Shock

For several years Britons have been looking down their noses at what they called "American spy hysteria." Last week, when one of their top atomic scientists was arrested as a Russian spy, the superior British stare turned slightly glassy. Dr. Klaus Fuchs, once a trusted top-level worker at the U.S. Atomic Laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex., had been detected, not by famed British Intelligence or Scotland Yard, but by the FBI, whom the British called into the case. Fuchs, said the FBI, had made a partial confession. He had been a secret member of the Communist Party for at least eight years, probably longer. Since 1943 he had had access to the tenderest U.S. and British atomic secrets.

Fuchs's arrest hit Washington between the eyes. A member of the Atomic Energy Commission said: "We realized that this was one of the blackest days in the history ... of the security of this country. We are treating this as the biggest problem we ever had." In consternation, President Truman's Cabinet met to discuss the case. One of those who attended the session said: "You can't overemphasize the seriousness of this development."

The story that led up to this shock goes a long way back, and winds through two aberrant doctrines besides Communism--pacifism and Naziism.

In Catastrophe. Klaus Fuchs (rhymes with books) was born 38 years ago in Russelsheim, Germany. His father, Emil Fuchs, was first a Protestant minister, became a Quaker in 1925. He was a lifelong member of the Socialist Party and a pacifist. During the 1930s the Nazis persecuted the whole family because of the father's Socialism and pacifism. Emil Fuchs spent nine months in a concentration camp. One of Klaus's sisters, a painter, became an active anti-Nazi political worker, helped her husband to escape from Germany, jumped to her death beneath a Berlin subway train after persecution had unbalanced her mind. The father, insisting that his fight was in Germany, stayed there through the war although U.S. Quakers offered him refuge. He recently lectured in the U.S.; one of his pamphlets, Christ in Catastrophe, has been published by Pendle Hill, a Quaker organization.

Young Klaus became an anti-Nazi leader among his fellow students at Kiel University. He escaped to Britain in the mid '30s. He became a British subject in 1942 and joined the British Communist Party. He stayed away from party meetings and from known Communists. He rarely discussed politics and disclosed no pro-Communist views.

Meanwhile, he had gained recognition as one of Britain's brighter young nuclear physicists. In 1943, he was one of a group of scientists sent to the U.S. to help out on the bomb, under an agreement between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, made at the Quebec Conference. Fuchs's security was guaranteed in a letter from the British to the U.S. atomic authorities.

He spent months at Los Alamos. No security distinction was made inside the group of visiting British scientists: what one of its members knew, the others knew. While in the U.S., Fuchs was in contact with a Russian agent to whom he passed information, according to the FBI account of Fuchs's recent admissions.

He went back to Britain in 1946, returned to the U.S. in 1947 to attend a Declassification Conference at which the U.S., Britain and Canada decided what atomic information could be made available to the public. He also visited the Argonne Laboratory in Chicago. On this trip he saw no information he had not seen before, nor did he get in touch with Russian agents so far as FBI men knew.

Fuchs became a member of the British atomic research project at Harwell soon after it was set up in 1946. He recently became head of the theoretical physics section, was one of the top nine scientists at the Harwell project. His annual salary was -L-1,600 to -L-1,800, which is considered very good pay for a scientist in Britain. He lived in three small rented rooms, was known as reserved and polite. His hobby was driving a sporty little MG car in his free time.

No word or action of Fuchs ever drew suspicion to him; his arrest came about another way.

Search at Harwell. For many months security officers of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission have had reason to fear a leak from Harwell. The British were not much impressed by American fears. Last September, however, British counterespionage, working against the Russian espionage, became convinced from what they picked up that atomic information was passing from Harwell to Russian agents.

Through October, the British tried hard to find a spy at Harwell, and had no success. Without telling the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission they called in the FBI. The FBI sent a team to London without even telling President Truman what was going on.

From the material that had gone to the Russians from Harwell, the FBI concluded that the leak was a top scientist; his selection of material was excellent; he knew what was important and what was not. By November the FBI had another lead: the Harwell informant probably had worked in the U.S. because he knew the "mechanics" as well as the physics of the bomb. (The method of detonating the bomb has always been the gravest U.S. secret.) The field was thus sharply narrowed and the closest surveillance set up over a handful of scientists. Of those, the one most closely watched was Fuchs because, in cross-checking, investigators recalled that his name had turned up in a notebook belonging to one of the men questioned in the Canadian atomic spy case of 1946. As a result of the surveillance of Fuchs, investigators found that one of his acquaintances was a person under suspicion as a Russian agent.

"A Purpose Prejudicial." One day last week Fuchs's superiors, at the request of the police, asked him to appear at their offices in London's Shell-Mex House. Two Scotland Yard men placed him under arrest. Fuchs turned to one of his scientific superiors and asked: "Do you realize the effect of this at Harwell?"

The FBI in Washington said that interrogators had had little trouble drawing a confession from Fuchs. He was taken to grimy Bow Street Police Court and there charged with betraying the official secrets of his adopted country. He listened impassively to the charges:

On two occasions, once in February 1945 and again in 1947, "for a purpose prejudicial to the safety of the interests of the state . . . [Fuchs] communicated to a person unknown information relating to atomic research which was calculated to be, or might be directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy . . ."

The magistrate asked if he needed help in finding a lawyer. "I don't know of anybody," said Klaus Fuchs. He was led to jail, to await an early trial.

Depressing Suspicion. The shock of the Fuchs case was much graver than the Canadian spy case or the trial in. Britain of Dr. Allan Nunn May. The scientists at Harwell were horrified and demoralized. In Washington a young general threw up his hands. "It's depressing," he said. "It makes you so suspicious you don't know whether to trust your own staff members." From Frankfurt came word of Klaus Fuchs's father. The old pacifist, now 75, had left two weeks ago to become professor of theology at the University of Leipzig in the Russian zone of Germany.

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