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- [00:00]
Charlie Higson
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 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 Fuchsia. 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 food. 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 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.
- [02:16]
Frank Close
Well, the remark about him being the most dangerous spy in history was a quote from a US 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, there were several spies not just in Los Alamos but in Canada and elsewhere which Fuchs is perhaps the most notorious. But he was described that way and I chose that quote on the on the ball.
- [02:54]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [03:37]
Frank Close
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- [04:00]
Unknown
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- [04:03]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [04:16]
Charlie Higson
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?
- [04:55]
Frank Close
No, that is indeed a fair assessment. I mean, I think Fuchs was working for everybody. But post war, what I discovered was in 1946 the McMahon 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 else? 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.
- [05:39]
Charlie Higson
Him as a man.
- [05:40]
Frank Close
It's interesting what you said about Bradbury 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 it 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, but we're certainly talking about somebody who is high quality. As a post doctoral student at Bristol University in 1938, I think he came to notice of Rudolph 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. No, here's a smart, smart guy. And that is how Fuchs came to be working with piles in 1940. 41. 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. Britain, the Battle of Britain had been thought 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 a non aggression fact that broke down. And Prime Minister Winston Churchill went on the old radio home service 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 hate Nazi Germany. You are actually a member of the Communist Party, so you are very favorable to the Soviet Union, who 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 take the decision to help. Was he right or was he wrong? Interesting question to weigh.
- [09:50]
Charlie Higson
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 had 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?
- [10:22]
Frank Close
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 when I say, but that was the threat of the concentration camps and so forth, more or less, it happened his father was quite a sort of authoritarian character. And yet years later, when interviewed by the security services in Britain, books described his childhood as happy, which is strange. I do have a sense that books did tell people what they wanted to hear. I 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. He had evicted and he confessed. So he was a failure. 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, those very sort of same questions. So perhaps not surprisingly, he was quite a chameleon character. But, you know, that's what. That's what makes a successful spy, I suppose.
- [12:03]
Charlie Higson
But he seems to be, I guess, much more driven by ideology than through any sort of trauma or emotional side of things. It was. He hated the Nazis and he wanted Soviets to succeed.
- [12:18]
Frank Close
Yes, I mean, I think there's no doubt at all. I mean, he was not a sort of 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 like that. He was driven totally by his ideology. There was one emotional side, though, to this which I discovered, which is 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, Minhaj, but the fact that she had 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 the 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 that is why he confessed, if you like, to save his sister.
- [14:16]
Charlie Higson
So a sort of element of cutting a deal.
- [14:18]
Frank Close
Yes, you can look it like that. But he didn't admit it as such. But that at the emotional level, you could say that was a very honorable thing to do, if indeed that is correct. But I think that that shows us something about the man.
- [14:35]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [15:01]
Frank Close
Easy.
- [15:02]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [15:40]
Charlie Higson
So, Frank, there were a great many minds involved in the Manhattan Project. The 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?
- [16:03]
Frank Close
That is what we know today. Looking back on that, I obviously wasn't around then, but it was a different world.
- [16:10]
Charlie Higson
It's all right. I'm not blaming you.
- [16:11]
Frank Close
Thank you. I mean, Rid of 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. The moment they realized that if you could enrich uranium into a special form, just a better grapefruit size would be enough, you could make a weapon which would be equivalent to all 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 said 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 Bronze, 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 about your question that disturbs me is, however, that by the time the atomic bomb was ready, Germany had already been defeated, and admittedly, Boswell there. But of the scientists involved, only Joseph Rotblatt 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 powers, 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, would 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 never have brought that number of people together to do this thing.
- [19:32]
Charlie Higson
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?
- [19:44]
Frank Close
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 the Americans chose not to prosecute Hall. And it wasn't until the 90s became 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.
- [21:30]
Charlie Higson
Yes, okay.
- [21:31]
Frank Close
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 whose fault knew that was it. Until Fuchs confesses the whole damn thing, I could imagine jaws dropping.
- [22:01]
Charlie Higson
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?
- [22:10]
Frank Close
I think that if those messages had not been intercepted, Klaus Vucht 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. Rudolph Piles was nice and he came to. Rudolph Piles, Fuchs's deputy, who succeeded him at Hirewell, became Lord Flowers. Bill Penney, the man who was in charge of the British atomic bomb project, was also into 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.
- [23:12]
Charlie Higson
So, I mean, so he was a key figure in the British nuclear atomic program.
- [23:19]
Frank Close
He was the chief British atomic program. And he would have been a scientific hero in the uk.
- [23:26]
Charlie Higson
Instead, he becomes sort of part of, the, sort of the stereotype of the evil German scientist.
- [23:33]
Frank Close
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, you know, 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.
- [24:07]
Charlie Higson
So even though, you know, he's saying, right, 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?
- [24:38]
Frank Close
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. But he felt that the only safe way to live with nuclear weapons was for everybody to know everything. And in the past sense, he was actually doing what he. I'm talking. Well, he certainly felt it was a good thing. So actually you can make a version of history, which is that. Thanks. I'm sort of indicating quotation parts 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 thanked for. To him, right.
- [25:32]
Charlie Higson
And I guess he felt his ultimate loyalty was not necessarily to science, to Britain, to communism, but to humanity as a whole.
- [25:40]
Frank Close
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 MI5 and then to the KGB, he was pretty good at letting people hear what they wanted to hear.
- [26:01]
Charlie Higson
So a better spy than the Soviets considered him.
- [26:05]
Frank Close
Oh, yes, I think that's true.
- [26:11]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [26:42]
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- [27:37]
Charlie Higson
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?
- [28:07]
Frank Close
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 can tell, Fuchs didn't put a foot wrong other than the fact that he chose to confess.
- [28:34]
Charlie Higson
And but he nevertheless did leave a lot of very hurt people behind him.
- [28:39]
Frank Close
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 the time off for good behavior. 1959 he was released, which was quite a surprise to people. And there's a letter from Rudolph Piles to Fuchs in prison, which I found actually in Piles papers in the Bodleian Archives in Oxford. I quoted in my book Trinity, but roughly speaking paraphrased it says 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 over 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 part in 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'd betrayed them. And I think this is the nearest I got to understanding that aspect of him. I think it was shame he was unable to face them. They were the people he betrayed. That was a betrayal that he couldn't handle.
- [30:23]
Charlie Higson
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.
- [30:31]
Frank Close
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 Fuchs said, controlled schizophrenia. And so the ability to do that successfully for nine years is remarkable when.
- [31:00]
Charlie Higson
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?
- [31:21]
Frank Close
Well, I mean, there has certainly since the Second World War, we can classify 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're asking 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 Older Masten, for example, in the UK and Los Alamos in the States and so forth. The atomic secrets are still there. One isn't sort of sharing them around and so on.
- [32:23]
Charlie Higson
Now, for most people, their sort of way into this story would have been maybe watching Oppenheimer. Did you see Oppenheimer?
- [32:31]
Frank Close
I did eventually, yes.
- [32:32]
Charlie Higson
I mean. I mean, what did you think of their representation of the Manhattan Project and the various scientists involved.
- [32:38]
Frank Close
One thing I did like, it's the first time that they got the science right in one one sense. I don't know how many newsreel films you may have seen of atomic bombs exploding and they're exploded 10 miles away and you see the flash and the bang at the same instant. In fact, Nolan did it beautifully, is that 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 Bricks contributed to the whole was a spy named Baus Fruit, which is far from true.
- [33:36]
Charlie Higson
Well, that's brilliant. Thank you very much, Frank.
- [33:39]
Frank Close
Thank you very much.
- [33:41]
Charlie Higson
If you're still keen to figure out the enigma that is Klaus Fuchs, check out Frank's book, 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 Jaffrey.
- [34:01]
Frank Close
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. Follow the Spy who now. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [34:33]
Charlie Higson
Wondery plus subscribers can binge full seasons of the Spy who early and ad free on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app.
- [34:42]
Unknown
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- [35:44]
Charlie Higson
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 Iver Manley. Music supervision is Scott Velasquez for Fris and Sink. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turkin. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.