Trinity by Frank Close

Author:Frank Close
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241309896
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Robertson added, gratuitously, ‘It is known that Mrs SKINNER has for some time been his mistress. She is a woman whose unfaithfulness to her husband is a matter of common knowledge in Harwell.’36

These three days and nights included much intimate conversation, which seems to have led to a crisis and confession by Fuchs.37 Erna was aware that ‘a man’ from London had interviewed Klaus about his father’s move to the Russian Zone. She might well have thought that removal from Harwell was a severe punishment for having a father in the Russian Zone of Germany and jumped to the conclusion that the authorities had doubts about Fuchs’ personal integrity, or perhaps Fuchs told her of Skardon’s accusations: what he and she discussed in detail during their assignation stayed with them. What we do know is that at lunchtime on 19 January, Erna phoned Herbert at the Royal Society ‘in distress’ and told him that Fuchs had ‘confessed’ to her.38

According to Erna, Fuchs told her about his impending departure from Harwell. She must have pressed him about Skardon’s interest in his father, because Fuchs ‘agreed [sic] there was something else’, but he did ‘not consider it very serious’.39 He then revealed to her that he had shared his work on the diffusion plant more widely than the authorities allowed.

Two years later, Herbert Skinner claimed in a letter to Henry Arnold, ‘Klaus confessed to Erna about the diffusion plant’, but ‘F. denied the bomb to E.’ How reliable was Skinner’s recall?40 His remark, ‘F. denied the bomb to E.’, is explicit and only has contextual meaning if there has been some prior discussion about Fuchs’ part in its development. It is possible that Fuchs made some self-serving remarks, which were restricted to his early work – Skardon, after all, had focused totally on New York, at which time only diffusion was on the agenda. This would be consistent with Herbert Skinner’s memory that Fuchs had mentioned diffusion, and had dismissed his behaviour as ‘not very serious’.

We can also be sure of the date when Erna told Herbert of this. She had called him ‘at the Royal Society’ on 19 January. On that day the Royal Society considered Fuchs for election to the Fellowship. Peierls had nominated him and although this application had been unsuccessful the previous year, by 1950 there was a wider realization that Fuchs was the nation’s leading full-time theorist in atomic energy.41 Herbert Skinner was on the Council and present at the Society’s headquarters in London that day, so the date in Skinner’s diary – ‘January 19’ – is assured. Erna’s ‘distress’ suggests that the full import of Fuchs’ ‘confession’ had come to her late during their time in London.

There is no record of this crucial phone call, which suggests that Erna phoned Herbert during the day, from a London phone that was not monitored by MI5. Herbert, aware of his wife’s neuroses, did not inform the authorities immediately and probably agreed with her that they talk about this together once he was back home.

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