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  MI5 quickly “Y-boxed” the file with a new sticker that overlaid its cluttered cover of stamps and file numbers. This new designation added security and meant that “this file when in transit must be in a closed envelope, addressed personally to the officer. HELD BY R5.” A specific person, rather than the Registry, would hold it to ensure against peeks from curious personnel, mistakes in delivery, and leaks. In this case, that person was Arthur Martin. “Indoctrinating” officers—that is, granting access to the secrets in this file—had to be approved by him or the director general of MI5.

  Klaus Fuchs’s security file was one for Martin to ponder. Clearly, Fuchs had kept MI5 busy throughout his sixteen years in England and Scotland—no speedy thumb through here. The details in the hundreds of pages led to vague connections and baffling contradictions. In Martin’s real-life game of whodunit, there was no answer card to correct a wrong guess.

  Fuchs had been investigated at least seven times, an unusually high number. Few months passed between 1939 and 1949 without his folder landing on someone’s desk for a review or approval. In Fuchs’s case, there was a work permit in 1941, naturalization in 1942, an exit permit to the United States in 1943, and security clearance in 1946 for his employment at Harwell, the main nuclear research facility in Britain and center for all projects on atomic energy.

  The last one was for a position as the head of the Theoretical Physics Division at Harwell. The letter requesting the security clearance explained that “there is, as far as we are aware, only one other person in this country who possesses qualifications and experience of Dr. Fuchs.”

  Clearances for top secret jobs and promotions required careful consideration and, on their own, would cause the formation of a security file. As Martin was about to discover, Fuchs’s file had a different origin. MI5 had opened it within a year of his arrival in England.

  Sitting in his office in Leconfield House, a supply of cigarettes within reach, Martin began his journey through Fuchs’s refugee life in Britain—the file pages worn, rumpled, and faded after fifteen years of scrutiny by others. The first nine dispelled expectations of typical interoffice squabbles and dictates from those in charge. The naked condemnation contained in this initial information—together with its questionable reliability—was stunning.

  The file began with a letter dated August 7, 1934. Four days before, twenty-two-year-old Klaus Fuchs had gone to the German consulate in Bristol to renew his passport, a seemingly innocent activity. He had been studying for a PhD in physics at the University of Bristol for about a year, and his German passport had expired in June. Staff at the consulate took his passport and forwarded it to the German embassy in London. The letter of August 7 was its response to Fuchs. For him to obtain a new passport, the police at his last place of residence in Germany had to certify that they had no objections.

  Two months later, Fuchs submitted his request for a certificate to the police in Kiel, his last official residence. Within the week, the German embassy sent him a letter refusing him a new passport. It gave him no reason. Instead, it offered to issue him “a short-term certificate”—one way only—to return to Germany.

  Britain had granted Fuchs asylum as a refugee from Nazi oppression. His life endangered in Germany, he couldn’t go back.

  Without a passport, Fuchs was stateless, stranded in Britain. It was a status becoming increasingly common to German refugees fleeing the Nazis and relatively easy to change. One simply applied to the Home Office to extend the time-limited residence permit.

  Martin requested the Home Office’s records on Fuchs, and they showed that year after year the government had rolled over his residence permits until 1938, when he gained permanent residence without a time limit. The only restriction imposed because of his statelessness was on travel outside the U.K. For this he needed official approval.

  What Martin read next suggested more than a citizenship problem. At the time of the passport request in 1934, the German Foreign Office in Berlin had returned Fuchs’s original letter to the consulate. On the back, the Gestapo in Kiel had scrawled a note. Translated, it read,

  The Student Klaus Fuchs, born 29.12.11 at Russelsheim was as per card presented here and dated 31.8.31 until 3.3.32 member of the Social-Democratic Party. Here he was excluded 1932. Fuchs joined then the Communist Party and worked for this Party as orator in the election-campaigns. Fuchs was leader of the Nazi commission of the Sea District, the task of which it was to break up the National-Socialist Party.

  Under strict confidentiality, the consul had forwarded the denunciation to the chief constable of Bristol, who sent a report to the director general of MI5 and the Home Office:

  The above-named German subject landed at Folkestone on the 24th September, 1933, conditionally that he registered at once with the Police, and that he did not remain in the United Kingdom longer than three months. . . . Information has now been given to the Police by Mr. Carl Ludwig Herweg, Secretary to Mr. C. Hartley Hodder, German Consul . . . that Fuchs is a notorious Communist. . . . During his stay in this City Fuchs is not known to have engaged in any communist activity.

  * * *

  —

  Disadvantaged by the fifteen-year gap since the incident, Martin didn’t know how intelligence officers had weighed the chief constable’s paraphrase of Fuchs as “a notorious Communist” against his observation that Fuchs’s record in Bristol was unblemished.

  He tracked the critiques through the file’s pages and found that during the war, with Nazi atrocities emblazoning headlines, MI5 had treated this report from the Gestapo as highly suspect—most likely propaganda. For a start, the Nazis lumped all Jews, Social Democrats, and communists together. MI5 analysts awarded Fuchs the benefit of the doubt, especially given that the government wanted and needed his scientific expertise.

  Martin skipped through the next eight years in the security file to find another troubling incident. Back in 1942, an MI5 informant had asked whether Klaus Fuchs was “identical with a certain CLAUS FUCHS.” Claus Fuchs was a physicist of about thirty years old, had been interned in Canada, and in the camps became a close friend of a German communist named Hans Kahle, who was very active politically.

  The question referred to the British internment of about thirty thousand “enemy aliens” at the outset of the war. Most of these—German and Italian refugees who were not yet naturalized British citizens—were Jewish, like the vast majority of émigrés, although Fuchs and Kahle were not. Wary of the costs of corralling masses of scared and angry young men, the British had simply transferred several shiploads to Canada. The camps there were full-fledged prison compounds: barbed-wire fences, spotlights, and sentry towers. Some had volatile mixtures of Germans: Jews, Nazi POWs, and communists.

  Was “Claus Fuchs” the same as Klaus Fuchs? The file gave Martin no immediate response, but digging through the minutes, he did find a later internal dispute that led to a conclusion: Klaus Fuchs had been shipped to Canada. Therefore, Klaus Fuchs and Claus Fuchs were probably “identical,” and thus he was the friend of Hans Kahle, someone whose own security file included charges of being a Soviet agent.

  The last document that drew Martin’s attention originated from an MI5 informant who gathered gossip from communist groups in various British cities. The informant, “Kaspar,” had heard that both Klaus and his brother, Gerhard, who now lived in Switzerland, had belonged to the German Communist Party. According to the rumor, Klaus never achieved any prominence in the party, but Gerhard was part of the “German Communist Apparat.” Klaus had fled to Prague and was not involved in political activity there. In the U.K., he was part of “the usual Communist propaganda,” according to Kaspar, but again not prominent. He concluded, “He bears a good personal reputation and is considered a decent fellow.”

  Was what Martin had extracted enough? Condemnation by the Nazis; a possible communist friend in an internment camp; and a report from Kaspar that stressed the actions of Gerha
rd and diminished those of Klaus. Did this give him an understanding of who Klaus Fuchs was? Most of the content argued and reargued Fuchs’s reliability. Forms gave a basic timeline. There were no interviews of friends or colleagues. Voluminous though MI5’s file was, Fuchs the person was a vague figure.

  One thing was clear: that during the war everyone knew that Fuchs could be a problem but hoped he wouldn’t be. At a point when bombs pelted England, killing residents and burning cities, an MI5 officer had to decide about a work permit for Fuchs to do secret research. He called a colleague and asked if it was “really serious” if the research ended up with the Russians. Could they “employ someone else instead of FUCHS”? the other person responded. Notes on the conversation read, “I said I thought that was the crux of the matter, and that if the work could not be done properly without FUCHS, we should have to accept such risk as there might be.” With devastation surrounding them, the British desperately looked to science for an edge to victory. After all, Hitler was still on their doorstep and could win. Fuchs received the permit.

  Not all agreed with this rationale. One MI5 officer, a hardened veteran of the Battle of Dunkirk, asked “whether a man of this nature who has been described as clever and dangerous, should be in a position where he has access to information of the highest degree of secrecy and importance.” To him, the evidence was enough to bar Fuchs from war research.

  Martin read a particularly telling exchange from 1943 when Fuchs needed an exit permit to go to the United States with the British Mission on Atomic Energy. An MI5 officer wrote to Michael Perrin, already a highly respected scientist and administrator with the government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. DSIR was the official employer of the British team in the United States. Was Fuchs scheduled to stay in the United States? MI5 wanted to know. Perrin said no.

  A month after the British mission’s and Fuchs’s arrival in the United States, Perrin reversed his reply because Professor Rudolf Peierls, a close colleague to Fuchs and a senior member of the British team, requested that Fuchs remain there. Knowing that some MI5 officers had “slight doubts” about Fuchs, Perrin wanted to ensure that there was no problem. “This is a very important matter vis-à-vis the Americans,” he wrote, “and I want to be quite sure that we do not slip up in any way.”

  From the vantage point of 1949, Martin followed MI5’s internal deliberations in the file, one that Perrin wasn’t privy to:

  [Fuchs is] rather safer in America than in this country . . . away from his English friends. . . . [I]t would not be so easy for FUCHS to make contact with Communists in America, and that in any case he would probably be more roughly handled were he found out.

  Martin saw that the letter Perrin received from MI5 had said much less. It read,

  It is considered that there would be no objection to this man remaining in the U.S.A. as he has never been very active politically, and recent reports endorse the good opinion you have of his behaviour in this country.

  And then came the caveat, which MI5 had added for Perrin’s eyes only:

  It would not appear to be desirable to mention his proclivities in the U.S.A. and we do not think it at all likely that he will attempt to make political contacts in that country while he is there.

  The restraint and composure of MI5’s approval belied the serious consequences of a miscalculation. Then, and throughout the war years, the agency’s calm tone of denial covered a sea of doubt.

  * * *

  —

  From Fuchs’s file sprang contradictions built on misinformation and misunderstanding that befuddled MI5’s insight into what drove him. But even if they had grasped the inner sense of justice that dictated his actions, they might have been confused. He came from a world that had to be lived or seen in deep relief to comprehend. For perspective, they might have harked back to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious turmoil of their own ancestors whose beliefs were indestructible in the face of torture and death. Those days of beheadings over faith and hiding holes for priests were not so different from the turbulent times that shattered post–World War I Germany. In this light, they might have understood that it wasn’t science that compelled Fuchs but an unwavering commitment to ideals that grew out of early years engulfed in political strife. That was the root of his story and of his being. That is what they needed to know, but didn’t.

  Clearly, what the Brits did know was that they were playing the odds, Russian roulette perhaps. And just as clearly, they intentionally failed to tell the Americans about the bullet in the chamber.

  I

  RESISTANCE

  Nazi student group before the main building of the University of Kiel, 1938

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings, Leipzig 1930

  Who was this Klaus Fuchs? Communist. Physicist. Potential spy. What motivated him? Where did this amalgam of technical genius and ideology come from?

  The last of those questions is the only one with a direct if simplistic answer. Klaus Fuchs came from Eisenach, Germany, a small town that pulsed with eight hundred years of history and culture. High above the Market Square that young Klaus crossed daily on his way to school was the Wartburg, an eleventh-century fortification. A symbol of protection and stability on a 1,350-foot rocky prominence, it had been Martin Luther’s refuge from Charles V in 1521, when he translated the New Testament into German. In the center of the town was the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Klaus’s own birth, on December 29, 1911, was actually in Rüsselsheim, just south of Frankfurt, where his father, Emil, was the rector of the redbrick Lutheran church in the middle of town. From the family’s thatched-roof cottage, Emil penned his weekly sermons as well as articles for its Evangelical Community Newsletter. On March 3, 1918, with the world war in its third year, he wrote one thanking God for Germany’s new treaty with Russia that removed the Eastern threat. He awaited the collapse of England—a “robber nation,” he called it—so that a free Germany with “a spiritual life of such power and purity, a state life of such justice,” could emerge to create world peace. Like many Germans, he was still optimistic that the long war would soon end, with Germany victorious.

  That summer, as fresh troops from America joined the battle and the Allies began turning back the last German offensives, the family moved to Eisenach. The church had assigned Emil a working-class parish drawn from the automobile industry there. He rented a house high on a hill overlooking the city—close to the Wartburg—with a garden and enough space for their goats.

  Despite the humiliation of Germany’s surrender six weeks before Klaus’s seventh birthday, the kaiser’s abdication, and the political and economic chaos that followed, the family still managed to enjoy their new home. The children celebrated holidays with friends; Emil wrote a play they performed at Christmas; little Klaus made a gizmo from a small piece of wood and gave a “serious” lesson to his class on his technique.

  Klaus and his sister Kristel, two years younger, grew into playmates, exploring a fantasy world from a big gall at the base of a backyard tree that transformed into a horse (for her) or a camel (for him) and, on a sunny afternoon, offered a ride of imagination across the countryside. In quiet hours, he taught her to read. She watched as he built mazes and running wheels for his pet mice. His concern for animals led him to become a dedicated vegetarian at an early age. At twelve, he became so seriously anemic that his parents sent him to a clinic in Switzerland for a cure.

  Emil transferred his older son, Gerhard, to the Odenwaldschule in August 1923. A sylvan oasis that combined theology, socialism, and educational reform, the boarding school was founded by an imposing tall, slim man with a full black beard and intense, deep-set piercing eyes named Paul Geheeb. Over time Geheeb and his wife became close to the whole Fuchs family, who one by one or in pairs escaped there for rest and recovery—especially Emil, who often sought respite from general life. Klaus loved his visits.

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  “But little by little,” as Emil recalled, “political developments cast their shadows over cheerful work and family life.”

  All over Germany, angry and unemployed veterans rallied and sometimes rioted in the streets, protesting the ineffectual, socialist government that had replaced the empire and the supposed “stab in the back” by Jews and communists that the right wing said accounted for Germany’s defeat, and after such sacrifice!

  German soldiers had drowned in the mud and blood of the trenches, while civilians had suffered extreme privations. Especially during the so-called Turnip Winter of 1916–17, when there was little else to eat, Germans had made ersatz “coffee” out of tree bark and joked that they were forced to eat ersatz cats and mice. The Quakers set up feeding stations for the severely malnourished children. Emil wandered dead tired in villages, going to friends of a cousin to buy food for his family. He kept them fed, but he could do little about the lack of heating fuel during the bitter cold.

  After Germany’s humiliating surrender, the Allies’ blockade continued in order to extend the suffering and force harsh treaty terms, including the payment of reparations that crippled the economy. The French occupied the Ruhr to carry off German coal, and then came three years of dizzying inflation: 1 million marks for a loaf of bread until the next week, when the price doubled or tripled, finally hitting 200 billion marks.