Free Fifties by David Halberstam Page A

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    Periodically, he would slip off in a broken-down car to nearby Santa Fe. There, unbeknownst to the others, he would contact his courier, a man named Harry Gold. He gave Gold detailed reports—for example, in June 1945, a month before the Alamogordo test, he supplied a description of the plutonium bomb. He believed that he was working for humanity and peace. When Gold once offered him $1,500 for expenses (of which there were none), Fuchs brusquelyturned him down. He spied purely for political reasons. In the fall of 1945, when most of the top people left Los Alamos, Fuchs stayed on for an additional year. In 1946 he returned to England and headed the British nuclear lab at Harwell. There the British authorities, unbeknownst to the British press and Parliament and their American colleagues, were trying to build their own bomb. In 1949 Fuchs’s name was advanced for membership in the prestigious Royal Society—no small honor, particularly for someone who had the misfortune not to be born in England. There was talk that the next chair to open up at Cambridge or Oxford might go to him.
    But that summer, American cryptographers cracked the code used by the Soviets in wartime, and among other things they found a complete report on the Manhattan Project written by Klaus Fuchs and transmitted by the Soviet mission in New York to Moscow in 1944. While that did not necessarily mean that Fuchs was an agent, subsequent discoveries showed that there was a Communist agent at Los Alamos, he was a scientist, and his sister had attended an American university, as Fuchs’s had. That put him under very close scrutiny. On September 22, the FBI opened a special case on Fuchs; the code name was Foocase. The authorities had to move cautiously, for they did not want to tip off the Russians that their code had been broken. So it was important that Fuchs be made to volunteer a confession. For William Skardon, the British counterintelligence agent who worked the case, it was like playing a huge fish on a light tackle.
    Strangely enough, the first step in getting Fuchs to come forward came from Fuchs himself. On October 12, he spoke to Henry Arnold, chief of security at Harwell. Fuchs said that his father was moving from West Germany to East Germany to teach, which, he suggested, might place him in a compromising position and make him a security risk. What drove Fuchs to take that first step is unclear—whether disillusionment with postwar Soviet policy in Europe, exhaustion at leading a double life, or perhaps the vain hope of heading off an investigation by volunteering such news. He asked Arnold if he should resign. Arnold told Skardon of the odd conversation.
    Harry Truman had no knowledge that British authorities, aided by the FBI, were closing in on Fuchs. Events in America nonetheless were assuming a fearful dynamic of their own. In late October, Oppenheimer wrote of the Super: “What concerns me is really not the technical problem. I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by oxcart. It seems likelyto me even further to worsen the unbalance of our warplans. What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the congressional and military people as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance. It would be folly to oppose the exploitation of this weapon. We have always known it had to be done; and it does have to be done, though it is singular proof against any form of experimental approach. But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of danger.”
    As the deadline for a recommendation to the AEC on the Super pressed closer, the scientists in the GAC convened a series of meetings. This formidable group included not merely Oppenheimer, its chair, but also I. I. Rabi; Fermi; Conant, of Harvard; and Lee DuBridge, of Caltech; among others. Conant, hardly a radical figure, was a particularly