GooMI5-FBIdman Relations and theKlaus Fuchs Case Who Is Trying to Keep What Secret from Whom and Why? MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case ✣ Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/7/3/124/1102551/1520397054377160.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 The best and most successful spies are the quiet, apparently boring and dull people who go on doing the same thing in an unostentatious way year after year. Former MI5 Director-General Dame Stella Rimington I attended the trial of Klaus Fuchs at the Old Bailey, and, watching that unas- suming, unimpressive ªgure in court, I was shocked and appalled. This single foolish individual had, by a curious trick of fate, found himself in a position to alter the whole balance of world power. Former MI5 Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe1 In May 2003 the British Security Service, MI5, released a series of previously top-secret ªles on Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist who worked for the Manhattan Project and secretly provided highly sensitive in- formation to the Soviet Union.2 The release of these ªles was remarkable not only because they were some of the ªrst postwar materials to be declassiªed by the counterintelligence service but also because of what they revealed about the Fuchs case and the broader picture of relations between MI5 and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the early Cold War. The documents indicate that high-level bilateral discussions began as soon as the British authorities learned of the suspicions about Fuchs. They 1. Dame Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 (London: Arrow, 2002), p. 126; and Sir Percy Sillitoe, Cloak without Dagger (London: Cassell, 1955), p. 165. 2. For details of the release, see the UK National Archives website (http://www.pro.gov.uk). See also Jamie Wilson, “How MI5 Cracked Nuclear Traitor,” The Guardian (London), 22 May 2003, pp. 1, 3; and “MI5 Unable to Prove Guilt of Soviet Agent,” The Independent (London), 22 May 2003, p. 1. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 124–146 © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 124 MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case also reveal that Fuchs, far from “slipping through the net,” was deliberately given special security dispensations because British ofªcials believed that his immense talents as a physicist outweighed the security risk. Even after the true extent of Fuchs’s espionage was disclosed, some in MI5 and the British nuclear weapons program were still convinced that Fuchs’s abilities could be of beneªt. The new material also sheds fresh light on the role of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, and his relationship not only with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/7/3/124/1102551/1520397054377160.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 the intelligence agencies in his own country but also with the British Security Service. Background Klaus Fuchs left Germany for Britain in 1933, having escaped Nazi persecu- tion. He completed his doctorate at Bristol University in 1936 and then moved to Edinburgh to undertake postdoctoral work. In 1938 he was granted an unlimited residence permit, though only two years later he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien. However, given the urgent need for competent scientists during the war, Fuchs was brought back to England. Under the tutelage of Sir Rudolf Peierls he became engaged in secret projects for the British government, working ªrst on intelligence estimates of the Ger- man nuclear bomb program and then on “Tube Alloys,” the codename given to Britain’s own bomb efforts. His security clearance was rushed through the approval process, and he became a naturalized British subject. In 1943 Fuchs was part of a team of British scientists who were sent to the United States to take part in the Anglo-American nuclear weapons pro- gram. A year later he was sent to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Proj- ect. He remained there until 1946, when he returned to Britain to take up the position of head of theoretical physics at the Atomic Energy Research Estab- lishment at Harwell, the main British nuclear weapons laboratory. In late 1949 British ofªcials learned that he had been spying for the Soviet Union, and in December 1949 he confessed to engaging in espionage. In early 1950 he was sentenced to the maximum term of fourteen years imprisonment, but in 1959 he was released early and allowed to depart for East Germany, where he remained until his death in 1988. Venona and Arrest The release in the mid-1990s of the Venona documents—the codename given in 1961 to the Anglo-American decryption of Soviet wartime intelligence and 125 Goodman diplomatic communications—provided the ªrst ofªcial evidence of how Fuchs was caught. Although the existence of Venona had been discussed in memoirs as far back as the 1970s, not until the release of the documents was it possible to see how extensively the Manhattan Project had been penetrated by Soviet spies.3 The new MI5 documents also reveal something of the internal debate at that time about how to proceed with the handling of the Fuchs case. In particular, they reveal that Fuchs was deliberately misled into a false sense Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/7/3/124/1102551/1520397054377160.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 of security to ensure he was as cooperative as possible. Clues concerning one of the Manhattan Project spies discussed in the Venona trafªc suggested that the perpetrator had to be Fuchs. According to MI5 Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe, the ªrst suspicions of Fuchs arose in August 1949, and they were conªrmed the following month.4 In a meeting on 7 September 1949, J. C. Robertson (the head of MI5’s B2a division, which was responsible for counterespionage) and Arthur Martin (the MI5 liaison ofªcer with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ) informed Michael Perrin (the deputy controller of atomic energy within the Ministry of Supply) of MI5’s suspicions. The three men decided to allow Henry Arnold, the security ofªcer at Harwell, to investigate Fuchs’s background in order to determine conclusively whether Fuchs was actually culpable.5 To complement Arnold’s investigation, MI5 began monitoring Fuchs’s phone calls and following his every move, as well as those of his close associates at Harwell. These included Professor Herbert Skinner, Harwell’s head of general physics, and Professor Sir Rudolf Peierls, one of Fuchs’s closest friends and colleagues.6 Because the latest evidence against Fuchs—the Venona messages—was so sensitive, the ofªcials agreed that they would not disclose any of it to Arnold. Instead, they told Arnold that the investigation was taking place because MI5 was “anxious to re-investigate the case of Fuchs whose past, as he knows, is not entirely above suspicion.”7 This was something of an understatement— suspicions about Fuchs had long existed but had been deliberately down- played because of the advantages Fuchs offered to the British nuclear weapons 3. Perhaps the earliest account that discusses the arrest of Fuchs and the breaking of Soviet codes is David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). See also Chapman Pincher, Their Trade Is Treachery (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981), pp. 46–50; and Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984). 4. “Klaus Fuchs,” memorandum, February 1950, from Sillitoe to Prime Minister, in United Kingdom National Archives, Kew Garden (hereinafter UKNA), PREM 8/1279. 5. J. C. Robertson, “Fuchs Investigation: Collaboration with Harwell Security Ofªcer,” 7 September 1949, in UKNA, KV 2/1246. 6. For more details, see “Fuchs Investigation,” in UKNA, KV 2/1246. 7. “Fuchs Investigation.” See also Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 1935–90 (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 95. 126 MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case program. An earlier investigation in 1948 had made this explicit: “It has been decided that the advantages gained by Harwell through the undoubted ability of Dr Fuchs outweigh the slight security risk.”8 As with other foreign nationals, Fuchs had undergone security screenings a number of times on each occasion had been given a clean bill of health. Evi- dence from Venona that the spy codenamed “Charles/Rest” was Fuchs ªrst became known to the British in late 1949, and this information, according to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/7/3/124/1102551/1520397054377160.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, was sufªcient to convince the British of his guilt.9 By contrast, Nigel West has argued that this connection to Fuchs is far more obvious with hindsight, even though the evidence indi- cated that “Charles/Rest” was certainly a nuclear physicist.10 It is interesting to consider who within the British establishment was privy to the Venona material. GCHQ had initially become involved with Venona in 1947 through a complete integration with the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, the agency responsible for the decryption operation. This bilateral arrangement predated even the FBI’s involvement with Venona material.11 When the evidence of Fuchs’s espionage was conveyed to the Brit- ish, only a handful of people within the British intelligence community knew of the information’s origins.12 West mentions that these included the depart- ing representative in Washington of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Peter Dwyer; the director-general of MI5, Sillitoe; MI5’s assistant di- rector, Guy Liddell; and the head of the specialist B2(a) branch of MI5’s counterespionage division, J.