She found this by while researching her previous book on nobel physicist. So lets 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, hes 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 thats what i used. So i finished about a year ago, a friend of mine in germany said why dont you write about klaus fuchs, this person is interested in him. To i thought thats interesting, but thats 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 hadnt 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 didnt know what to do with it and at some point you dont stop if you dont stop youll 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 worlds 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 dont bother and i thought oh i cant 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 dont 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, its not great but its 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 towns and its 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 givings. Pulling their group together. All signs of stuff, and i found hundreds and hundreds of pages. Slow thats a good point, and lets have you talk a bit about klaus himself as a young man and how he became criticize, and how he became an antifascist 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 didnt 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 werent the poor so there werent many socialists and there werent 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 universitys 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 president ial 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 couldnt 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, hed 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 didnt think it was right. And its there are some people dont 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 theres 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 didnt 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 wasnt spying. So that is the mystery of course, they have good evidence that you can explain, but they really didnt caught him in the act. Right. Then there is this delicate dance between his interrogators ands 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 im 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 didnt 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 thats 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 wasnt closet had to be someone else, and then you know if it wasnt 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 hasnt. But there is, you know the width of mccarthyism, and the cold war is raising and raging and the soviets, four years after hiroshima, and theyve 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, were caught a few years later and they get executed. But close, gets a 14 year sentence. Yes thats 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 wouldve been hung. Thats 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 didnt 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 lets go into the next story. They didnt 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. Were not even going to have a trial, if you know we are jeopardized by whats in the british press. So that was a big concern to mi5 and the british, so its harder for them to whip things up. Or was it that time under those particular laws. Because they couldnt 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 hes paroled and exchanged, and hes 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 hes given such privileges and, he goes back to working on science, he tries to start a reactor program, a nuclear reactor, and hes 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 wasnt 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 stalinism was terrible. And a real eyes a shun of communism not real communism. And im sure he got to the same point, with easter mints. He didnt quite say it, but he was devastated when they wouldnt let him you dont have the reactor program. It was a huge disappointment. He got to know his son,. Now hes 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 id 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 hand