Atomic Spy Read online

  Also by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  THE END OF THE CERTAIN WORLD:

  The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

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  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:

  This page: Photo courtesy of the Library and Archives of Canada, based on PA-143488.

  This page: Photo courtesy of the Buneman family.

  This page: Photo from Heritage Image Partnership Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo.

  Photo on this page by Ferdinand Urbahns; photo on this page is from Los Alamos National Lab; and photo on this page is from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 9780593083390 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780593083413 (ebook)

  Cover design: Jason Ramirez

  Cover images: (mushroom cloud) Ian Dagnall / Alamy Stock Photo; (Klaus Fuchs) Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration; (Fat Man blueprint) Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  To my husband, Stanley, who always believed that the children and I could do what we set our minds to. He led by example; he inspired us.

  And to my friend Gustav Born, who generously allowed me to write the biography of his father, Max Born, the experience that led me down this path.

  Contents

  Prologue: Revelation, London, August 1949

  I. RESISTANCE

  1. Beginnings, Leipzig 1930

  2. Loss, Kiel 1931

  3. Revolt, Kiel 1932

  4. Leader, Kiel 1933

  5. Underground, Berlin 1933

  6. Interlude, Paris 1933

  II. RESCUE

  7. Safety, Bristol 1933

  8. War, Edinburgh 1937

  9. Internment, England 1940

  10. Internment, Canada 1940

  III. RESEARCH

  11. Tube Alloys, Birmingham 1941

  12. Manhattan Project, New York 1943

  13. Trinity, Los Alamos 1944

  14. Director, Harwell 1946

  IV. RECONNAISSANCE

  15. Suspects, London, September 1949

  16. Surveillance, Harwell, September 1949

  17. Disposal, London, October 1949

  18. Interrogation, London, November 1949

  V. RESULTS

  19. Disposal Again, London, January 1950

  20. Confession, Harwell, January 1950

  21. Arrest, London, February 1950

  22. Trial, London, March 1950

  23. The FBI, London, May 1950

  24. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, 1950 and On

  VI. RETURN

  25. East Germany, Berlin 1959

  26. Expectations, Dresden 1960

  Epilogue: Remembrances, Berlin, March 1989

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  Revelation, London, August 1949

  On September 10, 1949, Michael Perrin’s phone rang in the middle of the night. The message was simple, direct, and urgent: come to the American embassy immediately.

  Perrin, deputy director of Britain’s longtime atomic energy program, jumped in a taxi for the five-mile trip south from Hampstead to 1 Grosvenor Square, where U.S. State Department officials hustled him into the communications room. There he learned the content of several coded telex messages from the Pentagon. The U.S. Air Force, using specially equipped planes, had detected radiation in the atmosphere. The only explanation could be the explosion of an atomic bomb. The United States needed an RAF plane to conduct additional tests to confirm the findings.

  One week later, Perrin gathered with other experts for a meeting of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee at the Ministry of Defense at Whitehall. To the surprise of many JIC members, the room was first cleared of secretaries and “anyone else who could not keep what was going to be said to himself,” placing the meeting, as one observer described it, “under a melodramatic bond of secrecy.”

  A balding physicist with a serious countenance, Perrin somberly explained that the radiation detected was most likely the result of a Russian A-bomb test, most likely in the area of Lake Baikal. RAF airplanes outfitted with special filters had “obtained particles which have been definitely identified as plutonium,” though he acknowledged that there was still some doubt about the specifics.

  The committee approved Perrin and the director of MI6 to brief Prime Minister Clement Attlee at his country home, and the two men hastened up to Putney. But Attlee was already aware of these dire developments. He and President Harry Truman had been in contact by telegram.

  Four years had passed since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the war had brought a significant realignment of the world’s major powers. Having sided with the Western democracies against the Nazis, the Soviet Union had emerged from the war—at least in the eyes of its former allies—as the greatest threat to the current peace. Joint Intelligence Committee papers had projected that the Russians would have a bomb by 1950 at the earliest, more reasonably in 1952. British military forecasting relied on these assessments. If the radiation was truly from a Russian test, how could this have happened so quickly? How could Soviet science have leaped so far ahead?

  In classic understatement, one participant in the meeting noted the significance of the A-bomb test in his diary: “The [Joint Intelligence Committee] papers will, of course, have to be revised.”

  * * *

  —

  Not far from Buckingham Palace, in an unassuming office building of ordinary brick and limestone near Hyde Park Corner, a man sat examining top secret memos that might provide the answer to Russia’s mysterious go-ahead. There was nothing about the man, Arthur Martin, to suggest international intrigue, even less so derring-do. The same was true of the building nestled in among the pubs and grocery shops of Curzon Street—except perhaps for some bricked-in windows. The gun ports on one side might strike an equally odd note for the careful observer. The bricks and the ports had been devised as last-ditch insurance against German paratroopers landing in Hyde Park during the war. The architectural anomalies made sense only if one knew that the unassuming building, Leconfield House, was the headquarters of MI5, the section of military intelligence tasked with hunting down spies on British soil.

  The memos in Martin’s care had originated across the Atlantic, where American and British code breakers toiling in Arlington, Virginia, had at long last made sense out of seeming nonsense. They had labored long and hard over a stack of coded messages sent between the Soviet consulate in New York and Moscow in 1944, back when the United States and the U.S.S.R. were closing in on German forces from opposite sides of Europe.

  Now, five years later, the decoded threads revealed evidence of a wartime traitor. Urgency and dread pulsated through a telegraph from the British embassy in Washington:

  We have discovered Material, which, though fragmentary, a
ppears to indicate that in 1944 a British or British-sponsored scientist working here on atomic energy or related subjects was providing Russians with policy information or documents.

  Agent’s cover name was initially Rest subsequently changed to Charles. In July 1944 he had been working for 6 months.

  On one occasion he handed over through cut-out report described as M.S.M. -1(part 3) subject of which appears to be fluctuations in stream or ray. . . .

  My present opinion is that this will prove grave matter.

  Again, British understatement held sway.

  Arthur Martin was relatively new as an intelligence officer at MI5, but he had a history with signals intelligence and encryption. He had spent five years at the Government Communications Headquarters securing its systems and examining those of foreign powers. Just recently he had been made liaison between GCHQ and MI5’s B Branch, counterespionage and counter-subversion, a division that was often the focus for high-profile action.

  * * *

  —

  For decades, MI5 had bugged the British Communist Party headquarters, routinely opened the mail of its members, and kept an eye on fellow travelers, and since the war it had doubled its efforts. It worried as it looked to the East. Moscow’s persistent pressure on Central and Eastern Europe had undermined nascent democratic governments. In March 1946, in a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill had described the Soviet menace with characteristically memorable prose: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

  In the face of Soviet expansion and propaganda, a weakened postwar economy that included continued rationing for food and gas in particular, as well as an acute housing shortage, made Britain vulnerable to leftist pressure. On the heels of World War II and the Great Depression, the austerity had pushed out Conservative governments and elevated left-wing ones to power, with Churchill sent back into the wilderness and Clement Attlee’s Labour government in control.

  A bright spot in the British firmament was science, a positive side effect of weapons research that included development of the atomic bomb. The nuclear age could give Britain the capacity to develop new forms of power and medicine, and new weapons. Many of its top scientists, partnered with their American counterparts, had tirelessly slogged in the Manhattan Project, the joint U.S.-U.K. effort to build an atomic bomb, and now Britain wanted its own. Until the British achieved that milestone, the Americans had a monopoly—or so they had thought before detecting radiation in the atmosphere.

  If Russia did have a bomb, and well ahead of schedule, it would shatter the West’s atomic hegemony. What would this portend for the security of Europe, and in particular the security of England? Moscow was only fifteen hundred miles from London. One burdened soul later agonized that with sufficient bombs the Soviets could “blot this country out entirely.”

  * * *

  —

  Arthur Martin chased suspects through clues on paper: studying the messages, reviewing the files, and slowly filling in the pieces of the puzzle. The tighter the pieces fit, the clearer the patchwork scheme became, and the more effectively field agents could operate.

  For this assignment, he had to penetrate the clues available in the decoded messages of the Russians and try to ferret out the traitor and what secrets he had betrayed. Hamstrung from lack of information, he could do little until the endless blocks of numbers in the coded messages yielded treasure. He waited.

  In a move to lift the veil, British intelligence officers in Washington told Martin that they were keen to dig into the 1944–45 files on the Manhattan Project. Their information was still fragmentary, but using the specifics they had—a scientist, perhaps British or British sponsored, working in the United States on a project probably related to atomic energy in 1944—they thought they could link the clues and identify the scientist who had betrayed them. A week later, they cabled Martin that they had come up empty, and any notion of an easy solution had evaporated.

  As the second week of the hunt rolled in, some light peeked through the clouds. The relentless chipping away of the code breakers in Arlington had extracted more information hidden in the blocks of numbers. The embassy sent Martin actual text from ten partially deciphered messages. But with the mixed bundle of fully deciphered sentences, partial ones, and large chunks of code that defied best efforts, he had plenty of head-scratching ahead. A message from New York to Moscow dated June 15, 1944, typified the decoded material he had in hand:

  To VIKTOR.

  [1 group unrecovered] received from REST the third part of report MSN-12 Efferent Fluctuation in a Stream [STRUYA]

  [37 groups unrecoverable]

  Diffusion Method—work on his specialty. R. expressed doubt about the possibility of remaining in the COUNTRY [STRANA] without arousing suspicion. According to what R. says, the ISLANDERS [OSTROVITYaNE] and TOWNSMEN [GOROZhANE] have finally fallen out as a result of the delay in research work on diffusion. . . . *

  *Only the latter part of the word has been recovered, but “Diffusion” is probable from the context.

  The code breakers had to turn seemingly random number blocks into Russian words and then into English, with specific code names requiring identifiers as well. Some of the identifiers were clear—“COUNTRY” was the United States, “ISLANDERS” were the British, and “TOWNSMEN” were the Americans. R, “REST,” was the mystery.

  * * *

  —

  Martin was different from most other officers in counterintelligence. He didn’t belong to the class of “gents” recruited from Oxbridge by way of Eton or Harrow, the toffs who dominated the intelligence establishment. His education was plebeian, and he made no attempt at clubbiness. Baby-faced and a heavy smoker, he kept a bottle of scotch in the desk drawer and drank it out of a coffee cup when needed. But he was a dedicated professional and a lawyer with meticulous focus, good intuition, and an analytical mind.

  The director of B Branch, Dick White, had brought him in, and they had a close relationship, both professionally and personally. Martin had married White’s secretary, Joan. Of course, in the symbiotic underworld of spying, the connection didn’t stop there. Before her marriage to Martin, Joan had carried on an affair with White.

  Scrutinizing the text of the ten new messages, Martin carefully extracted and listed the certainties along with the uncertainties. He could document that the spy called Rest was male, had been in the United States between March 1944 and July 1944, had worked on an Anglo-American scientific project, had contact with the report “MSN I-Efferent Fluctuations in the Stream,” and had a sister who probably lived in the United States. At least, the sister’s time in the United States overlapped with his. In 1944, an unknown Soviet agent visited this woman in October and possibly again in November. The key uncertainties were the nationality of the scientist, his possible transfer back to the U.K., the location of his sister, and the nature of the scientific project he’d worked on.

  The messages indicated that the British had considered transferring their researchers back to the U.K. because of tensions with the Americans. When confronted with this, the Americans countered that it would be a violation of the secret, scientific agreement that was part of the Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt. The messages didn’t indicate a decision about the transfer. Had Rest been posted to another position in the United States or sent back to the U.K.? Martin was left hanging.

  The British security officers in Washington worked closely with the FBI, the British shuttling between their embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and the FBI’s Washington field office housed in the Old Post Office Building near the White House. They both concluded that Rest had most likely infiltrated the Manhattan Project on the atomic bomb.

  MI5 and the FBI agreed on a concerted effort, which was to protect the top secret decoding project Venona, even if it slowed uncovering the identity
of the spy. Initiated on February 1, 1943, and continuing for decades, Venona was run by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed into the National Security Agency) as a means of decrypting messages transmitted by Soviet intelligence agencies. The longer the Russians stayed in the dark about Venona and the extent of Venona’s access, the longer Washington and London had an intelligence edge. Five-year-old messages could still betray valuable secrets.

  Martin met with his counterparts in MI6, the military’s division of foreign intelligence, to pinpoint the best entry into the maze of Rest’s identity. On September 1, the embassy in Washington cabled him that the FBI had identified two possibilities. Following the trail of clues from the report “Efferent Fluctuation in a Stream” that Rest had handed over, they made a breakthrough.

  That report had originated from the British scientific team. A particular physicist had written some papers for a research series, and his movements matched Rest’s. The FBI offered up the name of one Karl Fuchs, a naturalized British subject of German origin. According to their information, he had arrived in New York on December 3, 1943, and had then been transferred to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on August 14, 1944.

  The Washington team requested all information on this man. Their main questions: Did he have a sister in the United States? And if so, where was she?

  * * *

  —

  Martin now had a name to work with, except his request for a personal file on Karl Fuchs from MI5’s Registry came back unfilled. Klaus Fuchs, who had been a member of the British Mission on Atomic Energy in the United States, did have a file several inches thick, fattened with hundreds of documents.

  The file followed the standard MI5 format. Every letter or memo, every set of notes from a meeting, a phone call, or report, was paginated and clipped in the file chronologically. An index at the front of the file, denoted as “Minute Sheets,” briefly listed each document, its arrival date, and page number. Those privy to the file wrote comments to each other—called minutes—directly onto the index sheets. Plowing through it, Martin could follow the thread of confidential office dialogue to pry into the past interpretations and opinions of MI5 personnel.