A senior crown prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys, had already been appointed to prosecute Fuchs. He was present, and he assured Sir Laurence that Fuchs earned a substantial salary and could afford to pay for legal representation. Sir Laurence remanded Fuchs in custody for a week, and he was taken to Brixton Prison to await trial.
At about the time that Fuchs appeared in court, Perrin was going over Otto Frisch’s radio script with him, in the office at Shell-Mex House where Fuchs had been arrested the day before. Perrin altered two words because their use would have constituted a minor technical breach of security. He did not tell Frisch that he was dealing with a gaping wide hole in security, and that it had been knocked through by a friend of his.
From Shell-Mex House, Frisch went off to the BBC to record his talk, which was to be broadcast that evening. He had arranged to meet his fiancée, Ursula Blau, in the lobby afterwards for lunch. She told him that she had just heard on the lunchtime news on the radio that his friend Klaus Fuchs had been arrested for spying. Frisch said that was absurd, that if Fuchs was arrested it must have been for something minor, like a driving offence. She said she was sure the radio had said something about spying. They went outside and he saw a headline in the afternoon newspaper: ‘Atom Scientist Arrested’.
Now that Fuchs had appeared in court, the news was out. Everyone who knew him was dumbfounded. Reporters went down to Harwell, and talked to anybody they could find, asking about Fuchs. Many people there learned of his arrest for the first time in this way. A reporter knocked at the Rennies’ door, a few houses away from Fuchs, and told Marjorie Rennie. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘Then listen to the news on your radio,’ he replied.
Fuchs's close friends reacted as if they were members of the same family. Peierls learned the news from an Evening Standard reporter who telephoned him. With a scientist’s instinct for getting the facts right first, he declined to comment but asked the reporter to read out the full report to him, which the reporter did. Then he told Genia. They were both bewildered. They speculated that Fuchs might have had some kind of mental breakdown and exaggerated the importance of a security slip he had made. Peierls noted that Fuchs had said in court that he did not know a lawyer, and said they must at least make sure that he had one to represent him. They decided that he should go and see Fuchs in prison immediately.
The Skinners were house-hunting in Liverpool. They were using an office in the university as a base and they separated at one point, and Erna got back to the office first. A secretary told her there was a message for her husband to telephone Peierls in Birmingham urgently. Since it was urgent she telephoned herself, and said, ‘Rudi, what’s all this about?’ He said, ‘My God, haven’t you heard? Klaus has been arrested.’ Both the Skinners took the midnight train back.
At Harwell, Cockcroft asked Skinner to say a few words to Fuchs’s staff in the Theoretical Division. Skinner called them together. He was near to tears when he addressed them, and clearly still shocked. He reminded them of how much Fuchs had done to build up the division, and how much its work meant to them. He admitted that he did not understand what had happened, and stressed that Fuchs had only been charged, and had yet to come to trial.
The American Physical Society, the professional society of physicists, was holding its annual meeting in New York, and the news was received there with astonishment. People who had known Fuchs at Los Alamos sought out one another to discuss it. Teller, who had pondered often on Fuchs’s taciturnity, said, ‘So that’s what it was!’ Always ready to ascribe malign motives to the Russians, he told people that he believed that they had deliberately betrayed Fuchs in order to throw a wrench into US — British co-operation in atomic energy.
Martin and Suzanne Deutsch had a similar reaction to Teller’s. They had decided long ago that Fuchs’s reserve concealed something, that he was holding something back. They were amazed to find out what it was.
Four Los Alamos wives who accompanied their scientist husbands to New York were having a reunion lunch at the Museum of Modern Art, Ellen Weisskopf and Else Placzek among them. All four had known Fuchs; these two had known him well. One of them arrived late with an afternoon newspaper carrying the news of Fuchs’s arrest in a banner headline. They were all aghast. ‘I’d have given my right arm for Fuchs,’ said Else Placzek. They speculated that Fuchs might yet be found innocent, that there might be some other explanation.
Edward Corson, Fuchs’s friend from Edinburgh University days and New York, wrote immediately to Cockcroft asking what help he could give, and he cabled Fuchs: ‘Naturally do not believe accusations. Stop. If I can be of any service call on me.’ Fuchs cabled back: ‘Thank you. Stop. There is nothing you can do. The evidence will change your mind.'
Peierls went to London and telephoned Scotland Yard to ask if he might visit Fuchs in Brixton Prison. Actually, as a remand prisoner, Fuchs was entitled to receive visitors at any time, but Peierls did not know this. Commander Burt asked Peierls if he would come and see him first.
In his office, he told Peierls that Fuchs had already confessed. He said that he had so far refused to name anyone who was engaged in these activities with him, and asked Peierls to try to persuade him to do so, as a good friend. Peierls said he was amazed. He said he knew that Fuchs had been left-wing when he was young, as many people had been, but he did not think it went beyond that. Burt said understandingly that his own son was left-wing.
When Peierls went to Brixton that afternoon, Fuchs told him that he had indeed been passing secrets to the Russians, because he believed in Communism. But, he said, over the years he had come to appreciate the values of the British way of life, and had realized that he had been wrong to do what he did.
Peierls said he was surprised that Fuchs would have swallowed Communist orthodoxy. ‘You must remember what I went through as a young man in Germany,’ Fuchs told him. He also said that ‘when I have helped the Russians take over everything,’ as he put it, he would tell the Soviet leaders what was wrong with the Soviet system. Peierls reflected that with this, the arrogance that he had occasionally noticed in Fuchs came near to megalomania.
Then Peierls told him that he should tell the police who his contacts were. He said a schoolboy code of not sneaking on others was not appropriate here. He pointed out that if he did not name his contacts, then everyone who worked with him would be under suspicion, particularly, perhaps, foreign-born scientists.[19] And if this were true in Britain, it would be still more true in America, where illiberal and sometimes hysterical anti-Communism was emerging, with many intellectuals being accused on flimsy evidence of having Communist sympathies, which was held to be tantamount to treason. Fuchs’s only comment on this was that he did not want to appear to be currying favour in order to get a lighter sentence.
Erna Skinner went to visit him, and was upset at seeing him in prison. ‘Where are you sleeping?’ she asked. ‘What are you getting to eat? What’s it like?’
‘It’s not bad,’ he replied. ‘Old — [naming a mutual acquaintance who had luxurious tastes] would have died a thousand deaths. But it’s not bad.’
During those weeks in Brixton Prison, Fuchs had an air of calm and well-being that others noticed. He was at peace with himself as he had not been for a long time. His feelings were no longer in conflict with the life he was leading, and he could allow them to emerge, and accept them. He had adopted a rigid emotional posture when he left Germany as a young man, and now he could abandon it. He had to pay a price, but this was a price to be extracted by the law for what he had done, not a price to be paid by his conscience.
19
Certainly the case cast a shadow of doubt over the foreign-born scientists who had done secret war work. The wife of one of these said years later, ‘I must admit I was secretly pleased when Burgess and Maclean and Philby turned out to be spies. They were not foreign, they were not Jewish, they were true-blue British and had been to the best schools and to Cambridge.’