In June 1946, at the conclusion of the Manhattan Project, Fuchs
returned to England, eventually becoming head of the theoretical
division of the atomic energy establishment at Harwell, where the
British were developing their own plutonium bomb. His espionage
continued in this period under a new handler, Aleksandr Feklisov,
albeit at a reduced rate. By September 1949, however, the U.S. Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation, acting on information gathered from
the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications, had
opened a case file on Fuchs. British authorities were notified, and
Fuchs openly confessed to MI5 on 27 January 1950, characterizing
his double life as “controlled schizophrenia.” Because the Soviet
Union had been an ally of Great Britain during the war, the charges
against him did not involve treason but rather violation of the Official
Secrets Act. He was given the maximum sentence of 14 years but was
released after nine years owing to good behavior.
Aided by the intercession of his father, a new life and career
opened for Fuchs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
even though the loss of British citizenship was, according to him,
his deepest wound. After arriving in East Berlin on 24 June 1959,
he promptly married Margarete Keilson, an old friend and former
Comintern agent, and became a citizen of the GDR. Fuchs was then
named deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Physics at Rossen-
dorf near Dresden, where he remained for the next 15 years. Besides
receiving several prestigious state awards, he added his voice to the
East German government’s campaign for nuclear disarmament. He
died on 28 January 1988.FÜHRUNGSOFFIZIER. An intelligence officer directly responsible
for an individual agent, a Führungsoffizier was the common des-
ignation of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The three main
intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany, however,
rely on other terms. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz and
the Militärischer Abschirmdienst employ V-Mannführer, and
Verbindungsoffizier is the standard designation of the Bundesnach-
richtendienst.
FÜLLE, REINER (1939– ). A well-placed agent of the Hauptver-
waltung Aufklärung (HVA) in the Federal Republic of Germany
122 • FÜHRUNGSOFFIZIER