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Read Venona Intercepts
The February 9, 1944 cable:
Klaus Fuchs and Harry
Gold
Back to Intro
This cable concerns a meeting that took place between Klaus
Fuchs (cover name "Rest"), a young British physicist who
worked on the Manhattan Project and may have given away the
most valuable atomic secrets of all, and Harry Gold
("Goose"), who ferried those secrets to the Soviets.
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs was born in Germany in 1911. Hounded
by the Nazis because of his Communist proclivities, Fuchs
fled to England, where he became a naturalized citizen. A
bright young physicist, he was hired to work on the British
atomic bomb project in 1941. Soon afterward he started
spying for the Soviets.
Released from prison the day before, Klaus Fuchs,
48, prepares to board a flight to East Germany on
June 24, 1959.
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When the United States entered the war, Great Britain merged
its atom-bomb effort with America's, sending over 15 of its
leading scientists. Arriving in the States in late 1943,
Fuchs began working with a Manhattan Project team based at
Columbia University. The group was investigating ways to
separate U-235 from U-238. (U-235 is better suited to
generating an atomic explosion than the heavier isotope of
uranium.)
As this cable suggests, Fuchs kept right on spying once he
reached America, offering secrets about the two processes
for separating isotopes of uranium then being explored by
Manhattan Project scientists—gaseous diffusion and the
electromagnetic method. The cable was sent by New York-based
KGB officer Leonid Kvasnikov ("Anton") to Lt. Gen. Pavel
Mikhailovich Fitin ("Viktor"), who headed the foreign
intelligence section of the KGB from 1940 to 1946. In August
1944, Fuchs was transferred to the theoretical division at
Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project. When the war
ended, Britain reestablished its own atomic-bomb project,
which Fuchs rejoined in mid-1946.
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Harry Gold spent 16 years behind bars for his role
as courier for Fuchs and other spies.
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Three years later, in 1949, the FBI turned over to British
counterintelligence Venona decryptions like this one as well
as other evidence that Fuchs was a Soviet agent. MI5
officers began questioning Fuchs in December of that year,
and on January 24, 1950, Fuchs confessed. Convicted at trial
of espionage, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. When
he was released in 1959 after serving nine years, he moved
to Communist East Germany, where he became a lecturer and
director of a nuclear research institute. Fuchs died in
1988.
Fuchs' confession and decrypted Venona cables led the FBI to
Harry Gold. They searched his house, uncovering significant
evidence of long-term industrial and atomic espionage for
the Soviet Union. Like Fuchs, Gold broke under the pressure
of questioning and confessed everything. He was given a
30-year sentence and served 16 before being paroled in 1966.
Gold died in 1974.
The February 9, 1944 cable
Note: Consult the footnotes at the end of the cable for
identities of individuals and definitions of terms appearing
in capital letters.
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Photo credits
Read Venona Intercepts
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Family of Spies
20th-Century Deceptions
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Decipher a Coded Message
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