Gradually, Lamphere and Van Loon's suspicions came to focus on Gold. His 1947 grand jury story of innocent consultation with known Soviet agents was patently phony. He fit the general physical descriptions the Heinemans and Fuchs had supplied. “We instructed the Philadelphia office to open a very active investigation into Harry Gold,” Lamphere writes, “and as the reports from Philadelphia started coming in, our interest mounted.” Lamphere and Van Loon decided that Gold's file photograph might have misled Fuchs. They asked the Philadelphia office to take still and motion-picture photographs of Gold surreptitiously during surveillance.
Early in May, when Fuchs's appeals process had been completed, Lam-phere learned that he would be sent to London to interview the physicist, something Hoover had been trying to arrange for months. The tall Idahoan collected surveillance photographs and motion-picture footage of Gold from Philadelphia agents on his way up from Washington to New York, whence he departed on May 15 with Assistant Director Hugh Clegg, one of Hoover's cronies. That same day, FBI agents began interviewing Abe Brothman and Miriam Moskowitz in New York and Gold in Philadelphia. Moskowitz mentioned Gold's two fantasy children and Gimbel's-model wife. Gold freely discussed his interest in thermal diffusion for the industrial recovery of flue gases and described a paper he had written on the subject; his description matched the paper the FBI had in hand. He also confirmed his knowledge of Brothman's troubles with his business partners, Brothman's work on DDT and an aerosol container and his own interest in starting a laboratory, but he denied ever having traveled west of the Mississippi. The agents showed him photographs, relevant and irrelevant, including a photograph of Fuchs. “When Gold looked at Fuchs’ picture,” they reported, “he stated, “That is a very unusual picture — that is the English spy.’” He had never met Fuchs, he told them; he merely recognized the man from the newspapers. After three and a half hours of questioning, Gold begged off to return to Philadelphia General to continue work.
Gold understood immediately that he was under serious suspicion. From May 15 onward, he wrote later, “I was simply fighting desperately for time.” He wanted time “to figure out how I was going to tell my father and brother… I wanted to try to warn Tom Black to run… And there was my frenzied
effort to get the research work at the Heart Station in good enough shape so that someone else could carry on.” The Philadelphia agents interviewed him again on May 19 for six hours. This time they asked him if he had ever been to Boston or Buffalo or Santa Fe. They collected handwriting specimens. They repeatedly showed him photographs of Fuchs and the Heine-mans. They confronted him with Moskowitz's story of his wife and children, which he “emphatically denied.” They asked for permission to search his house. May 19 was a Friday; Gold put them off until Monday morning, when his father and brother would be away at work. They agreed to the delay, they explained in their report, because they felt “that their showing consideration for the father and brother would help break Gold, inasmuch as it was apparent that he was very much devoted to both of them.” Sunday, Gold sat through three and a half more hours of questioning and submitted to still and motion pictures, which went off immediately to Lamphere in London.
Saturday in London, Lamphere and Clegg had arrived at Wormwood Scrubs, the old prison where Fuchs was housed, which Lamphere found “dreary, bare and cold.” London itself was a ragged place, still suffering from the war five years past. “There was a great deal of bomb damage, and whole blocks had not been cleared of debris. Meat, butter, other foodstuffs and coal were rationed, along with nearly every other commodity. It was late in May, but the city was still cold, and there was no heat in our hotel room nor in many of the offices we visited during our stay.” Lamphere nevertheless “considered the chance to interrogate Klaus Fuchs one of the great opportunities of my life.”
Fuchs appeared much as Lamphere had expected: “thin-faced, intelligent and colorless.” They sparred at first, the convicted spy wondering why he should cooperate with the FBI; Lamphere quickly realized Fuchs thought of the agency as a sort of Gestapo and was maneuvering to protect his sister, and found a way to imply to Fuchs that his sister's security depended on his cooperation. Out came the photographs then. Fuchs sorted them down to three new surveillance photographs of Harry Gold. “I cannot reject them,” he said. Lamphere was ecstatic. But Fuchs was not willing to make a positive identification; he told Lamphere the photographs were not clear enough.
Monday, May 22, 1950, at Wormwood Scrubs, Fuchs viewed the surveillance motion pictures of Harry Gold, shot through the window of a car. After a first showing, he said, “I cannot be absolutely positive, but I think it is very likely him.” After a second showing, he still would not confirm an identification. A third showing wedged his identification at “very likely.”
In Philadelphia on Monday morning, the agents who had been questioning Gold knocked on his door shortly after eight a.m. The chemist recalls that he had made “only an abortive attempt to ‘frisk’ my room and elsewhere for incriminating evidence… [because] I couldn't do so till after Pop and Joe had left for work… [and] over the weekend I was afraid of arousing my family's suspicions.” “The search began in the bedroom,” the agents reported, “… which had considerable papers, books, chemical journals, and a vast amount of personal papers and effects.” Several documents the agents turned up unnerved Gold. They were two hours into their search when they finally found something directly incriminating:
The next and most important item located was a Chamber of Commerce map of the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was located behind some books in a bookcase. Gold was shown this and told, “You forgot you had this, didn't you, Harry?” to which Gold replied, “My God, where did that come from?” He then said, “I don't know how that thing got in there.” The Agents quickly told Gold that the whole thing was through and that the “jig was up” and he had better explain the whole matter. Gold was obviously very shaken and said that he would like to have a few minutes to think.
Gold explained many years afterward what he thought:
So when that map of Santa Fe turned up, I had a decision to make. In itself it wasn't too incriminating — along with a couple of other question-arousing items that had been found — but suppose I continued to protest my innocence and cry persecution? All my family and friends and associates at the Philadelphia General Hospital would rally to my aid. Now there existed very real evidence against me: Fuchs might identify me; I had visited his sister Kristel's home in Cambridge a number of times… Plus, who knew if the FBI might not come across Al Slack? And Abe Brothman had panicked once before on interrogation and had given the FBI my name in 1947. The structure of lies was bound to collapse and so I sat on my bed and asked for a cigarette (come to think of it, significant — I dislike them)…
“After about one minute and at 10:15 a.m.,” the agents’ report continues, “Gold stated, ‘I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave his information.’”
Gold went into voluntary custody. His brother came to see him at the FBI office that evening and Gold gave him the devastating news. “And the following night, Pop,” Gold wrote from prison in 1965: “Judge McGranery was a bit late when he pronounced his sentence; I really got mine when I saw Pop's eyes that night of May 23.”
Lamphere did not tell Fuchs that Gold had confessed. The physicist nevertheless identified Gold positively on May 24 from the still photographs the Philadelphia agents had taken the previous Sunday, possibly because the photographs were taken under better lighting conditions, possibly because they were posed frontal and profile shots that obviously had been obtained with Gold's cooperation, implying that identifying him would no longer give him away. As soon as Fuchs saw them he said, “Yes, that is my American contact.” “An unbelievably great weight seemed to lift from my shoulders,” Lamphere recalls.
Harry Gold was arraigned in Philadelphia at 10:45 p.m. on May 23, 1950; his arrest made headlines the following day. Ruth Greenglass, still convalescing from her burns, had just returned from another and happier hospitalization, her husband recalled. “It was the same day, the day after my wife came home from the hospital after giving birth.” Julius Rosenberg found the family at home. “I remember he knocked on the door,” David Greenglass continues, “I got up out of the living room chair, opened the door, there he was. It was in the morning, I hadn't gone to work yet. He had the [New York]
Rosenberg handed them a thousand dollars in old bills, tens and twenties. David: “He said… you have to go out of the country… He was excited… He feared he would be arrested; they would pick me up, I would lead to him.”
