In the House of Lords the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, also made a statement exonerating the security services. ‘It may be asked why Fuchs was not detected earlier,’ he said. ‘Look at the facts, my lords. Fuchs had recruited himself. There was no time when he was undergoing training in conspiratorial technique during which our security services might have had an opportunity of detecting him. When he first offered himself to the Russians, he had all the accomplishments of an experienced spy; and for two years of his career he was in the United States, beyond the reach of our counter-espionage services. And he has admitted that for another whole year, 1946, he had made no contact at all with his Russian masters or their intermediaries.’
Jowett said that tracking down Fuchs was ‘a really brilliant achievement’, and he went on: ‘It should be plainly understood both here and abroad that so far from our security services having anything to apologize for in this case, I am quite satisfied that they have every reason to be proud of the work they did and the way in which they did it.
‘There is no reason whatever to fear that secrets which are entrusted to our officers are in the least likely to be broken. A case of that sort might occur anywhere, whatever system is employed, if the man concerned is clever enough and wicked enough.’
It seems that the sentence about ‘secrets which are entrusted to our officers’ was aimed at the United States, for there was concern in Britain at the effect that the case would have on British-American exchanges of secret information. There were good grounds for this concern.
When Sir John Cockcroft sailed off on the Queen Elizabeth the previous November, happy to be turning his back on the painful question of Fuchs’s loyalty, he was on his way to Washington along with William Penney to meet American and Canadian officials, to discuss a new plan to revive wartime co-operation on the production of atomic bombs. The discussions would be in the framework of a meeting of the Combined Development Agency. This and the Declassification Committee were the only institutions left over from wartime co-operation in this area. The agency existed only to organize the supply of uranium, but its meeting was a convenient place to discuss the new plan. Cockcroft had every reason to feel optimistic.
The proposal came from the State Department, although it was something the British Government had wanted for a long time. It would have meant sharing research and development, with the British seconding some scientists to Los Alamos, as they had done during the war.
President Truman gave the plan his backing, and in July, Truman and other Administration officials met with a few senior members of Congress to brief them on the plan and ask for their support. State Department officials pointed out at the meeting that Britain was intending to produce its own atomic bombs anyway, and had the ability to do so. The senators and congressmen were sympathetic on the whole. Some said they were worried about sharing America’s unique knowledge of the atomic bomb with anyone, but this argument was largely stilled when Russia exploded its atomic bomb in September.
The plan was received favourably at the tripartite meeting in Washington in November. The following month, the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, discussed the prospect of congressional approval with Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, in an after-dinner chat. He cabled the Foreign Office: ‘Acheson said it should be possible to get Congress to make the necessary changes in the law, provided that an agreement could be demonstrated to produce maximum results in the most efficient way.’
The British Cabinet discussed the proposals at a meeting on 30 December, and approved them.
Then came Fuchs’s arrest, and cables from the Washington embassy reflected anxiety. One said: ‘We are receiving criticism even from normally friendly quarters for our laxity and “ideological blindness”.’ Sir Oliver Franks cabled a summary of Press comment after Fuchs’s trial and said: ‘This report contains further evidence of the damage done to our prestige by the Fuchs case. Criticism of what is called our “laxity” is widespread. Some responsible newspapers are arguing vigorously against any curtailment of Anglo-American exchanges of atomic information; but it is the mood of Congress that matters most.’
It was indeed. Acheson recorded in his memoirs the outcome of his effort to achieve a new agreement on cooperation in atomic weapons: ‘Then a bomb exploded in London. A British scientist — Klaus Fuchs, who had been working in this country on the Manhattan Project during the war — was arrested, and charged with passing on to the Russians information he had acquired then and later. In due course he was tried and convicted. Also in February, Senator McCarthy began his attacks on the State Department. The talks with the British and Canadians returned to square one, where there was a deep freeze from which they did not return in my time.’
Two months later, Acheson recalled, he visited London and met Attlee and other government leaders. ‘Attlee wanted to know whether there was any way of reviving the talks that had been interrupted by the Fuchs affair… I said regretfully that the effort I had tried so hard to pilot into safe waters had foundered, and I doubted that it would ever rise again.’[21]
It is given to few scientists to have so direct an influence on the course of international relations as Fuchs had.
The influence of the case did not stop there. A year later, in February 1951, scientific attaché Alec Longair cabled the Foreign Office from the Washington embassy concerning scientific and technical co-operation in generaclass="underline" ‘The arrest and conviction of Klaus Fuchs had effects which went very deep indeed. It is easy to blame everything on this, but the truer position is that a technical co-operation programme which was not working well before Fuchs’s arrest is now working very badly. It should be remembered that we for our part have gone very cautiously in making suggestions since the Fuchs business.’
For the revelation of Fuchs’s espionage came just at the time when it was likely to have the greatest impact on the United States. Americans were preoccupied at this time with the Cold War. America was still reeling, figuratively speaking, from the shock of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, which joined China to what was then the Soviet Bloc, and the more recent news that Russia could now threaten the United States with atomic bombs. Communism was seen as a threat from within as well as without, and anti-Communist hysteria and spy fever were growing. This was the beginning of the time of loyalty oaths and blacklists, and the withdrawal of passports from suspected radicals, which was later declared illegal by the Supreme Court. (Edward Corson’s passport was taken away from him as he was about to sail for France, after he had sent that cable to Fuchs assuring him that he believed in his innocence. It was given back to him only after he explained his position.) Clamorous voices on the far Right were blaming setbacks in American policy on spies and traitors: the Communist victory in China on Communist sympathizers among the old China hands in the State Department, the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe on Alger Hiss and State Department liberals. As Acheson indicated in his memoirs, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his notorious career as an anti-Communist demagogue in February 1950, the month in which Fuchs was arrested, with his famous speech before an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he brandished before them a sheaf of papers which he claimed was a list of 200 Communists in the State Department. With the Fuchs case, this current of irrationality mingled inextricably with reasonable concerns over security.