The Spy Who - The Spy Who Started the Cold War | The Most Dangerous In History? | 5

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Why did Fuchs take such a huge gamble by sharing US nuclear secrets with the Soviets? Was Oppenheimer's fellow physicist seeking peace - or war? Charlie Higson talks to Frank Close, an author and physicist, about Fuchs' decision and its impact on the course of history.Listen to The Spy Who ad-free on Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-spy-who now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson and this is The Spy Who. Now, as you may know, I am a novelist, actor, comedian, and overall spy enthusiast. Although I have to say that my involvement with the world of spying is more on the fantasy level of James Bond than the more serious real world of espionage that this podcast explores. And a very serious episode today

as we take one last dive into the brilliant, complex, but at times rather odd mind of Klaus Fuchs. Now, thanks to the film Oppenheimer, this key moment in history, the development of the atomic bomb, has been brought back into the spotlight, giving us all a chance to remember the great minds whose influence was as impactful in science as it was in politics. Now, prior to this series, I didn't really know anything about Foote. It's been fascinating to find out more about him.

And I'm really looking forward to speaking to our guest today, Frank Close, author of Trinity, The Treachery and pursuit of the most dangerous spy in history. Now, that's quite a claim. But thankfully, Frank is here to explain why he believed Fuchs to be so dangerous. And together, we're going to peel back the layers of the extraordinary life of a man whose brilliance illuminated the atomic age, but whose choices made him notorious. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Frank. It's a pleasure to be in the company of a man

of so many talents, author, celebrated scientist, OBE and lecturer. I can only imagine the many things that intrigue you on a daily basis. But given the title of your book, Trinity, The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, I'm intrigued to know what you feel made Fuchs so dangerous. Well, the remark about him being the most dangerous spy in history was a quote from a U.S. congressional inquiry in the 1950s when they were, after the war, examining the various espionage that by that stage had become clear. I mean, there were several spies, not just in Los Alamos, but in Canada and elsewhere, of which Fuchs is perhaps the most notorious. But he was described that way. And I chose that quote on the book. I just want to find out now, in your research on Fuchs, how much you felt you got to know him as a person.

I mean, it's obvious he had a brilliant mind, but he was also described as being rather strange. For example, the post-war director of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury, was quoted as saying, Fuchs was a strange man, a very popular, very reticent bachelor, who was welcome at parties because of his nice manners. He worked very hard, worked very hard for us, for this country. His trouble was that he worked very hard for Russia too. He suffered from a double loyalty. I mean, do you think that's a fair assessment?

No, that is indeed a fair assessment. I mean, I think Fuchs was working for everybody. Post-war, what I discovered was in 1946, the MacMahon Act was passed in the States, which said that the US must not share any of its atomic secrets anymore, even with its closest ally, Britain. And so when it came to Britain developing its own atomic bomb, they had to do it completely independently of the US. And who was the go-to scientist on the British atomic bomb project? Klaus Fuchs. And so the British atomic bomb project was also very much helped, if you like, by Fuchs spying for Britain against America. So he was out there sort of spreading it around left, right, and center. Him as a man, it's interesting what you said about Bradbury and describing him because Jenny Piles, the wife of

Professor Rudolph Piles, she said to me that he was one of the most honest men that he knew, fundamentally an honest man destroyed by the intensity of his ideology. I think what we need to understand about Fuchs are the circumstances that brought him to do what he did. From that, we might be able to imagine ourselves in his shoes and see how we might have acted. So he grew up in Germany. He was a student at the time that the Nazis rose to power in 1933. And it seems that he was a very eloquent speaker because he had a lot of charisma in Germany and was very anti-fascist. He was not Jewish, unlike the Piles who were Jews and fled because of that. Fuchs was a member of a Lutheran family who was strongly anti-fascist. And in 1933, it turns out that the

communists were the only people prepared to put up candidates in the national elections against the Nazis. And that is how Fuchs then joined the Communist Party because he was anti-Nazi. The Gestapo regarded him as a dangerous agitator. And fortunately, he got tipped off and so he fled. And that's how he ended up in the UK in 1933-34. So he has fled from Hitler. He is a good scientist. He's not a great scientist.

We're not talking here somebody in the League of Einstein and Fermi and so forth. We're certainly talking about somebody in the league of Einstein and Fermi and so forth. We'll be certainly talking about somebody who is high quality. As a postdoctoral student at Bristol University in 1938, I think, he came to notice of Rudolf Piles. Piles was already a very internationally renowned scientist. He came to Bristol to give a seminar and he met Fuchs, who was working on a problem that Piles was interested in. And Piles made a note, here's a smart, smart guy. And that is how Fuchs came to be working with Piles in 1941. Now, here's where the irony comes in. He starts working with piles. And it's at this moment that for the first time, Fuchs realizes that he is working on a project which could change the nature of warfare. And I don't think that's overstating it. The atomic bomb certainly finished the Second World War.

In 1941, the Battle of Britain had been fought. Britain was under threat of invasion. It was very likely that we were going to lose the war. And here was a possible way of doing something that could actually win it. So Fuchs has, by total chance, found himself right at the eye of the hurricane. Now, at that stage, Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia had another aggression. In fact, that broke down. And Prime Minister Winston Churchill went on the old radio home surface and gave a speech. And in the course of that speech, he said something like,

the Russians are now our friends and we will give them every help we can. Now, put yourself, Klaus Fuchs, in that situation. You ate Nazi Germany. You are actually a member of the Communist Party, so you are very favorable to the Soviet Union. You are now our allies. The prime minister of your newly adopted country is saying, we will give them every help we can. And you, by chance, are right at the heart of a thing that can indeed change the nature of warfare. But Churchill and Roosevelt were so suspicious of Stalin, they froze the Soviets out of this project. It's that background where Fuchs then takes the decision to help. Was he right or was he wrong? Interesting question to weigh.

So he's mild-mannered, he's useful, he's reliable, a good man to have around. Was there any hint of the, because there was a sort of darker side to his family, wasn't there? That they had been, many of them had been arrested and released. His mother committed suicide, his sister committed suicide, and was it his maternal grandmother had also committed suicide? I mean, does any of that sort of show in Fuchs, or is he the sort of classic idea of the sort of unemotional scientist?

Well, you've touched on one of the things that I found very strange and I don't understand, and it's this. I mean, you're right. His mother committed suicide, and there was a history of suicide in the family. One sister committed suicide, but that was the threat of the concentration camps and so forth. But nonetheless, it happened. His father was quite a sort of authoritarian character. And yet, years later, when interviewed by the security services in Britain, Brooks described his childhood as happy, which is strange. I do have a sense that Hoops did tell people what they wanted to hear.

I've read not just the transcripts of the interviews of him by the FBI and by MI5 in the UK, but later after he was released from jail and went back to East Germany and discovered that the Soviets wanted him to spy in East Germany for them, which he actually managed to avoid. But they interviewed him, and they sent agents to interview him,

and I managed to get translation of some of the Russian records which became released during that period just after the Berlin Wall fell. And of course, from the Russians' perspective, Fuchs was a failure. He had passed information to them, which was good news for them, but he had been found, and he had convicted and he had confessed. So he was a failure and they wanted to know why. And the answers that Fuchs gave to their questions are not quite the same answers that he gave to the FBI and MI5 for those very sort of same questions. So perhaps not surprisingly, he was quite a chameleon character, but you know, that's what makes a successful spy, I suppose.

But he seems to be, I guess, much more driven by ideology than through any sort of trauma or emotional side of things. He hated the Nazis and he wanted the Soviets to succeed. Yes. I mean, I think there's no doubt at all. I mean, he was not a spy who was paid money to do anything at all like that. In a sense, this might sound like an oxymoron, but he was an honest spy, if you like that. He was driven totally by his ideology. There was one emotional side though to this, which I discovered, which is, you know, why did he confess? Now, one of his other sisters had actually managed to flee Germany and settled in the United States.

Crystal, living in Boston, was used as a sort of emergency contact. And it was through her that the Russians managed to make contact with Klaus Fuchs again. And he, yes, Minard. But the fact that she had been used as this contact, that was known. But it had been believed that this was sort of like almost accidental. But it's clear that she had a code name. The Russians recognized her as an authoritative contact. And from some of the details, it's clear that she knew pretty well what was going on.

So that is important information because if we just jump forward now to 1950 when Fuchs is finally arrested, Fuchs has done absolutely everything right. He doesn't know what has happened. And the only interpretation that he can give that authorities are onto him is they must have arrested Harry Gold, his contact back in the States, and that Gold must have said something and so forth. But his sister Crystal has been used. And this is where the emotional side comes in. Because, as we've alluded to, their mother and grandmother had committed suicide. Their sister had committed suicide. And Crystal had already had a nervous breakdown and was in a psychiatric hospital in Boston.

And I believe that Fuchs was seriously worried that she also would commit suicide. And that is why he confessed, if you like, to save his sister. So a sort of element of cutting a deal. Yes, you can look at it like that, but he didn't admit it as such. But at the emotional level, you could say that was a very honourable thing to do, if indeed that is correct. But I think that that shows us something about the man. So, Frank, there were a great many minds involved in the Manhattan Project,

the most high profile, the best known being, of course, Oppenheimer. But as a scientist, you're in a very good position to answer the question of why do you think so many great minds were happy to join this project, considering that its key focus was an enormously destructive atomic weapon? That is what we know today, looking back on that. I obviously wasn't around then, but it was a different world. It's all right. I'm not blaming you. Thank you. I mean, Rinov Piles addressed that question in his memoir, if I can recall how he said it, but paraphrasing it, which was, but war is war. People are killed. People are injured in their millions. And in war, you have to do things which you would not do other times. That's

one way of looking at it. It is intriguing to me that when they started the project, Piles had realized, as a scientist, when you're trying to solve a problem, you're hitting your head against the wall, and eventually it breaks. And once you've got the solution, it's so obvious, you think, why didn't I see that before? And the next thing is, have others already seen it? And that's exactly what happened with piles in 1940. just a better grapefruit size would be enough. You could make a weapon which would be equivalent to all of the bombers that dropped on Dresden, all in a single bomb in one plane. It would change the nature of warfare. And his immediate thought was, wow, has the Nazi scientists already realized this? Is Hitler making a bomb already? And in the memorandum sent to the British

government, he said that this is a bomb against which there is no material form of resistance other than to have one of your own as a deterrent. In fact, what we now call mutually assured deterrence was foreseen by Piles back in 1940 as the original rationale for doing it. If Germany gets this before we do, that's it. We're done. And so the original thing was to stop the Nazis getting there. In fact, General Brodens, who was the man overseeing the whole project, I think his mission statement was to make and deliver an atomic weapon before the Germans do. The thing that, Bab, your question that disturbs me is, however, that by the time the atomic bomb was ready, Germany had already been defeated.

And, admittedly, it wasn't still there. But of the scientists involved, only Joseph Rotblat left the project. At a certain level, one has to recognize, it must have been incredibly exciting. I mean, we have since the start of the 20th century been aware that in the heart of the atom, in the atomic nucleus, is a source of energy like how is the sun vastly greater than anything at all that we have ever had previously. Is it possible to extract that and make use of it? And that was an incredibly exciting intellectual challenge which people had been pursuing for 30 years.

And also to be fair, I mean, wouldn't we ever have discovered the explosive power of uranium fission had it not been for wartime. Because in order to actually achieve it, in North America, the scientific endeavor was comparable to the size of the auto industry at that time. I mean, it was vast. Unless there'd been the needs of war, you would have never have brought that number of people together to do this thing. And so Fuchs is at the heart of this and trying to share all this information, but he wasn't the only scientist who was accused of being a spy, was he? No.

In fact, what is ironic is that it wasn't known until the late 1990s that there had been another spy at Los Alamos, an American scientist called Ted Hall, who was quite precocious. He was the second youngest person at Los Alamos. He was directly involved in much of the work on the atomic bomb, and he passed information to the Soviet Union. The difference between Hall and Fuchs is that whereas Fuchs confessed and was convicted based totally on his confession, Hall did not confess. And because the fact that the Soviet codes had been cracked was such a secret, that could not be used as evidence. And so americans chose not to prosecute hall but it wasn't until the 90s it came clear that he had been almost as important as fuchs during that

period in los alamos i mean the thing that is unique about fuchs as to why he was the most dangerous is the time span that he was in literally at the beginning with piles before the Americans even got started. Fuchs clearly was very important, but he was one of several spies. The dangerous time was after the war when Fuchs was working at Harwell on the British atomic bomb, a project that was so secret, only a handful of people in Whitehall even knew its existence, that Fuchs had now made this an open book in Moscow. And that was the time, I mean, at least during the war, I say at least, during the war, the

Soviet Union were allies. It was a political decision not to share with them, but they were allies. Post-war, they certainly were not allies. It was a political decision not to share with them. So they were allies. Post-war, they certainly were not allies. And Stalin had designs on Western Europe. And Fuchs was passing information which could have been cataclysmic. I wish I'd been a fly on the wall when Fuchs made his confession because all the authorities had on him was one cracked code, one meeting once in New York. It was false news. That was it. Until Foote confesses the whole damn thing,

I could imagine jaws dropping. I mean, do you think if they hadn't intercepted those messages and decoded them that he might have never been caught? Or do you think he would have cracked eventually? I think that if those messages had not been intercepted, Klaus Fuchs would have been regarded as a hero of the atomic bomb project. And in the UK, in fact, my ironical summary is that look what happens to all the people who worked with and around Fuchs. Rudolf Piles was nice and he became Sir Rudolf Piles. Fuchs's deputy who succeeded him at Hirewell became Lord Flowers. Bill Penny, the man who

was in charge of the British atomic bomb project, also entered the House of Lords. Klaus Fuchs was the go-to man on the British atomic bomb project. He also was the person consulted when Britain started to make their hydrogen bomb. By this time, incidentally, Fuchs was in jail and I discovered that Penny went and visited him in jail in order to find out the science of a hydrogen bomb about which we knew nothing. The Fuchs, I think, could have ended up in the House of Lords. I said, the Red Baron. So, I mean, he was a key figure in the British nuclear atomic program. He was the

key to the British atomic program. And he would have been a scientific hero in the UK. Instead, he becomes sort of part of the stereotype of the evil German scientist. And the other irony as well is that he would not be guarded as a hero over in the Soviet Union.

Some colleagues of mine in the former Soviet Union try to explain this. They said that when the wall came down and various papers were now accessible, it was clear that Fuchs was never read until after his death. He was given no credit there because for the Soviet public, they developed the atomic bomb themselves. They didn't have any help from anybody outside, let alone a German. So even though, you know,

Issei Wright, he's lost all his respect and whatever because he's been selling the secrets to the Russians. At the same time, we perhaps wouldn't have had the same program as quickly as we did without him. And it's that weird divided loyalty with him that, you know, he is working hard for the British. He worked hard for the Americans. He worked hard for the Soviets. And he compartmentalized all of that.

He sort of claimed that he had a sort of controlled schizophrenia, didn't he? Yes. In fact, I mean, I suspect that he felt that, in fact, I think he even said so at some point in one of his many interviews, that he felt that the only safe way to live with nuclear weapons was for everybody to know everything. And in that sense, he was actually doing what he, well, he certainly felt it was a good thing. So actually, you can make a version of history, which is that thanks to, I'm sort of indicating quotation marks here, thanks to Klaus Fuchs, the extent of knowledge about atomic weapons was wide enough that nobody has used them, fingers crossed, since 1945, and in particular, they were not used

in 1950-51. So in some ways, we might have reasons to be thankful to him. Right. And I guess he felt his ultimate loyalty was not necessarily to science, to Britain, to communism, but to humanity as a whole. I'm sure that if asked, he would say that, and probably to some degree that that's fair. But I also have this little caveat in my mind that, as I said, when I read very carefully his replies to the FBI and to MI5 and then to the KGB, he was pretty good at letting people hear what they wanted to hear. So a better spy than the Soviets considered him. Oh yes, I think that's true. So moving on to the time that Fuchs was outed as a spy.

During his trial, his testimony led to the arrest of other spies, including Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed, a much worse fate than Fuchs, who got 14 years, I believe. And clearly, Fuchs's decision had dangerous consequences for both science and politics. I mean, so why then do you think that he never really expressed any regret for his spying? Ultimately, it is the fact that the Russian codes have been compromised through to the Russian incompetence that identifies the fact that there is a spy in Los Alamos

and enables them to focus in and show that it is Fuchs. So the dominoes that fell were all the fault of the Russians, not the fault of Fuchs. As far as I could tell, Fuchs didn't put a foot wrong other than the fact that he chose to confess. But he nevertheless did leave a lot of very hurt people behind him. Oh, that certainly is true. And that, I think, is the thing that is very profound and upsetting. To me, the most upsetting thing that I found was in the archives. So Fuchs was arrested in 1950, sent to jail for 14 years, given time off for good behavior.

In 1959, he was released, which was quite a surprise to people. And there's a letter from Rudolf Peils to Fuchs in prison, which I found actually in Peils' papers in the Bodleian archives in Oxford. I quoted it in my opportunity, but roughly speaking, paraphrased, it says, oh, dear Klaus, I understand that you are about to be released from jail. And if there is any way I can help you get started again in academia or with money to get going and so forth, please let me know. And Fuchs never responded to that. He never had any contact with Piles again. Now, strangely, for the rest of his life, he maintained contact with other scientists in the UK that he had worked with. He even maintained contact with Henry Arnold, who was the security officer at Harwell, who had been instrumental in passing Fuchs, getting arrested and convicted. But he never

had any contact with Piles or the family ever again. Now, these are the people that had taken him into the bosom of their family, that treated him almost as a son, and he had betrayed them. And I think this is the nearest I got to understanding that aspect of him. I think he was shame. He was willing to face them. They were the people he'd betrayed. That was a betrayal that he couldn't handle. So that's an example of his compartmentalizing and saying, right, I'm just going to shut that part off and not think about it. Yes. I mean, I try to imagine what it must be like to be a spy. You've got two lines. You've got the life that nobody must know about,

and then you've got the other life which you live with them all, and they have to be compartmentalized, as Fook said, controlled schizophrenia. And the ability to do that successfully for nine years is remarkable when you think about it. And within the scientific community, well, let's talk about today. Obviously, there is a great desire to share things, to share research and advances. But presumably, people are saying, well, don't share it with these people because we don't want them to know that yet. I mean, how much of that goes on these days? Well, I mean, there has certainly since the

Second World War been classified secret work and open work. So, for example, I mean, I'm a theoretical physicist. I have never signed the Official Secrets Act. I don't work on weapons or anything at all like that. My work is completely open. And I have colleagues who also, in addition to doing the sort of work that I do, which is completely open, do work on behalf of the security things. And when one has conversations with them, sometimes it's quite bizarre because we are talking about an area of science. I'm saying to myself,

oh, I mustn't say to you the following thing. Even though, you know, so you can tell that sometimes they ask themselves in their head, is this classified secret or is it not? So there is secret work. I mean, work that's going on at Aldermaston, for example, in the UK and Los Alamos in the States and so forth.

The atomic secrets are still there. One isn't sharing them around and so on. Now, for most people, their sort of way into this story would have been maybe watching Oppenheimer. Did you see Oppenheimer? I did eventually, yes. I mean, what did you think of their representation of the Manhattan Project and the various scientists involved? One thing I did like, it's the first time that they got the science right in one sense.

I don't know how many newsreel films you may have seen of atomic bombs exploding. They're exploded 10 miles away. And you see the flash and the bang at the same instant. In fact, Nolan did it beautifully. There was about a 30 to 40 second gap between the flash and the sound wave arriving. And I thought, when they saw that flash and they start seeing this mushroom cloud, and they first of all know it worked. And it was so much bigger than anybody anticipated.

And at that moment, I would have been thinking, what is about to hit us literally? So that was very interesting. One of the great ironies, I mean, we're talking about Klaus Fuchs here. The impression one gets from the Oppenheimer film that the only thing that Brits contributed to the whole plot was a spy named Klaus Fuchs,

which is far from true. Well, that's brilliant. Thank you very much, Frank. Thank you very much. If you're still keen to figure out the enigma that is Klaus Fuchs, check out Frank's book, Trinity, The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. Thank you for listening and do join us for the next season, The Spy Who Putin Poisoned, hosted by Raza Jafri. Next time, we open the file on Sergei Skripal. When the USSR falls apart, GRU officer Skripal finds himself adrift in the new Russia.

The world of espionage becomes his way out and his downfall. Sergei Skripal went from a life of covert operations to a dramatic poisoning that captivated the globe. of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Started the Cold War. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery,

with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The producer of this episode is Natalia Rodriguez. The senior producer is Philippa Gearing. Our managing producer is Rachel Byrne. The sound designer is Ivor Manley. Thank you. Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.