The Rest Is Classified - 30. The Spy Who Betrayed Oppenheimer: Showdown with MI5 (Ep 4)

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

What happens when the world’s most valuable spy is finally caught? How did British and American intelligence hunt him down? And, was Klaus Fuchs a hero, a villain, or something in between? Klaus Fuchs' final days as a free man were marked by growing suspicions, clandestine exchanges, and a relentless pursuit by MI5. The secrets he passed had already set the stage for a nuclear-armed Cold War, irreversibly altering the balance of global power. As the truth emerged, so too did the cost of his betrayal - a world reshaped by espionage, ideological conviction, and the stolen intelligence that fuelled an arms race. Listen as David and Gordon take you inside the mind of the man who stole the bomb - and the world he left in his wake. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The truth is, no one does it alone. And why would you want to? We all need someone to make us believe. Hashtag, you got this. By 2050, new cancer cases are projected to rise by 77%. It's why the Princess Margaret is reigniting our commitment to transform cancer outcomes in a quest we call Carry the Fire.

But we can't achieve this alone. We need your help. Together, let's carry the fire for a world free from the fear of cancer and give every cancer patient brighter tomorrows. Donate to the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation at CarryTheFire.ca My parents have had a lot of time on their hands lately. At first, it was nice. Hey Mom, can you drive me to soccer practice? Sure can.

We're having slow cooked ribs for dinner. It was awesome. And then it became a lot. Some friends are coming over to watch a movie. Ooh, what are we watching? I'll make some popcorn. Thanks to Voila, they can order all our fresh favorites from Sobeez, Farmboy, and Longos online, which is super reliable. And now my parents are reliable. A little too reliable.

Voila! Your groceries delivered. Just like that. I think about it, getting married from time to time. But you know, I'm walking through a minefield. One false move and it will all blow up. I can accept the worst case scenario but I can't involve a wife and children. Furthermore, to have a family in England is not part of my plans for the future.

I'd like to help the Soviet Union until it's able to test its atomic bomb. Then I want to go home to East Germany where I have friends. There I can get married and work in peace and quiet. That's my dream. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was Atomic Spy Klaus Fuchs speaking to his Soviet handler Eugene on a park bench in Putney Bridge Park, South London, near the Spotted Horse Pub, just months before

his world is going to come crashing down. It's one of your haunts, right Gordon? I don't actually know. It's one of the few pubs in South London I don't know, but it is one of the ones that Klaus Fuchs visited and that we might do on our Klaus Fuchs walking tour. Gordon will be there this Friday night from 7 to 9 p.m. representing the research. Classified for research. That's right. We're here with Klaus Fuchs now in 1949. He's been at the heart of the British atomic bomb project

at Harwell, having already been working on the bomb in America on Los Alamos all the time, spying for the Soviet Union. And despite some leads on him that MI5 have really failed to follow, he's kind of got away with it until now. But at this moment, crucially in 1949, things are going to go south for him. Well, that's right. And it's going to come down to the blunt fact that by 1949, the US in a program called Venona has figured out how to decrypt KGB communications inside the US in a program called Venona has figured out how to decrypt KGB communications inside the US. Now, this is a program that's being run out of the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service,

sort of a precursor to the National Security Agency, being run out of an old lady's finishing school in Arlington, Virginia. It's called Arlington Hall. It's got one of the first IBM processing machines, which is probably the size of a warehouse. And I think that story of how the Russian code was broken, Gordon, is kind of an episode in and of itself. I think it's one we'll do in the future. It involves brilliant American cryptologists who'd been working on this problem. And Gordon, Gordon. Well, it does. GCHQ is very involved in Venona from very early on. I was just on a roll there talking about how awesome this American effort was.

I just lost my flow here. It's like in the Afghanistan episodes where you brought up the special boat service, Gordon. Coming to save the day. Coming to save the day. So, brilliant American and some British cryptologists had been working on the problem for years, kind of pulling threads on these KGB communications, and they begin to show that the KGB had penetrated the Manhattan Project. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, it's interesting because the whole story of Winona is fascinating, but it's some diplomatic communications that the Soviets sent back home, which they used a one-time pad to encode it, but they used it twice. And by doing that, it allowed you to try and break the code. What's fascinating is that the Americans and the Brits are still working on Venona up to 1980 to try and decode some of these messages. But what they get are clues for the message, because you can break the code, but there are still basically fragments of the message you get rather than the full message. And often they involve the kind of cryptonyms, the code names for agents whose spying is basically being reported back to Moscow.

And that's what they get, which points, I think, crucially without naming them to their having been a spy in 1944, specifically passing details from the nuclear program. The fragmentary nature of the decoding here is important because it's going to influence why nobody is certain right away that it's Fuchs, right? Because in August of 49, they decipher this code name, REST, and they eventually discover, it's kind of sifting through all of these cables and really decoding pieces of them, that he's male, they have dates that he was in the US, they know he has a sister in the US, and they know that he passed a technical paper, MSN 12, to the Soviets, but they don't have a name and because of this fragmentary nature of the information, they can't immediately map it to Klaus Fuchs.

That's right, but the suspicion is there and they decode a few more of these documents. So, by the time I think you get to September, you've only got a few suspects, haven't you? That are possible because it looks like it's someone on the British team. I mean, Fuchs is in the mix, clearly, along with Piles as one of the possible suspects. The critical bit, which is they decode that he's a Brit, right? So they can kind of narrow it down to the team that was at Los Alamos in 44 and 45. And then that goes to the Brits. And that's passed, I think, in September, isn't it, to MI5 to start investigating this. And, you know, it's interesting, isn't it, because one of the problems you have with

this is Venona is so secret. So very, very few people know about it. In the US, I think J. Edgar Hoover, who's the head of the FBI, knows about it, but a lot of his team don't know about it. And it's the same at MI5, where this breakthrough is kept so secret that very few people are told about the Venona secret. So they've got this fact that they think there is a spy and a couple of possible suspects, but that is not enough actual evidence, but nor could you use Venona in court, even if

you had the name, because it's top secret that you're breaking these codes because they want to be able to catch more spies using it. So they've got this lead, but not actually enough to really do that much with it yet. Well, and I think there's also some confusion because I think Rudy Piles, another member of the team, actually had a sister in the States. The dates are a little confused. And the technical paper that this spy rest code name rest had passed, Fuchs is the author, but it's not necessarily the case that the author passed it, someone else could have gotten access to it. So the suspect pool is it's not just Fuchs, right? There's a handful of members of this British delegation that it could be. But of course, they have that adverse information

on Fuchs from before. They know that he had these communist sympathies going back to his Berlin days. And they have a report from a source inside the German emigrate community in Britain that those had continued up until the point where he actually went to the United States. And so I guess the sort of temperature inside MI5 starts to rise,

and they eventually decide to begin surveilling him properly and to kind of put this net around him. And so MI5 reads his mail, they tap his phone at home and at his office, they put something called an SF on the phone. It's essentially like a small washer on the phone that enables them to listen to all of the calls that he has. They review his bank records. And MI5 at this point is not big. They establish round-the-clock physical surveillance.

And when you read through the actual reporting from MI5 at the time, you get a sense, I think, of just how straining this is on the organization to keep watch on him at all times. And they're carrying out the surveillance. And we should say, actually, a lot of these MI5 files have actually been declassified. And you can find them in the National Archives on Fuchs, which give a kind of insight into what was going on and that kind of surveillance that was taking place. But the truth is, they're not finding anything.

There's zero evidence that they're gathering from this surveillance. I mean, at this time, he's not really meeting his KGB handlers regularly. He'd become, as we saw last time, perhaps a bit conflicted about the Soviet Union and perhaps, you know, a bit more reluctant as well. And so, you know, there's very little evidence that they've got, even as they're trying to close the net. And this is, I think, a great quote from a guy named Henry Arnold, who's the head of security at Harwell, where Fuchs works building the British bomb. And he's someone who'd been, I think, suspicious of Fuchs, but also had befriended him and

was part of this kind of social circle. And what Arnold says is, you know, Fuchs is a very reserved man. He's mentally tough. He is fond of both whiskey and women and can take a large amount of alcohol without being affected. He is a man who is not only brilliant intellectually, but also extremely shrewd from a practical point of view. You know, you get the sense that by this point in his espionage career, Fuchs has become a very worthy adversary for MI5. Now, MI5 gives him a code name. They call him Ramsey in the documents.

The investigation is led by an MI5 investigator named James Robertson. They have a team of listeners, which are young, I think all female MI5 employees, that basically sit as a transcription team that work from the side room at this old post office outside of Hartwell. One of them speaks German just in case Fuchs speaks in his native tongue. They have a cover story that they're there as sort of post office relief staff

working on a statistical study of calls passing through that exchange. So they're listening to every single call that he's making. They are opening his mail using a steam kettle and checking for invisible ink. Of course, none of this is going to work to catch Fuchs because he's not sending anything to his Soviet handlers. And the physical surveillance that MI5 has to conduct is actually very hard because, at least my understanding, Gordon, is that this area at that point was pretty sparse, pretty treeless in parts. And so to actually watch him as he's driving away from Harwell was very complicated and took multiple teams. And I think the signs are that actually at various

points Fuchs might realize he's under surveillance, I think, at this time and is aware of it. He's smart enough to know that. And pretty much the only thing they find out about him is that he seems to be having this very close relationship with Erna Skinner, the wife of one of his colleagues. Who's calling him all the time. That's the main thing that they've worked out. And I think it's worth saying that beyond this surveillance, something critical also happens in September 1949, which is that the Soviets test the nuclear bomb at that moment. Just as Venona's made the breakthrough in August, they're working on the surveillance

in September. Then at this moment, talk about the temperature going up and the significance going up, because suddenly years ahead of when anyone thought they'd be able to do it, the Soviets conducted a nuclear test. I mean, this is a kind of shocking moment for the West, isn't it? Particularly for the US, which thought it had effectively a nuclear monopoly, which was going to give it freedom of maneuver for some period. And it's suddenly gone. And so, the question is, immediately, how did they do it? How did they manage to do it? And so, again,

the kind of pressure on MI5 on the question of whether there was a spy stealing secrets is really going up at this point to find out if there was a traitor. Again, I think you get a sense from the Oppenheimer movie about just how shocking this was because if listeners will recall, there are some scenes in black and white where Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. and basically everybody from the kind of key people in the Los Alamos team are seated around this round table. And at one point Robert Downey Jr. is holding up the results that this massive nuclear explosion had taken place inside the Soviet Union.

And there's almost disbelief, I think, at this point. And in fact, there's a delay between the test and Truman announcing it because there was so much, I think, just disbelief that the Soviets had done this. I believe the CIA estimates at the time didn't have the Soviets producing a bomb until maybe four or five years out, at least the early 50s. So this is totally, totally unexpected. And I think to some degree for Klaus Fuchs, who's knowledgeable of this, it's probably, you know, mission accomplished. He's helped the Soviets get exactly what he wanted them to have, which is an atomic bomb. Now, during one trip to London, Fuchs visits a photography supply shop,

and he's kind of looking for very small Kodak film. And the MI5 notes suggest that Fuchs is starting to understand that he is being watched. And so MI5 and kind of the back office investigation piece of this, you know, up to this point, Gordon, they certainly suspect Fuchs. I mean, he's one of a small number of Brits who are part of the delegation to the Manhattan Project, but they haven't been able to formally rule out other members, most importantly, Rudy Piles, who was Fuchs's mentor. And what ends up happening is that MI5 is scouring the files on their travel in the states and all of the reports that they had authored.

And they eventually construct a timeline. MI5 constructs a timeline that shows that Rudy Piles had left Los Alamos before that technical report, that MSN 12 report that had been handed to the Soviets, before that report had even been finished. And so with this very kind of mundane detail, they're able to eliminate Piles as the potential suspect and confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that Klaus Fuchs is rest the Soviet asset. Yeah. And it's interesting around this time as well, Klaus Fuchs is in touch with his father, and some messages come from the family. I think these are interesting because his father

has been offered a teaching position in Leipzig, which is in the Soviet part of Germany, and that will trigger a kind of a security question for Fuchs himself and he knows he's going to have to report that. And he also, I think it's significant here, he gets word that his sister, Christelle, who is the one who'd been the contact in America, is also mentally ill at this point and is having a breakdown, which as we've heard is kind of one of the issues with the family. So, you know, all of this is kind of happening at the same time, kind time in the last few months of 1949, where you've got Venona breaking and the investigation and surveillance of Fuchs. You've got the Soviets testing the bomb, which creates an even more intense hunt for who might have betrayed the secrets in the West.

You've got Fuchs' personal dilemmas involving his father going to a sensitive position and his sister being ill. And I think it looks like at this point MI5 realized their only hope for actually trying to effectively prove that it's Finks is to confront him and try and get a confession. So they've got no evidence that's actually admissible in court. Venona can't be used. So their only option at this point is to see if they can kind of leverage this information to try and get him basically to admit what he'd done. It's kind of a showdown, right? Man to man here. So what MI5 does is they have an interrogator,

a very experienced interrogator, although potentially maybe not so well suited for the job, which we'll talk about in Jim Skarden, who is going to use this, I guess, really the hook that Fuchs's father, Emil, is considering taking a position in East Germany. What MI5 is going to do is they're going to use that as a way to tell Fuchs, look, you're going to have to quit essentially working on this top secret atomic project if you have a father who is kind of under communist control and influence in East Germany. And so they kind of use that as I guess the initial bait to try to get Fuchs talking. Yeah, and it's worth just a moment on Skarden

because he's a figure who comes up quite a lot in this period as the kind of MI5 chief interrogator. It's a bit of mythology around him that he's this great interrogator. Actually, he's a thin figure with a moustache. He looks like the police inspector detective that he was before he joined MI5. But actually, his record is actually a little bit mixed as an interrogator because a couple of years before this, he's actually interrogated Sonya Ursula Kuczynski, who we heard about had been Fuchs' handler and fails to kind of land a finger on her in terms of interrogation. So he's the guy though who is going to be tasked with effectively trying to break Fuchs. And again, it's kind of interesting because he's been told Fuchs is under suspicion, but

Skardon has not been told about Venona. So he doesn't know why people believe he's a spy. He's just given the task of trying to prove that he's a spy. So he's going into the kind of the fight, the interrogation with one hand tied behind his back to some extent, but he's going to try and get that confession from him. Well, I guess the plan of your Skardon here is you sort of set it up as a friendly chat and you get Fuchs talking in the hopes that he'll incriminate himself and you probably do that by bluffing how strong your hand is, right? So it seems like it would have been helpful if Skardun had known about Venona to help with the bluff, but what am

I to say? So Skardun opens up, so he meets with Fuchs on Wednesday the 21st of December and he opens up by kind of saying, look, your father is taking this position in Leipzig and East Germany. That isn't really going to work if you're working at Harwell. And then he kind of gets Fuchs to go over his background. So Fuchs spends time talking about his youth at Germany for like an hour. And then out of the blue, Skarden breaks in and accuses Fuchs of spying and he uses New York as the example. Basically says, I know that you were in contact with the Soviets while you were in New York.

In 1944. Yeah, it's very specific. Very specific, which of course is true. But Fuchs is absolutely stunned. He kind of opens his mouth in surprise and then he polishes his glasses to maybe play for time, shakes his head and says, I don't think so. But Skardin is kind of poking around, I guess you'd call it being on a fishing expedition here, kind of bluff to see what kind of reaction he's gonna get. But he doesn't get really more specific than that in his accusations. He just keeps

coming back to this point around, you know, we know you were in touch with the Soviets in New York. And I think it's an interesting strategic move here because if he'd gotten more specific, even if he had used some of the Venona stuff, you wonder if you would have gotten to the confession more quickly. But he kind of allows Fuchs, I think, to gather himself, get his wits about him, and he just keeps up the denial. I think by saying, we know you passed information in New York in 1944, it's so specific, but it also, if you're Fuchs, you kind of go, if that's all they know, they don't know very much because he's been spying for seven years, and clearly they don't know about most of

it if that's all they've got. And so I think it possibly gives Fuchs a bit of confidence actually to think, I might be able to get away with this. And this is a very British interrogation, Gordon. So there's a lunch break. They stop at about 1245. Fuchs goes to the Skinners to see Erna. Erna had fixed him something soft for lunch.

Now if you remember back from episode one, Fuchs has a history of street brawls against Nazis, and he had lost teeth in one of those brawls. And recently he had broken the plate for his front teeth and was in a lot of pain. And so he has lunch. He has like scrambled eggs for lunch with Erna Skinner. He calls a dentist in Oxford to schedule an appointment. And then he goes back to the interrogation. And Skarden that afternoon says, he kind of raises the temperature a bit and says, we're going to have to fire you because of your father's job in East Germany.

Says the ministry doesn't know about all the spying, but with kind of a favorable report from Fuchs on his espionage activities, he might be able to stay at Harwell. And so there's this very weird thing where MI5 starts to say, look, if you just come clean, you can stay, you can keep this position. And they end the interview at 345. So Fuchs at this point has admitted

essentially to nothing other than his life experience and his youthful associations with Communists but certainly none of the espionage. Yeah and it's interesting the conclusion is Fuchs's demeanor throughout was wholly consistent with guilt or with innocence and we are therefore left with an extremely awkward situation on our hands. That's a very British understatement of the fact that we didn't get him. And this is going to be the first of a series of interrogations, but actually that point about if he admits he might be able to stay at Harwell is absolutely pivotal because that's going to be one of the key messages which Fuchs is kind of given, which is, hey, if you own up,

it might be all right. We just need to know about this. But if you kind of tell us everything that you did, you know, you might be able to stay at Harwell, maybe you may be able to go somewhere else. That is the implication of that and what comes out in some of the future interrogations. And it's going to be kind of quite important to what happens and to where it goes next. But I think at that moment, with Fuchs on the rack, but not having confessed, let's take a break. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN.

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They're going to kill me. Listen to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and so Klaus Fuchs has been interrogated not once, not twice, but many times by Jim Scardin, MI5's man who's been sent to confront him, but he's not cracked. He's not confessed. But then, and this is so interesting isn't it David finally on January 23rd Klaus Fuchs says he wants to see Scarden and it's because he's got something to say well, that's right And it's a predictably cold and wet January day and Scarden drives up and meets with Fuchs at his prefab

Concrete bunker that he lives in at Harwell. We didn't mention this Gordon earlier when we set up Harwell, but it's my understanding that in this period everyone was basically living in concrete boxes and so Klaus Fuchs has his own concrete box. Skardin shows up outside the box and says, you asked to see me and here I am. And Klaus Fuchs says, yes, it's rather up to me now. which I think has a very understated smiley-esque vibe to it. And for the next two hours, Klaus Fuchs comes clean. He talks again about his life story, his days in the underground in Germany, up to his present work. He actually confesses to having met with the Russians and shared these

atomic secrets with them. He talks about how he believed that Russia had really made the only sincere effort to defeat the Nazis. The body count of Russians would suggest that he's probably got something there, given how much they sacrificed, of course. And I think he also says that his internment had to some extent shaped his views of Britain's shameful compromises with Hitler. Now, initially not a whole lot is new, but what Skardin will say is that there's kind of urgency and emotion to it. And at this point, Skardin says, you know, you've told me a long story providing the motives for actions, but nothing about the actions themselves. And Fuchs says, I will never be persuaded by you to talk. And then Gordon, they have lunch, which again, you know, these interrogations are very

polite, I would say. They actually go to Abingdon, they have lunch, they have coffee in the lounge, and then they go back to Harwell for another round of this. And it's here in the afternoon session back in that prefab that Fuchs confesses and really tells all and he says he was compelled by a duty to the world to pass information to the Russians. So that's why he says he passed information to the Russians. But why does he confess? I think it's fascinating, isn't it? Because until now, he's effectively got away with it. And you know, he may not realize it, they have nothing on him. I mean, without this confession, they have nothing. And yet, at this point, he is going to tell them maybe

not quite everything, but a lot of what he's up to. Well, I think his case officer, Eugene, who's Sasha Feklasov, believes that Fuchs at this stage was in the grip of a psychological crisis, kind of a breakdown in that controlled schizophrenia we talked about in the last episode, which by the way, the case officer will make a connection between Fuchs' psychological state and that of his mother and his sister, both of whom had killed themselves. And what Fecklusov, what the case officer will say is that Fuchs felt like his mission had been accomplished with the Soviet bomb test. You know, there's one element here, which is my work is done.

And because he had been led to believe that he'd really only be stripped of his security clearance if he confessed, and that he'd be able to kind of safely retire and hold on to that community in Harwell to some extent. So I'll give you my view, which perhaps goes back to my slight, dare I say it, sympathy for Fuchs at this point. I think a few things have happened. One is maybe his pro-communist ideology has dimmed with what's happened to the Soviet Union. I think he's genuinely come to care about England and Britain in a slightly different way, and he's become attached to people, including perhaps Ernest Skinner, perhaps others, whom

he might have also confessed to beforehand. I think it is that possibility that he might be able to stay that is driving him, and the thought actually he can continue within this community at Harwell, perhaps if he confesses, that gets to him. But I also think there's one other factor which is interesting is that he does seem to be trying to protect his sister, Christelle. I think Frank Close, you know, in his book Trinity talks about this a bit, that the suggestion that Fuchs was also worried about her because she's actually in a psychiatric hospital at this point and given everything that's happened to the family, he wants to also protect her. And there's some suggestion that the FBI might be onto her and might put pressure on her.

And I think there is also a desire to protect his family there, which leads him to think, I can take the heat off her and by taking responsibility myself and admitting some of this. So I think it's a kind of mix of reasons, but I think it is also that sense, you know, we talked about the compartments in his minds, the controlled schizophrenia. I think this is the moment they break down, I guess, and he realized he can't manage those two compartments separately anymore in the way he could at the past. And I think he's just got to unburden himself. Well, that is a very charitable view, Gordon, and it actually reads just like the sort of memoir of Fuchs's case officer who really, you know, seems to have had tremendous

respect for Klaus Fuchs and makes many of the same points that you just did. I mean, the other piece to this, which I think we should probably address, is there's probably some egomania involved here. Maybe, maybe. I'm not sure about that with him. Fuchs thinks he's indispensable to the British atomic bomb project and therefore if he just admits he can continue on, he's so necessary they can't get rid of him. He's kind of the centerpiece. I do think that the connections that he had made at Harwell had anchored him to Great Britain in

a way that he had not been anchored anywhere else since he had fled Germany. And what his handler will say is the memories had troubled Fuchs's mind and paralyzed his willpower. And that the absolute key to his breakdown was that he was being accused of something that could only be corroborated by a confession. And Fuchs, had he been in a different mental state, I think, might not have broken down and admitted to anything,

but with the Soviet bomb done, with his sister in done, with his sister in crisis, with him probably believing that he was critical to the project at Harwell, all these things sort of conspire to get him to confess. Yeah, I think that's right. But interesting enough, MI5 have a problem here because he's confessed to Skarden, but this isn't a written confession. He hasn't been cautioned.

I mean, this is not actually admissible, this confession. And so, they realize that they've actually got to go ahead and get a written confession from him. And they've also got this slight problem that there has been arguably inducement. In other words, he's been offered something to confess this issue, you might be able to stay at Harwell. And so, MI5 have got kind of quite an awkward issue about dealing with that. And so, they then have to bring him in again to take him to London and caution him and get him, they hope, to do a written confession. And until he does that, they still haven't got him yet. So, that's still a crucial moment. And actually, when it comes to his prosecution, it's one of the weaknesses. They know if the defense go for them

over the issue of inducement and that he'd been induced, actually the whole prosecution might fall apart. Yeah, because they would make the case that he had been told, look, if you confess, you can stay. And so there's kind of a quid pro quo. As a sidebar, Fuchs' handler in his memoirs, as a Soviet handler, is absolutely perplexed,ed Gordon that Fuchs has not been arrested at this point in this back and forth for weeks over getting the formal confession. He calls it quote island mentality of the British, which allowed you to keep rule of law might be a better a better way to describe it. That island mentality that prevented you from from shooting him immediately upon confession. It's also interesting because Fuchs doesn't make a run for it, right?

Which I think is a point in favor of this idea that he's anchored to this place, and he doesn't want to run. But eventually, he does, of course, confess, and he writes it down. And on February 2nd of 1950, Fuchs is summoned to a meeting in London where he is arrested. He's surprised by this. He slumps into a chair. He had maybe been thinking that by confessing, he would avoid the arrest.

I'm going to suggest that may have been implied to him. I mean, that's clearly what he believed. In my sympathy to Klaus Fuchs, please close your ears if you work for MI5 at this point, I have more sympathy with Fuchs than MI5 at this point because I feel like they, you could argue they've tricked him. They've tricked him into confessing and he thought, well, you know, I'm going to confess, I might stay at home. And then suddenly like, they're slapping on the handcuffs and like, off you go to prison. And then, you know, the next thing he knows, he's out. I mean, he's been tricked into this, hasn't he? But how else were they going to arrest him? And then, you know, the next thing he knows, he's out. I mean, he's been tricked into this, hasn't he?

But how else were they going to arrest him? Well, I mean, he was guilty. Don't get me wrong. You bring up a great point, though, which is everybody knows from the decryption of the Venona communications and the then sort of paper investigation to whittle down the British suspects to fukes that everybody knows it's fukes right but you just can't prove it which I guess is how you get to these kind of slippery cop situations where you know somebody's guilty you just have to fabricate some evidence to

make sure it stands up in no no I wouldn't do that this is slightly different from that but there's a there is an issue to that but he's charged under the Official Secrets Act which didn't carry the death penalty I think think everyone in America was like, send him to the chair. But you know, that was not an option in this case. And so the maximum penalty is only 14 years. And then he is put on trial in the Old Bailey in March 1950. And he is visited by Rudy Piles in prison. This is very interesting is that Rudy Piles asks him, is his old mentor, very interesting, is that Rudy Piles asks him,

this is his old mentor, you know, asking him, why did you do this? I mean, Rudy Piles is a guy who Fuchs has betrayed throughout the 1940s consistently. And Fuchs says, knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country, but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind. So I think we see here again, this self-assurance of the true believer, somebody who has the fate of the world on their shoulders and who is able to make these decisions and in fact has the ideological certainty around their actions to make these kind of massive decisions for the benefit of their tribe or their group, right? We come now, Gordon, to a point in the story, which for those who've listened

out to all the episodes, you should be aware that we decided to do this story solely so we could tell this story. No, we didn't. Here, which is that the trial in the Old Bailey, which happens in March of 1950, the judge is a guy named Rainer Goddard, who's I guess the last of the hanging judges, Gordon. They put the black cap on and literally passed sentence for people to be killed. Judge Goddard is a borderline psychotic bully who was very excited throughout his career in announcing death sentences.

And throughout the trial was apparently visibly disappointed that he was not able to have Fuchs executed for treason because again he's being tried under the Official Secrets Act. The maximum penalty is 14 years. Now according to Goddard's clerk, his pleasure at issuing the death penalty was so extreme that he would ejaculate when condemning a prisoner to death and quote, a fresh pair of trousers had to be brought to court on these occasions. Now no such trousers were required for the Fuchs trial because it was not a capital case. I am disappointed at you telling that story, David, because I feel you have stained the reputation of our podcast and of the British judiciary in one felled sweep.

And I just think it's, it's disappointing. And you've let yourself down, I think, as well as the memory of Judge Goddard. The memory of Judge Goddard. And his trousers. The frame trousers will also be on display during the rest is classified, uh, pub tour around, around London. The Klaus Fuchs, uh, pub, pub experience will include that. But again, it's a very, despite the judges proclivities, it's a very quick trial, it lasts one hour and 20 minutes, Klaus pleads guilty to four counts of espionage, he gets 14 years. And it's done.

He's eventually in prison, stripped of his British citizenship. Which I think hurts him. I think that's a blow to him. Yeah. Yeah. Big blow. But he is kind of in prison. He's kind of a model citizen, isn't it, Gordon?

I mean, he gets along well with the other prisoners. I think he actually studies economics while he's in prison and he's a very well behaved prisoner. He's got good behavior and the sentence gets reduced by a third because of his good behavior. So there's a lot of, of course, fanfare around the trial and his imprisonment, but he ends up being released on the 23rd of June 1959. So, you know, after serving just about eight years, and I think, you know, the reaction to his quick release was kind of mixed. I mean, there were headlines in the British press saying, good riddance, and another fuchs,

no resentment. And, you know, there's interviews with former inmates, where one of them said, the doc is one of the best. One of the interesting things is Rudy Piles and his wife write a letter to him when he's being released saying, do you need any help when you're out, when you're finished, which he doesn't reply to. But there's something I find quite interesting that for Rudy, you know, this guy who's technically betrayed him, he still has a kind of affection, loyalty for him.

So amongst the scientists, I think amongst his own community, weirdly, I think there's a kind of understanding of why he did it and actually, strangely, a sympathy for him rather than what you might expect, which is a sense of betrayal. But, you know, for Fuchs himself, he's lost his British citizenship. So strangely, he goes back home, back to Germany, this time East Germany, communist East Germany, for his remaining days. The Soviets don't quite know what to think about him. The KGB are probably a bit annoyed he confessed, I imagine. They also, I think, don't want to acknowledge perhaps how much he'd given them and what he'd done because in their eyes they want to emphasize the heroic contribution of their own

scientists rather than the idea that the Soviet bomb had come through espionage. So again, on that side, he doesn't quite get the kind of recognition. He's not turned in any way into a hero in that strange afterlife he has in East Germany, where I guess he lives out his days. You know, I think Gordon,

one of the major questions that this story raises is what advantage did Fuchs actually provide the Russians in the end? Because, you know, he delivered these incredible atomic secrets, but would the Russians have developed the bomb anyway? I think they were working on it, but I think he shortcuts their process by years. I mean, some of the Soviet scientists will later kind of say one to two years, but I think that's probably them playing it down because they want to emphasize their own work. I think it's probably multiple years that he saves them in terms of their ability to get the bomb.

I think that does matter because at this period in the early Cold War, the US believed it had the advantage. Fuchs has effectively taken away years where the Americans could have had a freer hand in that early Cold War. And I think what the consequences are for that, it's quite hard to say. It's a bit of a counterfactual, isn't it?

Whether actually what America might have done if it had had a few more years of the nuclear monopoly. I mean, whether potentially things could have got hotter or not. But ultimately, you know, you end up moving faster to the world of mutually assured destruction and deterrence. And that, I think, is what Fuchs wanted. His drive was the idea that the Soviets should have the bomb as a deterrent rather than for it to be used.

Well, I think the Fuchs case and really the era in which he's spying, I mean, prior to the atomic age, I guess, or the dawn of the atomic age, it had always been the case that, you know, a nation's technological prowess or capabilities, I mean, there's always an intelligence target there, right? I mean, if you're spying on the Germans, you wanna know what kind of

tanks do they have and how many and you know, how do they build them. But the bomb actually changes the I guess the targets of intelligence to some degree, because you now in sort of the Manhattan Project, as a starting point, you have the direct application of scientific theory to warfare. And so what the KGB and the GRU are spying on is our scientific establishment, right? It's the scientists and the institutions that are directly applying the science to weaponry. That had not really been the case prior.

And so you can draw some direct line from Klaus Fuchs to today. I mean, really, you know, right through Los Alamos around these intelligence targets being scientists, being people who are working on the next generation of basic research that's going to feed the weaponry. Yeah. And the importance of having nuclear bombs. I mean, you know, you could see the way in which Russia was able to invade Ukraine and

do certain things, knowing it had those nuclear weapons as as cover, you know, just goes back to that point of the power of having nuclear weapons. And there was there was nothing like it. But last point, Klaus Fuchs, the the man what's your view hero villain villain. Yeah yeah i'm he gave the he gave the plans to the atomic bomb to the soviet union what he did was treacherous and villainous but the man himself i can't help but think. can't help but think people described him as an honorable man. Now, I think you can just who are these people Gordon? Who are these people? Some of his colleagues said it was a kind of I think it goes back to where we started, which is this was a man who followed his conscience, you know, and

it was brought up to follow his conscience. These are dangerous, dangerous sorts of people. Did what he thought was right. And so look, I am not saying hero, I am not going to take the opposing side just to make the point. But I do think he is an interesting, complicated figure. No, that is certainly true. And hero or villain oftentimes is not the most interesting question. It is certainly the case that the Life and Times and Espionage and High Treason of Klaus

Fuchs are intensely interesting. And it's also true, and I think just shows that anytime you have sort of these massive research efforts, weapons programs, there are going to be people like Klaus Fuchs who have very strong beliefs about what should be done with that power. And that's probably going to differ from their sort of political masters or the establishment above them. They're going to make their own decisions and those kinds of people are absolutely ripe for recruitment. Your final thought is beware scientists and beware nerds.

So on that note, thank you for listening to The Rest is Classified. Thank you for joining us on this journey with Klaus Fuchs and to the heart of Los Alamos and the nuclear program. See you next time. Watch out for nerds. See you next time.