Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies

          University of Wales Aberystwyth

The documents

Number One: Atomic spy Dr. Klaus Fuchs interviewed 30.1.50 & 22.3.50 (Public Record Office, Kew: AB 1/695}.  Document released 2001.

Background

The German-born, British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs was thirty-eight when, under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, he was found guilty of betraying atomic secrets to Soviet agents.  The intelligence document that we are concerned with here (reproduced in a web link from a digital scan below) is concerned with two interviews conducted with Fuchs after his arrest.  They were released by the Public Record Office in the year 2001 and help us address questions that have been unanswered for half a century.  What actual information did Fuchs pass the Soviets regarding the atom bomb?  How much had he told them about the impending fusion (hydrogen) bomb?  What were his motives?  How had he managed to operate with apparent impunity for so long?  Why had he not fled?  Of course, the answers to these questions were supposed to illuminate much about western intelligence as well as Soviet knowledge of the bomb.  While such questions had to be kept out of the public domain in 1950 the answers found at the time can be invaluable to historians of the Cold War as well as those who seek to situate the role of intelligence in democratic states by tracing its evolution.

On January 27, 1950, Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs, 38 years old, met William James Skardon for a pre-arranged rendezvous at Paddington Station in London.  Skardon, an MI5 counterintelligence officer assigned to Scotland Yard, promptly escorted Fuchs to the War Office, where Fuchs dictated a long statement, which Skardon wrote down and Fuchs signed.  In it, Fuchs confessed that from 1942 to 1949, while working on British and American nuclear weapons, he had deliberately and systematically given atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.  But who was this man and why is his name as prominent today as that of virtually any traitor in history?

Born in Frankfurt on December 29th, 1911, Fuchs, like his Lutheran minister father, was to become deeply committed to socialist ideology, joining the German Communist Party in 1930. With the rise of Hitler, Fuchs' political affiliation made him a ready target for the Nazis, resulting in him fleeing to Britain in 1934. Later he explained that it was actually the Communist Party that had sent him out of Germany `to finish studies' that would enable him to contribute `in the building up of ... [a] Communist Germany'. He finished his studies in Britain, obtaining doctorates in Philosophy and Physics, and won the Carnegie Research Fellowship in 1939.

A shy, reclusive man, the talents of this exceptional scientist were recognised by a professor at Birmingham University, who was then engaged on the `Tube Alloys' programme -- the cover name for the British atomic bomb research project. Accepting the call for assistance, Fuchs signed a security undertaking on June 18th, 1942. Within months he had become naturalised as a British subject, swearing the oath of allegiance to the King. In spite of his known political leanings he had been blithely admitted to Britain's most secret nuclear work. His allegiance to Communism, however, took precedence over his newly-declared loyalty to the crown, and on learning of the significance of his work, Fuchs decided to make contact with Moscow via the Communist Party. Any doubts in his conscience were resolved through his Marxist philosophy, as his future confession revealed: `dialectical necessity of correct Party behaviour permitted espionage in the name of historical determinism'.

So important had his services become, that in December 1943, Fuchs was sent to the US as part of a research mission into atomic energy, assigned to the American atomic bomb programme - the Manhattan Project. After a stint at Colombia University, he was transferred to the weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Throughout his eighteen-month stay, Fuchs continued to send the Soviets information of the utmost sensitivity (including details of the `Fat Man' bomb dropped on Nagasaki) through a spy ring which included Harry Gold and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He probably knew as much then about the theory and design of the A-bomb as anyone in the world.

In 1946 he returned to Britain and became head of the theoretical physics division at the Harwell nuclear research station in Berkshire. He continued to pass secrets to the Russians, including the first design of the hydrogen bomb.  Suspicion of Fuchs' spying finally came to light from US intelligence intercepts of Soviet signals traffic, known as Venona - in particular, a Soviet consulate message transmitted in 1944, but not deciphered until 1949.  Of course it was soon after - on January 27th, 1950 - that Fuchs confessed all, simply because, many believed, that he was actually profoundly relieved at being discovered. 

The judicial process was rapid in dealing with him: Fuchs was arrested on February 2nd; committed for trial at Bow Street on February 10th; tried and sentenced at the Old Bailey on March 1st. As he had pleaded `guilty' at the outset, the trial was equally swift, lasting less than two hours.  With the Cold War well under way, and in a climate of anti-Communism, little sympathy was afforded to a man guilty of supplying atomic secrets to the enemy. The maximum sentence ordained by Parliament was fourteen years, and that is what Fuchs received.

At his trial on March 1, 1950, in the the Old Bailey, Klaus Fuchs, expressionless and seemingly nonchalant, listened quietly to the charges against him. When asked to plead, he whispered that he was indeed guilty. The presiding judge, characterizing the crime as 'only thinly differentiated from high treason' convicted Fuchs as charged and sentenced him to the maximum term. 14 years in prison.

In the United States, evidence supplied in the confession led the FBI to Harry Gold, Fuchs's American courier. Gold's confession, in turn, led to the Soviet spy ring that included David Greenglass and 'Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenberg case be came the focus of the American public's and the historians' concern with atomic espionage, which J. Edgar Hoover called "the crime of the century." In spite of widespread doubts about the Rosenberg's guilt, they were convicted of treason and executed.  Today much information has recently become available, including U.S. Atomic Energy Commission files and FBI files on Fuchs' statements and on his and Gold's confessions, as well as memoirs published by Fuchs' communist associates in Britain. From these and other sources it is clear that many aspects of the case were kept from the public in order to conceal important political secrets, not just atomic ones.

One political secret was how Fuchs' spying was discovered in the first place. We now know that in 1949, when American government cryptographers decoded some messages sent from the Soviet embassy in New York to Moscow during World War II, they came upon a report by Fuchs on work being done at Los Alamos. To conceal from the Soviet Union that their codes had been deciphered, the American and British security services sought to have Fuchs confess to his actions. The result was the series of interviews with Skardon and Perrin, two of which are reproduced below. The breaking of Soviet codes was never mentioned during the prosecution of the case and remained a government secret for decades.

Another political secret was that Fuchs was known to be a communist even before he arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. From a Gestapo report and from information provided by a German agent working for the British in the city of Kiel, the British Home Office knew of Fuchs' membership in the German communist party (KPD). And Fuchs continued to express communist views while he lived in England. Even so, the British government, which was desperate to recruit scientists for the war effort, hired him in 1941 to work on the British bomb project and repeatedly cleared him for top-secret work.

Was British security merely hasty or incompetent in not ferreting out Fuchs' communist ties, or were there more sinister reasons for granting him easy access to secret weapons information? We now can see that his spying was part of a much larger Soviet effort to penetrate and control the British intelligence services, especially those sections of M15  and SIS that were concerned with Soviet espionage. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and H. A. R. ('Kim') Philby all worked for British intelligence during the war, and all, we now know, were Soviet agents.  It has been suggested, not unnaturally, that some people in the highest realms of British intelligence had a grave interest in making sure that the Fuchs case did not lead to disclosures about these Soviet in roads.

One of the most important facts that the British government concealed at the time of Fuchs' trial was that he was helping the British build their own atomic bomb, a project that was being kept secret from the public and one that the American government jealously opposed. Of course Fuchs and other British scientists at Harwell had brought back from their work at Los Alamos much knowledge and experience that was crucial to the British project. Anglo-American cooperation on nuclear research, already shaky, was further endangered by the Fuchs case. The British government was understandably eager to keep Fuchs' betrayal of secrets as quiet as possible.

Another secret dimension of the Fuchs case concerned the fact that he had not given the Soviets any information of value concerning the hydrogen bomb.  Nevertheless, in 1950, exaggerated news reports of Fuchs' treachery were a boon to those who argued for expanding the scope of weapons research in the West. The United States government had its own reasons for manipulating the public's perception of the facts in the case.  In Czechoslovakia and in China, communism had achieved notable successes during the previous two years, and the Soviet Union had recently tested its first nuclear weapon. The FBI's discovery of a communist 'atom spy' only accelerated the anti-communist sentiments being stirred up by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Alger Hiss case (which first brought Richard M. Nixon to the fore). The FBI's use of wiretapping and other illegal clandestine activities to procure evidence in criminal cases seemed to be justified by these events.

In such a turbulent political atmosphere, it is not surprising that the Fuchs case seemed to offer support for the policy of maintaining national security through increased secrecy. The scientists, many said, would simply have to be brought into line if they were to be given access to national security information. The example of Klaus Fuchs stood as warning to others that gaps in security would be identified and closed. During the Cold War the traditions of open scientific research, publication and peer review gave way to greater classification of scientific information, restricted research, and loyalty oaths for scientists.  The Fuchs case raises a number of disturbing questions about sharing and concealing information from friends and enemies in the name of national security.  What is the proper balance between security via scientific advance and suffocating restrictions on the exchange and flow of information with friendly states.  This is further heightened by the new accountability demanded of  intelligence services in the contemporary world.  How do people in a democracy distinguish between essential military and scientific security and infringements on 'the right to know' under a catch-all 'culture of secrecy'.

As it was, Fuchs' espionage had a profound effect: the US hydrogen bomb effort was accelerated; and on March 8th, the Soviets announced that they, too, possessed the A-bomb. The American ban on the flow of atomic secrets to Britain (the McMahon Act) seemed strengthened - despite the establishment of NATO in 1949 - and the seeming abilities of the Soviet intelligence network prompted a belief that it was time to fight (Soviet) fire with fire.  This US fire came in the shape of NSC-68 and all the other national security measures of the 1950s.  As for Klaus Fuchs, he managed to die in his bed: in 1959, after serving nine years in jail, Fuchs was released to communist East Germany where he became deputy director of the GDR's nuclear research institute. He died on January 28th, 1988 - only two and a half years before the end of the German communist state.

Reading

Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, London: John Murray, 2001.

David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, Yale University Press, 1994.

H. Montgomery Hyde, The Atom Bomb Spies, London; Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Norman Moss, Klaus Fuchs: the Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb, 1987.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Introduction: Oleg Penkovsky documents

 Oleg Penkovsky was one of the most significant western espionage successes of the Cold War. The most extensive study of his espionage states: ‘During the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missiles crisis in 1962, Penkovsky was the spy who saved the world from nuclear war’.[1] The case of Penkovsky illuminates a range of issues concerning the study of intelligence, from understanding the challenges of collection to analysing the problems of assessment and exploitation. It also raises vexing and intriguing questions about the realm of counter-intelligence and whether, as has been claimed, Penkovsky was a triumph of Soviet counter-intelligence rather than a success for western intelligence. The case of Penkovsky further illustrates the British-American intelligence relationship. CIA documents provide details of SIS-CIA collaboration and insights into the roles (and identities) of SIS officers, though relevant SIS files remain classified. Nor has access been gained to the records of either the KGB who arrested Penkovsky or the GRU to whom he belonged.

 The documents presented here were released to Jerrold Schecter and Peter Deriabin by the CIA under the US Freedom of Information Act and are available at their web-site.[2] They are organised into two sections. The first illuminates CIA tradecraft and shows details of how the CIA conducted clandestine communications. The second concerns doubts about whether Penkovsky was (or became) a Soviet agent of disinformation and provides a focus on counterintelligence issues.

Tradecraft

Document 1:   [Blank] Operational Plan, 1 January 1961

Document 2:   Briefing of (Blank) to Load Drop for (Blank) 3 May 1961

 It is an abiding principle that intelligence services do not disclose sources and methods. Yet in the 1990s the CIA declassified documents that provided insights into its operational methods. Clandestine communication with agents is a core activity in espionage. The ‘[Blank] Operational Plan’ provides detailed and specific instructions on reconnaissance and preparation for clandestine communication including casing and servicing ‘dead drops’.[3] Procedures for signalling that dead drops have been activated are spelt out. A second document provides a record of a briefing that was prepared for a foreign diplomat from a western European ally as part of an ‘elaborate backup plan’ in case SIS operations in Moscow fell through.[4] 

 The plan is dated 1 January 1961. This was after Penkovsky made contact with the CIA but before either they or SIS had established communications with him. The plan was part of the agency’s response to Penkovsky’s approach and to his choice of dead drop.[5] Annex II of the plan and the May 1961 memorandum make clear that the CIA was dependent on allied intelligence services. As Schecter and Deriabin have shown the CIA’s Moscow station was not yet fully effective and the officer tasked with contacting Penkovsky had failed to do so.[6] And without the active support of American diplomats, the CIA turned to SIS, who were aware of Penkovsky after he made an approach to a British businessman, Greville Wynne.  

How significant are these documents?  In terms of how Penkovsky was run in Moscow, they are of limited value inasmuch as it was SIS and not CIA that had operational responsibility. Although some contact became possible with the Americans at embassy receptions Schecter and Deriabin show arrangements for communicating with Penkovsky in Moscow were conducted by SIS through its intermediaries, Greville Wynne and Janet Chisholm, the wife of the SIS Head of Station, Rauri Chisholm. The dead drop was a standard technique for secret communication, although Penkovsky himself strongly preferred to use clandestine human contact ‘because of security considerations, as well as because he derive[d] satisfaction from personal contact’.[7] However, as discussed below, the KGB did activate a dead drop after Penkovsky was arrested when he presumably revealed its existence to them. The potential importance of this incident is discussed later.   

The documents clearly provide operational detail of intrinsic fascination and importance to the conduct of espionage in a hostile counter-intelligence environment. They show the considerable attention to detail in planning such operations. Techniques of tradecraft are the foundation of an effective intelligence service and details never willingly disclosed. 

What is also significant is that disclosure of this kind of material calls into question any blanket prohibition on the release of materials about operational matters, and provides a precedent.

 A Wilderness of Mirrors?

Document 3 Translation of the letter which [Penkovsky] passed [Janet Chisholm] Blank) on 28 March 1962

Document 4 Memorandum on Counterintelligence Activities, 20 July 1962

Document 5 Memo for the DDP form Howard J. Osborn re Oleg V. Penkovskiy

Document 6 Penskovskiy Case [Minute of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Board] 26 June 1963

The history of intelligence shows that those running espionage operations need to consider whether they are gathering intelligence from their agent or receiving disinformation from their adversary’s double-agent. Doubts about Penkovsky first emerged from the KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who persuaded some senior officials including James Angleton, the CIA's Head of Counter-Intelligence.[8] These doubts were shared by some British officials, notably Peter Wright of MI5. [9] Edward Jay Epstein made public these suspicions and stated that Penkovsky was ‘a Soviet postman at the time of the missile crisis’.[10] For those who believed that the Soviets had penetrated western intelligence the success of the Penkovsky operation was a problem. Wright, for example, claimed that the head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole. Yet as Gordon Brooke-Shepherd argues: 'If it is accepted that Oleg Penkovsky was not a Soviet plant, then it must follow, as night follows day, that Roger Hollis, then Head of MI5, was not a Soviet agent'.[11]  

Whether Penkovsky was (and remained) genuine was a concern for the American and British intelligence communities. The documents show that by the summer of 1962 there was concern within CIA that Penkovsky was under Soviet suspicion and might have been compromised to the point where he could be acting as a double agent. Sir Dick White, the Chief of SIS, apparently believed Penkovsky might have been turned by the spring of 1962.[12] Penkovsky’s letter to his handlers nevertheless shows that Penkovsky himself alerted western intelligence to his concerns about surveillance, and his final letter continued to warn of KGB surveillance. The  ‘Memorandum on Counterintelligence Activities’, written by the head of the CIA’s Soviet Division’, indicates that concerns about the security of the operation led to increased scrutiny of the material and provided delays in the dissemination of material pending careful checks with other sources. The CIA’s 1963 assessment (Documents 5 and 6) was that Penkovsky’s material was authentic. Schecter and Deriabin concur: 'he told too much, and what he provided was too damaging to Soviet interests'.[13] Everything he told the west about Khrushchev’s policy on Berlin, for example, seemed designed to encourage a firm and resolute western approach to confronting Soviet demands.

 Yet one reason for the inherent complexity of counterintelligence is because of the nature of deception. Winston Churchill famously observed that 'in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’. In fact it is the lie that can be so precious and needs a bodyguard of truth - to maintain the credibility of the deception some accurate information needs to be provided in some form, often termed ‘chicken feed’. Determining what is and is not of value to an adversary can be far from simple. In the Second World War the key to the use of British double agents in support of strategic deception lay in interdepartmental co-ordination by committee work. From what is known of Soviet intelligence and its role in the machinery of government no such co-ordinating structures were in place in Moscow in the early decades of the Cold War.

 Moreover, the conduct of intelligence and counter-intelligence operations are often undertaken by different organisations with different interests. And while one organisation may be loath to disclose its own secrets it may be more inclined to make sacrifices of others. It is now clear, for example, that the KGB learned about western communications interception in Berlin at the planning stages of the operation from their agent in SIS, George Blake. Yet for thirteen months Operation Stopwatch/Gold yielded a considerable amount of intelligence from the Soviet military in Germany because the KGB did not wish to risk compromising Blake.[14]

 Is there a possibility that the KGB would have surrendered high level military secrets on such a scale? Given the scope and scale of the material it surely stretches credulity to believe that they did. Would they have also revealed the identities of large numbers of GRU officers and moreover a significant number of their own?[15] What possible operation could have justified such action? There may perhaps be more scope (though no more evidence) for the supposition that Penkovsky could have been turned during the course of 1962. But by then he had conducted 42 face to face meetings with his handlers and handed over much of the written material that was of such value.

 One further incident is relevant to these issues and also underlines the importance of tradecraft described above. In October 1961 Penkovsky was briefed on a procedure, to enable him to provide emergency warning of a Soviet attack.[16] This involved voiceless telephone calls to the US embassy to be followed by use of dead drop to give details (although the telephone calls were themselves sufficient to constitute emergency warning). According to the KGB, Oleg Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October. The emergency procedure agreed with Penkovsky was subsequently activated on 2 November.[17] When the coded warning was sent, news was immediately passed to the Director of the CIA, who in turn briefed the President on 3 November.[18] Although this occurred after the denouement of the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet-American agreement had still not been formalised, and US (and UK) nuclear forces remained at higher than normal states of alert, with the US Strategic Air Command at the unprecedented Defense Condition 2, just short of full readiness for war.

 The reasons for the KGB’s actions are unclear but the most plausible explanation is Raymond Garthoff’s suggestion that Penkovsky deliberately tried to provoke a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.[19] This would be consistent with his repeated suggestions to his handlers that they provide him with atomic demolition charges to plant at strategic points in Moscow to 'decapitate' the Soviet system at the necessary moment.[20] If Penkovsky was a Soviet-controlled agent it is difficult to see what the KGB hoped to accomplish by provoking a nuclear attack on Moscow.  If he was turned during 1962 (for which there is no evidence) a final act of retribution on his part might be consistent with his actions though only of he had given up hopes of personal survival. The most plausible explanation is that the incident provides yet more support for Penkovsky’s bona fides.