Continuing to blog the past, this article focuses on Klaus Fuchs, the notorious Soviet spy in the Manhatten Project: The Conscientious Spy by Stephen Toulmin New York Review of Books 11/19/87 issue.
Fuchs passed important information about the atomic bomb project to the Soviet Union through the spy network that included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed after being convicted of espionage in the case. In 1950, Fuchs decided to spill the beans to British intelligence after they informed him that had evidence against him. Fuchs, who was from Germany, served nine years in British prison and then spent the rest of his life in East Germany pursuing a scientific career.
This brief PBS biographical sketch of Fuchs summarizes his espionage:
Edward Teller, the physicist credited as the father of the hydrogen bomb, claimed that the information Klaus Fuchs supplied the Soviets saved them as much as ten years of research and development. However, the CIA estimated only one or two.
Klaus Fuchs fled Germany before the war because he was associated with communist political organizations. After he fled to England, he earned his doctorate and began his research in nuclear physics. He was eventually invited into the British atomic bomb project.
During his time in the Manhattan Project and afterwards working in the British nuclear energy program, he continued to supply information to the Soviets until he was captured.
Fuchs was the son of a Lutheran minister in Germany who was a committed socialist. Fuchs himself later became a member of the Germany Communist Party and left Germany after Hitler came to power.
It may seem surprising to many people today that people who had been members of Communist parties or otherwise associated with them were allowed to work on as highly-sensitive a project like the atomic bomb. Actually, there were quite a few scientists in the project with leftwing - and I don't mean Democratic Party - affiliations, including Robert Oppenheimer himself, the head of the project.
When hefilled out a security questionnaire in 1942, "Oppie" wrote that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast." He first got involved in Communist causes as a professor at Berkeley, when he began dating Jean Tatlock, who was a Party member. Oppie's brother Frank (who also worked at Los Alamos on the Manhatten Project) was a Party member, as was his wife. Oppie always claimed that he was never a Party member, a distinction which became more than academic during the McCarthy era.
Oppie married Kathryn "Kitty" Puening, the fourth marriage for her, the first and only for him. Her second husband was a man named Joe Dallet, whose father was a prosperous investment banker, but who had become a Communist and was involved in union activities, and Kitty eventually joined herself. Dallet went to Spain in 1937 with the International Brigades to fight for the Spanish Republic, and was killed there. After another brief and unhappy marriage, she met and married Oppenheimer in 1940.
General Leslie Groves, the military head of the bomb project, felt strongly that Oppie was the right man to head the project and he sensibly recognized that Oppie was not a security threat. Interestingly enough, Col. John Lansdale, Groves' security aide. Lansdale became convinced that Oppie's wife Kitty was fiercely dedicated to her husband and to his success and would insist on his staying away from any activities that might compromise security, and that was a decisive factor in his appoving Oppie's clearance.
Time proved Grove's and Lansdale's judgment correct. Oppie renewed his friendship with Jean Tatlock and had an affair with her during his visits to Berkeley, which kept security people busy taping their encounters at Jean's home. She committed suicide during the war.
Klaus Fuchs, on the other hand, who came to the US project from the British atomic research program, was a security risk. Toulmin's article focuses heavily on his motivations for confessing. He notes that in 1949, a cousin came to visit him in England.
His cousin brought important news, that his father had decided to leave West Germany and take a chair of theology at Leipzig in the DDR; and this gave Fuchs an occasion for [his] self-unmasking confession ... As he said when he confessed, he could not hope to keep his position as a leading theoretician in the British nuclear weapons team at Harwell, outside Oxford, once his close connections with East Germany were known. Or that was what he said when he first began to open up to his guardedly suspicious friend in the Harwell security division, Henry Arnold; but, as was soon clear, Fuchs had reached a point at which he was ready to get his serious doubts about his years of espionage off his chest, in an unrealistic hope of redeeming his hopeless situation. Before long he was volunteering the whole story.
Toulmin describes some of the situation that shaped Fuchs' wartime persepctive:
His political situation was doubly ambiguous. Despite his continued faith in communism, he was in most ways a critically minded intellectual who insisted on thinking for himself. We have seen that he was troubled about the Soviet pact with Hitler and he added in his confession that Russia's attack on Finland "was more difficult to understand." After the German invasion of Russia in June, he apparently distrusted the British Conservatives whose enmity with Nazi Germany was qualified by a sense that Hitler was the lesser (because anticommunist) evil, and who followed Churchill only grudgingly into alliance with the Soviet Union. As the atomic bomb project took shape, he felt, as he indicated in his confession, a conflict between a duty to his British hosts, who gave him a chance to do wartime work in theoretical physics, and his older commitment to working as a Communist for a more humane, socialist Germany.
He was not alone in such a quandary. Other scientists who did war work in Britain after 1939 were aware of political ironies. To speak of what I myself knew at firsthand: having recognized the leading military role of the Eastern Front in the fight against Hitler, Churchill insisted on sending "massive military aid" to the Soviet Union—not least, as Williams notes, "Mark II radars, fighter planes, bombers, antiaircraft guns, destroyers, ammunition, and three million pairs of boots for the impending Russian winter." Despite the volume of this military aid, however, there were limits on the technological sophistication of what was sent. Thus, a crucial component for high power microwave radar, the magnetron, was developed in England in 1940, and shared with the US well before Pearl Harbor, at a timewhen joint Anglo-American research and development programs were set up in electronics, as well as in the field of nuclear weapons. Still, for years after Russia became Britain's fighting ally in June 1941 (at a time when an isolationist US Congress still hung back), the British made every effort to limit Soviet access to advanced radar equipment.
Toulmin believes that Fuchs came to his willingness to participate in atomic espionage for principled reasons, however misguided. After the Second World War, the Soviets began shying away from using committed partisans for specifically espionage missions of that sort. But that was not the case during the war:
All in all, this is not a pretty story, but it is an intelligible one. Klaus Fuchs comes out of it as no run-of-the mill or dollar-in-the-pocket spy. He was made of the same stuff as Ignatius Loyola's early recruits, knowing how to balance intellectual brilliance on an abstract level against a hidden commitment to a far from ignoble cause. To say this is not to approve his chosen course of action; nor is it to make him out as an agreeable person. The styles of personality encouraged by the habits of mental reservation seldom help anyone to be outgoing or spontaneous, and many of those who spoke about him after his trial cited his chief personal characteristics as "coldness" and "detachment." Still, he created his own dilemma, and he was ready, at least at first, to live with its inevitable outcome. This does not make him any more sympathetic now than he was at the time, but it does help to sharpen our ideas about his motives for being involved in what was in so many other ways a shabby business.
Addressing what seemed very strange during the Cold War years (and to most people today), Toulmin writes:
While the Second World War was in progress, Soviet sympathies were no disqualification. Even Bill Donovan, heading the American Office of Strategic Services, declared, in a remark Professor Williams quotes, "I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler." After the war, when the truculence of Russian policy had turned into frank expansionism, all this changed. But from 1950 on the recriminations between the British and American intelligence and security services had to do chiefly with water that had flowed under the bridges long before, at a time when Russia was still anally, and Allied energies were concentrated elsewhere.
The entire story surrounding the development of the bomb and the various implications of it is fascinating, despite the violent horror which was the end result in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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