Yes but with a significant difference. Ted was not a Communist Party
member when he did his spying. Kllaus Fuchs in contrast was not just a
member of the German CP as a young student, In Kiel, Germany, he was a
street fighter for the Party which engaged in pitched battles with both
Socialist Party and the rising Nazi brownshirt gangs. He was significant
enough as a teenager that he was reported by an MI6 agent to British
headquarters by name, so that when he fled Germany in 1936 via France to
England just ahead of the Gestapo, who went after him following the
Reichstag Fire, he was identified at British immigration, and only got into
the country thanks to the intercession of a Quaker organization which knew
of his prominent Lutheran/Quaker minister father, who had visited Britain
earlier and was well respected. After entering his PhD studies at Bristol
University at a time when Communists in Britain were viewed with equanimity
because of their anti-facist credentials as Hitler's Nazi's were on the
reise, Fuchs was suddenly picked up and deported to a prison camp in
Quebec for German Nazis and Communists onc Germany and the USSR invaded
Poland under the terms of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty. With
Quaker help, Once Hitler invaded the USSR in Operation Barbarossa,
Churchill's attitude towards German refugee Communists changed and Fuchs
was allowed to come back to the UK to resume his doctoral studies, and was
rather amazingly also allowed to join the top-secret Tube Alloys project --
Britain's Manhattan Project,. That's when he volunteered to be an NKVD
agent at the Soviet Embassy to become an atomic spy -- a role he carried
with him in 1943 when he became part of a contingent of Britain's top
physicists brought over to Los Alamos to help speed up US work on
developing the bomb.
For Fuchs, the goal was to help the Soviets get the bomb because he
viewed the USSR as mankind's best hope. It was a f\view he expressed some
doubts about after his release from nine years in a British Prison after
his having headed up the British bomb project in the late '40s and 1950
when he was exposed in Venona documents and arrested by MI5, and after
Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes.
The difference with Ted Hall was hat he saw his spying as providing
another country with the atomic bomb -- a country with the will to stand
against US use of the weapon -- a goal, in other words, of blocking the
bomb's use, with the ultimate hope that such a standoff would lead to a
global ban on the bomb, as happened after WWI with chemical and germ
weapons.
In my naive and only.lightly researched essay in 2017 which led to
Joan Hall reaching out to me, I didn't know about these differences, but
learned them.
An interesting thing is that Ted's information provided to the
Soviet Consulate NYC and NKVD officers working there as a walk-in
volunteer, arrived at the exact time that they had completely lost track
with their main spy, Fuchs. Karl Fuchs had thought in July 1944 that he was
being transferred as a British team member from his posting at the
Manhattan Project site at Columbia University, to the UK and the Tube Alloy
project there, His handler Harry Gold had made an appoint to meet him
before he left for Britain, but he missed that date and went a day later,
to learn from neighbors of Fuchs in the same building, that he had already
left. Actually, what happened was Fuchs' orders changed and instead of
returning to Britain, he had been sent to Los Angeles, where he arrived in
early August.
But Los Alamos was a difficult place to communicate from. There were only
two phones, one in Oppenheimer's office and one in Gen., Lesley Groves'
office, and pay phones in Santa Fe. and even Albuquerque were being
monitored, as was ingoing and outgoing mail, so Fuchs had no way to
communicate his change of posting to anyone -- even his sister Kristal in
Boston. From the end of July to late mid-December, while Fuchs was busy
working on the two bombs at Los Alamos, he was MIA. That's why the
Consular based NKVD head made the unusual decision of accepting Ted Hall as
a spy, and assigning his friend and college roomate Saville Sax as his
courier without gaining permission to do so from headquarters in Lubyanka.
Ted had to be back at Los Alamos by Oct. 27, and needed to know if he was a
spy, and who would be his courier/contact. Because top leaders in Soviet
intelligence were at that time wondering if Fuchs was a double agent (how
had he managed to get hired onto the Tube Alloys Project as a known
Communist? Why had he vanished, were his reports on the complex and
difficult to construct implosion system needed to detonate the Plutonium
bomb actually disinformation? Ted, who they knew was completely unaware of
Fuchs as a spy and vice versa, coming in with the same set of information
gave Stalin, Beria and struggling Soviet atomic scientists the confidence
to drop work on the easy to build uranium bomb, which they would not have
obtained the U235 needed for years, and to instead focus all available
resources on copying the plutonium bomb, the fissionable element plutonium
bring readily available through chemical extraction techniques from reactor
waste.
On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 1:01 PM Michael Meeropol <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave, let's not forget Fuchs made the same decision as TED ...
>
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 12:39 PM Dave Lindorff <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> My view is that Oppenheimer should have done what Ted Hall did, or used
>> his considerable clout to convince Roosevelt to bring America's wartime,
>> the Soviet Union in on the bomb project, or at least to alert them to what
>> it was doing in secret. The film presents Oppenheimer as a tragic figure
>> fighting in vain to regain his security clearance so he could continue to
>> work on nuclear fission and fusion research, when he could have simply
>> shifted to astrophysics and devoted brilliance to trying to do what other
>> brillant physicists were doing, seeking to find a unified theory of
>> relativity and quantum mechanics.
>>
>> He should also have resigned over the decision to nuke Japan and joined
>> Joseph Rotblat, who quit the Manhattan Project in November 1944 when he
>> decided the bomb should not be built if Germany was not going to get an
>> atomic bomb..
>>
>> That it took a 19-year-old kid to realize that if the Soviets didn't get
>> the bomb the world would be subject to US nuclear domination is shameful.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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