Nancy i was interested in him when i was working on my on bourne. I had a lot of papers on the bou rnes. Letters, diaries. In the late 30s, when he was there, he was always showing up in some piece of paper. He was showing up as a very nice person. He took their children to the movies, played cards with them. As germans do. 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. I came into this information. They did not know much about him when i was first working on it. So, at that point, i thought i should find more about fuchs. I went to the archives in london and there were three little skippy files. 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 fuchs files from his trial and everything . The person who received it said through them away. So i was astounded. There is not anything. Bourne book, it was what it was. About a year after i finished a , friend of mine in germany said, why dont you think about writing about fuchs . This person was interested in him too. I said i am not sure there is , enough information to write about him. About a year when i looked, it was the early to thousands and my book came out it was 2000s and my book came out in i went back to the 2005. Archives of london and mi5 had declassified hundreds and hundreds of files. Not only on him, but people from the 30s and 40s and 50s. Pages missing that they would not let you see but there were thousands of pages there. I thought, well, this is a good start. Yes, i can do this. He was an inherently interesting person. He became more so as i met his family, read family papers, heard other stories, read all the other i was able to find a huge number of archives nobody else had ever found. Thats i like being a detective. So that sent me on a path. In fact i found so much i did , not know what to do with it all. You know, this is what happens. You getmuch the, so much stuff if you dont stop, you will never finish. That is what we do. 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. So which was your favorite one . Which was the most productive in this Treasure Hunt . Nancy the most productive was at the university of kiel. I was told by a friend in germany not to even bother to go there. There was one file there and it was about the father. So just dont bother. I thought, i cannot do that. I need to go. American sitting here, i went to the archivist. Many people do not do that. If it is your country and you know how things work, you go to the archives yourself. I wrote to this archivist, this lovely lady. I did it in german. I had enough german to be able to do that. It is not great, but it is good enough. And she wrote me back and she said, i think you might find gold here. And she sent me the numbers for some files they had that were miscellaneous disciplinary matters, nothing to do with clouse fuchs. Klaus fuchs. She was right. She obviously peeked. She knew what was in them. I went to this archive in this very sweet little town. It is not in kiel, it is up in scheswig. It was all about klaus and his brother and all of the nazis that they fought. And all of the problems that occurred. Once i got the idea of how to find things, i could go to the files myself and found lectures they were giving. Pulling a group together, all kinds of stuff. I just found hundreds and hundreds of pages. So, that is a good point. Lets have you talk a little bit about klaus himself as a young man and how he became an antifascist. Tell us that story. Because that obviously gets into the motivation for what comes next. Does. It it was the key part of his life, to me the most fascinating because nobody else well, let me say, he started off in a family of four children, he was number three. He was born right before world war i, 1911. And he had a very politically 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. He was a socialist. He joined the social democratic party, the socialist party in germany. He was not a communist. There were very strong distinctions between those two things. All of his children became socialists. Whereas klaus is extremely reserved, his father was very outspoken. But they both had the same determinationing inside and they were both the same in that way. They just espoused it in different ways. But klaus, 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, in the gymnasium, he won the reasonable regional prize in the Weimar Republic of the best student in the whole area. He did not talk about politics at all. His brother and two sisters and his father did all the talking that was needed. They were all activists. He went to the university in the 1930s to study mathematics. His brother was there studying law. And he went to live with his brother. The first thing his brother had him do was join the socialist party with the students there. Already, in there were fights in 1930, the streets. The nazis got their grips in the german universities really early. And most of the students were from welltodo families. They were not rich, but they were government officials kids. They were not the working class, the poor. So there were not many socialists and there were not many communists. There were a lot of nazis. And they were having fights in the streets. Said, and klaus said, i learned more in the streets than i did in the classroom. He was there for a year and then he and his brother moved to the university of kiel and they started their own socialist Student Group with both communists and socialists. They thought there should be a merging of the two. They felt that would be the only way to get a concentration big enough to fight the nazi students. Nazi students were much more entrenched. And so they started the way the students fought at that time was initially by making incendiary speeches and handing out pamphlets and calling each other names. Things like that. That was the level of the discourse. But it could cause tumult, cause fisticuffs and things like that. The administration was actually not a Nazi Administration at all. They gave the brothers a lot of leeway to a large degree. 1932, the turning point , which setss gang 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. Fuchses, klaus and his brother gerhart, learn this, they were dismayed. Hindenburg, they could not support him. So they started supporting the communist candidate. And immediately, the social democrats, 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. That was it. At they did not join because first, they were communists. They were for the working class. They joined because they wanted to fight the nazis and they thought the socialists were not fighting the nazis. The socialists fought the communists and the communists fought the socialists. They hated each other. So he was traumatized, initially, by this whole experience, no . Nancy they tried to kill the nazi students. The Council Voted secretly to kill him. That was in 1933. There was a riot and the students around the university in the riot were yelling throw him in the fjord. The fjord was a piece of the baltic sea. It was february. You could not be in their but for a few minutes be in there before a few minutes it would kill you. They threw him in. All he ever said about it was that he swims out. It was very traumatic. And then he ended up in berlin a few weeks later. The gestapo was after him. There were resistors in the underground and they were trying to get people to mobilize against the nazis. They were risking their lives every single minute. In the gestapo was ruthless and tortured them all. It was terrible and they all did it. And it was a terrible life. For those three years and it did have an effect on him. This is obviously part of his motivation for what he does later. Nancy exactly. At one point in your narrative, you quote the head of the british mi5. This is after the case breaks and they have caught fuchs. Someone says his motives were pure. He did not do it for money. It was all ideology. He was angry when he saw the british and the americans by this time, he had become a british citizen after fleeing germany. So he was angry at the british and the americans for withholding science and scientific information from an ally, the soviets. So he just wanted to balance the table, right . Nancy yes and it is true. Dick white was also the head of mi6. He was really involved and he was there when they were prosecuting. He was right in mi at that time. Time. Mi5 at that people 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 them feel creepy. He never said anything. Others liked him very much. He was very, very generous to his friends with his time and help. His motives were completely ideological. He was very angry that the war angry as 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 especially in the upper classes of british society, would be nice if the russians juste fought each other and did each 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. At that point, they were not. This was after reagan tropemolotov pact. After they got attacked, 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. Being, by that time, he was a communist. When you first joined, he was then, he had gone full into it ideologically. He became a real true believer. Nancy true believer. Defended it. Nancy completely. Yes. Always talking about it to friends at the time when he was open about being a communist, when he was first there is a student in bristol and edinboro. Edinboro. One of the born daughters, the whole way back and forth, he would be telling you about communism. So he did not keep it a secret at that point. He did later, but he didnt then. Stte moving along in your story, he is a very good scientist and he begins working for the british in britain on the early bomb project and he gets transferred in 1944 to los alamos and there he meets to los alamos and there he meets oppenheimer and all these other noted scientists. At this point, he has been passing on things to the soviets 42 . When, nancy 1941 is when he started. He is very successful at it, very calm. No one suspects him. He slips right under the radar. Say, people either like him because he is friendly. Not a big ego. A perfect spot in some ways. Spy in some ways. Nancy 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 there you found they are and you found these surveillance transcripts. He came under suspicion and they started following him and tapping his phones and his house. And you have the transcripts of these conversations. Really, wow what a rich , resource. Nancy hundreds of pages. And all of his friends. They tapped his friends phones, too. It was coming and going. You have both sides twice. This is a very unusual, rich source for a biographer to have telephone transcripts. I mean, you know, a diary is good, but a telephone transcript is in the moment. [laughter] so, were these transcripts declassified fairly recently recently . In the last 10 years or . Nancy they mostly came out around 20032008. Gradually. Not only were they telephones, they had bugs in his house and his office. So people walking into his office and asking a question or at the table or him being on the telephone with somebody they would get all of that. Every inch ofmost his life covered for 34 months. But he was not spying, so there wasnt any. [laughter] that is a mystery of course. Evidence, but they had not caught him in the act. Then there was this little delicate dance between his interrogators and fuchs. And this is just a marvelous story. I am struck by how naive he is. Serve ling to saying, yes, i did do that, but it was not really important. He did not consider it spying apparently. Nancy he did not consider it spying. He considered it something he could do because we were allies and we promised to cooperate with them. He was helping out the u. K. And the u. S. With the information they were supposed to give and didnt. How did he get caught . Therell, there is was all this information about him. He was not spying so they could not use it. Wenona was done just a few miles from where i am sitting 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. And they deciphered bunches and bunches of them. And when they did it, they saw there was a spy involved in the manhattan project. Arrest. Alled breast. Rest. They knew there was somebody involved. He had a sister and he might have gone here or there. They could look at time frames. That is how they knew there was somebody. Within two weeks, they thought it was probably klaus. He fit everything. So, but what is interesting about to me, the interesting piece in this is that he knew he was going to be uncovered. He knew it. They did not find this out until august of 1949. That there were these messages and this information was in it. In april of 1949, he stopped spying. And i cover 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 and live with klaus. He said to his father, he wrote, from prison, now you understand why i could not take care of this little boy. And implying that this was all going on. In july, when his father and nephew were there, mi5 and the fbi did not know there was a spy. Know he was a spy. They did not even know there was a spy. He knew they were getting close to figuring it all out. How, i do not know. That did not work. They then decided after much discussion they did not know what he would do if they interviewed him they decided, enter via mi5, to interview him. Mi5 interviewed him several times. You tell this great story about the mi5 officer, who was a great interrogator. Just very gentle and calm. Hours and of discussions. Finally, one point at one point, klaus sort of blurts out and says, yes, i did that. Time, he decided himself to convince 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, that he had never been aware of these problems that he could cause his friends. Because if it was not him, it had to be someone else. And it would be one of his friends. He confesses in february of 1950 . Nancy the end of january. January. This is 1950, so the korean war has not yet broken out. Nancy no, it hasnt. But there is, you know, the whiff of mccarthyism and the cold war is raising in the is raising and the soviets, four years after hiroshima, they tested their own atomic bomb. This ratchets up the cold war to a new, frightening stage. So, he is uncovered. He is unmasked at a very delicate time. So, what happened the surprising thing to me, you know, julius and Ethel Rosenberg get caught a few years later and they get executed. But klaus fuchs gets a 14year sentence . Nancy yes. That is what it was. So why does this happen in british justice . Fory they tried him espionage, not treason. If it had been treason, he would have been hung. If he confessed, he thought maybe that would happen to him. But they tried him for espionage, as far as i can tell. Because at the time he was spying, he was spying for a friendly nation. They were allies, the russians were. So, it made a difference in their own laws and how they defined espionage versus treason. So and 14 years was the maximum for espionage. He got out in nine for good behavior. Whereas our definitions are different and there were a lot of other politics involved. As you said mccarthy had , started. He did his West Virginia speech he confessed and then they had a week they did not do anything with him. On february 2. Im mccarthy was midfebruary, he went to West Virginia. So it was just weeks. All of a sudden, there was all this information that came out at that moment just as mccarthy had these lists of names and things was exactly when klaus was arrested. So it was just a tremendous whirlwind of communism. Huac had been the year before 49 andlger his, 1948 or that had been going on for quite some time. In the u. S. , and there was much more in the news that in britain. Then in britain. Britain did not make a big deal over it. They also have a different legal system. They cannot make a big deal of it because if too much information comes out, it jeopardizes the trial. When the brits gave the fbi information, it always seemed to leak out, and it would end up in the u. S. News and then it would end up in england. Mi5 said, if it comes in here, it could mess up our trial. We are going to lose. We will not even have a trial if we are jeopardized by the british press. So that was a big concern to the british. It is harder for them to whip things up it was at that time with those particular laws. The other surprising thing about the klaus story, he goes to prison, he spent nine years in prison. Then i guess he is paroled and exchanged. He is allowed to go to the eastern bloc. He spends the rest of his life in east germany, a member of the communist party, a member of the elite. He is given, as such, the privileges of a party member. He goes to back that she goes back to working on science. He goes back to working on science. He is trying to as a physicist, he believes in the idea that Nuclear Energy can provide electricity and a force for good. Of course, the used germans have no interest in doing it. They have all this blood coal they think they can rely on. Black coal they think they can rely on. So he has a frustrating career after this, but he is still loyal to the ideology of the party. Nancy he was loyal to t