nancy authority like green spandex but her book atomic spy, the dark dark lives of klaus fuchs. the leon levy center for biography hosted this event and provided the video. she explains how she discovered klaus fuchs while researching her previous book. a screen spend starts by explaining how

she found this by while researching her previous book on nobel physicist. >> so let's go at it. i was asking you why close a few cars. >> i actually got interested in him when i was doing this because i had a lot of family papers, i had huge numbers of letters and diaries. in those, during the late thirties when he was there, he was always showing up in some little piece of paper that i had, he was showing up is very nice person. he took their children out to the movies. he played cards with them. he was in their little music on stumble. people liked him, he was very

quiet, very shy but he was a nice person and all of a sudden he was a spy and they were dumbfounded and i came into this information as i did, i did know much about him when i was first working on it. so, at that point as i was writing about him i thought i should find out more about klaus fuchs, he's an interesting person. i went to the archives in london and there were three little skimpy files. the very last one that i looked at had a letter, a memo from somebody in the administration saying what am i supposed to do with all of these files from his trial and everything? and the person who received it said, throw them away, so when i saw this i thought, oh lord. >> oh dear. >> there is not anything. so for the borne book, it is having the information, and i had a lot for the boards and newspapers and things. and that's what i used. so i finished about a year ago,

a friend of mine in germany said why don't you write about klaus fuchs, this person is interested in him. to i thought that's interesting, but that's not enough information to write about him. so when i looked at it was early 2000 and my book came out in 2005 so i hadn't gone back i went back to the archives in london, and i looked and mi5 had declassified hundreds and hundreds of files not only on books but all the people from the thirties and forties and fifties, many many of these files there are pages missing but basically there were thousands of pages there and i thought well this is a good start. so yes i can do this and he was inherently an interesting person and he became more so as i met his family and family papers and heard of their

stories and read all the other the things that i was able to find a huge number of archives that nobody else could find it. and i like being a detective so that set me on a path and i found so much that i didn't know what to do with it and at some point you don't stop if you don't stop you'll never finish. so this is it. but >> so we are detectives that what we do, we detective work. i was astonished at the end of your book you list over 25 or almost 30 archives that you visited and they are all over the world's so which one was your favorite one, which was the more productive in this treasure hunt? >> the most productive was at the university of peel, and i was told by a friend in germany not to even bother to go there because there was one file there and it was said just you

know i was told just don't bother and i thought oh i can't do that you know that i had somebody else tell me that too and being an american sitting here, i went to the archivist and many people don't do that you know that you go to the archives yourself usually. so i wrote to this archivist to us this lovely lady, and i did it in german i had enough german to be able to do it, it's not great but it's good enough and she wrote me back and she said that i think you might find gold here. and she sent me the numbers for some files that they had, that were labeled led miscellaneous disciplinary matters. nothing to do with the close himself. she was right and she had peaked and she knew what was in them and i went to this archive and its sweet little town's and

it's above keel that in this area. it was all about klaus and his brother and all the nazis that they thought. and all the problems that occurred and it was that idea of how to find things and i could go through the files myself, and found lectures they were giving's. pulling their group together. all signs of stuff, and i found hundreds and hundreds of pages. slow >> that's a good point, and let's have you talk a bit about klaus himself as a young man and how he became criticize, and how he became an anti-fascist and tell us that story, because at obviously gets into the motivation for what comes next. >> it does, and it was the key part of his life it was to me one of the most fascinating

because nobody else you know let me just say he started off in family of four children he was number three. and he was born right before world war i. in 1911. he had a very politically active father. the father was extremely liberal, he was a minister and he was in the very conservative lisbon church. the two did not match and his mission in life was to support the working class. he was a socialist. he joined this is socialist democratic party. the socialist party in germany, and he was not a communist. there was a very distinct strong distinctions between those two things. all his children became socialists. where klaus is extremely reserved, his father was various broken but they both had the same steely unbending determination inside and they

were both the same in that way. they just espoused in different ways. but klaus when he was a teenager, he was a scholar in the family. he was famous in the area for his mathematical gifts and talents and when he was a senior in high school, in the gymnasium he won the regional prize, for the republic of the best student. it was only given out once in a while, it was a celebration. and he was the best student in the whole area. the and he didn't talk about politics at all he left that you know out and his brother and two sisters and father did all the talking that was needed. they did all the time. they were all activists. so in 1930, he goes to the university of light zeke and studies mathematics. but and he went to live with his brother and the first thing his brother had him do is join the socialist party and the students there.

and already in 1930 there were fights in the streets and the nazis got their grips in the german universities very early and most of the students learn were from well to do families they were rich but they were government official kids and you know they weren't the poor so there weren't many socialists and there weren't many communists and there were a lot of nazis and they were having fights in the streets. and klaus said at one point, i learn more on the streets than i did in the classroom at that point and he was only there for one year. then he and his brother both moved to the university of teal and they started their own university's group and they felt they should be emerging of the two and that was the only way they could fight the nazi students and the nazi students

in heel and the way the students fought at that time initially was by making incendiary speeches and handing out pamphlets. and ahead newspapers and stuff and that was the level of the discourse gap. but it could cause turmoil, it could cause a few disputes, and the administration was not the nazi administration at all at that point. and they gave the brothers a to lot of leeway in that degree. but in 1932, the wood sets out the platform for the rest of his life 1932 was a presidential election, and hindenburg was running for a

second term. the socialists decided they were going to support hindenburg because they did not want to split the vote. there was another candidate running for president and they wanted to make sure that candidate did not get in. the candidate was adolf hitler. when klaus and his brother learned this, they were dismayed. hindenburg, they could not support him. immediately, the socialist party kicked them out. the communists said, come be with us. klaus hesitated but eventually, they both joined, and they never looked back. they did not join because they were communists. they joined because they wanted to fight

the nazis and they saw the socialists were not fighting the nazis. the socialists and the communists hated each other. >> their council voted to kill them there was a riot they they got beat up, and the students around the university and the right were yelling thrown in the fjord that was a piece of the baltics sea and this was in february. you couldn't be in there except for a few minutes they threw him in. all he ever said about it was that he swims out. it was very traumatic. he ended up in berlin a few weeks later.

the gestapo was after him. there was resist or in the underground. they were trying to get people to mobilize against the nazis. they were risking their lives every single minute. it was a terrible life. it did have an effect on him. this is obviously part of his motivation. at one point in your narrative, you quote the head of the british mi5. this after the case breaks and they caught fuchs. dick white says he was quote, relatively pure. meaning he was doing it for

money. it was all ideology and he was angry as a physicist when he saw the british and the americans, by this time, he'd become a british citizen after fleeing germany. he just wanted to balance the table, right? >> yes, that was true. he was also the head of mi6 and mi5. he was really involved and he was there when they were prosecuting klaus fuchs, he was right in mi5 at that time. people liked him, they sought and they didn't think it was right. and it's there are -- some people don't like him

because they were too reserved, there is women that said he never said anything and thought he was creepy, but others thought he was very generous to his friends with his time. his motives were completely ideological. he was very angry that the war started in 1939, he was reading the newspapers. in his mind, what it looked like was -- and there was some truth to this -- the upper classes of british society, would be nice if the germans and russians and if the germans won, it was ok with them. there was very little in the newspapers, we have to help our allies, the russians. this was

after molotov. after that, the russians got attacked, the brits did nothing to help them. he felt they really hated the communists and they were going to do whatever they could to get rid of them. by that time, he was a communist. when you first joined, he was not. by then, he had gone full into it. >> he became a real true believer. true believer. completely. he he was always talking about it two friends at the time, open about being a communist when he was first there's a young student in bristol in edinburgh. one of the daughters there, she said, you go to the movies with

him and the whole way back and forth he will be telling you about communism he didn't keep it a secret, he did later but not been. >> moving along in your story klaus fuchs begins work, he is a very good scientists and he begins working for the british in britain on the early projects and then he gets transferred, in 1944, and there he meets open high moore and all these other noted scientists. he has been passing things onto the soviets -- 1940 -- 1942? 1941 is when he started. he is very successful at it, very calm. no one suspects him. he

slips right under the radar. ppeople either like him because he is friendly. in this way, he is a perfect spy. exactly. what really strikes me about your narrative, when he moves back to britain after the war is over, he is working at a scientific institute and you found these transcripts. he came under suspicion and they started following him and tapping the phones at his house. you have the transcripts of these conversations. what a rich resource. hundreds of pages. >> they tapped his friends

phones to, you have it coming and going, both sides twice. >> this is a very unusual rich source for biographer too somebody that -- they would get all of that. they had almost every inch of his life covered for three to

four months. but he wasn't spying. >> so that is the mystery of course, they have good evidence that you can explain, but they really didn't caught him in the act. >> right. >> then there is this delicate dance between his interrogators and's klaus fuchs. and this is a marvelous story. i am struck by how naive he is. he really just sort of said, yes i, did do that but it was not really important. he did not considerate spying apparently. >> he did not. he did not considerate spying. he considered it something he could do because their allies have we had promised to cooperate with him and he was just really kind of helping out the uk and the u.s. with that

information he was was to give a did not. >> how did he actually get caught i'm >> well, there was all this information about him and he was not spying so they could not use it. this was done here just a few miles from where are sitting, in arlington, virginia, there was a big decoding center in the u.s. and the uk both had their people there and they had russian messages from the early 1940s. and for various reasons, they struggled for years to decode them, and they found the code. and they deciphered bunches and bunches of them, when they did they saw there was a spy involved in the manhattan project. it was called rest, they didn't know what rest was. but they knew it was somebody involved and there were little hints about, it he had a sister,

he did this and he might have gotten here and there. they could kind of look at timeframes, and that's how they knew there was somebody was who basically who tweaked, and he fit everything close. -- to me, the interesting piece is that he knew he was going to be uncovered. they did not find this out until august of 1949. there were these messages and this information was in it. in april of 1949, he stopped spying. i go through this the evidence of what was going on is a little complicated. aaaz ever said about it was he wrote a note to his father when he was in prison and his father had come to visit him in the

summer of 1949, and at that time, there was interest in having a nephew come live with klaus. he said to his father, he wrote, now you understand why i could not take care of this little boy. implying that this was all going on. in july, when his father and nephew were there, mi five and the fbi did not know he was a spy. he knew they were getting close to all

of it all being found out. how, i do not know. that did not work. they then decided after much discussion, they decided -- mi five interviewed him several times. >> at one point close sort of blurts out and says yes i did that. >> and at the time he decided himself to confess another friend, convinced him he had to confess, to make sure his friends did not fall under suspicion. that is why he confessed. there were other pieces to that, but that was the main one. and he felt extremely guilty that he had done this and not realized, that he had not been aware of these problems, that it could cause his friends. if it wasn't closet had to be someone else, and then you know if it wasn't him would be one

of his friends. >> well he confesses, in february of 1950. >> actually was the end of january. so this is 1950, so the korean war has not yet broken out. >> no. but it hasn't. >> but there is, you know the width of mccarthy-ism, and the cold war is raising and raging and the soviets, four years after hiroshima, and they've tested their own atomic bomb. and this, wretches up the cold war, to a new frightening stage. so, he is uncovered and unmasked, just at a very delicate time. >> the yes. >> so, the surprising thing to

me is, that julius and ethel rosenberg, we're caught a few years later and they get executed. but close, gets a 14 year sentence. >> yes that's what it was. >> so why did this happen in british justice? >> they tried him for espionage not treason and if it had been treason he would've been hung. that's what he thought was going to happen to him and he confessed and he thought that could happen to him but they tried him for espionage as far as i can tell, because the time he was spying he was spying for a friendly nation. they were allies. the russians were. so it made it a difference in their own laws on how they defined espionage versus treason. so that is you know 14 years

was the maximum for espionage. and he got out in nine for good behavior. whereas, our definitions are different and there was a lot of other politics involved. as you said mccarthy had started, and he did his west virginia speech, and klaus fuchs he confessed, and then they had a weekend they didn't do anything with them, they just got information from. they arrested him on february 2nd, and i think that mccarthy it was mid february he went to west virginia. so is just a few weeks. and all the sudden, there was all this information that came out of that moment. just as mccarthy had these lists of names and things, and it was exactly when klaus was arrested. it was a tremendous whirlwind, of communism. then the year before that, in 1948 and 1949, just a few years before and that had been going on for quite some time. so it really in the u.s., and

there was much more news than in britain. and so written said well let's go into the next story. they didn't make a big deal of it. and they also have a different legal system, they cannot make a big deal of it because if too many too much information comes out on it it jeopardizes the trial. and in fact, when the brits gave the fbi information, it almost seemed to leak out. and it would end up in the u.s. news, then it would end up in england, and mi5 said, if it comes in here it will mess up our trial. and we are going to lose. we're not even going to have a trial, if you know we are jeopardized by what's in the british press. so that was a big concern to mi5 and the british, so it's harder for them to whip things up. or was it that time under those particular laws. because they couldn't put a lot

in the news. >> right, so the other surprising thing, about the clouds story, the klaus fuchs story, he spends nine years in prison, then he's paroled and exchanged, and he's allowed to go to the eastern bloc. and he spends the rest of his life, in east germany and a member of the elite, of the communist party, and he's given such privileges and, he goes back to working on science, he tries to start a reactor program, a nuclear reactor, and he's a physicist and he believes in the idea that nuclear energy, can provide electricity and believes in the

idea that the that is a force for good. and of course the east germans, they have no interest in doing that they have all this black hole that they think they can rely on, so he had a rather frustrating career after this. but he is still loyal to the ideology, to the party, he was. >> he was loyal to the ideology, but he wasn't loyal so much to the party. he was a person that never complained, he just kept a small shut but he did decide and he thought that stalin-ism was terrible. and a real eyes a shun of communism not real communism. and i'm sure he got to the same point, with easter mints. he didn't quite say it, but he was devastated when they wouldn't let him you don't have the reactor program.

it was a huge disappointment. he got to know his son,. >> now he's nephew his nephew, yes i do know him. >> he became a very important source for the book no? >> very important, and he had all the family papers and one day after i'd been visiting him for years, i visited him several times and we sat and had lunch and chitchatted, the. >> and this is in germany. >> yes in berlin, and he had this whole closet full of information that i had no idea, and at the very last minute when i was about to ship it to an archive, to have them work on it and catalog it which means i would not have got my hands on it forever, so's it turns out that i said wow, i just sat there and took pictures from my ipad, four days until i was just barely moving. and that's where i found so much of the information, and

that and in the styles the archives, is where i had the information for what happened to him in his later years. and also the stories from the families. because, where in the earlier time no one was around, but in these times he had the other family he had a niece, who had been an american niece who went to school and university in leipzig and she gave me a lot of information to. she's just even weekends, so i had firsthand knowledge of what he was like during that time. >> it's ironic, that you get these surveillance transcripts from the british intelligence, and then you get this stalls-y archives, to tell you what he was doing in his life after he gets out of prison. that's remarkable. >> let me say, everybody in east germany for the most part they were informant, so if they

were in your house they were informants. so there was a lot of information from a lot of different people. >> so coming back to his father, who obviously was really important in his whole life, and you quote clouds a saying of his father, he was never a man of the church, but a face. and then you write, the same could be said of the sun. so tell us a little more about the father. >> he had -- hold on there's a problem when we come closer to the mic. -- he had his own way and his own ideas about religion, and he was very faithful to the bible and those principles.

but it wasn't his ethics, and his personal attitude toward his social side of him, and the sense of a quality, you know work part of the lutheran church in germany anyway. and, he just made his own way in that church, with his own principles and his own ethics. so he took what he saw as the face, and that's what he preached but it wasn't what the lutheran church preached. it wasn't their dogma, and he expanded it and that was the that was his modus operandi. and he helped reform adult education in germany, and he was always out doing something. he was never seen still, and he was always advocating for something and he was writing

pieces in the newspaper, and he hated you know he was railing against the right wing militia, that was going on. and when he made it through the war, and he was in prison for a while, because he always was talking to much, and his children got nervous about what he might say. when you might say about them to. so they didn't tell him much, so you wouldn't repeat it because he always seem to. and it wasn't to be mean, but he just ran his mouth. and he said something about the nazis, to a person who had been part of a parish, and she had told the police and they put him in prison for six weeks. and he was found guilty, and he was lucky it was in 1933, when there was still decent judges. so they gave time served, as well he did. but that's we was, he was

always pushing, and yet he never gave up. he was one of the most determined people, and he live till 97 and even at that age he still out there. writing letters and pushing people. and that was emil. and he did it inside. >> he was a very strong he had a very strong influence on the sun. >> and the other people in the family to. >> so coming to the end of the story, and the point of it all, there is always in every spy story argument of well, did the spy make any difference? did it change history? and you make an argument at the end of the book, and it's only speculation, but you point out in terms of the chronology of the events, that klaus fuchs his spying, may have helped the soviets advance their own

atomic bomb program by a year or two. that if so, they got the bomb in 1949, and so it was available, as such on the shelf there, when the korean war breaks out. and if they had not developed the bomb, in 1949 and it had been delayed until 1951 or 52. well there's a possibility that the korean war would have started, and there would have been the temptation by the americans to use anatomic balm, again against the chinese troops, that were intervening and pushing back the americans. so in that sense, what klaus fuchs did, may have changed history. and have prevented, the use of another atomic weapon. >> yes, and that is true.

you can also argue, that the means do they justify the end? that is that question. and there are factors of why we do not drop bombs, we have a bomb sitting on some island sitting there and mcarthur wanted to do that, and truman said no. and there were a number of factors, so you can't say it was just the fact that the that they were afraid of the russians, but that had to be a piece of it. along with other factors, so from a military point of view, that it had that consequence. from a political point of view, in the u.s., it certainly helped fire up, mccarthy in particular. and newspapers that were that way. so that had a profound effect on us. i think so. >> so you end the book with a

question, about close, what klaus was he good or evil, was he a traitor or a hero. and the fact that you asked the question was kind of shocking. we think of me as a spy. and yet you can ask was he a trader or hero? and i guess, it's an open ended question at the end of the book right? >> right, in terms of someone asked me, if he was evil, which it made me think about the moral ambiguity, and accountability of people and we all you know none of us are perfect, and we all have things that we do that aren't consistent with our personality, as some people would see it. and although he was fairly consistent, and you can read his principles, the way he

carried them through is the way he saw it. but, you know if in fact what he did helped us, convinced us in part not to drop a bomb, to my mind and to probably yours, that's a good thing. >> right right. >> yes. >> it's a little ambiguous, but. >> yes in so many of us, you know people are talking about it now, in what we're doing with their own history, and this person did this, but they did something that was decent, so this is not an unusual kind of question. we talk about thomas jefferson, and people like that, and there are many facets to people's personalities, and how to grapple with them. and it is all or nothing? are they just all literal that? is it one dimension? or can you somehow look at these things in a fuller way,

and maybe you can't come to the answer, but you can appreciate the fact that there are different perspectives, in a person and in all of us. we >> absolutely. and well i want to move to some questions, that we've got in the queue in a box here, but before i do that just following up on that, so at the end, i was astonished you have a funeral scene, where klaus fuchs dies, but who is in attendance, but vladimir putin is there? >> yes, and there's a picture of him and there's a newspaper picture, but he was the russian representative, because he was the kgb agent, and that's where folks was living klaus fuchs was living, and that was. it >> he probably thought he was the hero right. >> he probably did. >> but the russian government

has never acknowledged that he spied. never. >> so let's move to some questions from the audience, and here is one so was klaus fuchs outraged by nazi scientists like brown from the u.s.? i guess he would've heard about this. >> assuming he heard about it in prison, he never made any mention of it, so i honestly don't know the answer to that one, either one way or the other, and i don't know if you ever knew about it. i don't know you know i don't think they have a lot of newspapers to read in prison. >> right. >> so here's another question, did he express regret about his spying, aside from the risk it ran for his friends at the time? did he later issue an apology? did he ever? >> no never, he never said i

shouldn't have spied. except in connection with his friends he did not feel that he had done anything wrong by giving the information to the russians. end of story. >> yes. >> except for his friends. >> well he is like his father, very determined and loyal to his beliefs, and principles. >> exactly. >> so, another question here could you say, a few words about the klaus fuchs relationship with his one-time handler. kaczynski, and alias sonia. >> he started working with her, in about 1942, so it was 90 40 to her 43 before he went to the u.s.. so she was part of this family interesting family german

communists, all who came over to london, and her brother was a very close, what i don't know if they were friends but they were compact rates. the they were compatriots. and he was in the u.s. for a while and and her brother jurgen put him in touch with us klaus. he put the sister in touch with klaus. and he didn't seem to know ursula. so ursula he did not identify as part of the kaczynski family. and they had a professional relationship. she is one of the top, spies for the communists. and she worked in a few different countries. she and he would meet, and they

would walk along the lane, and pretend that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and he would hand her whatever information he had at that time, and she had a special place to put it behind the tree and someone else will come in fetch it. they had the whole thing worked out and they do that for about a year and a half. it was about that amount of time i think so they did not have a long relationship, but it was very professional and she was one of the best. there is no doubt. and when he was apparently supposedly, he never got back in touch with her. but it turns out, that when he was near oxford, she was in a little town, maybe 20 or 30 miles away, and i wonder if perhaps, they had gotten in touch. just themselves, and she was perhaps the person who told him that the arlington people, it

was working on the messages, and there was a possibility that they could come up and find out about him. because they were just right there, and the first night he was interviewed, he disappeared for hours. and mi5 did not know where he was. and he had a car, he could've driven to see her. no one was following him at that moment. so i don't know if they ever saw each other again or not, i do not know the full relationship, and her family's, i would've been interested in talking to her family, but you know for children are around, but there are certain narrative that they have and there are books written, that she wrote and autobiography in a memoir, and someone else was a family friend wrote something in german, but it does not say anything other than what we already know. so i was not able to get to the family. i couldn't get any information.

i don't think anyone knew any different. so they have a professional relationship is the answer and if they had more, which could be possible nobody knows. >> so mysteries remain, what i see. >> yes mysteries remain. >> so if you could ask klaus fuchs one question what would it be? >> my one question is, and actually have two questions i want to ask him, i would ask him how he knew that basically what was going on in arlington, and that he was close to being uncovered. i just you know he never said anything about it so that is one, but there's another story and turns out he was basically a piece of british in for british history that people don't know much about is that they interned about 30,000 mostly driven refugees. most of them were jewish, and

they decide that the these shoes would be a fifth colony to help them invade. and they thought once a german always a german. and they rounded them up 30,000 of them. and many of them they sent to canada, and in canada klaus fuchs was very free about his communism, and he came under the influence of a charismatic person named haunts, and there was a small clique of communists in this's internment camp in canada. and these were all the many of the people in the east were young university students or you know as one of the camp commander said, i have the smallest star of the smartest group of people anywhere in canada. and he was a noble prize winner, and they had all kinds of

amazing scientific discoveries these people later on in their lives. because they have been taken you know he was like klaus fuchs he was taken out he had been in edinburgh, he had a post doc and he was taken off. and that happened to all of them. one of those people want to another physicist and it turned out that this person was part of this communist group, and it turned out that when klaus had a theoretical physicist, basically in her well, basically this person work for him. he knew that klaus was a communist. and he did not hide his feelings when he was in the camps. so he worked for him, and there was a lot of tension between them and i knew this person's wife, and i went talk to her on a number of occasions. and she would tell me about it. and i would like to know, if

basically what the relationship was, and how they bridged this problem of this person knowing about klaus communism. he did not see he was a communist at that point, he just said he was a social democrat. and that's true. and he was. so how did they work this out? i have no idea. and i tried to find out, and nobody knew. i know his family well, and they didn't know. they >> didn't know right. >> so, another member of our audience tonight asks, can you outline the nature of the information that klaus shared a new, and how exclusive was it? >> his first basically he first worked on the fusion, gaseous diffusion which takes the isotopes you want to use out of uranium, in order to have a

chain reaction and a uranium bomb. that was the first thing. and a lot of the theory behind it, and when he came to the u.s. he worked out all the controls of the whole plant for the u.s., so you had this problem that problem that's what you do. and he was highly technical, basically and getting one of these things to work, and the size of a diffusion plant was a size of three football fields. and there were thousands of filters it had to go through, so that was one piece. and they had all that information. and that's all we had it first, because i thought he did. when he went to lost almost, he worked on the plutonium bomb. and he worked on lenses that were explosive, and they had to compress at a certain time. it was one 1 millionth of a second, it was the timing of this to compress the core, and to create the chain reaction of

plutonium. he gave those plans, to the russians. on june 2nd of 1945. and they may have been more theoretical, but he had a lot of the drawings and things