ for the government to criticize Russia ‘at a moment when for the first time the Russians appear to the public to be making concessions’. Healey recoiled from offending public opinion by correcting its ignorance.4
‘All communists, from the top to the bottom, have a conception of the outside world based upon the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin,’ Sir Frank Roberts wrote from the Moscow embassy at this time. Inconvenient incidents were squeezed into orthodox ideological interpretations. In an international crisis such as the Gouzenko case, ‘a small group of high communists or N.K.V.D. officials might cover up their own clumsiness by convincing Stalin that what appeared like Soviet espionage was in fact only a further example of the determination of the outside capitalist world to stage a major anti-Soviet demonstration’.5
Gouzenko’s material revealed that Soviet intelligence had received atomic secrets from Maclean’s Trinity Hall communist contemporary Alan Nunn May. Nunn May had in 1942 joined the Cambridge-based, French-led team of Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski, which had shipped 185 kilograms of heavy water from France to England ahead of the German invaders. Halban had been born in Leipzig; his ancestors were Polish Jews, Vienna civil servants and Bohemian soldiers; his doctorate was from Zurich; and he was a French citizen. Kowarski had been born in St Petersburg, spent his adolescence in Vilnius (the Lithuanian capital, which was then in Poland), had his scientific training in Paris and was also a naturalized French citizen. ‘Too many damned foreigners’, Sir George Thomson, the Nobel laureate physicist, barked as he contemplated this research team. Nunn May was supposed to keep a patriotic watch on them as well as developing measurement techniques and improving the handling of experimental errors.6
Sir James Chadwick, a Nobel laureate physicist who had discovered the neutron in 1932, was leading research and development in England’s secret atomic-bomb project, which was codenamed TUBE ALLOYS. Once, in 1942, Chadwick put an abrupt question to Nunn May: ‘Do you know Nahum?’ Ephraim (‘Ram’) Nahum, who was killed that year by one of the few German bombs that fell on Cambridge, was the son of a rich textile merchant from Manchester: Eric Hobsbawm called him ‘a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority … and … the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation’. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (where Chadwick had worked until he obtained the chair of physics at Liverpool) everyone knew Nahum as the CPGB organizer of science students. When Nunn May admitted to knowing Nahum, Chadwick continued: ‘We tried to get him for work on the project, but the security people made objections, on very silly grounds.’ He then gave Nunn May a pointed look. Chadwick was indicating that he knew Nunn May, like other Cavendish scientists, to have been a party member, and did not regard this as a bar to recruitment to the Halban–Kowarski project; but as security officers were unlikely to show latitude, Nunn May should be discreet about his past or present beliefs. ‘Chadwick’s attitude was at the time perfectly normal,’ Nunn May judged. ‘This was a war against Fascism in which Russia was our ally, so a history of resisting Fascism and of support for Russia was no bar to recruitment, [it was] even a positive recommendation.’ There were few suitable scientists available for the work: if Chadwick had followed the security officers’ criteria he would have been chronically short-staffed. It is also arguable that MI5 were keener to keep communists out of development work on such important projects as radar that promised imminent tangible success. Atomic weapons at this stage were a remote and less understood possibility.7
After joining Halban’s project, Nunn May had an unheralded visit from CPGB members whom he had known as a research student. They urged him to revive his party contacts, which he had let lapse after the Nazi–Soviet pact. Nunn May was told to attend weekly meetings of a secretive cell of government employees who studied party literature and undertook non-subversive work. By this time Chadwick was sleepless with the knowledge that atomic bombs would be used in war and would proliferate among nation states. He was said by his university Vice-Chancellor to have ‘plumbed such depths of moral decision as more fortunate men are never called upon even to peer into’: Chadwick, he continued, suffered ‘almost insupportable agonies of responsibility arising from his scientific work’. Thinking in similar terms, but acting differently, Nunn May decided in the autumn of 1942 that it would be criminally irresponsible to leave the Russians unaware of the possible dangers of nuclear-bomb or radioactive-poison attacks. He wrote a summary of the project and of Anglo-American intentions, so far as he knew them, which he handed across the table in a seedy café after an apparently casual encounter in the street. He and his contact sat at a window table in the café, and afterwards Nunn May worried that the handover had been photographed for blackmail purposes.8
Later Nunn May was instructed by his party group leader to accompany Halban’s team when it relocated to Montreal as the English equivalent of the American MANHATTAN PROJECT. Once settled in Canada in 1945, Nunn May was visited by a man who uttered the agreed recognition signal, ‘Greetings from Alex’. This was Pavel Angelov, codenamed GRANT, from the Russian embassy in Ottawa. Nunn May determined to help the Russians because, or so he afterwards maintained, his American colleagues were explicit that Leslie Groves, the US General who ran the MANHATTAN PROJECT in 1942–7, intended to use atomic weaponry to ensure post-war American domination. Nunn May felt ‘loyalty as a socialist to what was then the only socialist country in the world’, and judged that Stalin’s Russia would be a stronger bulwark against American domination than any London-based parliamentary democracy.9
Nunn May provided uranium samples and laboratory reports as well as material on the chemistry and metallurgy of uranium and plutonium, the design of the American graphite piles, xenon poisoning and the Wigner effect (the displacement of atoms by neutron radiation). He informed on the organization of the MANHATTAN PROJECT, and provided secret information on its successor organization at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He spied on the experimental nuclear pile at Argonne, Illinois and reported on the vast Hanford installation in Washington state. Natural uranium is comprised of two isotopes, U-238 (which accounts for about 99 per cent of the substance) and the much rarer U-235, which is highly radioactive and best for atomic explosions. On the day that the US dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki (9 August 1945), Nunn May stole a platinum foil coated with U-235 from the Montreal laboratory. Within hours it had been flown to Moscow. Angelov so little understood the motivation of Nunn May that he tried to ensnare him with paltry gifts of whisky and 200 Canadian dollars (which Nunn May claimed to have burnt).
Gouzenko’s evidence of Nunn May’s treachery was accepted within days in Whitehall, where the traitor became known by the codename PRIMROSE. As early as mid-September, about a week after Gouzenko’s defection, the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, informed General Groves of the security breach. Groves was enraged, because a year earlier he had raised his concerns about Nunn May’s repeated, prying visits to Argonne, where nuclear-pile technology was being developed. Chadwick had assured Groves that Nunn May was ‘exceptionally reliable and close-mouthed’; but Groves in October 1944 had forbidden further visits by Nunn May to Argonne. After Halifax’s admission to Groves, American trust in Britain dived.10
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr had earlier urged Roosevelt and Churchill to prevent a nuclear arms race by sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. Halifax now raised with Groves and recommended to London that the Anglo-American powers should consider pooling their atomic secrets with their Soviet wartime allies in return for free facilities for inspection and assurances of peaceful intent. ‘Perhaps I should apologize for inflicting such superficial thinking on you, who are so much more deeply steeped in all this baffling business, and I may be dead wrong,’ Halifax wrote in a top-secret message to London on 20 September. But in the aftermath of his discussions with Groves about Nunn May, two facts were revolving in his head: ‘(i) that the Russians are going to get the secret anyway; (ii) that, if Groves is right, they are long years off being able to translate knowledge into practice’. Halifax was not alone in hoping that a policy of cooperative trust of the Russians in nuclear matters might reduce risks. A few days later President Truman told him that he feared ‘the impossibility of keeping scientific secrets secret for more than a very short time’ and was reflecting whether it might be possible to reach a nuclear agreement with the Soviet Union by ‘passing on scientific knowledge which they would probably get anyway pretty soon’, together with development expertise. Groves was insistent that the Russians would cheat and betray any undertakings along these lines. The Foreign Office, too, thought that the Soviets would find ‘specious excuses’ to break any such agreement when they had got all that they wanted from it. A tripartite nuclear treaty, placing trust in Stalin’s intentions, would be reviled: ‘Opposition would be raised in many quarters of these much blitzed islands, and by friendly nations in Western Europe and indeed all over the world, if a gift were made to the country which attacked Finland in 1939 and Poland … of facilities for blitzing us and others out of existence.’11
The advice of Bohr, and the hopes of Halifax and Truman, to attempt to establish mutual nuclear trust were remote from Nunn May’s outright betrayal of his colleagues’ scientific results to Moscow. Nunn May, though, considered that his actions were not dissimilar to those of the atomic appeasers. A few days later, oblivious of Gouzenko’s denunciation of him, he walked along a corridor at the Montreal laboratory to collect the documents for his return flight from Canada to England. Ahead of him were two unmistakably English civil servants holding standard-issue Whitehall briefcases. They were greeted by the senior British administrator who shook their hands and then spotting his approach, said: ‘Why, here is Dr Nunn May!’ The two visitors swivelled round, looking as shocked as if the administrator had said, ‘Why, here is Josef Stalin!’ Nunn May was rattled by this incident. Soon afterwards, back in London, in the coffee-room of the Royal Society, Sir George Thomson cut him dead. Patrick Blackett, who was to be awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1948, was beckoned away by Thomson while talking with Nunn May, and hurried off after Thomson had whispered to him. When MI5 warned that it was too short-staffed to keep Nunn May under surveillance, the Minister at the British embassy in Washington, Roger Makins, who was bearing the brunt of American fury, protested to the PUS, Sir Alexander Cadogan, about MI5’s handling of what the few British officials privy to Gouzenko’s material called the TUBE ALLOY leakage. ‘Apparently our people are now saying they can’t guarantee to watch or control the bird who has come over here,’ noted Cadogan. ‘This [is] ridiculous, & I sent for Liddell.’12
Nunn May was due to meet his new Russian handler on 7 October in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury and was primed with a new recognition signal, with ‘Greetings from Mikel’ replacing ‘Greetings from Alex’. A colleague at King’s College, London said to him casually, ‘you will find this an interesting topic’ and passed a slip of paper on which was written: ‘Do not keep your appointment.’ This warning may have originated from Philby. A few days later Nunn May met a former colleague from the Halban team, who asked: ‘What have you been up to? We have all been told not to talk to you.’ He realized that he was being followed and that his telephone was bugged. On 27 October, in a Bloomsbury street, he met by chance an ex-colleague from the Cavendish whom he had not seen for years. They went into a nearby tea-room to exchange news. Two other men followed them into the tea-room, and sat at the next table, although the other tables were all vacant.13
On 15 February 1946 Nunn May was unexpectedly confronted by two men in military uniform, Commander Leonard Burt of Special Branch and his colleague Reg Spooner. ‘Burt opened the proceedings by greeting me using the ultra-secret password which had been assigned to me (“Greetings from Mikel”) while looking me straight in the eyes for my reaction.’ Nunn May claimed to have put on a successful show of calm, and to have parried their questions with nonchalance. The MI5 report of the interrogation gives a more convincing account of Nunn May turning pale at hearing ‘Greetings from Mikel’, looking distressed, pausing for two or three minutes before answering questions and almost always limiting his responses to ‘yes’ or ‘no’. When asked if he would volunteer information – that is, to become an MI5 informant – Nunn May claimed to have replied, ‘Not if it is going to be used for counter-espionage.’ Burt regarded his refusal to admit anything as a sure sign of guilt. Although Burt dwelt on ‘Greetings from Mikel’, neither he nor MI5 colleagues challenged Nunn May about the password ‘Greetings from Alex’, which indicated illicit contacts before Nunn May went to Canada. MI5 wanted a clean, clear case to bring to court, and eliminated complications. It was only after Nunn May’s conviction, when he was in prison, that they interrogated him about pre-1945, pre-Canadian espionage. Nunn May was determined not to incriminate himself further, admitted nothing and yielded no information. Indeed, he remained anxious about a further prosecution on pre-Canadian leakages to the end of his life.14
There was insufficient evidence to convict Nunn May without a confession: this was extracted by William (‘Jim’) Skardon, whose working life had begun as a clerk in the household of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and who had been, as a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, seconded to MI5 in 1940. The investigation of the Nazi propagandist William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) in 1945 had shown his abilities as an interrogator. Skardon’s easy manner disguised his purposive ruthlessness. He graded people’s susceptibility to treason by categorizing their hobbies as ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’ – that is to say to connoting safe, trustworthy and stable social values, or insecure characteristics and risky attitudes. Gardening he reckoned was ‘very constitutional’, skiing ‘doubtful’ and motor-racing ‘very suspect’. Skardon won Nunn May’s trust, told him that the British had proof of his treason and bluffed him into a full confession of his guilt in February 1946. Writing of him afterwards, in a book sponsored by MI5, Alan Moorehead declared that Nunn May was ‘an entirely new sort of traitor: a man who gave away secrets not for money or for power or through fear or hatred or the perverse attraction of the act of spying, or even because he believed in a political faith. He betrayed because he found himself in possession of information of the utmost value and with an Olympian confidence decided that he should pass it on for the good of mankind.’ He was, said Moorehead, ‘a self-appointed world saver’.15
Nunn May faced an Old Bailey trial on 1 May 1946 with the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, prosecuting and Gerald Gardiner defending. ‘My Lord,’ Shawcross told the judge, ‘I ought to make it abundantly clear that there is no kind of suggestion that the Russians are enemies or potential enemies.’ He stressed that the charge concerned communicating information to unauthorized (and unspecified) persons, and emphasized that Nunn May had received $200, as if his motives were mercenary. Sir Roland Oliver, the High Court Judge who sentenced Nunn May to ten years’ imprisonment, reiterated Shawcross’s point about this paltry sum as if it mattered. Spy trials are show-cases of misdirection.16
Unbeknown to the security services, there was another atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs had been born in Germany in 1911. His father was a Lutheran pastor who became a Quaker. He suffered traumatic losses during his early manhood: his grandmother committed suicide, he saw his mother die after taking hydrochloric acid in 1931, one sister threw herself under a train in 1938 and the other was schizophrenic. For years after these tragedies he would be subdued by sudden involuntary bouts of mourning during which he lay for hours, or even days, with his face turned to the wall, starving himself, mute, unresponsive, as if in a trance. He was myopic, cackhanded, preternaturally precise, physically frail, but with formidable self-command. He chain-smoked cigarettes, was a mighty drinker of spirits and drove cars at top speed because he loved the thrill of skids and the excitement of controlling them.
Fuchs had degrees in mathematics and physics from the universities of Leipzig and Kiel. He joined the German communist party in 1932, and was once beaten up by Brownshirt students at Kiel and chucked into a river. On 28 February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, a warrant was issued to arrest him. By chance he left home early that morning, before the police arrived to detain him, in order to meet student communists in Berlin. Seeing newspaper reports of the arson, as he sat on the train to Berlin, he took the hammer-and-sickle badge from his lapel and from that moment went underground. He hastened on party orders to Paris, where he registered with the Quaker Bureau. His entry into England in September 1933 was sponsored by Ronald Gunn, an executive of the Imperial Tobacco Company living near Bristol, who knew of his Quaker affiliations and (perhaps significantly) had visited the Soviet Union a year earlier. It was with Gunn’s help that Fuchs obtained a post in the laboratory of Nevill Mott, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bristol University. In Bristol, Fuchs frequented meetings of the Friends of Soviet Russia and of Münzenberg’s front organization, the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. It seemed innocuous to Mott for a refugee from Nazism to evince communist sympathies.
Fuchs, who was awarded his PhD in 1936, continued to live with the Gunn family until 1937, when he went to work for his DSc in Max Born’s laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. Born spoke of him as ‘a brilliant young fellow’, a sad and lonely refugee, ‘likeable, kind, harmless’, and ‘passionately pro-Russian’. Fuchs reconciled himself to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 by persuading himself that Stalin was buying time to gather strength against Hitler rather as Chamberlain had done by means of the Munich agreement of 1938. His German passport having been revoked by the Nazis, he applied for British citizenship in 1939. This had not yet been granted when war broke out: he was interned as an enemy alien in May 1940 and shipped to a primitive internment camp in Quebec, where he gave classes in theoretical physics. One of the internees who attended his brilliant lectures was Max Perutz, a molecular biologist at the Cavendish Laboratory, who was later awarded the Nobel prize and the Order of Merit. ‘Fuchs is a brilliant mathematician and physicist; he also has an accurate memory and a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly,’ Perutz said; but ‘I had no human contact with that pale, narrow-faced, thin-lipped, austere-looking man.’ After eight months of internment, both Fuchs and Perutz were released in January 1941 following representations by the Royal Society.17
Two refugee scientists in Birmingham, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, had in March 1940 circulated a memorandum showing that only a few kilograms of the fissile uranium isotope 235 were needed to detonate an atomic weapon. Their exposition set in train the development of atomic bombs under the codename of the TUBE ALLOYS project. Forces of incredible violence began to be harnessed by men of mild looks and unassuming manners. Peierls recruited Fuchs to investigate the gaseous diffusion process involved in separating uranium isotopes. When Fuchs joined TUBE ALLOYS in June 1941, he signed the Official Secrets Act. There was no interview or investigation of him by MI5 officers, who were over-stretched on other urgent matters. Jane Archer did comment, after reading inconclusive entries on his file about communist affiliations, ‘Fuchs is more likely to betray secrets to Russians than the enemy.’ She recommended that he should not be shown more secret material than necessary, but, as Peierls commented, in a project like his ‘there was no half-way house’. Everything was hurried in the wartime emergency. Frisch was pleased when Chadwick told him in 1943 that he would have to become a British subject if he was to follow the project to America. Within a few days a Special Branch officer visited Frisch to establish his antecedents, personal details and character references as the preliminaries to naturalization. ‘You must be a pretty big shot,’ the policeman mused. ‘I have been told to get everything done in a week!’18
Fuchs joined TUBE ALLOYS in the month that Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia. He soon contacted the NKGB/NKVD organizer in London, Jürgen Kuczynski, was accepted as a source in August 1941 and provided his first tranche of scientific secrets in the following month. His subsequent codenames included REST, BRAS and CHARLES. He became a British subject in 1942. His first Soviet handler Simon Kremer @ BARCH did not build an affinity with him. In 1942, after he had complained of BARCH to Kuczynski, the latter’s sister Ursula was (by Moscow’s decision) put in charge of running him. Best known by her codename SONYA, she was Ursula Kuczynski @ Ruth Kuczynski @ Ruth Werner @ Ursula Beurton @ Ursula Hamburger. Born in 1907, the daughter of an eminent Jewish statistical economist in Berlin, she joined the German communist party at the age of eighteen. During the early 1930s she worked for Red Army intelligence in Shanghai, Peking and Mukden: Mao Tse-tung’s victory in 1949 was ‘the most important milestone in the history of the Labour movement since the October Revolution of 1917’, she wrote in her eighties. ‘For me personally, it was one of the happiest events of my life.’ After returning from undercover work in Switzerland in 1941, she had handled the atomic spy Melita Norwood. She was ruthless in promoting her cause. Noël Coward’s account of his breakdown in the Artists Rifle Corps, which led to his hospitalization in a ward for shell-shock patients in Camberwell in 1918, excited her contempt in 1941: ‘His reactions as a soldier in the First World War are exactly the reaction of a liberal intellectual incapable of disciplining himself, incapable of renouncing his individualism, of subordinating himself and withstanding physical effort.’19
Her first meeting with Fuchs was in Banbury, midway between his base in Birmingham and her wartime home in Oxford. At this inaugural rendezvous they walked arm in arm together, according to an established practice of illicit meetings, discussing books and films as a way of gaining mutual trust. No one mentioned espionage; she found Fuchs sensitive, reserved, donnish and clumsy. Their next half-dozen meetings were also in the countryside, because it was harder for watchers to shadow them in open rural areas. She pedalled to their assignations on a bicycle with a wicker child’s seat cushioned by a cheerful green pillow embellished with pictures of daisies. They could conduct their business in two minutes, but it looked less suspicious if they took a pleasant walk together for up to half an hour. Fuchs supplied SONYA with numerous blueprints, copies of all the reports he had written, and data on the gaseous diffusion method of separating the uranium isotope U-235 and on the mathematics used to evaluate the size and efficiency of atomic bombs. By December 1943, when Fuchs crossed the Atlantic with Peierls to work on the MANHATTAN PROJECT, he had confirmed to the Russians that the Americans and British were building plants to produce atomic weaponry and that Germany’s equivalent projects had stalled.
The MANHATTAN PROJECT was based in New York and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In February 1944 Fuchs had his first rendezvous with his new American handler, Harry Gold @ GOOSE @ ARNO @ MAD @ RAYMOND, who was a chemist by training and son of an anti-Romanov radical who had fled tsarist Russia in 1903 to avoid military conscription. The two conspirators met at the entrance to the Henry Street Settlement, which provided health care and social services to the needy in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and identified one another by holding gloves, a green-covered book, a handball and other paraphernalia. Thereafter Fuchs supplied Gold with material on the design and assembly of the atomic bomb, which proved of utmost value in advancing Soviet atomic expertise. Under the Soviet system, with its reliance on denial and deception, the Kremlin’s scant public references to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were an index of the importance attached by Stalin to atomic nuclear weaponry. ‘It has never been admitted that the atomic bomb had any real influence on the Japanese capitulation and Stalin did not refer to it in his final victory broadcast,’ Clark Kerr, the Ambassador in Moscow, reported in September that year. Ignorant of the espionage by Nunn May and Fuchs, Clark Kerr was encouraged by the Kremlin’s mild reaction to Anglo-American duplicity: there had been no denunciation of ‘our failure to impart to them the formula of the atomic bomb which can imply nothing but a lack of confidence in our Soviet allies’.20
A fortnight after the destruction of the two Japanese cities, the Prime Minister Clement Attlee circulated a memorandum on the atomic bomb. ‘No Government has ever been placed in such a position as is ours today. The Governments of the U.K. and the U.S.A. are responsible as never before for the future of the human race.’ Attlee saw no hope of restricting the spread of nuclear weapons. ‘Any attempt to keep this as a secret in the hands of the U.S.A. and U.K. is useless. Scientists in other countries are certain in time to hit upon the secret.’ The experience of recent years had convinced him that the necessary response to saturation bombing was retaliatory raids. ‘Berlin & Magdeburg were the answer to London and Coventry. Both derive from Guernica. The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.’ This was the hard, hostile new terrain through which Fuchs, as well as Attlee’s government, had to find a safe path.21
In the summer of 1946 Fuchs was appointed head of theoretical physics at the new Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell (then a bleak encampment around an empty airfield). From the technical questions asked of him by the Russians, Fuchs deduced the existence of another atomic spy: this, unknown to him, was Melita Norwood. Once installed at Harwell, he tried to contact Jürgen Kuczynski, who however had worked for US military intelligence in 1944–5, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel while attached to the US army of occupation in Berlin, and declined to cooperate with the local NKGB station. In September 1947 Fuchs had his first rendezvous with his new handler, Alexander Feklissov @ KALISTRAT, at the drab Nag’s Head public house in Wood Green. For mutual confirmation of identity, Feklissov said, ‘Stout is not so good: I generally take lager,’ and Fuchs replied, ‘I think Guinness is the best.’22
Fuchs resumed the supply of official secrets, which had been suspended when he left the USA a year earlier. Hydrogen-bomb plans, English and American atomic stockpiles, processes for isolating plutonium, and theoretical calculations of explosion were among the material that he betrayed. ‘I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments,’ Fuchs explained, with acute self-analysis, to his MI5 interrogator in 1950. In one compartment he allowed himself:
to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be … I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point. I could forget the other compartment and still rely on it. It appeared to me at the time that I had become a ‘free man’ because I had succeeded in the other compartment to establish myself completely independent of the surrounding forces of society. Looking back at it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it a controlled schizophrenia.23
Feklissov told Fuchs that if he had to defer a rendezvous or needed an emergency meeting, he should go to Richmond, Surrey and throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over the wall of 166 Kew Road, with a message on page 10 supplying a new place and date. He then had to make a chalk mark on a wall in nearby Holmsdale Road. The garden in Kew Road belonged to a former CPGB activist, Charles Moody, who had become an outwardly conventional Attlee supporter: nominated by the Labour party to the bench of Richmond magistrates in 1945, this former dustman was eventually a respected chairman of the juvenile bench. He had been the husband since 1927 of Gerty or Gerda Isaacs, daughter of a rabbi named Moses Isaacs (described in the 1901 census as Russian-born, but a subject of the Sultan of Turkey). The Moodys lived at 166 Kew Road with three sons and Gerty’s sister Clara Isaacs. The two women were not open CPGB members but, as an MI5 report noted in 1954, ‘Mrs MOODY often refers to people who are merely sympathisers with a pro-Russian or Communist organisation as being “the unconverted”.’24
There were tens of thousands of Soviet sympathizers like the Moodys, who wished to believe that Stalin wanted world peace. When the Atomic Energy Bill was debated in the Commons in 1946, its provisions for safeguarding official secrets were resisted by the Labour MP Wilfrid Vernon, the member of the aviation spy ring at the Royal Aircraft Establishment whose activities had been compromised by the bungling Blackshirt raid on his shack. Vernon lacked subtlety. He advocated open, unrestricted collaboration between nuclear physicists of all nations. Official secrecy, he said, was a hindrance to scientific advances. If the purity of scientific exchanges was polluted by considerations of national security, able graduates would be scared of entering atomic research lest they make an inadvertent slip and land themselves in prison. Scientists working on nuclear weaponry would moreover be prevented from consulting those interested in nuclear energy, and vice versa. The world shortage of fuel was taking the planet back to ‘the Stone Age’, Vernon feared. Instead of maximizing the effort to develop new power to replace coal and oil, ‘we are letting our military madness clamp down on this vital possibility for the future of mankind’. Such ebullitions confirmed the judgement of a former Farnborough colleague that Vernon was ‘a second-rate man with a second-rate mind … an idealist and a type who would die on the barricades’.25
Alexander Foote, Ursula Kuczynski’s former associate in Switzerland-based espionage, defected in Berlin in 1946 and gave full information on her to MI5. As a result of Foote’s defection, Moscow broke contact with her. For several months she cycled on allotted days to her dead drop in the hollow root of the fourth tree on the left after a railway tunnel on the Oxford–Banbury road, but never found a message. MI5 began to test Foote’s account. SONYA was found to be living in a house called The Firs in the Oxfordshire village of Great Rollright. Effective surveillance was impossible: she was too careful to post incriminating letters; the local telephone exchange was too small for the monitoring of her calls to pass unnoticed; in a village watchers would be spotted within a day.
On a summer day in 1947, Skardon and Michael Serpell arrived without warning at The Firs. (Serpell was the favoured personal assistant of the then Director General of the Security Service, Sir Percy Sillitoe, who later said after rewarding him with a hoist in the office hierarchy, ‘if I don’t promote him nobody else will’.) They walked into the room and said without pausing, ‘You were a Russian agent for a long time, before the Finnish war disillusioned you. We know that you haven’t been active in England. We haven’t come to arrest you, but to ask your cooperation.’ She almost laughed at what seemed a clownish attempt to throw her off balance. They asked about incidents in Switzerland, which made her suspect that her activities had been betrayed by Foote, but stressed that they considered her a loyal British subject, who had been disillusioned with communism by the Russian invasion of Finland. She admitted to her marriage ten years earlier to an active communist in China, but refused to answer questions about her experiences before she got a British passport. Her interrogators professed astonishment at this obstinate attitude from someone who had been guiltless since settling in England.26
Code-breakers posed as great a threat as defectors to Moscow’s espionage apparatus. During 1944–5 the Soviets were careless enough to reissue some one-time pads, which made their cipher system for high-grade diplomatic and intelligence communications vulnerable to American and British code-breakers. In 1946 Meredith Gardner of the US Army Security Agency (ASA), who knew German, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Spanish, French, Japanese and Russian, began decrypting messages exchanged between Moscow Centre and its American agencies. His team of code-breakers, who were mostly young women, embarked on a momentous project which received the codename VENONA. They collected evidence of massive Soviet espionage, which was not reported by ASA to the FBI until 1948. (The CIA was, however, not informed about VENONA until 1952: partly because of bitter inter-agency rivalry; but also because its decrypts revealed that Moscow’s agents had infested the CIA’s predecessor body, the OSS, and Hoover feared that the CIA was equally pest-ridden.)
Moscow Centre heard about VENONA five years before the CIA. William Weisband, a Russian linguist in ASA, codenamed ZHORA and RUPERT by his chiefs in Moscow, was a prowling snooper who peered over Meredith Gardner’s shoulder at the moment when the cryptanalyst was decrypting an NKGB telegram which revealed that Los Alamos had been penetrated by Soviet agents. Weisband was never prosecuted for betraying VENONA to Moscow, because the US authorities shrank from court disclosures about VENONA. He did, however, serve a prison sentence in 1950–1 for contempt of court after refusing a grand jury subpoena: he thereafter worked as an insurance salesman. Moscow was thrown into uncertainty by Weisband’s revelations, for it was impossible to predict which NKVD telegrams would be decrypted or which Soviet agents would be compromised. Its perturbation was increased in July 1948, when Elizabeth Bentley testified in public to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Whittaker Chambers named Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and others in evidence to HUAC a month later. Moscow Centre expected these revelations to lead to a series of show-trials.27
In September 1949, just before leaving for Washington, Philby warned Burgess that VENONA was close to identifying a major atomic spy, who had been active in the United States (Philby did not know the spy’s identity as Fuchs). Burgess’s information from Philby was included in three rolls of microfilm received from Blunt by the new Soviet contact, Yuri Modin, on 11 October 1949. The microfilms had, however, been over-exposed and were unusable. When 168 recopied documents, totalling 660 pages, were delivered to Modin on 7 December, Burgess forgot to repeat his warning about the Anglo-American decryption effort and the atomic spy. If Blunt had not photographed the early batch of material badly, or if Burgess had remembered to repeat his warning note, Moscow could have exfiltrated Fuchs in November or December, or at least briefed him on handling MI5 interrogators. Instead, when Fuchs was arrested, they became obsessed with the idea that he had been betrayed by his former American handler, Harry Gold.
Fuchs underwent repeated vetting in 1946–9 as he took charge of the mathematical work needed to develop nuclear power, and was promoted to be deputy chief scientific officer at Harwell: Roger Hollis had cleared his file for the sixth time. Then VENONA decrypts identified a Soviet agent codenamed CHARLES as a supplier of vital intelligence on the MANHATTAN PROJECT. There were three prime suspects for the part of CHARLES: Fuchs, Peierls and Frank Kearton. A bricklayer’s son with a first-class degree in chemistry from Oxford, Kearton had shared an office with Fuchs in America, never doubted him and treated him as a friend. Kearton, who became one of post-war England’s most formidable industrialists and received a barony in 1970, said the worst time of his life was when he was under MI5’s suspicion. It did not last long. By careful study of all the references to CHARLES, MI5 cleared first Kearton and then Peierls, which left only Fuchs. MI5’s Arthur Martin and John Marriott interviewed Kearton in mid-November. ‘KEARTON could not believe that FUCHS was a spy, although it did not seem from anything KEARTON said that this could be ruled out,’ noted Liddell. In fact, he added, Kearton had been just as incredulous as Nunn May’s colleagues when security doubts were raised about him.28
From July 1949 Fuchs was subject to tapped telephones and intercepted mail, but nothing incriminatory was found. An intensive investigation by MI5’s B Division could find no incriminating evidence because he had by then renounced espionage. MI5 could not use the highly classified secret VENONA decrypts or any SIGINT intercepted material as evidence against Fuchs in a criminal trial. Skardon – the man who had failed to shake Ursula Kuczynski two years earlier – was sent to interview Fuchs at Harwell on 21 September 1949 without being told of the VENONA decrypts. He saw no signs of guilt, as he reported after two interviews. Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet found no suspicious inconsistencies or incriminating contradictions in the interview transcripts. The cover for MI5’s sudden interest in Fuchs was that his father had recently moved to Leipzig, in communist-controlled Germany, and that this raised security concerns which might require Fuchs to leave the Harwell establishment. Dick White coached Skardon like a schoolmaster preparing a star pupil for an examination, and sent him on further visits to Harwell, where Skardon simulated a trusting affinity with Fuchs.
In mid-January 1950, with an air of relaxed sincerity, Skardon suggested that there was still a chance that Fuchs could become Director of Harwell if he told his story fully. Fuchs could not have been incriminated if he had said nothing, but he relented as lonely men under sympathetic questioning sometimes do. He volunteered his story – although, as Skardon did not have a high enough security-clearance, he refused to give technical details of the official secrets that he had given the Russians. There was then a nerve-racking hiatus for Fuchs lasting more than a week. Finally he was asked to come to London, where he gave and signed a full confession on 27 January. Breaking Fuchs was the acme of Skardon’s career. It vindicated his technique of formidably ruthless sympathy. ‘My name is Skardon,’ he would say by way of introduction to someone whom he was about to interview. ‘I was the man who persuaded Klaus Fuchs to confess. A dear man.’29
Edward Teller, the Budapest-born deviser of hydrogen bombs, who had complained that Fuchs was ‘taciturn to an almost pathological degree’, exclaimed on hearing of Fuchs’s arrest: ‘So that’s what it was!’ Fuchs’s trial at the Old Bailey on 1 March took a total of ninety minutes: Skardon was the only witness; no jury was needed, for Fuchs pleaded guilty; he was given a sentence of fourteen years. There was as much official misdirection as there had been in the trials of Glading and Nunn May. The indictment referred to four specific acts of espionage in 1943, 1944, 1945 and 1947 without revealing that Fuchs had confessed to starting his betrayal of atomic secrets in 1942 and continuing until 1949.30
Ursula Kuczynski left England with her young children, whom she was rearing as anti-fascists, days before the start of Fuchs’s trial. She was unsure whether MI5 had failed to connect her with Fuchs or had preferred her to escape like Glading’s handlers: her arrest might have complicated the case, brought awkward public disclosures about a decade of Soviet espionage and perhaps provoked the punitive ire of the FBI. She was living in East Germany when Stalin died in 1953: ‘every communist I met considered it as I did – a great loss’. Skardon interviewed Charles and Gerty Moody on several occasions; their associates were investigated; Home Office warrants for telephone and postal interception were issued; their file was revisited periodically for years. Evelyn McBarnet of MI5 concluded, ‘I am left with the impression that MOODY must, almost certainly, have been the person concerned with retrieving the magazine thrown over the wall by FUCHS, that he was possibly not aware of the precise significance of his action, and that he had probably never heard of FUCHS before the story of his arrest appeared in the press.’31
Graham Greene, who had joined SIS in 1941 and worked in the Iberian Section under Philby in 1943–4, concluded from his experiences that Soviet espionage was ‘a branch of psychological warfare’ in which the object was to destroy trust between the allied powers that were its adversaries. He remained an SIS Friend, received funding from the Service for his inveterate travelling and reported to it from Russia, Poland, Vietnam and China during the 1950s and 1960s: the virulent anti-Americanism of his public statements about the Vietnam War may have been a cover for his continuing SIS allegiance. It was as an SIS trusty that he gave his conclusion that Russia had been enabled by Nunn May and Fuchs to advance its manufacture of atomic bombs by a few years, but would have soon reached parity in its ability to destroy the world even without their help. ‘The real value of the two scientists to the Soviet Union’, he wrote, ‘was not the benefit they received from their scientific information, but from their capture, and the breakdown in Anglo-American relations which followed. A spy allowed to continue his work without interference is far less dangerous than the spy who is caught.’32
In Wakefield prison Fuchs shared a cell with Edouard-Jean Johnston @ ‘Count’ John Edward Johnston-Noad, a Mayfair bon vivant who had been disbarred as a solicitor after his conviction for keeping a brothel near Burgess’s flat in Old Bond Street, who posed as a member of the Montenegrin royal family, who was married to a Hatton Garden diamond thief known as ‘Black Orchid’, and who was described by his own counsel, at his fraud trial in 1952, as ‘a vain, egotistical megalomaniac’. This incompatible pair, who were the least rough cellmates in the prison, were both released in 1959. Fuchs soon moved to Dresden. There, suspected by the KGB of having given the names of its agents to MI5 under interrogation, he was forbidden to give interviews, prepare his memoirs or contact his former handlers. This treatment was a torment to him. Markus Wolf, head of the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Ministry of State Security in communist East Germany, encountered him during the 1980s and ranked him as a master-spy comparable to Philby. He tried to assuage his enemies by hard-line loyalty, which made him tell western visitors that the dissident nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov deserved more condign punishment than compulsory exile in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod). Yet the KGB shunned Fuchs, never honoured his self-sacrificing achievements and perhaps blamed him for getting caught. ‘This silence from a country that he had served purely out of conscience and at great cost to his liberty and scientific career, weighed on him like a daily burden,’ wrote Wolf.33
It is interesting to compare Fuchs’s fate with that of Theodore Hall @ MLAD. Born in 1925, son of a New York furrier named Holtzberg, he anglicized his surname before going to study physics at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1944. He and his Harvard room-mate Saville Sax @ STAR, who was another New Yorker of Russian Jewish ancestry, shared communist ideals. After Hall had been assigned to a Los Alamos team investigating the physics of implosion for plutonium-bomb development, he and Sax agreed that his secrets should be shared with America’s ally, the Soviet Union. Sax tried to approach Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA and ex-husband of Maclean’s handler Kitty Harris. After rebuffs, Sax finally contacted the NKGB agent Sergey Kurnakov @ BECK, whom he introduced to Hall. Kurnakov agreed to receive Hall’s material, if it was brought to him in secret batches from New Mexico by Sax. Hall was far junior to Fuchs as a scientist, but was well placed at Los Alamos to gain access to useful secrets. ‘His English is highly cultured,’ wrote Kurnakov in a pen-portrait of 1944 for Moscow Centre. ‘He answers quickly and very fluently, especially to scientific questions. Eyes are set closely together; evidently, neurasthenic. Perhaps because of premature mental development, he is witty and somewhat sarcastic, but without a shadow of undue familiarity.’ His family were Jewish, continued Kurnakov, ‘but [he] doesn’t look like a Jew’. Hall, who moved to scientific work in Chicago after the war, fell under suspicion with Sax in 1949, when VENONA decrypts showed their names in plain text, before they had been allotted cover names. They denied contacts with Soviet intelligence when interrogated by the FBI in 1951; and given the decision not to bring VENONA evidence to open court, and in the absence of other incriminating material, they were not prosecuted. Hall moved to England, where he worked in Cambridge University’s electron microscopy research laboratory before his death in 1999. Sax taught ‘values clarification’ in an educational programme of the mid-1960s, is said to have become a drug-experimenting hippy and died in 1980.34
American witch-hunts intensified after (with help from the espionage of Nunn May, Fuchs and others) the Soviet Union had exploded its ‘First Lightning’ plutonium implosion bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan in August 1949. The project was run by the nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov, but was under the control of the fearsome Beria. With characteristic Stalinist paranoia, Beria both suspected the Anglo-American atomic secrets as disinformation and used the same espionage material as a check on Soviet atomic scientists whom he equally distrusted. The test-site was a stony, sparsely covered expanse where the heat was oppressive by early morning. It had been arrayed with locomotives, railway-stock, tanks, artillery, animals and homesteads so that the effects of irradiation could be studied. After Beria’s arrival at Semipalatinsk, the device was detonated in its tower. A mushroom cloud rose 5 miles into the sky. At ground level everything was annihilated.
‘Molten lumps flew about in all directions like small pieces of shrapnel and radiated invisible alpha, beta and gamma rays,’ noted the chief of the Radiation Protection Service. ‘The steel girders of a bridge were twisted into ram’s horns.’ Beria was mistrustful of what he had seen. ‘Haven’t we slipped up?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t Kurchatov humbug us?’ He telephoned Stalin and said, ‘Everything went right.’ Stalin, who had been asleep, was confused by drowsiness and old age. ‘I know already,’ he replied untruthfully, and put down the telephone receiver. Beria erupted into paranoid rage at his companions at Semipalatinsk. ‘Who told him? You are letting me down! Even here you spy on me! I’ll grind you to dust!’35