CHARGE AGAINST KLAUS FUCHS

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26032, 8 February 1950, Page 5

CHARGE AGAINST KLAUS FUCHS

ALLEGED LEAKAGE OF ATOMIC DATA EVIDENCE GIVEN IN WASHINGTON WASHINGTON, February 6. The British atomic scientist, Klaus Fuchs, had “transmitted highly secret information to the Soviet Union,” said Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, to-day. Senator McMahon reviewed the testimony given by Mr J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at a closed session to-day. He said there could be no doubt as to the general extent of Fuchs’s information and knowledge of atomic and so-called hydrogen weapons. Fuchs had helped to develop the atomic bomb in the United States from 1943 to 1946. Mr Hoover had said that the F. 8.1. had not been notified at the time by the atomic project authorities that Fuchs or a British atomic mission were in the United States working on the atomic bomb. “Further ramifications of this matter are being worked on by the F. 8.1. and the British intelligence service,” he said. Senator McMahon said that the F. 8.1. did not investigate any employees of the atomic bomb project from March, 1943. until January, 1947, when the United States Atomic Energy Commission took over. * “We were advised that the background of Fuchs’s family had been Communistic,” said Senator McMahon. “Fuchs, since he was a young man, had been definitely sympathetic to the Communist ideology, and most of his relatives had either been members of the party or fellow travellers.” Senator McMahon said that Fuchs was not under suspicion until information was sent from the United States Government to the British authorities toward the end of last December. He said he assumed that the British had been unaware of Fuchs’s political background. Mr Hoover had told the committee that there was a necessity for better security in highly secret work. He realised that it was possible that security consciousness could impede the progress of the work.

Internment in Canada The Canadian Press Agency says that it was learned in Ottawa to-day that Fuchs was interned in Canada for some time during the war. He was released to participate in the atomic bomb projects. Fuchs was one of the many Germans rounded up by the British authorities in 1939-40 and sent to Canada for safekeeping. Reuter’s correspondent in Berlin states that Fuchs grew up in Kiel, where his father, one of Germany’s few Quakers, taught theology.>Fuchs, who, with his sister and brothers, was active in Left Wing student politics, emigrated to England soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. Fuchs’s father was removed from his job by the Nazis and imprisoned for one month for insulting the State.” His brother served a long prison sentence, and his sister committed suicide after her husband was sent to a concentration camp.