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Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs
The gripping biography of a notorious Cold War villain--the German-born British scientist who handed the Soviets top-secret American plans for the plutonium bomb--showing a man torn between conventional loyalties and a sense of obligation to a greater good.
German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and a highly effective spy. He was convicted of treason by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous espionage agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?
Using archives long hidden in Germany as well as intimate correspondence, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan brings into sharp focus the moral and political ambiguity of the times in which Fuchs lived and the ideals with which he struggled. As a university student in Germany, he stood up to Nazi terror without flinching, and joined the Communists largely because they were the only ones resisting the Nazis. After escaping to Britain, he was arrested as a German �migr�--an "enemy alien"--and sent to an internment camp in Canada. His mentor at university, Max Born, worked to facilitate his release. After years of struggle and ideological conflict, when he joined the atomic bomb project, first in Manhattan and later at Los Alamos, his loyalties were firmly split. In 1944, in New York with the British Scientific Mission, he started handing over research, partly because of his Communist convictions but seemingly also to level the playing field of the world powers.
With thrilling detail from never-before-seen archives, Atomic Spy places readers in the Germany of an ascendant Nazi party; the British university classroom of Max Born; a British internment camp in Canada; the secret laboratories of Los Alamos; and Eastern Germany at the height of the Cold War. Atomic Spy shows the real Klaus Fuchs--who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught. His extraordinary life is a cautionary tale about morality and the prisms through which we perceive it--and a classic anti-hero story.
German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and a highly effective spy. He was convicted of treason by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous espionage agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?
Using archives long hidden in Germany as well as intimate correspondence, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan brings into sharp focus the moral and political ambiguity of the times in which Fuchs lived and the ideals with which he struggled. As a university student in Germany, he stood up to Nazi terror without flinching, and joined the Communists largely because they were the only ones resisting the Nazis. After escaping to Britain, he was arrested as a German �migr�--an "enemy alien"--and sent to an internment camp in Canada. His mentor at university, Max Born, worked to facilitate his release. After years of struggle and ideological conflict, when he joined the atomic bomb project, first in Manhattan and later at Los Alamos, his loyalties were firmly split. In 1944, in New York with the British Scientific Mission, he started handing over research, partly because of his Communist convictions but seemingly also to level the playing field of the world powers.
With thrilling detail from never-before-seen archives, Atomic Spy places readers in the Germany of an ascendant Nazi party; the British university classroom of Max Born; a British internment camp in Canada; the secret laboratories of Los Alamos; and Eastern Germany at the height of the Cold War. Atomic Spy shows the real Klaus Fuchs--who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught. His extraordinary life is a cautionary tale about morality and the prisms through which we perceive it--and a classic anti-hero story.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published May 12, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
June 17, 2020
This book takes a little known, but important, figure from the history of the atomic bomb and the early Cold War and explores his complex, fascinating life. Klaus Fuchs was a refugee from the Nazis, a physicist, a communist, and a spy. His story brings to life the turbulent, violent rise of Nazism, the Manhattan Project, and the intrigues of the late 1940’s into focus.
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan unearths a surprising amount of detail about his early years and radicalization as Hitler’s thugs and secret police swallow up Germany. Seeing these events from the vantage point of an idealistic university student provides a fresh perspective on history that has been covered in books from Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, In the Garden of Beasts, and many others.
I have read the definitive accounts of the Manhattan Project and birth of the nuclear age, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes. These books cover Fuchs’ work on the bomb and his passing of bomb designs from Los Alamos to a Soviet agent. But Greenspan delves much deeper to try to show who he was, what he had been through, and why he did it. This is a tough task because Fuchs himself is an enigma who never revealed much about himself.
My favorite part of the book covers Fuchs’ postwar work as a key scientist on Britain’s atomic bomb project and the years of work by MI5 to confirm their suspicions about him, which ultimately led to his confession and arrest in 1950. We are accustomed to fictional stories of spies and counterintelligence. Greenspan shows us what an actual investigation looked like. She tracks the meticulous efforts of security agents to assemble a case against him from hints and fragments of information. She turns this quest into a compelling, real-life spy drama.
The final section of the book describes the last decades of Fuchs’ life in East Germany, where he lived after his release from prison in the UK. It provides a glimpse into a society suffocating from ideology and a pervasive security apparatus, in which almost everyone was a suspect or an informer. There is even a brief cameo by a young KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, who attends Fuchs’ funeral in 1988.
Greenspan’s writing is crisp and clear as she tells this compelling story. Her research is impressive. Atomic Spy is an important contribution to the history of the mid-twentieth century. I enjoyed it and you will also.
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan unearths a surprising amount of detail about his early years and radicalization as Hitler’s thugs and secret police swallow up Germany. Seeing these events from the vantage point of an idealistic university student provides a fresh perspective on history that has been covered in books from Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, In the Garden of Beasts, and many others.
I have read the definitive accounts of the Manhattan Project and birth of the nuclear age, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes. These books cover Fuchs’ work on the bomb and his passing of bomb designs from Los Alamos to a Soviet agent. But Greenspan delves much deeper to try to show who he was, what he had been through, and why he did it. This is a tough task because Fuchs himself is an enigma who never revealed much about himself.
My favorite part of the book covers Fuchs’ postwar work as a key scientist on Britain’s atomic bomb project and the years of work by MI5 to confirm their suspicions about him, which ultimately led to his confession and arrest in 1950. We are accustomed to fictional stories of spies and counterintelligence. Greenspan shows us what an actual investigation looked like. She tracks the meticulous efforts of security agents to assemble a case against him from hints and fragments of information. She turns this quest into a compelling, real-life spy drama.
The final section of the book describes the last decades of Fuchs’ life in East Germany, where he lived after his release from prison in the UK. It provides a glimpse into a society suffocating from ideology and a pervasive security apparatus, in which almost everyone was a suspect or an informer. There is even a brief cameo by a young KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, who attends Fuchs’ funeral in 1988.
Greenspan’s writing is crisp and clear as she tells this compelling story. Her research is impressive. Atomic Spy is an important contribution to the history of the mid-twentieth century. I enjoyed it and you will also.
May 26, 2020
The author does a great job of not only telling what Fuchs did as a spy, but also explaining his family and personality that lead him to it. Greenspan seems like an observer who wants to make sure the reader has the whole story. While a spy who betrays his country is naturally a villain, the author seems to be so neutral that his villainy is not always obvious. Like the Cambridge spies, the British did not do adequate background checking because if they had they would have discovered his communist sympathies. To make it worse, the Americans just accepted that he had been vetted when they put him on the Manhattan Project where he worked on some of the most technically difficult parts of the bomb. He quietly applied himself to making the weapon and made sure the Soviets had everything he did. Nobody knows exactly how many years Fuchs advanced the Soviet nuclear program, but everyone agrees that he gave them a fantastic head start.
April 12, 2025
I had two broad problems with this book:
* Fuchs' life is simply not very interesting, or at least Greenspan did not succeed in making it interesting. We don't get more explanation of his motivation for giving plutonium bomb designs to the Soviets than (a) he became a Communist because he thought the KPD was the strongest force fighting the Nazis and (b) he thought it would be good to share intelligence with the US's wartime ally / a Communist government he admired. It's really very simple, and long expositions of his time in Canadian internment or his affair with a colleague's wife in Harwell don't add much to our understanding of why he did the most important thing he did in his life.
* Greenspan's writing, at just a formal/mechanical level, is not especially good. This failing is most egregious when describing the MI5 investigation into Fuchs, which involves them sorting through conflicting pieces of evidence from many moments in history. A more skilled biographer would've highlighted these clues when they happened rather than introducing many at the end of the narrative, as he's getting caught. It's tremendously hard to follow and structured confusingly.
One example: Greenspan tries to explain why Fuchs might have felt the doors closing in on him in 1949, the year investigators, spurred by American codebreakers translating NKVD documents as part of the Venona Project, identified the spy "Rest," who they'd show to be Fuchs. "[Fuchs'] awareness of a threat almost had to stem from the steady, although still vague, advances on cracking the Venona messages," Greenspan writes. Wait — what? This is the first time we've heard that Fuchs himself was tracking the Venona effort. That's a big deal! Why is it dropped in at the last minute like this?
Another thing: why does Greenspan repeatedly refer to the NKVD as the KGB, which would not exist until 1954? Fuchs never spied for the KGB because it did not exist when he was spying. Greenspan, I have to assume, knows this. Does she think her readers are too dumb to follow it?
An even worse example of an intriguing idea limned briefly, and then left grasping for breath like a moribund fish on the deck of a trawler, is the book's conclusion, which is worth quoting fully:
Greenspan briefly mentions the Korean War earlier, but only briefly. This is the first and last time this case for Fuchs' actions is mentioned: that it deterred the US from taking the Korean conflict nuclear. That is an explosive argument that deserves some exposition if Greenspan really wants to make it. And it faces potent counterarguments. It's now abundantly clear from archival evidence in the Soviet Union that Kim Il-Sung invaded South Korea because Stalin gave him the go-ahead to do so. What's more, Stalin specifically told Kim that he would approve an invasion because he doubted America would intervene, citing (a) their failure to intervene in China during the civil war and (b) the Soviet atomic bomb, which offered deterrence. Without the Soviet bomb in 1950, it's quite possible that the Korean War would not have happened in the first place. The case that Fuchs' actions enabled the war to occur and as many as 3 million people to die is at least as compelling as the case that his actions saved lives by keeping the conflict non-nuclear. Greenspan does not engage with this point at all.
A major problem with the book is that Greenspan loves this guy entirely too much. This project appears to have come about after a biography of Fuchs' mentor Max Born, and Greenspan seems to have absorbed that subject's affection for his old student. But … c'mon. The guy gave the Soviets a nuke, at least a year before they would've otherwise gotten it. He gave Stalin a nuke. He's a bad guy! This is not very complicated, however much Greenspan wants it to be.
(Sidenote: the obituary of Fuchs' sister Christel, who became a peace activist in Vermont, is fascinating.)
* Fuchs' life is simply not very interesting, or at least Greenspan did not succeed in making it interesting. We don't get more explanation of his motivation for giving plutonium bomb designs to the Soviets than (a) he became a Communist because he thought the KPD was the strongest force fighting the Nazis and (b) he thought it would be good to share intelligence with the US's wartime ally / a Communist government he admired. It's really very simple, and long expositions of his time in Canadian internment or his affair with a colleague's wife in Harwell don't add much to our understanding of why he did the most important thing he did in his life.
* Greenspan's writing, at just a formal/mechanical level, is not especially good. This failing is most egregious when describing the MI5 investigation into Fuchs, which involves them sorting through conflicting pieces of evidence from many moments in history. A more skilled biographer would've highlighted these clues when they happened rather than introducing many at the end of the narrative, as he's getting caught. It's tremendously hard to follow and structured confusingly.
One example: Greenspan tries to explain why Fuchs might have felt the doors closing in on him in 1949, the year investigators, spurred by American codebreakers translating NKVD documents as part of the Venona Project, identified the spy "Rest," who they'd show to be Fuchs. "[Fuchs'] awareness of a threat almost had to stem from the steady, although still vague, advances on cracking the Venona messages," Greenspan writes. Wait — what? This is the first time we've heard that Fuchs himself was tracking the Venona effort. That's a big deal! Why is it dropped in at the last minute like this?
Another thing: why does Greenspan repeatedly refer to the NKVD as the KGB, which would not exist until 1954? Fuchs never spied for the KGB because it did not exist when he was spying. Greenspan, I have to assume, knows this. Does she think her readers are too dumb to follow it?
An even worse example of an intriguing idea limned briefly, and then left grasping for breath like a moribund fish on the deck of a trawler, is the book's conclusion, which is worth quoting fully:
Most of the scientists at Los Alamos shared his strong feeling that the United States should not have a monopoly on nuclear weapons, that the Russians should take part in the secrets and be partners. They would have their own bomb soon enough anyway, probably by 1951. The information Fuchs provided advanced their timeline by a year or two at most. Their nuclear stockpile of a couple of weapons in 1950 might have kept the United States from dropping an atomic bomb on North Korea. If so, was that a bad outcome? Was the person who made that happen evil or good, guilty or innocent, a traitor or a hero?
Greenspan briefly mentions the Korean War earlier, but only briefly. This is the first and last time this case for Fuchs' actions is mentioned: that it deterred the US from taking the Korean conflict nuclear. That is an explosive argument that deserves some exposition if Greenspan really wants to make it. And it faces potent counterarguments. It's now abundantly clear from archival evidence in the Soviet Union that Kim Il-Sung invaded South Korea because Stalin gave him the go-ahead to do so. What's more, Stalin specifically told Kim that he would approve an invasion because he doubted America would intervene, citing (a) their failure to intervene in China during the civil war and (b) the Soviet atomic bomb, which offered deterrence. Without the Soviet bomb in 1950, it's quite possible that the Korean War would not have happened in the first place. The case that Fuchs' actions enabled the war to occur and as many as 3 million people to die is at least as compelling as the case that his actions saved lives by keeping the conflict non-nuclear. Greenspan does not engage with this point at all.
A major problem with the book is that Greenspan loves this guy entirely too much. This project appears to have come about after a biography of Fuchs' mentor Max Born, and Greenspan seems to have absorbed that subject's affection for his old student. But … c'mon. The guy gave the Soviets a nuke, at least a year before they would've otherwise gotten it. He gave Stalin a nuke. He's a bad guy! This is not very complicated, however much Greenspan wants it to be.
(Sidenote: the obituary of Fuchs' sister Christel, who became a peace activist in Vermont, is fascinating.)
March 22, 2023
This is a thoroughly well researched book about the life of Klaus Fuchs up to his trial [1]. He's possibly the greatest scientist-spy of all time [2]. As mentioned by Greenspan, without his help, it would have taken one or two years more for the USSR to get the atomic bomb, and the consequences can only be imagined [3]. The depth of information collected for the book, including diaries and letters of friends and relatives of Fuchs, is just amazing. However, I think some parts could have profited by a more cursory approach, leaving the details for the footnotes (even though I know that some readers despise any kind of note).
[1] Only at the end of the book I learned that Fuchs lived almost 30 years more in East German, pampered by the communist State and contributing to research on peaceful uses of nuclear technology. This is a whole new book waiting to be written.
[2] I wonder if Fuchs influenced Le Guin's composition of Shevek in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.
[3] As suggested by Greenspan, the USA could have deployed nuclear bombs against North Korea, for example.
[1] Only at the end of the book I learned that Fuchs lived almost 30 years more in East German, pampered by the communist State and contributing to research on peaceful uses of nuclear technology. This is a whole new book waiting to be written.
[2] I wonder if Fuchs influenced Le Guin's composition of Shevek in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.
[3] As suggested by Greenspan, the USA could have deployed nuclear bombs against North Korea, for example.
December 14, 2024
Interesting read about the man who gave the atomic secrets to the Russians!
January 17, 2023
Interesting story about someone I never heard of and yet had tremendous influence on atomic energy and did not believe all the power and influence should rest with one country.
September 2, 2023
Atomic Spy.. (28/45)
Bit late on this review but whey. Even after finishing the book Klaus Fuchs is still a mystery, a lot of the book I felt like I was just spinning in circles but I suppose that may just be the nature of spies at the end of the day. Decently education, just found my attention slipping quite a bit. May try again in the future?
Bit late on this review but whey. Even after finishing the book Klaus Fuchs is still a mystery, a lot of the book I felt like I was just spinning in circles but I suppose that may just be the nature of spies at the end of the day. Decently education, just found my attention slipping quite a bit. May try again in the future?
July 17, 2025
This started out interesting > a story of a man raised in Germany, opposed the Nazis and believed in communism. He escaped persecution in his home country to live as a refugee in England. Then when the war came was swept up with other Germans and banished to Canada, where he with the others, were interned in concentration camps on par with those for Jews in Germany.
His education in Physics got him involved with the development of the atomic bomb. Yet he didn't feel only the Americans and British (who didn't always cooperate with each other) should be the only ones to have knowledge of such a weapon, Thus he sucuumbed to pressure to share information with the communists. This made for interesting internal dynamics.
The chapters in the first half of the book ranged from 3.5 to four stars, but the second half, after the war was over, were a series of disjointed chapters between two and three stars. A paragraph would be mentioning something in one sentence, then the next would be about some person elsewhere. I wanted to quit reading, but with nothing else on standby i slogged threw (instead of through if you can sense the pun).
Oppenheimer was talked about a few times and it made me wonder if the film mentioned Fuchs. I rented the DVD and at the one hour and four minute mark Fuchs put in an appearance then was in a few scenes after that. If someone was not familiar with the name (i.e. through reading Atomic Spy) the significance would be missed.
At the time of Fuchs being caught out as a spy (c1949) it was in the news and after his death (1988) the East Germans made a film about him. There wasn't much about his beliefs and why he gave away secrets in the Oppenheimer movie. I thought a little contrast and comparison between Oppenheimer's thoughts (which were a big part of the movie) and Fuch's position would have given more depth to the film than the antagonism with the Robert Downey character. There could have been room for both but now i'm getting into reviewing the movie.
His education in Physics got him involved with the development of the atomic bomb. Yet he didn't feel only the Americans and British (who didn't always cooperate with each other) should be the only ones to have knowledge of such a weapon, Thus he sucuumbed to pressure to share information with the communists. This made for interesting internal dynamics.
The chapters in the first half of the book ranged from 3.5 to four stars, but the second half, after the war was over, were a series of disjointed chapters between two and three stars. A paragraph would be mentioning something in one sentence, then the next would be about some person elsewhere. I wanted to quit reading, but with nothing else on standby i slogged threw (instead of through if you can sense the pun).
Oppenheimer was talked about a few times and it made me wonder if the film mentioned Fuchs. I rented the DVD and at the one hour and four minute mark Fuchs put in an appearance then was in a few scenes after that. If someone was not familiar with the name (i.e. through reading Atomic Spy) the significance would be missed.
At the time of Fuchs being caught out as a spy (c1949) it was in the news and after his death (1988) the East Germans made a film about him. There wasn't much about his beliefs and why he gave away secrets in the Oppenheimer movie. I thought a little contrast and comparison between Oppenheimer's thoughts (which were a big part of the movie) and Fuch's position would have given more depth to the film than the antagonism with the Robert Downey character. There could have been room for both but now i'm getting into reviewing the movie.
November 20, 2021
Solid history of a little know (at least to me) spin the Cold War. Fuchs handed over secrets about the atomic bomb to help the Soviets catch up. According to the author, they would have got the bomb anyway - he simply sped up their work by a year or so. He helped the Soviets because he didn't want the Americas to have a monopoly on the bomb. perhaps a noble motive. But here is a man who fled the totalitarian Nazi regime to Britain help a another totalitarian regime.
Is he a sympathetic character. On balance I say no - but it's a close call. His motives were perhaps noble. But perhaps more naive than noble. And at the end of the day he was a traitor.
Along the way, the author explores whether or not MI5 was lax in its assessment of Fuchs at important stages in his career, especially his being made part of the team on the Manhattan Project in the US - where he gained the secrets he gave to the Soviets.
One interesting sub-plot is the treatment of aliens in the early days of WW2 in Britain. People like Fuchs, a refugee from Nazi Germany were rounded up and confined with German POWs - first on the Isle of Man and then in Quebec. The sea voyage was unspeakable terrible. A not-so-positive look at what awful things are done in wartime.
Is he a sympathetic character. On balance I say no - but it's a close call. His motives were perhaps noble. But perhaps more naive than noble. And at the end of the day he was a traitor.
Along the way, the author explores whether or not MI5 was lax in its assessment of Fuchs at important stages in his career, especially his being made part of the team on the Manhattan Project in the US - where he gained the secrets he gave to the Soviets.
One interesting sub-plot is the treatment of aliens in the early days of WW2 in Britain. People like Fuchs, a refugee from Nazi Germany were rounded up and confined with German POWs - first on the Isle of Man and then in Quebec. The sea voyage was unspeakable terrible. A not-so-positive look at what awful things are done in wartime.
September 21, 2020
This is a little bit different than reading about the WWI, WWII and cold war spies. These time periods are covered but IMO there are many different views this book is written from. Klaus Fuchs had little to say. Much of the information comes from his friends, family and colleagues. In the end the author leaves it up to the reader to decide or judge whether K. F. did a good thing or bad thing. There is a LOT of history in this book and insights of the time period you may or may have not picked up from other books and authors about spies, wars and countries. I thought it to be interesting but the onslaught of history to give you the mindset of Fuchs can be just a touch overbearing but necessary I suppose. I'd recommend this book w/5*.
April 26, 2023
"Atomic Spy" more than filled in the questions I had about Klaus Fuchs and the role his espionage during the Manhattan Project played in helping the Soviet Union create their own atomic weapons. Having read many books on atomic history, Fuchs was often mentioned, but only in his role as a spy. This book finally explains the key roles Fuchs held in researching the creation of the atomic bombs at Los Alamos; though someone else could have probably done the same work, he made very real contributions during that process. Fuchs took almost no payment for his spying, making his leaking of atomic secrets truly a crime of conviction. After being released from UK prisons, he traveled to East Germany, where he tried to pick up the threads of physics research, but was largely frustrated.
August 3, 2023
I didn't read this whole book - I mostly read the parts about Fuchs serving as a Russian spy when he was in England and later at Los Alamos. Having seen Oppenheimer, I just wanted a little more info on Fuchs who I knew actually was a spy for the Russians. I did not read all the way to the end - I know that he did spend time in jail, but was surprised that he wasn't executed. But maybe the death penalty wasn't a thing in 1960's Great Britain. I am unclear on that point. But Fuchs seems to have been well-liked at Los Alamos and other places he worked, so who know what leads people to spy? It doesn't sound like the British did a very good job of checking out his communist background that made him want to share info with the Russians.
April 11, 2022
A clunky, poorly structured, and sloppily copy-edited biography of Klaus Fuchs. I got through his trial and sentencing and gave up. The author seemed to be grasping at straws throughout to maintain a strong narrative flow, but instead constantly got bogged down in juggling every incidental player and minute action in the story. There’s also some baffling psychological presumption about Fuchs that was a real turn-off. Human beings are complicated and often contradictory (I don’t think this is a wild notion,) but the author seemed to want to bend over backwards to circle the square on Fuch’s motivations.
Skip this one.
Skip this one.
September 12, 2024
This book never really caught my attention, which may be on me. Yet I found the book confusing as to its larger goal in the portrayal: is it a story justifying Fuchs' actions (the last sentence or two certainly seems weighted this way)? Is it describing how he got caught by MI5? Is it taking us into the mind of a monster with "dark lives"? Certainly a good book can wrestle with elements of all of those, but to me this felt like a book that tried to do a bit of everything and never really gave me a satisfying experience on any of them.
August 2, 2020
400 pages, Fuchs remains mostly a mystery. We know he’s a communist. We know he’s devoted to the cause. We know he passes nuclear secrets to the Russians and serves time in British prison for it. But even after this deep dive into his childhood, family and internment, Fuchs remains a pencil sketch of a detached scientist, mild-mannered with bookish glasses, passionless beyond physics and socialism. Was that all he was?
August 30, 2020
Poorly written. First chapter describes a scene in March 1918 "with the world war in its third year. " By no measure was March 1918 only the third year. The war began in the summer of 1914. So three years elapsed would be summer of 1917. And, if counting individual years, 1918 was the fifth year at war. It's an egregious error that undermines the author's credibility out of the gate. I fought through it, only later to find "hear" written as "here" instead. Sorry, book closed.
September 27, 2020
For fans of Soviet spy craft and cold war politics. I was most interested in the early part of the book, which details how Fuchs was shaped by politics in Germany as the nazis came to power. The actual spy vs. spy stuff could get a little dull. I was, frankly, impressed with how much the British seemed to care about Fuchs' legal rights. I felt like in America post 9/11, no one would be given those same rights. Depressing.
October 23, 2021
The story of Klaus Fuchs: the British spy who worked on the Manhattan project and gave the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. He was motivated by Communist ideology, not money. He only accepted a nominal amount of money on one occasion, as a “trust building” measure. Interesting parallel with the book “Agent Sonja”: the same British spymaster who was so blinded by “Sonja’s” housewife persona, also failed to prevent a known Communist from gaining access to secret atomic research.
August 13, 2023
An authoritative and easy read on the life of Klaus Fuchs. I'll admit I picked this book up after seeing Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" and realizing I knew next to nothing about the atomic spies other than that they existed. I think this book does a good job of sticking to the facts, providing a thorough summary of Fuchs' life, while also being able to use these facts to put forth a compelling case for his motivations. Always a good sign when I have to remind myself that this isn't a work of fiction, but a non-fiction spy novel!
August 18, 2024
My daughter told me about a book she read regarding the enrichment of uranium at Oak Ridge Tennessee for use in our first atomic bomb. I mentioned to her about Los Alamos, New Mexico where the bomb was developed. I told her there was a Soviet spy at Los Alamos which led me to this intriguing book about Klaus Fuchs. It’s interesting to note that a young KGB officer attending Klaus’ funeral was none other than Vladimir Putin.
August 19, 2020
The history of where he came from (his student days) can seem tedious and make one want to put the book down; but persevere because the subtlety of his rationale for "spying" is worth the slog. Leveler of the atomic playing field? Sheds light on other Nazi atrocities--he was the son of a Lutheran minister.
August 2, 2021
Confusing and often times oversaturated with unnecessary detail that did nothing but drown the main premise of the text in a thick word soup that was a battle to wade through at times. I finished reading the book with the feeling that it could've been much shorter without losing the gist of the story.
November 18, 2024
Spies everywhere. The wool pulled over the eyes of so many people thinking they were acting for the greater good and not thinking of the consequences of folks who were not altruistic…. Klaus Fuchs had so many chances to back off. But chose to give away the work of scientists to folks who planned to use it as threats.
May 13, 2020
This was an interesting biography about a controversial historical figure. The author goes into a lot of detail about Klaus' life so there was a timeline leading up to him giving Russia the plans for the plutonium bomb that led to him being labeled a villain.
July 5, 2020
Atomic Spy:
The Karl Fuch the spy who stole the account of the Russian who stole and how the secret stolen was the the secret to building an Atomic bomb ended up in Russian hands. Ok account but needed more and better on personal level.
The Karl Fuch the spy who stole the account of the Russian who stole and how the secret stolen was the the secret to building an Atomic bomb ended up in Russian hands. Ok account but needed more and better on personal level.
September 15, 2025
So I actually started this book a while back, and let’s just say I’m glad I finished it. Too many details, two many names. Maybe it’s because the guy seemed to be a complicated person himself and was hard to figure out.
September 25, 2025
I read the book and it is both long and mostly boring.
The last third of the book was more interesting and after Fuchs’ confession.
I find it pretty amazing that Fuchs did not receive more or a different punishment.
I have a hard time recommending this book.
The last third of the book was more interesting and after Fuchs’ confession.
I find it pretty amazing that Fuchs did not receive more or a different punishment.
I have a hard time recommending this book.
October 15, 2025
A really fascinating read about loyalty, power, and technology. There are a lot of WWII narratives and a lot of Cold War Narratives, but this is one of the few I've come across that follows someone through both and speaks to how one created the other.
September 23, 2020
A poor job describing such a rich subject. Reads like a textbook. Elementary language and at the end of the day, essentially an apology for MI5 incompetence.
February 7, 2021
The biography of a guy smart enough to build an atomic bomb yet too dumb to see that communism is a garbage ideology.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews