The Atomic Spy Ring

One of the greatest accomplishments of Cold War Soviet espionage actually occurred before the Cold War began. It was the infiltration of the U.S. atomic bomb project at the secret nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II.

We now know that the Manhattan Project was rife with Soviet spies. The two most damaging were Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, two physicists who provided the Soviets with regular updates on the bomb's progress. The German-born Fuchs was recruited to join the Manhattan Project even though he had been forced to flee Nazi Germany due to his membership in the German Communist Party. Hall, a 19-year-old wunderkind scientist from Harvard, had known leftist connections. Nevertheless, neither Fuchs nor Hall was seen as a security risk: U.S. counterintelligence feared infiltration by German or Japanese spies, not by communists.

Fuchs and Hall provided the Soviets with classified information on how to develop and detonate an atomic bomb. The information was passed to the Soviets through couriers like Harry Gold, a Russian-born American chemist and longtime Soviet spy. Gold would turn it over to agents working out of the Soviet consul in New York. Also providing Gold with Los Alamos secrets was David Greenglass, a U.S. Army lieutenant who happened to be the brother of Ethel Rosenberg. Ethel's husband Julius was also passing U.S. military secrets to the Soviets, through his job as an electrical engineer on defense projects.

The spy ring was finally cracked by a U.S. army intelligence decryption project code-named "Venona." Intercepted Soviet messages implicated Fuchs, and he was arrested in 1950. Fuchs named Gold as his courier and Gold named Greenglass and the Rosenbergs as fellow spies.

But the damage was done. All told, the atomic spy ring is believed to have saved the Soviet Union two to eight years in developing their own atomic bomb. For naming names, Gold and Greenglass were spared the death penalty: Gold spent 15 years in prison; Greenglass served 10 years. The Rosenbergs were not so fortunate: they were executed in 1953. But by far the most damaging spies were Fuchs and Hall; Fuchs spent nine years in a British prison before emigrating to communist East Germany. Incredibly, Hall was never imprisoned.