Thursday, April 1, 1999Trade of 'Blackest' Secrets Began in '45 -- in N.M.
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
Nuclear espionage was born in New Mexico along with the atomic bomb.
You can trace its history to two days in June 1945 -- to a bridge over the Santa Fe River and a nondescript Albuquerque apartment on High Street NE.
June 2: German-born chemist Klaus Fuchs comes down from Los Alamos to Santa Fe for a meeting with a Soviet courier named Harry Gold.
June 3: Gold travels to Albuquerque, where a Manhattan Project machinist named David Greenglass passed him a crude drawing of an atomic bomb.
Nations have always tried to carefully guard their military secrets, to protect them from enemies real and imagined.
Among those secrets, though, the enigmas of awesomely powerful nuclear weapons have been in a category of their own.
"It's always been the most secret," said Pennsylvania State University historian Charles Ameringer. "It has almost been what you might call 'the blackest of the black.' ''
But from the beginning, those secrets have leaked.
"It is unlikely," a panel of experts that included H-bomb advocate Edward Teller told the Pentagon in 1970, "that classified information will remain secure for periods as long as five years, and it is more reasonable to assume that it will become known to others in periods as short as one year."
It begins with three
When scientists and soldiers gathered behind barbed wire in Los Alamos for a World War II crash program to build the world's first nuclear weapon, at least three among them were also atomic spies.
Fuchs, Greenglass and a precocious young physicist named Ted Hall together passed on enough detailed information about the U.S. design for the first atomic weapons to cut years off the Soviets' efforts to get the bomb.
A scandal raging today over whether a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist passed nuclear secrets to the Chinese in 1988 raises echoes of that history.
But experts say it's important to understand how different the landscape was almost 54 years ago when Fuchs met Gold on the bridge.
Los Alamos was a closed city of 6,000, its researchers working on a top secret project the very existence of which had been kept from our enemies.
The Soviets -- the United States' ally in World War II -- may have penetrated its security, but the program's prime target at the time, Nazi Germany, never knew what was going on.
"The Germans never found out," noted Robert S. Norris, a nuclear weapons expert working on a biography of Gen. Leslie Groves, the military officer in charge of the Manhattan Project.
Today, not only is Los Alamos an open community, but many of the old secrets are open as well.
Ideas that used to be highly classified -- how to use nuclear fission to make a bomb like that detonated over Nagasaki, or fusion like the hydrogen bomb that held the world in terror through much of the Cold War -- are now widely known.
"The principles of both fission and fusion weapons have long been in the public domain," said Steve Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists. "You can find them in your school encyclopedia."
Espionage evolves
That means atomic espionage today is of a very different nature, involving subtle details of how you make not just a bomb that will work, but a miniaturized warhead that packs the power of a thermonuclear weapon into a package small enough that a half dozen or more can be fitted inside a highly accurate missile.
It is that sort of information that may have been obtained by the Chinese, a piece of espionage that some in the intelligence community believe allowed them to leapfrog years of trial and error in optimizing their warheads.
A Taiwanese-born Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was fired March 8 for allegedly breaking security rules, though he has not been charged with passing secrets to the Chinese.
There have been other cases, most notably the reported theft by the Chinese in the 1980s of information from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that allowed them to build a neutron bomb, a type of nuclear weapon that kills with a burst of neutrons while causing only limited damage with its explosive blast.
No one was ever charged in that case.
Also in the 1980s, a Los Alamos scientist named Peter Lee gave the Chinese information about lasers used to simulate nuclear blasts. Lee pleaded guilty in 1995 to transmitting classified national defense information to China.
Ideology factor
The atomic spies of the 1940s were driven by a desire to help a U.S. ally and a belief in communism.
The Manhattan Project-era spies believed they were "advancing the interests of humanity," said Pennsylvania State University historian Charles Ameringer.
"Ideology was a powerful factor," he said.
Belief in communist ideals was widespread in intellectual circles at the time, he said. For many, the hardships of the depression of the 1930s were evidence of the failures of capitalism, and they saw communism as an alternative.
Thus Hall, a bright young physicist from Chicago, Fuchs the chemist, and the machinist Greenglass all felt they were acting in the interests of humanity by preventing the United States from holding a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
It was a time, Ameringer said, when idealistic young communists didn't understand the dark side of the Soviet dream.
"They saw it in a more idealistic sense, without the full realization of the evils of Stalin," he said.
Working independently, the three spies passed the Soviets key details of not only the general principles of the U.S. program but details of the design of the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
It's still unclear exactly what Fuchs passed to Gold in that envelope on the bridge. But in a 1950 meeting with the FBI, Fuchs drew a sketch showing what he had passed -- a diagram of the bomb complete with plutonium core and the high explosive jacket used to set it off.
Greenglass gave Gold a similar drawing.
And Hall gave detailed plans for the bomb.
Together, according to Harvard historian Priscilla McMillan, the scientists gave the Soviets a significant head start on building their first nuclear weapon, which they detonated in 1949, just four years after Gold made his trip to New Mexico.
Historians do not doubt that Soviet scientists could have developed a bomb on their own. But the weapon detonated in 1949 is believed to have been an exact copy of the bomb tested in New Mexico in the summer of 1945 and then dropped on Nagasaki.
Following the war, FBI investigators arrested Greenglass. He spent 10 years in prison, and two couriers he testified against, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for espionage.
Fuchs confessed and spent time in a British prison.
In addition, there have been reports from Russia following the end of the Cold War of a fourth Los Alamos spy code-named "Perseus," but the mysterious character has never been identified.
Ameringer believes America is such a different place today that catching modern nuclear spies is a very different thing than it was in the days when the Rosenbergs were executed.
The notions of civil liberties that reportedly led the U.S. Justice Department to thwart requests for a wiretap of Los Alamos suspect Lee would not have been an issue during the anti-communist furor of the post-World War II world.
"What you need for counter-intelligence is a sense of paranoia," the Pennsylvania historian said, "and I don't think that sense of paranoia exists at this time."