26 ***^ Sunday 11 August 2019 The Sunday Telegraph
T
he chief lesson of Frank
Close’s superlative
biography of Klaus
Fuchs, “the most
dangerous spy in the
history of nations,” is
that John le Carré never needed to
invent a single thing. It’s all here- the tradecraft, reptile fund, Circus
characters, coded recognition
signals, letter drops in hollow trees
in Banbury; the endemic shabbiness
and shadowiness. It fits perfectly
that Fuchs lived in a dreary tin
pre-fab near Didcot.
When Fuchs went to meet his
contact in a pub in Wood Green, the
passwords were “Stout is not so
good, I prefer lager”, to which the
response had to be “I think
Guinness is best. Do you know Big
Hannah?” Fuchs would leave chalk
crosses on a wall, “on the north side
of the Holmesdale Road by the
junction of Ennerdale Road”, in
Richmond.
He’d check for signs of MI5
surveillance by getting on and off
buses, going in and out of
department stores, doubling back
on his tracks, and glancing at
reflections in shop windows: “Only
when satisfied that all was clear did
he get into a car.” Did you know that
radio transmitters were hidden
inside a child’s teddy bear, or that if
you walked past the Metropolitan
Museum in New York, carrying a
green book and a tennis ball, don’t
be shocked if someone sidles up and
talks Russian? This is the sort of
knowledge Frank Close divulges.
In January 1950, after enduring
many interrogations – always very
admitting neither guilt nor remorse.
He was arrested on Feb 2 1950 and
sentenced to 14 years, for breaching
the Official Secrets Act. Released
early, in 1959, he moved to Dresden,
East Germany, as the deputy head of
the Central Institute for Nuclear
Power.
While in prison, Fuchs had
continued to give advice from his
cell. In 1952, Britain’s own nuclear
bomb, “based on a design Fuchs had
inspired,” was detonated in
Australia. “Fuchs is continuing to
collaborate in various other
matters,” wrote the controller for
Atomic Energy, in February 1953.
With history’s hindsight, Fuchs
was no traitor or villain. It must be
remembered that in the late Forties
and throughout the Fifties, hawks at
the Pentagon “openly advocated a
pre-emptive strike against the
Soviet Union, so America could
establish global hegemony”. What
stopped this was news of the Soviet
arsenal, which suddenly established
a balance of terror – the promise of
mutually assured destruction,
which in precarious fashion has
maintained the peace for over 70
years. Paradoxically, Fuchs, who
died in 1988, is the man who kept us
safe.civilised; some took place over lunch
at the Queen’s Hotel, Abingdon,
“famed for its linen tablecloths, its
waiters dressed in dark suits” – Fuchs
had made “a full confession of
espionage on behalf of the Russians
from 1942 until February 1949”. He’d
passed on to his handlers everything
he could find about the atomic bomb,
such that, during the war, Stalin
knew more about the advanced
weaponry than any of the other
Allies. Harry Truman was utterly in
the dark until April 1945, when he
was sworn in as president after the
sudden death of Roosevelt.
It is an astonishing story, as
gripping as Smiley’s People. Fuchs
was born near Frankfurt in 1911, and
studied mathematics at Leipzig. His
father was a theologian, his mother
committed suicide, and he joined the
Communist Party after witnessing
the thuggery of the Nazis. Indeed, for
wearing a hammer-and-sickle lapel
pin, Fuchs was himself harassed by
the Brownshirts, who knocked out
his teeth. By 1933, he was on the
Gestapo “wanted” list, so fled to
France, crossed the Channel, and
arrived in Bristol, his passage
facilitated by the party’s network of
sympathisers.
Fuchs enrolled as a student at
Bristol University, receiving a
doctorate in 1937. In the early months
of the war, he was interned as an
enemy alien, but was released in
December 1940, as the professors
who’d known him, Rudolf Peierls
(Birmingham) and Max Born
(Edinburgh), recognised that his
scientific skills were going to be
useful against Hitler.
There was no end of German and
Jewish refugees in Britain, secretly
working in the universities on a
“superbomb”, which “in less than
one-thousandth of a second ... would
be hotter than the centre of the sun”.
What I found sinister, however,
reading this book, is that these
boffins – dons, misfits, loners, cranks- were so absorbed in solving the
mathematical puzzles and framing
the algebra, they rather forgot that
there would come into being an
actual atomic bomb, capable of
destroying the planet. A physicist
called Edward Teller, for example,
sounds like Dr Strangelove, in his
hope to build a doomsday device, “a
single fission bomb with enough
power to destroy all life on Earth” by
igniting the nitrogen in the
atmosphere. These characters were
besides themselves with glee when
they realised that an atomic bomb
could be light enough and portable
enough to be dropped from an
ordinary aircraft.
Fuchs, who never concealed his
anti-fascist and socialist views, sawwhat he was up to as a utopian
exercise. His belief in the future of
Communism never wavering, he
decided to share information with the
Soviet Union – our ally at that time.
It’s as if, when Churchill, in June 1941,
had announced that “we shall give
whatever help we can to Russia and
the Russian people”, Fuchs took him
at his word.
At a party in Hampstead, Fuchs had
made contact with an intelligence
officer at the Soviet embassy. In due
course, he passed on the formulae
and data for determining the
destructive power of atomic bombs,
the “basic ideas of gaseous diffusion”,
the practical guides for the bomb’s
construction, the calculations for the
optimum height at which the bomb
should be detonated to maximise the
amount of damage, and speculations
about the effects of radiation.
In 1944, under the guise of the
British Supply Mission, Fuchs and his
colleagues went to America, to join
the Manhattan Project, where, at a
cost of $2.6 billion, the “Trinity” test
was to be conducted in the New
Mexico desert, under J Robert
Oppenheimer. Here, for the first time,
the nuclear blasts and mushroom
clouds were observed. The following
month, the bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At one time, “the fear that Hitler
might get there first” was the spur- but when Germany surrendered,
and later Japan, work was not
suspended but accelerated. The
Americans and British were already
planning the post-war era, with the
Soviet Union deemed the aggressor
in Western Europe. Hence, the Cold
War.
In April 1947, Fuchs resumed his
espionage tricks, letting the Russians
know about the nuclear plant at
Windscale. By now, MI5 wasmonitoring him, intercepting the
mail and tapping the phone,
following him around London. Why
didn’t they pounce? Expediency.
According to a memo, “the
advantages gained [...] through the
undoubted abilities of Dr Fuchs
outweigh the slight security risk”. He
was blown, so to speak, when GCHQ
decrypted messages his handler had
sent to Moscow – at which point Kim
Philby immediately advised the KGB
to cut off all contact with Fuchs.
Fuchs himself, “his austere exterior
masking deep emotions,” when
interviewed by the security services,
gave nothing away at first, then
decided to give himself up, whilstIt’s all here: the coded
signals, the tradecraft,
the letter drops in
hollow trees
A biography of a
spy that reads like
a le Carré novel
BETTMANN ARCHIVE; ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGESTRINITY
by Frank Close528PP, ALLEN LANE,
£25, EBOOK £12.99ÌÌÌÌÌ
ROGER LEWIS
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Call 0844 871 1514 or see books.
telegraph.co.uk to order for £20Atomic traitor: scientist Klaus Fuchs,
below, supplied information about the
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