A life of secret power
A man with enormously potent knowledge, the trust of the world’s great powers, and no motive but ideology
As spies go, Klaus Fuchs was in a class of his own. The German-born political activist, mathematician and physicist — exiled to Britain in World War 2 — managed to pass on atomic secrets to two of the three Allied powers who became sworn enemies during the Cold War. He also helped the third, the US, to build bigger and better hydrogen bombs. One can hardly dispute British author Mike Rossiter’s claim that in helping to usher no fewer than three nations into the nuclear age, Fuchs was the most important spy of the 20th (or, for that matter, any other) century.
Growing up in the chaos of the post-WW1 Weimar Republic, with its food and fuel shortages, worker violence and antiSemitism, this son of a pacifist Lutheran pastor joined the German Social Democratic Party as a student.
As the Nazis became steadily more brutal, he moved leftwards into the Communist Party, the KPD. When Hitler began sending thousands of suspected communists to concentration camps, the KPD decided that Fuchs should go into exile, first to Paris, and then to Britain, where he became a research physicist at the University of Bristol. Finding board and lodging with a socialist couple sympathetic to the Soviet Union, he resumed his activism against the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Spain, though he was never to join the British Communist Party.
His academic brilliance led to his being granted a succession of research fellowships, culminating in 1937 in a scholarship to study in Edinburgh under fellow German exile Max Born, a cofounder of quantum mechanics. As Born’s assistant, he quickly became one of Britain’s leading theoretical physicists, chosen to work on the top-secret Tube Alloys project — the development of the atom bomb.
Fuchs survived a cursory examination of his political background by the UK’s wartime security services, as well as a spell of internment in Canada in the company of other German exiles, before becoming a British subject in 1942. Lingering suspicions about his true loyalties were brushed aside because of his importance to the atomic project.
Throughout his years in Britain, evidently believing that the Communists were “the only defence” against the Nazis, Fuchs regularly passed on the fruits of his researches to agents of the Soviet Union, arranging cloak-and-dagger meetings in parks and pubs after the exchange of pre-agreed signals. His motives were ideological, for he had little interest in money.
Helped by his fellow scientists to allay fears about his allegiance, he was sent in 1943 to Los Alamos, New Mexico, as one of 17 British scientists seconded to the Americans to work on the 20th century’s “single biggest secret” — the Manhattan Project. With a staggering insouciance, MI5 suggested it might be a good idea to allow Fuchs to go to the US because he would find it more difficult to make contact with Communists there than in Britain and might be more roughly treated were he ever found out.
At Los Alamos, Fuchs was taken into the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project, alongside such scientific and mathematical luminaries as Richard Feynman and Edward Teller, working on the development of two atomic bombs. Once again, he was able to supply Soviet “moles” in the US with crucial technical information about the latest nuclear technology, which quickly found its way to Moscow.
For nine years, Fuchs spied for both the Soviet Union and Britain. He took no notice of the McMahon Act, designed to pre- vent the disclosure of the US’s nuclear secrets to any foreign country, including the UK, and supplied information about the bomb to colleagues in Britain’s scientific community, as well as his Soviet contacts.
In September 1949, however, US intelligence agents cracked Soviet diplomatic codes which revealed that Fuchs had been passing documents to Moscow. Three months later, he confessed to British interrogators about his double role. Fortunate to escape the death penalty for treason, he was sentenced, after an unusually quick trial, to 14 years’ imprisonment. Released for good behaviour after nine years, he went to live in East Germany, where he embraced the country’s Soviet-style system. He died in 1988, shortly before the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
Rossiter tells a compelling spy story well, explaining the complexities of nuclear technology in understandable language and maintaining the pace of his narrative in John le Carré-like style. He has the advantage of now being able to delve into newly released German and Soviet archives, and some heavily edited MI5 files, in order to assess the impact of Fuchs’ nefarious activities.
He doubts, however, whether the full story about the leaking of Britain’s nuclear secrets will ever emerge. Fuchs’ espionage was a severe embarrassment to the British security establishment, which declines to this day to reveal fully how an outsider of suspect loyalties was allowed to betray his adopted country so successfully and for so long.