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THE SPY WHO ATE HERE


The mysterious story of master spy, Klaus Fuchs, and his connection to Steventon

Klaus Fuchs was the atomic spy credited with one of the greatest acts of treachery in British history.  His espionage, from 1941 when he was working on the Manhattan Project in the USA, to his confession in 1950, resulted in the Russians building their own Atomic bomb.


Fuchs was an anti-Nazi German refugee who studied at Bristol.  He worked with Rudolf Peierls, initially at the UK Ministry of Aircraft Production, his speciality being refining uranium for the development of an atomic bomb.  In 1944, they both joined the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.  It is believed that Stalin knew about the Trinity Test (the first nuclear detonation) before President Truman did!  Whilst still at Los Alamos, Fuchs started work on Hydrogen Bomb.  After the war ended, he was reassigned to the UK Atomic Energy Project in Harwell. By 1949, he had passed on enough intelligence to the Russians to enable them to have a detailed understanding of British and American progress on nuclear weaponry. 

Fuchs was finally identified in the summer of 1949 following FBI work on decoding messages. MI5 started systematic surveillance. MI5 shared their concerns with the Director at Harwell, Sir John Cockcroft, and with Henry Arnold who was in charge of security. The MI5 interrogator, Jim Skardon, interviewed Fuchs at Harwell three times in December 1949 and January 1950 but found no conclusive evidence of his treachery. Meanwhile, Cockcroft was asked by the Home Office to seek ways of removing Fuchs from Harwell without a confession.

In the photo, Fuchs is standing on the left.

Throughout January, Fuchs’s behaviour became more erratic as he gradually became aware of the danger he was in. On 23rd January, he asked his friend, the security officer Henry Arnold for a “long quiet talk”. Arnold was briefed by MI5 not to reveal to Fuchs that he knew anything about the investigation. Fuchs and Arnold went to The Railway House Hotel in Steventon (now The Cherry Tree). Arnold later told MI5 that Fuchs appeared “under mental stress” and that he “might now be ready to make a confession.”


The following day, Skardon and Fuchs met again at Fuch’s home. Fuchs poured out his life history. After two hours, Skardon told Fuchs that he should, “… unburden his mind and clear his conscience by telling me the whole story.” Fuchs replied, “I will never be persuaded by you to talk.” By now it was one o’clock and they decided to break for lunch. This time Fuchs suggested the very smart The Queen’s Hotel on the Market Place in Abingdon. Over lunch, Fuchs told Skardon that he was ready to talk, and they hurried back to Harwell. Fuchs realised that there was compelling evidence of his espionage and so his lengthy confession began. Even so, he was not immediately arrested. Skardon asked Fuchs to make a full official statement and, on January 27th, they met at The War Office. Fuchs was hopeful that he would be allowed to continue with his work at Harwell but he was tried and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and stripped of his British nationality. He was released from prison in 1959 and returned to East Germany where he continued to work in atomic research. He died in 1988.


MI5 dossiers show that without that lunch with Arnold in Steventon and the further lunch and post lunch confession with Skardon, there would have been insufficient evidence to prosecute Fuchs. This very civilised approach to extracting a confession was certainly effective. Skardon later obtained a confession from Anthony Blunt, the Cambridge spy.

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