Souers may have supplied Louis Johnson's reactor story or the other way around, but either way, Truman was skeptical of the Soviet achievement; he told a senator later that he could not believe “those asiatics” could build so complicated a weapon as an atomic bomb.
Lilienthal argued for candor. The President took the decision under advisement. There was nothing more the AEC chairman could do. Back at his office, Lilienthal found Oppenheimer “feeling badly.” “We mustn't muff this,” he quotes the physicist in his diary; “[it was a] chance to end the miasma of secrecy — holding a secret when there is no secret.” “Weren't you surprised?” Lilienthal asked Oppenheimer. “Yes, yes.” “A good deal?” “Yes, a good deal,” Oppenheimer explained. “Always hoped, half-thought our troubles would have” — but Lilienthal does not finish Oppenheimer's half-thought. Did the former Los Alamos director imagine that Soviet scientists could not duplicate so soon, or at all, what he and his colleagues had accomplished? Lilienthal for his part droned back to Martha's Vineyard that evening in a B-25 to tell his wife about his extraordinary twenty-four hours, ending his diary entry in the style of Samuel Pepys, another government official who kept a personal record of the dissonances that reverberate between public and private life:
10:30 p.m. Long visit with Helen before the fireplace, from the light of limbs from the old dead apple trees, the wind blowing like mad, the Wuthering Heights touch again as it goes through the loose house; to bed.
Because Los Alamos was involved with fallout analysis, the word went round the laboratory before any public announcement. It caught up with Stanislaw Ulam returning from a trip to Washington. Ulam and others — Nicholas Metropolis, Teller, John von Neumann when he was in town — played small-stakes poker once a week, Ulam explains, “a bath of refreshing foolishness from the very serious and important business… of Los Alamos.” Landing at the airstrip that ran off the eastern end of the mesa, Ulam remembered being “met by several people, Nick Metropolis and others, who told me two things. One, the Russians have exploded an atomic bomb. Two, [a poker buddy] had won 150 dollars in poker. So I believed only the poker story.” No one had expected a Soviet bomb so soon, Ulam points out. “Teller and others thought it would come sooner or later, but not that quickly… It was quite a successful shot and it really shocked people.”
Teller had enjoyed a leisurely late-summer visit to England. “He saw a lot of [Klaus] Fuchs at that time,” the FBI paraphrases him. “… Fuchs had met him at the American embassy in London shortly after Teller's arrival in England and… later they had had official contact at Harwell. One evening during Teller's stay at Harwell, he had spent several hours with Fuchs at Fuchs’ flat.” In September, the Hungarian-born physicist had sat long at dinner at Caius College, Cambridge, with James Chadwick, the notoriously taciturn discoverer of the neutron and the wartime director of the British Mission in the United States. Responding to a question from Mrs. Chadwick, Teller made the mistake of disparaging General Groves, whereupon Chadwick spoke for a solid hour on Groves's conscientiousness and reliability, concluding, “I hope you will remember what I have said tonight.” Teller sailed home, learned at the Pentagon what Chadwick already knew and took Chadwick's oration for a warning that the scientists who had directed the Manhattan Project lacked the drive and conviction to frame a proper response to the challenge of the Soviet bomb.
Before Truman would tell the world, Herbert York reports, he made Lilienthal and the members of the detection committee personally sign a statement “to the effect [that] they really believed the Russians had done it.” After briefing Congressional leaders and the Joint Chiefs, the President announced on the morning of September 23, 1949, “that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” Though its arsenal by then numbered at least a hundred atomic bombs, the United States no longer enjoyed an atomic monopoly.
Before Truman's announcement, US intelligence and security agencies had already begun to explore the possibility that espionage had contributed to the timely Soviet success. At an FBI meeting in early September, Robert Lamphere and other agents reviewed the three major wartime Soviet probes on which they had files: the effort through Steve Nelson to recruit scientists around Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which the FBI believed it had countered; a recruitment of minor value at Chicago; and the hemorrhage out of Alan Nunn May in Canada. “Then, in mid-September,” Lamphere writes — “still before the President's announcement — I found a startling bit of information in a newly deciphered 1944 KGB message.” The information Lamphere found in the New York cable was a partial summary of a theoretical paper on gaseous diffusion. The decode immediately established that a spy had been at work within the United States program as well as the Canadian. More analysis of the intercept revealed that the spy had operated out of the British Mission in New York. By the time of Truman's announcement, the AEC had identified Fuchs as the author of the paper. The identification did not confirm that Fuchs was a spy, and for a few days Lamphere carried Rudolf Peierls on his suspect list as well. Then he reviewed another intercept that mentioned a British agent whose sister was attending an American university. Fuchs's sister Kristel had attended Swarthmore. Lamphere discovered other clues in Fuchs's file that the Bureau had previously overlooked: a captured Gestapo document identifying Fuchs as a German Communist and the names and addresses of the physicist and his sister in the address book of Israel Halperin, one of the GRU agents Igor Gouzenko had exposed. “And so I became convinced that Klaus Fuchs was the prime suspect,” Lamphere concludes. On September 22, the FBI agent opened a case file, alerted New York to begin an investigation and wrote British intelligence, discussing not only Fuchs but also, because of a clue in one of the intercepted Fuchs cables, Abe Brothman.
Two days later, a Soviet agent named Filipp Sarytchev traveled to Philadelphia and knocked on Harry Gold's door. It was Saturday night and Gold was asleep on the living room couch, his father sleeping upstairs, his brother Yosef out for the evening. In July, Gold had received a code signal by mail that had called him to a rendezvous at a Manhattan bar, but he and his unknown contact had missed connections. Now a stranger greeted him in an accent so thick Harry started to shut the door. “Remember John and the Doctor in New York,” the stranger rushed to say. Gold let him in. Sarytchev sat down and immediately asked Harry if he had any material. Gold, surprised, told him it had been many years. The Russian — Gold was sure the man was Russian — berated him for missing the meeting in July, then briefly went over Harry's 1947 grand jury testimony. They arranged to meet again on October 6.
Harry had recent, anguishing evidence that his years of espionage were a curse. He had taken two weeks’ vacation from Philadelphia General at the beginning of August determined to convince Mary Lanning to marry him. He probably knew at that time that he was being promoted to chief research chemist at the Heart Station; the promotion became official on August 16. He and Mary had taken a walk along Wissahickon Creek in Fairmount Park and he had proposed. Mary had not given him an answer, but she had told him that for the first time he seemed “completely natural; at this time she came very close indeed to accepting me.” Harry pressed his case and they decided to go off together:
But on our next meeting several days later, during a trip to the Poconos, I “froze” completely — yes, I froze as badly as a tyro on a high scaffold. And Mary complained she did not believe that I really loved her and cited my “lack of ardor” as proof. But it was not lack of ardor, it was fear of exposure — and not fear for myself, but a horror at the thought that the revelation might come after we had been happily married for, say, three or four years, with children and a home of our own.
The snub-nosed girl of his dreams turned down Harry's second proposal then and they broke off their relationship; he spent the rest of his vacation at home.
Gold took the train to New York on the night of October 6 and met Sarytchev at nine o'clock outside a movie theater in Queens. It was raining hard. The Soviet agent was dressed for the weather, but Gold had brought no raincoat. Indifferently, Sarytchev ignored Gold's drenching; they walked in the rain and talked for three hours. The Soviet agent grilled Harry minutely about the 1947 grand jury, concluding by asking him what he believed the jury knew about him. “Gold advised,” the FBI paraphrases, “… that he believed the grand jury thought that he was, at the most, a well-meaning dupe or possibly implicated to some small degree. At this remark… [Sarytchev] shook his head and smiled, indicating to Gold that he was wrong in his opinion of the grand jury's naiveness.” Then Sarytchev advised Gold to begin planning on the possibility of having to leave the country. “The Russian… briefly pointed out that it could easily be handled by Gold leaving the United States, going to Mexico first and then eventually to one of the countries in Europe, which Gold construed to mean one of the Iron Curtain countries and not Soviet Russia.” There would be plenty of money, Sarytchev promised him, “should an emergency arise.” Gold “was horrified and
