En lo vinculado al Impuesto al Valor Agregado

forefront. With a sympathetic listener, Fuchs began to pour out

160 THE TRAITORS

his heart to Skardon. When he was finished, he had admitted to an achievement for which he felt great pride: almost singlehand- edly, he had given the Soviet Union the atomic bomb.

A year later, Fuchs' admission would earn him a 14-year prison term for espionage, but by that time, the great VENONA spy hunt had already passed him by, deep into a pool of even greater mysteries for which Fuchs was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Among those mysteries was Fuchs himself. Born into a family of German Quakers, most of whom were committed leftists, Fuchs joined the German Communist party in 1932, when he was only 19 years old. Then studying at the University of Kiel, he was con- sidered a brilliant physics student with a bright future in research or university teaching. That career was cut short in 1933 when the coming to power of Hitler threatened to make life impossible for German Communists. Fuchs fled to Great Britain, where he worked in some humdrum scientific jobs and joined the party's exile group in Bristol. By then a hardened Communist slavishly devoted to the Soviet Union, Fuchs actively searched for ways to aid Moscow. He had no access to anything of importance, but in 1941 was recruited to work in something called the Tube Alloys Project. Fuchs was told only that he was joining a very hush-hush wartime scientific project, but on the first day he started working at the project's laboratory, he realized Tube Alloys Project was an innocent-sounding cover name for what was in fact work on an atomic bomb. Apparently, Fuchs deduced, the British and Amer- icans had made great strides toward overcoming the considerable scientific and engineering obstacles in making a nuclear bomb. Fuchs also learned that the British and Americans were keeping this great secret from their ally, the Soviet Union. Now, at last, he had something he could contribute to the cause. Already a re- cruit of Ruth Kuczynski, the GRU master spy in Great Britain, Fuchs told her the news. Within days, he began stealing docu- ments from the project for Kuczynski to photograph onto micro- film, adding his own scientific evaluations.

It was at this point that the first mystery about Fuchs arose. Given the fact that he was an avowed Communist who partici- pated openly in the activities of the exile faction of the German Communist party, how was it possible that he received a security clearance to work on so security-obsessed project as the atomic bomb? A special section of MI5 in those days kept close tabs on Communist activities in Britain; how had it missed Fuchs? Years

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later, mole-hunters from MI5 would examine this sequence of events and conclude that a KGB mole inside MI5 had arranged for Fuch's Communist leanings to be overlooked. The same mole (never identified) may also have been responsible for another, subsidiary, mystery about Fuchs.

In 1945, British intelligence managed to capture almost in- tact all the Gestapo files from the agency's field office in Kiel. The cache included detailed records on all known Communists in Kiel, records that had been collected since well before Hitler came to power. Among them was an extensive dossier on Klaus Fuchs. MI5 examined those records in an attempt to find any Communists who might have emigrated to Britain during the 1930s and gone to work for Soviet intelligence. Curiously, there was no record that MI5 had ever investigated Fuchs, an unbeliev- able lapse never explained.

These sort of lapses later stood in stark relief in light of the damage that Fuchs caused. In 1943, he was assigned to the Man- hattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where an elaborate security screen was supposed to keep out any enemy agents at- tempting to infiltrate the project. But it was no help against a man like Fuchs, equipped with a lofty security clearance from MI5 that permitted him access to any aspect of the project. By 1944, he had provided the Soviets with the key secrets of the bomb, most importantly the unique implosion design that created the weapon's tremendous destructive power. But at this moment of triumph, Soviet intelligence committed a grave mistake, a lapse that ultimately would prove very costly.

Desperate for the intelligence Fuchs was providing, the GRU decided to assign one of its important American assets, Harry Gold, the job of picking up some material from Fuchs during a brush contact near Los Alamos. But six years later, when Fuchs was giving his confession, he revealed the contact with Gold. That revelation was of acute interest to the FBI, which already sus- pected Gold.

Again, the VENONA decryptions had played a key role. They hinted at the existence of three major espionage rings op- erating in the United States during the war that had been as- signed the job of obtaining secrets of the atomic bomb project. One ring operated at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi had conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reac- tion. The second operated at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The third, and most extensive,

162 THE TRAITORS

was a ring of 22 American Communists who had been recruited years before to steal American industrial and technological se- crets. It operated out of New York and in 1943 had been diverted into atomic espionage.

It was this ring for which Gold worked, primarily as a courier. The FBI had some indications of the ring's existence, primarily through its investigation of the theft of radar technology early in the war. Later, in 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, a disillusioned Com- munist, approached the FBI and told them she was an aide to the chief GRU controller for a number of rings, including a large technology theft network. She did not know its members, but remembered that her boss had contacted one of its members, a man he called "Julius."

VENONA provided further clues, among them the revela- tion that there was a man and wife team of assets involved in the atomic espionage operation who had a relative working in the Manhattan Project. Those circumstances, it turned out, fit Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose brother, David Greenglass, worked as a technician at Los Alamos.

Fuchs provided the final link. Shown an array of photo- graphs of suspected American GRU assets, Fuchs picked out the one of Gold as the man to whom he turned over information in Los Alamos. The FBI pounced on Gold, who confessed, leading the FBI to the other members of the ring. The GRU's operational error in using Gold to service two different sets of assets had now borne bitter fruit.*

If Fuchs was bothered by the wreckage his confession had caused, he didn't show it. He served his prison time quietly, teach- ing an elementary science course to fellow inmates. Released in 1959, he emigrated to East Germany and went to work at a nu- clear physics institute, where he labored in obscurity until his retirement in 1979 (he died nine years later). In 1993, in a be- lated tribute, Soviet nuclear scientists admitted that they had built the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb largely on the basis of ma- terial provided them by Klaus Fuchs.

* In a tragic irony, the two most minor members of the ring, the Rosenbergs, were convicted of espionage and executed in 1953. The more important assets were evac- uated eastward by the GRU: Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, who went to work in a Soviet high-technology institute; and Morris and Lena Cohen, who resurfaced in 1962 as Peter and Helen Kroger, working for an important Soviet spy ring in Great Britain.