John told me that there existed in Albuquerque a man who was employed in the atomic energy project. I assumed that he meant a civilian. He told me that after I had seen Dr. Fuchs, that I should return to Albuquerque, and that on that Saturday night I should visit this man and pick up certain information which he had prepared. I further was instructed that should this man not be in Albuquerque, that his wife would be there and would have information for me. In addition, I was given the sum of $500, and was told that should either the man or his wife evince any need for the money, that I should give it to them.
Gold also recalled Yatzkov giving him a recognition device corresponding to the tennis ball and gloves that he and Fuchs had carried to their first meeting: “I was to tender a piece of cardboard cut in an irregular manner; this piece of cardboard was to be matched by a second piece which the person whom I met would have.” The “piece of cardboard” was half of Julius Rosenberg's Jello boxtop; Ruth Greenglass had carried the matching half to Albuquerque in her wallet.
Gold departed Philadelphia at the end of May for Chicago. In Chicago he managed to arrange an upper berth to Albuquerque. Yatzkov had instructed him to follow a more circuitous route through Arizona and Texas, but Gold recalled being “extremely short of money” and having “to watch what I had very carefully” — he had about four hundred dollars left from expense money Yatzkov had given him in February or March — and being short on time as well. Fuchs had recommended that Gold get off at Lamy, New Mexico, the usual stop for Santa Fe-bound passengers (since the New Mexican capital lacks a railroad terminus), saving the backtrack bus ride from Albuquerque sixty miles further south. But Gold had surmised that “the only people going to Santa Fe [from Lamy] would be those connected with the atomic energy project and they might wonder who this stranger was in their midst.” As these and other decisions make clear, Gold was not easily swayed by other people's opinions — a characteristic he demonstrated most radically by his commitment to espionage.
The bus pulled into Santa Fe at about two-thirty Saturday afternoon, June 2,1945. Fuchs and Gold had arranged to meet on the Castillo Bridge at four. “I had considerable time to spare,” Gold remembered, “… and to avoid drawing attention to myself, I went as any ordinary tourist would, to the rather large historical museum located in Santa Fe.” At the museum he asked for a map and got one identical to the yellow brochure Fuchs had given him in Cambridge. With the map, at the appointed time, the thirty-four-year-old industrial chemist found his way to the bridge. Fuchs drove up late in the battered old two-door gray Buick he had bought second-hand — you had to hold the gearshift to keep the transmission from jumping out of gear going downhill, its next owner, physicist Anthony French, remembers. “Klaus arrived… possibly two or three minutes late,” Gold says, “during which two or three minutes I became extremely uneasy, as the area around the Castillo Street Bridge was extremely sparsely settled.” Both men independently remembered what followed; in Fuchs's words, “I… picked up Raymond and we drove across the river bridge, turned into a lane which ended at a gate in an isolated place, and there we continued our meeting.” They talked for about half an hour, thirty minutes of fateful significance for the Soviet atomic-bomb program.
“Klaus told me that he was getting along very well with his work in Los Alamos,” Gold remembered, “and told me that he did not, however, believe — and that was a reiteration of his statement which he had made several times before, once in Cambridge and at least once or twice in New York — that the atomic energy project would be completed in sufficient time for use in the war against the Japanese.” Everyone was working hard, the physicist reported, almost night and day; “he himself put in an average of from eighteen to twenty hours a day.”
Getting down to business, Fuchs says he told Gold “the names of the types of explosives to be used in the bomb [information important to the design of high-explosive lenses]; the fact that the Trinity test explosion was to be made, with the approximate site indicated, soon in July, 1945, and that this test was expected to establish that the atom bomb would produce an explosion vastly greater than TNT and the comparative estimated force of this explosion was indicated in detail with relation to TNT.” Fuchs put the expected Trinity yield at about ten kilotons. The explosives, Fuchs said, were “Baratol” and “Composition B”; he knew little about them, and did not understand, he said later, what their use meant in terms of high-explosive technology. He was aware at the time that a uranium gun bomb was under development, but it was outside his area of expertise and he apparently did not mention it to Gold. The two men discussed meeting again. Fuchs wanted to meet in August — “due to… some important development,” Gold recalled without remembering the July test that would determine the effectiveness of implosion — but Gold “demurred, and we finally set [the meeting] for the 19th of September 1945.”
Following his usual cautious practice, Gold accepted from Fuchs last of all what he called “a considerable packet of information.” Fuchs emphasized the importance of the packet, and probably added measurably to Gold's anxiety, by telling the chemist “that among the data he had given me was a sketch of the atomic bomb itself.” Fuchs later described the contents of that considerable packet in detail:
I delivered… confidential and classified written information in a paper or document, which I had personally written in longhand. Included in this written paper were the following items… . a description of the plutonium bomb, which had been designed and was soon planned to be tested at Alamogordo; a sketch of the bomb and its components with important dimensions indicated; the type of core; a description of the initiator; details as to the tamper; the principle of the IBM calculations; and the method of calculating efficiency.
“He reported that the bomb would have a solid plutonium core,” a physicist who interrogated Fuchs in 1950 specifies, “and described the initiator which, he said, would contain about fifty curies of polonium. Full details were given of the tamper, the aluminum shell, and of the high explosive lens system.” Fuchs's sketch, which he later reproduced for the FBI, depicted a cross section of the Fat Man implosion design, a
Gold walked to the Santa Fe bus station and took the next bus to Albuquerque, arriving there around eight or eight-thirty Saturday night. “I went to the place whose address had been given to me by Yakovlev,” he recalled. The house at 209 High Street had a large screened porch; on the porch, Gold testified, “I was met by a tall, elderly, white-haired and somewhat stooped man,” probably P. M. Sherer, the father of the Greenglasses’ landlady. “The old gentleman… told me the Greenglasses had gone out for the evening; and, on my further inquiry, said that he thought they would be in the following morning.”
“So,” Gold continues, “Saturday night in a town in wartime. Just try to get a room in a hotel without a reservation (at one dignified old place called, I think, the Franciscan, they actually laughed at me). I had not, of course, expected to stay over and was, it may be believed, most anxious to get away as soon as possible from the area of Santa Fe and Albuquerque.” In the course of his hunt for a place to stay that night, Gold gave his name at the Albuquerque Hilton:
Finally, about [midnight]… the Hilton advised me that there was such a long waiting list ahead of me that they were certain no room would be available that night. I thereupon wandered through Albuquerque and finally, upon asking a policeman, he directed me to a private home near the main street… which had been temporarily converted into a rooming house. The only space that these people had, and I with difficulty talked these people into letting me stay there, was in the hallway on the second floor… where a makeshift screen was put up around a very rickety cot. I spent the night there…
The chemist slept badly, if at all: he had secrets to protect. “Now, with servicemen on the loose,” he remembered long afterward, “police sirens kept screaming all night. And every time one did, I was jarred instinctively reacting with the thought that they might be coming for me — because of that fat package from Fuchs in my possession. It was [a] traumatic experience…”
Sunday morning, June 3, 1945, Gold moved uneasily to his rendezvous. “I clearly remember that on leaving the rooming house that morning I was anxious to get to High Street before the Greenglasses might go out again. So, likely I checked my bags at the [Santa Fe railroad] station, as it was right in the direction I was going… “He
