History tv, every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Americasreated by Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Next on American History tv, Nancy Thorndike greenspan talks about her book atomics by the 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. Lets go at it. I was asking you why klaus fuchs. I was interested in him when i was working on my previous book. Papers. Lot of family diaries during those late 1930s. He was always showing up in some piece of paper. Showing up as a very nice person. He took the children out to the movies. He played cards with them. He was in there he was in their music ensemble. People liked him. He was very quiet, very shy, but he was a nice person. All of a sudden, he was a spy, and they were dumbfounded. They did not know much about him when i was first working on it. At that point, i thought i should find out more. I went to the archives in london and there were three little skimpy files. The very last when i looked at, had a letter from somebody in the administration saying, what am i supposed to do with all of these files . The person who received it, throw them away. I was astounded by that. There is not anything. For the born but, it was what it was book, it was what it was. After ied a year finished, a friend of mine in germany said why dont you think about writing about fuchs . I am not sure there is enough information to write about him. Early looked, it was the 2000. Back to the archives of declassified5 had. Undreds and hundreds of files pages missing that they would not let you see but there were thousands of pages there. Yes, i can do this. He was an inherently interesting person. As i heard other stories, i was able to find a huge number of archives nobody else had ever found. I like being a detective. That sent me on a path. I found so much i did not know what to do with it all. At some point, if you dont stop, you will never finish. Do. Hat is what we detective work. I was astonished at the end of your book, you list over 25 or 30 archives you visited and they are all over the world. Which was your favorite one . Which was the most productive in this Treasure Hunt . Nancy the most productive was the university of kiel. I was told not to even bother to go there. There was one file and it was on his father. I thought, i cannot do that. Being i went to the archivist. Many people do not do that. I wrote to this archivist, this lovely lady. I had enough german to be able to do that. Not great, but good enough. Said,ote me back and she i think you might find gold here. She sent me the numbers for some files they had that were labeled miscellaneous disciplinary matters. Othing to do with klaus fuchs she was right. She obviously peaked. Archive in this. Ery sweet little town about klaus and his brother. Although nazis that they fought. Once i got the idea of how to find things, i found lectures they were giving. Pulling a group together, all kinds of stuff. I found hundreds and hundreds of pages. That is a good point. Lets have you talk a little bit about klaus himself as a young an and how he became antifascist. Tell us that story. That gets into the motivation for what comes next. Nancy it was a key part of his life, one of the most fascinating because nobody else ofhe started off in a family four children, he was number three. He was born right before world war i, 1911. He had a very clinically active father. The father was extremely liberal. He was a minister in the very conservative Lutheran Church. The two did not match. His mission in life was to support the working class. E was a socialist he was not a communist. All of his children became socialists. Where klaus is extremely reserved, his father was very outspoken. They both had the same steely unbending determination and they were both the same in that way. , when he was a teenager, he was the scholar in the family. He was famous in the area for his mathematical gifts and talents. When he was a senior in high school, he won the regional prize of the best student. The best student in the whole area. Politics. Talk about his brother and two sisters and his father did. They were all activists. In the to the university 1930s to study mathematics. His brother was there studying law. The first thing his brother had him do was to join the socialist party with the students there. In 1930, there were fights in the streets. Got their grips in the german universities very early. Most of the students were from welltodo families. They were government officials kids. Socialistsnot many and there were not many communists. There were a lot of nazis. They were having fights in the streets. The college said at one point, klaus said, i learned more in the streets than i did in the classroom. He and his brother moved to the university of kiel and they started their own socialist student group. They thought there should be a merging of the two. Students were much more entrenched. The way that students thought at that time was by making incendiary speeches and handing out pamphlets and calling each other names. Level of the discourse. Tumult, it can cause fisticuffs. Nazi administration at all. In 1932, the turning point, which sets up the platform for the rest of his life, 1932 was a president ial election. 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. Brother, they were dismayed. , they could not support him. Immediately, the socialist party kicked them out. The communists said, come be with us. Eventually,ted but 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 thought the socialists were not fighting the nazis. And thealists communists hated each other. They tried to kill the nazi students. The Council Voted secretly to kill him. And thes a riot students around the university were yelling throw him in the fjord. It was a piece of the baltic sea. It was february. Him in. Ew all he ever said about it was that they he swims out. It was very traumatic. He ended up in berlin a few weeks later. They were trying to get people to mobilize against the nazis. They were risking their lives every single minute. Life. A terrible it did have an effect on him. Obviously part of his motivation. Nancy exactly. At one point in your narrative, you quote the head of the british mi5. Breaks andthe case they caught fuchs. [indiscernible] it was all ideology. Saw the british and the americans by this time, he had become a british citizen after fleeing germany. He just wanted to balance the table, right . Nancy yes, that was true. Whiteite was also dick. As also the head of mi6. Eople liked fuchs they did not think what he did was right. But they liked him as a person. Some people did not like him because he was too reserved and it made him feel creepy. He never said anything. Others like him very much. He was very, very generous to his friends. Completely were ideological. That the warngry 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 andhe germans and russians if the germans won, it was ok with them. There was very little in the newspapers, we have to help our allies, the russians. 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. 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. Nancy true believer. Defended it. Nancy completely. He was always talking about his friends at the time, open about a communist. Daughters, the whole way back and forth, he would be telling you about communism. Moving along in your story, he is a very good scientist and he begins working for the on the earlyitain projects and he was transferred to meet oppenheimer and other noted scientists. He has been passing things onto 1940 1942 . Nancy 1941 is when he started. He is very successful at it, very calm. No one suspects them. He slips right under the radar. People either like him because he is friendly. In this way, he is a perfect spy. Nancy exactly. What really strikes me about your narrative, when he moves back to britain after the war 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. Nancy hundreds of pages. They tapped his friends phones, too. Unusual, richery source for a biographer to have telephone transcripts. A diary is good but a telephone transcript is in the moment. Were these transcripts declassified recently . In the last 10 years . Nancy they mostly came out around 20032008. Telephones,e they they had bugs in his office. Him being on the telephone with they would get all of that. Moment, every inch of his life covered for 34 months. They have good evidence. They had not caught him in the act. Then there was this little delicate dance between his interrogators and fuchs. This is a marvelous story. Naive he is. Y how did do do this that but it was not really important. It spying. Consider nancy he did not consider it spying. Out the u. K. And the u. S. With the information they were supposed to give and didnt. How did he get caught . Nancy there was all this information about him. He was not spying so they could not use it. In arlington, virginia, there was a big decoding center. The u. S. And u. K. 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. They deciphered bunches and bunches of them. They thought there was a spy involved in the manhattan project. They knew there was somebody involved. He had a sister and he might have gone here or there. There wasw they knew somebody. Within two weeks, they thought it was probably klaus. He fit everything. Interesting to me, the interesting piece is that he knew he was going to be uncovered. Out untilot find this 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. Basically, the only thing he 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. Wrote, to his father, he now you understand why i could not take care of this little boy. Goingng that this was all on. In july, when his father and nephew were there, mi five and the fbi did not know there was a spy. He knew they were getting close to airing it all out. How, i do not know. That did not work. They then decided after much decided miey five interviewed him several times. You tell this great story about the mi five officer, who was a great interrogator. Hours and hours of discussions. Sort of blurts out and says, yes, i did that. Nancy 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. That was the main one. He felt extremely guilty that he had done this, that he had never been aware of these problems that he could cause his friends. He confesses in february of 1950. Nancy the end of january. The korean war has not yet broken out. Nancy no, it hasnt. Know, ahere is, you ofth of mccarthyism whiff mccarthyism and the cold war is raising in the soviets, four years after hiroshima, they tested their own atomic bomb. Warhis wretches up the cold ches up the cold war. He is unmasked at a very delicate time. Me,surprising thing to julius and Ethel Rosenberg get caught a few years later and they get executed. 14years fuchs gets a sentence. Happen . This nancy they tried him for espionage. If it had been treason, he would have been hung. If he confessed, he thought maybe that would happen to him. They tried him for espionage, as far as i can tell. Spying ime he was he was spying for a friendly nation, they were allies, the russians were. It made a difference in their law and how they defined espionage versus treason. Maximum for the espionage. He got out in nine for good behavior. Our definitions are different and there were a lot of other politics involved. Mccarthy had started. He did his West Virginia speech he confessed and then they had out he had a week where they did not do anything with them. February, hemid went to West Virginia. All of a sudden, there was all this information that came out at that moment just as mccarthy had this list of names was exactly when klaus was arrested. It was a tremendous whirlwind of communism. That had been going on for quite some time. U. S. , and there was much more in the news that in britain. Make a big deal over it. They also have a different legal system. They cannot make a big deal of it. If too much information is out, it jeopardizes the trial. When the brits gave the fbi information, it always seemed to leak out. It would end up in the u. S. News and then it would end up in england. We are going to lose. Trial ifot even have a we are jeopardized by the british press. That was a big concern to the british. It is harder for them to whip things up with those particular laws. The other surprising thing about the klaus story, he goes to prison, he spent nine years in prison. I guess he is paroled in he is allowed to go to the eastern bloc. He spent the rest of his life in east germany, a member of the , a member of the elite. Goes back to working on science. As aying to , he believes in the idea that Nuclear Energy can provide electricity and believes in the idea that Nuclear Energy can provide and of course the east germans have no interest in they have all this black coal 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 loyal to the ideology, but he wasnt so much loyal to the party. He was never a person who complained. He just kept his mouth shut. But he did decide. E thought stalin was the biggest communist. He didnt quite say it but he was devastated when they wouldnt let him agree to the reactor program. Yes. That was a huge disappointment. A huge disappointment. Got to know his son . His nephew. Yes, i do know him. He became a very important source for the book, no . Very partner, and he had all the family papers. One day after i had been visiting him for years. I visited him several times a year and we sat and had lunch and chitchat. This is in germany . In berlin. Yes. He had this whole closet of information i had no idea and at the very last moment when he was going to ship it to an archive that was going to work on it which means i wouldnt have gotten my hands on it forever. So i just sat there and took pictures with my ipad of it for days until thats where i found so much information and, that and the stazi archives and the stories from the family, because where as the earlier times no one was around then. These times, remember, he had other a niece who had been an american niece who went to the university and she gave me a lot of information, because she used to go visit him on the w50ekeds so i had a lot of firsthand knowledge of what he was like at that time. Its amazing. You get these surveillance tributes from the British Intelligence then the stazi ar kies to tell you what he was doing with his life after he gets out of prison. Remarkable. Yes. I just let me say, everybody in east germany was an informant. If they were in your house they were informing on you, thats why they were there, so there was lots of information from a lot of people. So coming back to his father, emil who was important in his life. You quote him as saying he was never a man of the church but of faith and then you write, the same could be said of the son. So tell us a little more about emil, the father. Coming we are to a problem let me move closer. That seems to do it. He had his own way his own ideas about religion. He was very faithful to the bible. Nd those principles, but his ethics and his personal attitude toward the social side of him. The sense of equality. You know, werent 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 elliottics. Ethics. So he took what he saw as the faith, and that is what he preached. But it wu7b9 what the Lutheran Church preached. It wasnt their dog anyway. Their dogma. He expanded it. He was also very involved in education. He helped reform Adult Education in germany. He was always out doing something. He never stayed still. He was always advocating for something and writing pieces in the newspaper. And he hated the he was railing against the rightwinning militia that was going on. And he made it through the war. He was in prison for a while, because he always was talking too much, and his children got nervous about what he might say about them too. And so they didnt tell him much so he couldnt repeat it. Because he always seemed to. Not to be mean. He just ran his mouth. And he said something about the nazis and she went and 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 is what they did. So thats what he was. Always pushing. Yet he never gave up. He was the most determined person. He lived to 7 and even at that age he was still writing letters and pushing people. And that was emil. And a very Strong Influence on his son. And the other people in his family too. So coming to sort of the end of the story. The point of it all. Theres always in every spy story an argument of well, did the spy make any difference . Did it change history . And you make an argument at the end of the book. Its only speculation, but you point out in terms of the his ology of events that spying may have helped the soviet advance their own Atomic Bomb Program by a year or two. If so, they got the bomb in 1949. And so it was available as such on th