Nancy Thorndike Greenspan - Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs

THE END OF THE CERTAIN WORLD:

The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution

On September 10, 1949, Michael Perrins phone rang in the middle of the night. The message was simple, direct, and urgent: come to the American embassy immediately.

Perrin, deputy director of Britains longtime atomic energy program, jumped in a taxi for the five-mile trip south from Hampstead to 1 Grosvenor Square, where U.S. State Department officials hustled him into the communications room. There he learned the content of several coded telex messages from the Pentagon. The U.S. Air Force, using specially equipped planes, had detected radiation in the atmosphere. The only explanation could be the explosion of an atomic bomb. The United States needed an RAF plane to conduct additional tests to confirm the findings.

One week later, Perrin gathered with other experts for a meeting of Britains Joint Intelligence Committee at the Ministry of Defense at Whitehall. To the surprise of many JIC members, the room was first cleared of secretaries and anyone else who could not keep what was going to be said to himself, placing the meeting, as one observer described it, under a melodramatic bond of secrecy.

A balding physicist with a serious countenance, Perrin somberly explained that the radiation detected was most likely the result of a Russian A-bomb test, most likely in the area of Lake Baikal. RAF airplanes outfitted with special filters had obtained particles which have been definitely identified as plutonium, though he acknowledged that there was still some doubt about the specifics.

The committee approved Perrin and the director of MI6 to brief Prime Minister Clement Attlee at his country home, and the two men hastened up to Putney. But Attlee was already aware of these dire developments. He and President Harry Truman had been in contact by telegram.

Four years had passed since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the war had brought a significant realignment of the worlds major powers. Having sided with the Western democracies against the Nazis, the Soviet Union had emerged from the warat least in the eyes of its former alliesas the greatest threat to the current peace. Joint Intelligence Committee papers had projected that the Russians would have a bomb by 1950 at the earliest, more reasonably in 1952. British military forecasting relied on these assessments. If the radiation was truly from a Russian test, how could this have happened so quickly? How could Soviet science have leaped so far ahead?

In classic understatement, one participant in the meeting noted the significance of the A-bomb test in his diary: The [Joint Intelligence Committee] papers will, of course, have to be revised.

Not far from Buckingham Palace, in an unassuming office building of ordinary brick and limestone near Hyde Park Corner, a man sat examining top secret memos that might provide the answer to Russias mysterious go-ahead. There was nothing about the man, Arthur Martin, to suggest international intrigue, even less so derring-do. The same was true of the building nestled in among the pubs and grocery shops of Curzon Streetexcept perhaps for some bricked-in windows. The gun ports on one side might strike an equally odd note for the careful observer. The bricks and the ports had been devised as last-ditch insurance against German paratroopers landing in Hyde Park during the war. The architectural anomalies made sense only if one knew that the unassuming building, Leconfield House, was the headquarters of MI5, the section of military intelligence tasked with hunting down spies on British soil.

The memos in Martins care had originated across the Atlantic, where American and British code breakers toiling in Arlington, Virginia, had at long last made sense out of seeming nonsense. They had labored long and hard over a stack of coded messages sent between the Soviet consulate in New York and Moscow in 1944, back when the United States and the U.S.S.R. were closing in on German forces from opposite sides of Europe.

Now, five years later, the decoded threads revealed evidence of a wartime traitor. Urgency and dread pulsated through a telegraph from the British embassy in Washington:

We have discovered Material, which, though fragmentary, appears to indicate that in 1944 a British or British-sponsored scientist working here on atomic energy or related subjects was providing Russians with policy information or documents.

Agents cover name was initially Rest subsequently changed to Charles. In July 1944 he had been working for 6 months.

On one occasion he handed over through cut-out report described as M.S.M. -1(part 3) subject of which appears to be fluctuations in stream or ray....

My present opinion is that this will prove grave matter.

Again, British understatement held sway.

Arthur Martin was relatively new as an intelligence officer at MI5, but he had a history with signals intelligence and encryption. He had spent five years at the Government Communications Headquarters securing its systems and examining those of foreign powers. Just recently he had been made liaison between GCHQ and MI5s B Branch, counterespionage and counter-subversion, a division that was often the focus for high-profile action.

For decades, MI5 had bugged the British Communist Party headquarters, routinely opened the mail of its members, and kept an eye on fellow travelers, and since the war it had doubled its efforts. It worried as it looked to the East. Moscows persistent pressure on Central and Eastern Europe had undermined nascent democratic governments. In March 1946, in a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill had described the Soviet menace with characteristically memorable prose: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.