28. The Spy Who Betrayed Oppenheimer: The Manhattan Project (Ep 2)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What makes a man betray his closest friends? How did a German refugee help Stalin build the bomb? And why did British intelligence fail to spot the most dangerous spy in the Manhattan Project? Klaus Fuchs was brilliant, quiet, and unassuming. A physicist at the cutting edge of nuclear science, he worked at the heart of Britain’s secret atomic weapons program before being sent to the United States to join the Manhattan Project. But, all the while, Fuchs was passing the most closely guarded secrets of the West straight to the Soviet Union. Listen as David and Gordon uncover how Fuchs’ communist beliefs and wartime alliances led him to become one of the most infamous spies of the 20th century. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [email protected] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There have been things in my life that I must admit I would do differently.
0:11.5	Looking back at those 72 years I've lived, I can see all the mistakes I made and those I could have avoided.
0:17.4	But I'm deeply convinced that in spite of all the mistakes and the negligent behaviour,
0:21.9	if the line of your life still took you towards the goal you'd set once and for all, if you
0:27.5	were able to reach that goal, or at least get closer to it, if going in that direction you did
0:32.4	not lose yourself, nor squander your strength, commit anything contemptible, humiliate yourself, climb over dead
0:39.0	bodies nor harm others to get there. If you were able to maintain the moral course within your soul,
0:45.5	which in every language is called conscience, you can consider your life a success.
0:50.8	Welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was
0:55.9	Klaus Fuchs, writing later in his life. It was the first paragraph of Gordon's new book for everyone.
1:01.4	My autobiography. Yeah, of Gordon's autobiography. A life of conscience. But no, that was Klaus Fuchs
1:08.8	rather than Gordon Carrera, offering some clues on why he made the
1:12.1	fateful decision to spy for the Soviet Union. We looked last time at Klaus Fuchs, this fascinating
1:18.8	figure, you know, who talks there about conscience, who'd grown up in Nazi Germany, who'd fled to
1:24.2	Britain, who'd been interned in Canada, who'd been this brilliant mathematician and
1:28.9	theoretical physicist, and who'd had a communist past and some communist friends. And we'd left him
1:35.6	really just as he was being drawn into what he'd discover would be Britain's nuclear program
1:42.8	and also meeting with agents of Soviet intelligence.
1:47.3	Well, that's right. And I think, you know, Gordon, it's probably at this point in the story helpful to kind of set up a bit of the Soviet intelligence services that Klaus Fuchs is actually going to meet with and start to really work for in the coming years and months.
2:02.4	So the Soviet intelligence services in sort of late 30s, early 40s are highly effective in many
2:10.3	respects. They've recruited a lot of high profile assets in the 30s and 40s. You mentioned last
2:17.0	time Kim Filby and the Cambridge five.
	...

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