29. The Spy Who Betrayed Oppenheimer: Deception at Los Alamos (Ep 3)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did a Russian spy end up at the heart of the Manhattan Project? What happened when Soviet intelligence lost track of their own spy? And how did one man hand Stalin the bomb on a silver platter? Klaus Fuchs was already one of the most valuable spies in history, feeding atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. But when he disappeared in 1944, his handlers feared the worst. In reality, he was about to get even closer to the ultimate prize: the blueprints for the atomic bomb. This week, Gordon and David uncover how Fuchs embedded himself in Los Alamos, the most classified site on Earth, and carried out one of the greatest intelligence coups 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

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0:33.2	I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments.
0:43.7	One compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relationships,
0:47.9	to help people, and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be, and the kind of man which in personal ways
0:56.0	I'd been before with my friends in or near the Communist Party. I could be free and easy and happy
1:01.8	with other people without fear of disclosing myself, because I knew the other compartment would
1:07.6	step in if I approached the danger point. I could forget the other
1:11.7	compartment and still rely on it. It appeared to me at the time that I'd become a free man
1:16.7	because I had succeeded in the other compartment to establish myself completely independent of
1:23.2	the surrounding forces in society. Looking back at it now, the best way of expressing it seems to
1:30.7	be to call it a controlled schizophrenia. Welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera and I'm
1:36.7	David McClarsky. And that was Klaus Fuchs atomic spy writing years later about the way he
1:43.8	compartmentalized his life, the betrayal he'd
1:48.0	been carrying out, and the years of deception that were involved. Klaus Fuchs, of course,
1:54.5	was this brilliant mathematician, theoretical physicist who'd come from Germany to the UK, who'd been a communist and anti-Nazi as well,
2:04.6	had been interned and had got to know through this group of communists, mainly based in Hampstead's
2:10.9	leafy suburb, the Soviet Union's intelligence service, the GRU, and had been recruited effectively as he joined
2:18.6	the atomic program of the UK and then headed over to the US. And we left him last time,
2:27.1	didn't we, David, having been meeting his now KGB handler, Harry Gold, codenamed Raymond, as he knew
2:33.9	him, in New York. But then suddenly, August 5th,
2:37.8	1944, Fuchs doesn't turn up for the key next meeting, nor the one after that. He's disappeared.
	...

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