Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

Fuchs returned to New York after Christmas. The review of gaseous-diffusion technology then underway culminated in a stormy meeting with General Groves early in January 1944 when Groves won British endorsement of manufacturing a new and superior barrier material at Kellex that would supersede existing barrier production. Retooling for the new barrier would significantly delay starting up the big Oak Ridge gaseous-diffusion plant then under construction; Harold Urey, for one, understood the decision to mean that the United States was pursuing a postwar nuclear-weapons capability, not simply trying to beat the Germans to the bomb. Thereafter Fuchs concentrated on gaseous-diffusion theory as a consultant to Kellex, working first from offices at 43 Exchange Place, later out of the British Mission of Supply at 37 Wall Street. By February 1,1944, he had settled into a furnished apartment in a brownstone at 128 West 77th Street passed along by a member of the British Mission who was returning to England.

Fuchs would recall later that he first met with the man he knew as “Raymond” — Harry Gold — “around Christmas 1943.” But Fuchs had been in Cambridge at Christmas; Gold remembered more accurately meeting Fuchs for the first time in “late January or very early February 1944.” It was standard Soviet practice to prearrange recognition signals between agents unknown to each other; Gold would testify that Sam had instructed him “to carry a pair of gloves in one hand, plus a green-covered book, and Dr. Fuchs was to carry a hand ball.” Sonia had briefed Fuchs before he left England on recognition signals and meeting place, which was to be outside the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.[14] Fuchs was apprehensive about this first American meeting; rather than risk asking someone how to find Henry Street he had bought a map and worked out the subway route from the stop nearest the Barbizon Plaza. Fuchs remembered the initial contact differently from Gold, recalling that Gold “was wearing gloves and carried an additional pair of gloves in his hand and I had a tennis ball in my hand.” (Gold recalled stopping on his way to the meeting to buy a pair of gloves, presumably an extra pair since it was winter.) Gold introduced himself as “Raymond”; Fuchs gave his real name. Raymond “indicated he had been expecting [me],” Fuchs reported, “and he stated definitely that he was pleased to have been selected for such an important assignment.”

“We went for a brief walk,” Gold recalled of that first rendezvous, “and then took a cab uptown to [Manny Wolfe's] restaurant around 3rd Avenue in the 50's, where we had dinner, but we did not speak much there. Afterwards we went for a walk, during which we completed arrangements for further meetings.”

Fuchs reported the discussion in more detail in paraphrased testimony:

[Fuchs] told “Raymond,” in answer to questions, where he was living and where he was working. They also arranged to hold another meeting in the immediately near future. He discussed with “Raymond” his plans. He also discussed with him orally some of the officials for whom he was working and told him where, in fact, he was working at the time. “Raymond” specifically suggested that at future meetings Fuchs make sure that he was not being followed. The attitude of “Raymond” at all times was that of an inferior. At this first meeting Fuchs believes that he made a statement to “Raymond” about atomic energy, and he knows that the words “atomic energy” and “atomic bomb” were both mentioned, and “Raymond” must have known about them as he did not ask any questions of interpretation or explanation. He also believes that the comparative strength of an atom bomb was also mentioned at this first meeting…

But Fuchs remembered no dinner together that first time out; he thought the first meeting lasted only about twenty minutes, though he did remember having dinner with Gold at least once during their New York contacts, and agreed that it might have been then. Evidently Gold was dazzled to be working with a man who he believed to be “one of the world's foremost mathematical physicists.” If Fuchs characterized their relationship as that of superior to inferior, Gold recalled it more generously: “I liked this tall, thin, somewhat austere man… with the huge horn- rimmed glasses… from the very first, and in his stuffy, repressed British manner he reciprocated.” To Gold, Fuchs was no less than a “genius (a word I always use with caution).”

After he and Fuchs parted, Gold rendezvoused that same evening with Sam and reported what Fuchs had told him. Thus the connection between Fuchs and Kurchatov's team in Moscow was renewed. “Intelligence information was channeled directly to [Kurchatov],” Anatoli Yatzkov, who was about to become Gold's control, wrote late in life. “Representatives of the Intelligence Service contacted him directly. He studied the materials, produced detailed reviews and compiled lists of questions, which were immediately sent to rezidents.”

On January 4, Eddie Sinelnikov wrote her sister in England from “Near Moscow” describing the conditions under which the Soviet scientists were living and working:

Our present abode is in rather nice surroundings and I begin to appreciate the beauty of the real Russian winter — not in town — but communication with Moscow is not all that could be desired — but we get pleasure from visits to Marina [Kurchatov] and the Kapitzas. Garry [i.e., Igor Kurchatov] is now an Academician and has grown a beard! We can't decide whether it was originally due to lack of razor blades or mufflers. Anyhow he looks very amusing and friendly with it and on New Year's Eve I measured it and discovered the said beard to have the drastic length of twelve centimeters! Jill [the Sinelnikovs’ young daughter] and Garry are great friends.

Gee! Isn't the news from the front splendid? Every day fireworks — and such jolly ones. Bang! Bang! and up into the air, over Moscow sail hundreds of brightly coloured balls — like so many bouquets of flowers thrown on high.

“A turning point came in the war,” Igor Golovin explains the fireworks. “Our armies drove back the foe relentlessly. In November, 1943, Kiev was liberated; in January of the new year, 1944, the siege of Leningrad was lifted… Moscow hailed the victories with salvoes.” By the end of 1943, the Red Army with increasing mastery had liberated two-thirds of Soviet territory. The Soviets called 1943 theperelom year: the year of the great turning point. The fireworks Eddie Sinelnikov enjoyed included 120-gun victory salutes that had begun on August 5 with the liberation of Kursk and continued throughout the rest of the war as towns and regions were liberated, more than three hundred salutes in all. Soldiers were still dying, an average of five thousand a day throughout the war. “None of the Russian offensives in 1944 were in the nature of a walkover,” Werth reports, “and the nearer the Russians got to Germany, the more desperate became German resistance.” But the Katyushas were rolling west. Soviets called the multiple-banked rocket launchers “Stalin Organs”; the Germans, on the receiving end, called them “The Black Death.”

Kurchatov's colleagues had nicknamed him “the Beard.” Some of them were puzzled at his stock of ideas and information. “The reason for selection of graphite as a moderator [for the first small nuclear reactor the Soviets were planning], by Kurchatov, immediately in the spring of 1943, remains unclear,” writes Golovin; “one can only guess why he did so.” Kurchatov evidently did so because he had learned that the United States had done so, successfully. When Kurchatov presented a laboratory group with two versions of calculations to compare, experimental physicist Lev Altshuler recalled, “the joke was that one version came from the ‘ceiling’ — meaning Beria — and the other came from the Beard.” Altshuler understood that they were “testing that this [data derived from espionage] was correct information rather than disinformation.”

Gold met once more with Sam before his second meeting with Fuchs. Sam had surprising news: he was passing Gold off to another control, a man Gold would know as “John.” Subsequently Gold met John for the first time across the street from the Manhattan 34th Street bus terminal. “He was younger than I, and was taller by some inches; he had a shy, boyish grin and a lock of dark hair that kept falling over his right forehead, and this he would always brush back with a characteristic motion… 'John Jed Gold to a nearby bar — the Russian had a purposeful but duck-like walk, Gold noticed — where Sam joined them and they discussed the transfer of control. When Gold next met Klaus Fuchs, he would deliver his report to John.

“John” was Anatoli Antonovich Yatzkov, known during his years in the United States by an assumed name, Yakovlev. Born in 1911, trained like Semenov in engineering, Yakovlev had entered the United States in February 1941. Though Gold always assumed that John, like Sam, worked for Amtorg, his new control was officially a clerk at the Soviet Consulate in New York; as New York NKVD rezident, he also controlled the Cohens. “I failed to master English in the three-month term which I was allocated,” Yatzkov remembered in old age, “but I took the risk and went to America. My luck was to talk to Americans, which made it easier to learn English, but I progressed slower than I would like.” Now he could talk to Harry Gold as well.

An FBI informant who bumped into Yatzkov/Yakovlev at consulate receptions during this period remembered