Bomb (26 page)

The countdown hit ten seconds, then five, four, three, two, one …

And then: “On top of the tower an unbearably bright light blazed up,” one of the Soviet physicists recalled. “The white fireball engulfed the tower, and expanding rapidly, changing color, it rushed upwards.”

The bomb was an exact copy of the American implosion bomb tested at Trinity, and the rising, twisting, pulsing ball of fire looked just the same. The steel tower was vaporized. Tanks placed around the tower to test the bomb's strength were tossed into the air.

As he watched the bomb's glow brighten low hills in the distance, Kurchatov was hit by the same emotion that had swept over Oppenheimer at Trinity: pure relief. And his first words were identical. “It worked.”

A much more excited Lavrenti Beria hugged and kissed Kurchatov, then ran to the phone and shouted for an immediate connection to Stalin's home. Stalin's secretary picked up in Moscow, where it was two hours earlier. He explained to Beria that the Soviet leader was still asleep.

Beria said, “Wake him up.”

*   *   *

T
HE
S
OVIET
U
NION'S FIRST ATOMIC
bomb exploded with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. It was too big to hide.

Just a few days later, a U.S. Air Force weather plane flying over the western Pacific detected high levels of radiation in the air. Air samples were collected and sent to labs for study. In Washington, D.C., a panel of scientists—including Robert Oppenheimer—analyzed the results. They were quickly convinced that an atomic bomb had exploded somewhere in the Soviet Union, probably on the morning of August 29.

Oppenheimer was not surprised. Just a few months before, he'd told a reporter, “Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun.”

But President Harry Truman was stunned. His intelligence experts had just told him the Soviets wouldn't have the bomb until the middle of 1953. How had they built an atomic bomb so quickly?

An FBI counter-intelligence agent named Robert Lamphere asked himself the same question. “Had the Russian scientists actually been several years ahead of our estimates of their progress?” Lamphere wondered. “Or had they been aided in their effort to build it by information stolen from the United States?”

The answer lay in a stack of coded telegrams sent from America by Soviet agents during World War II. While in the United States, Soviet spies had to use an American telegraph company to send information quickly to Moscow. The KGB probably knew that the telegraph company was making copies of every telegram and handing them over to the U.S. Army. This didn't particularly worry the Soviets—the messages were always written in an extremely complex code.

In 1949, after years of failure, American code breakers cracked the code. Intelligence agents began decoding all the messages sent to the Soviet Union during the war. That's when they came across a shocking note sent from New York City to KGB headquarters in 1944.

“In this cable were data and theories that seemed to have come directly from inside the Manhattan Project,” Lamphere explained. “When I read the KGB message, it became immediately obvious to me that the Russians had indeed stolen crucial research from us, and had undoubtedly used it to build their bomb.”

The 1944 telegram summarized a top-secret scientific paper. The paper had been written by one of the British scientists working with Oppenheimer. A few phone calls later, Lamphere had the name of the paper's author: Klaus Fuchs.

Lamphere notified agents of MI-5, Britain's military intelligence agency.

*   *   *

A
FTER THE WAR,
Fuchs had returned to Britain and continued working for the government. By 1949, he'd risen to the head of the theoretical physics division at Harwell, Britain's main atomic research center.

One morning shortly after the Soviet bomb test, a tall, thin man stepped into Fuchs's office. He identified himself as William Skardon, an investigator with MI-5, and said he was just doing a routine check. Puffing on a pipe, Skardon asked Fuchs a long series of questions about the scientist's background and family.

After seventy-five minutes of friendly chatter, Skardon suddenly said, “Were you not in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York? And did you not pass on information to that person about your work?”

There was a long silence. Fuchs sat perfectly still. Even his face remained frozen.

Finally he said, “I don't think so.”

At that moment Skardon knew the man was guilty.

But he had no evidence. The coded Soviet telegrams couldn't be used in a public court, because the Americans didn't want the Soviets to know they had broken their code. Sure, Fuchs had been a Communist back in his college days, but that was hardly proof he was a Soviet spy.

Skardon repeated the charge anyway, just to get a reaction.

“I don't understand,” Fuchs said. “Perhaps you will tell me what the evidence is.”

Skardon declined, moved on to other subjects, and said a polite goodbye.

He questioned Fuchs several more times over the next few weeks. Fuchs continued to deny everything, though the pressure was getting to him. At home, alone at night, he considered suicide.

On January 22, 1950, Fuchs called Skardon. He said he wanted to talk. Skardon came to Fuchs's house.

“You asked to see me, and here I am,” the investigator said.

“Yes,” said Fuchs. “It's rather up to me now.”

“When did it start?” asked Skardon.

“I started in 1942.”

“Tell me, just to give me a better picture, what was the most important information you passed over?”

“Perhaps the most important thing was the full design of the atom bomb.”

*   *   *

H
ARRY
G
OLD'S FEAR
of exposure had ruined his relationship with Mary Lanning. Alone again, he tried to focus on his job—always wondering when his house of cards would come crashing down.

When he read newspaper accounts of the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in Britain, he knew it would be soon.

On Monday, May 15, 1950, FBI agents Scott Miller and Richard Brennan came to the Philadelphia hospital lab where Gold worked. “Even before they showed me their identification, I knew who they were,” Gold recalled.

The agents asked Gold to come down to the Bureau offices to answer a few questions. They were curious about men Gold had worked with during the war, “and,” they added, “some other matters.” Gold was questioned for five hours that night, but the questions were general—there was no accusation of spying.

On Tuesday, he noticed two men in suits following him. On Wednesday, while he was at work, an agent poked his head into the lab.

“I thought I'd stop in and see what your place was like,” the man said with a smile.

Gold showed the agent around. They chatted politely, but the mood was tense. Both were pretending this was just a friendly visit. But knew it wasn't.
I'm under surveillance
, Gold kept thinking.
Why? What do they know?

Agents Miller and Brennan brought Gold to FBI offices for questioning again on Thursday. But they didn't accuse him of anything—not yet. Then, after a nine-hour session on Friday night, Brennan handed Gold a photograph.

“Do you know who he is?”

Gold looked at the photo. It was the pale, sad, owl-like face of Klaus Fuchs.

“I do not know him,” Gold said, desperately trying to sound calm. “I recognize the picture as that of Dr. Fuchs, the Briton who got in trouble over there, but I don't know him. I've never been in England.”

“Oh yes, you know him. You met him in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

“Never been there in my life.”

As with Fuchs, the agents had no proof that Gold was a spy. Fuchs had described Gold's appearance but didn't know Gold's real name. Fuchs had also told investigators that his American contact seemed to know a lot about chemistry, but that was hardly evidence. The FBI needed to force Gold to confess, or they had no case.

That was why they were keeping him under constant surveillance, and conducting late-night interrogations. The agents were hoping to wear Gold down, to confuse him, to make him lose hope. It was working. After two more long interviews on Saturday and Sunday, the agents mentioned they could settle the matter once and for all by taking a quick look in Gold's house. Gold had the legal right to refuse, but decided there was no point.

“What would happen, would happen, and that was all,” he later said of his thinking at this critical moment. “Possibly it was the sheer and utter exhaustion of that past week which had produced this reaction in me.”

The next morning, May 22, Gold ate breakfast at home with his brother and father. When they put on their coats to leave for work, Gold was still in his pajamas.

“I have to work home today,” he told them. He said goodbye, and they left.

Gold looked at the clock. The FBI would be there any moment. Shaking off his fatigue, Gold decided to make use of what little time remained. He started quickly up the stairs to his bedroom.

He had a few more minutes to destroy seventeen years of evidence.

Harry Gold is escorted by federal marshalls after a meeting with a federal judge, May 31, 1959.

 

 

EPILOGUE: SCORPIONS IN A BOTTLE

KLAUS FUCHS
MADE A COMPLETE CONFESSION
and was taken to a prison in London to await trial. When friends came to visit, Fuchs tried to explain how he had divided his brain into two compartments: one for his commitment to Communism, and one for his personal life. His main regret, he said, was that his secret mission had caused him to lie to his friends.

“You don't know what I had done to my own mind,” Fuchs said.

On the morning before his trail, Fuchs met with his lawyer in a prison cell beneath the courthouse.

The lawyer, Derek Curtis-Bennett, warned Fuchs to brace himself—he was likely to be given the maximum penalty allowed by law.

“You know what that is?” Curtis-Bennett asked.

“Yes,” said Fuchs. “It's death.”

“No, you bloody fool, it's fourteen years.”

Fuchs was confused.

“You didn't give secrets to an enemy,” the lawyer said. “You gave them to an ally.” During World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union had been fighting on the same side. In the eyes of British law, Curtis-Bennett explained, that made all the difference. If Fuchs had committed treason to help an enemy, he'd face the death penalty. But the maximum sentence for passing secrets to an ally was fourteen years in prison.

After a trial lasting just two hours, Fuchs was given fourteen years. He was released from prison in 1959, thanks to a reduction in sentence for good behavior. He moved to Communist East Germany, where he got married, and continued atomic research. Fuchs died in 1988, at the age of 76.

*   *   *

A
S SOON AS
the FBI found incriminating papers in his bedroom, Harry Gold cracked wide open. Seventeen years of secrets came pouring out. “Every time you squeeze him, there is some juice left,” said one of the interrogating agents.

Here's where the huge mistake made five years before by the KGB came back to bite them. When Gold went to New Mexico in June 1945, he had orders from his KGB handler, Anatoly Yatzkov, to pick up information from both Klaus Fuchs
and
a second source, David Greenglass. By doing this, Gold cross-contaminated two separate spy rings. He learned about, and was therefore capable of exposing, two different operations.

That's exactly what happened. Gold told the FBI about Greenglass, who was arrested and questioned. Greenglass identified the people who had recruited him to spy for the Soviets, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the most famous espionage trial of the century, the Rosenbergs were found guilty of helping to pass vital national secrets to the Soviets. They were sentenced to death—under American law, the fact that the Soviets were not enemies at the time the information was exchanged did not save them. The trial exposed the names of Soviet agents, and many had to flee the country. The KGB continued to spy on America, of course, but they were never again as effective as they had been during World War II.

Gold's confession and the Rosenberg trial also helped ignite the Red Scare of the 1950s—an obsessive hunt for Communists everywhere in American society. Gold watched it all from his jail cell. By cooperating with authorities he avoided the electric chair, getting a thirty-year sentence instead.

“I am calm,” he said during his prison term, “and my mind is at peace for the first time in more than a decade and a half.”

Gold was paroled from prison in 1965. He returned home to Philadelphia, where he died in 1972, at the age of 61.

*   *   *

T
ED
H
ALL WAS THE ONE
who got away.