William Skardon was known to friends and colleagues as ‘Jim’, which puzzled strangers, but his middle name was James. He had been a London policeman and a detective on the murder squad, and was recruited into MI5 during the war. A tall, thin-faced man with a thin moustache, usually smoking a pipe, he had a mild manner and a low-key approach, but also gave the impression of a man who would not be easily fobbed off nor easily fooled.
He once said: ‘My golden rule of interrogation is: never let a man get away with a lie. If he tells one, stop him, let him know that you know. If you let him tell a lie, he’s stuck with it. He has to defend it, and then he’ll be led further away from the truth.’ He had a good detective’s shrewdness about what makes other people tick. His method as an interrogator was not to sound like an accuser, but to win the subject’s confidence, and become his friend, so that they seemed to be on the same side, working together to bring out the truth.
He said once that he liked to have two facts which pointed towards a man’s guilt, and he did not have these in Fuchs’s case. If he had these, he said, he could use his standard approach: ‘It runs like this: a feeling of cooperation, a disclosure by me, in pleasant terms, that an offence has been committed, a suggestion that the subject might be responsible, and finally, a positive statement at some stage indicating the sure knowledge that I had of his guilt. But I had no personal confidence when I saw Fuchs that he was guilty.’
He had one fact that he could use: an item of information was given to the Russians in New York. He could say exactly when it was given. He believed that Fuchs was a party to it, although he was not absolutely certain even of this; he would have to pretend that he was.
Henry Arnold told Fuchs that a man from the security service wanted to see him about his father’s move and its possible implications. Skardon went down to Harwell on the morning of 21 December. Arnold took him to Fuchs’s office, introduced the two men and left them alone.
Skardon asked Fuchs whether he could tell him anything more that might be relevant. Fuchs talked to him about his family and his own political background, more frankly than he had talked to anyone before. No longer certain of what he should be doing, he was not suppressing his past as firmly as he had done. He told Skardon about his brother in Switzerland and his sister in America. He told him about his politics while he was at university in Germany, and told him that he had been expelled from the student Social Democrats for supporting the Communist candidate in the 1932 election. His period of student politics was much more important to Fuchs than it is for most people. It was his last overt political activity, and so the experience that provided material for his reflections on politics.
He talked about his career in Britain, and Skardon hinted at the issue of treason when Fuchs talked of becoming a British subject. Skardon asked him what his oath of allegiance meant to him. Fuchs said he regarded it as a serious matter, but felt that he still had freedom to act in accordance with his conscience if a situation arose comparable to that in Germany in 1932 — 3. Then he would feel free to act out of loyalty only to humanity.
This went on for an hour and a quarter. Skardon never took notes during an interrogation, because this created a barrier between himself and his subject. He just sat and listened to Fuchs. When Fuchs was talking about his work in New York with the uranium diffusion project, Skardon jumped in.
He asked: ‘Were you not in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York? And did you not pass on information to that person about your work?’
Fuchs must have been startled by this, but he kept his feelings hidden as usual. However, he was thrown off balance, so that after a pause, he gave a nonsensical reply, I don’t think so,’ he said.
At this, Skardon decided that Fuchs was probably guilty. He repeated his suggestion, saying that he was in possession of precise information. He knew, he said, that it was either Fuchs or someone so close to him, such as his assistant or his secretary, that he must have known about it.
‘I don’t think so,’ Fuchs said again. Then: ‘I don’t understand. Perhaps you will tell me what the evidence is? I haven’t done any such thing.’
Skardon did not say anything about the evidence. Instead, drawing on what the security service now had in its files, he asked Fuchs whether he had ever heard of Professor Israel Halperin. Halperin was the Canadian Communist who had been put in touch with Fuchs by his sister’s friend when he was in the internment camp in Canada; he was named in the Canadian spy ring inquiry. Fuchs said Halperin had sent him some magazines while he was in the internment camp but he had never met him, which was true.
At 1.30 they broke for lunch, which they ate separately. They resumed their talk at two o’clock. Again Skardon said he knew Fuchs had given some information to the Russians or allowed it to be given, and again Fuchs denied it. However, he said, if there were suspicions about him, perhaps he should resign from Harwell. Then they talked some more about his father, and broke up after another two and a half hours.
Skardon went back to London and told his MI5 superiors that he thought Fuchs had probably passed on some information. He said he had an idea that Fuchs was wrestling with a moral problem of his own, and that he should be left to think it over during the Christmas holiday. If Fuchs were handled carefully, he thought there was a good chance that he would confess voluntarily.
Fuchs drove to Birmingham to spend Christmas with the Peierls, taking with him a number of records as a present. He gave no sign that anything was bothering him.
Skardon saw him again soon after his return to Harwell, on 30 December, the day after his thirty-eighth birthday, and again two weeks later. As an interrogator, he was skilful at playing on his subject’s feelings. If Fuchs needed to unburden himself, he would relieve him of his burden. He would be Fuchs’s friend. And Fuchs turned to him, as he had turned to Arnold. Like Arnold, Skardon represented the authority he had been deceiving and evading, and more so, for Skardon had accused him. In a strange way, he was drawn to his accuser.
He was vulnerable now. Once, he had his belief in Communism, the answer to the problems of the world that he had arrived at by his own reasoning process, and he could hold firm to that. But he no longer had this belief, nor his old confidence in his reasoning. If he had still believed firmly in Communism, he would have been unyielding.
At both of these meetings, they talked about Fuchs’s family and his background. Skardon asked for one or two more details: could he remember the address of his apartment in New York? Fuchs could not recall it exactly. They were on friendly terms now, addressing one another as ‘Klaus’ and ‘Jim’, and in those days Englishmen did not proceed to first-name terms as readily as they do today.
At both meetings, Skardon again dropped into the conversation at some point the statement that he knew Fuchs had given information to the Russians in New York, or else someone very close to him had done so. ‘It was either you or your twin brother,’ was the way he put it on one of those occasions. Both times Fuchs denied it again. But he did not break off the conversation, as someone else might have done.