What inspired you to become a biographer?

A love of history and the thrill of detective work has always drawn me to biography. I decided that the real adventure must lay in the hands-on uncovering of a life.  And such was the case. Discovering the letter or document hidden in dusty archival files that filled in holes in history made the crunching through thousands of scraps worth it.  

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How did you become interested in the story of Klaus Fuchs?

The introduction was through my first biography, The End of the Certain World, on Nobel Laureate Max Born. Fuchs was his assistant for four years in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was an intriguing figure because he seemed a decent person—the Born’s were very fond of him—but he spied against a country that had offered him a home. At that time, very little public information existed, and I doubted whether a full biography could be supported. Then MI5 opened its files, and thousands of documents spewed forth. Snooping around the internet, I also found a half dozen neglected archival troves. With them I could describe, for the first time, the man in pre-Nazi Germany, British internment, WWII and the bomb, and East German, as opposed to simply Fuchs the spy. It’s a very different story. 

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What was your greatest discovery about the story of his life?

In general, it was what a genuinely thoughtful person he was, especially to his family for whom he made many sacrifices. It makes sense that a friend’s insistence that he confess to shield his friends, most of whom were refugees like him, could compel him to do so. 

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If you could talk with Klaus today, what are three questions you would ask him?

a) In 1950, as he sat in prison, he wrote a somewhat cryptic line to his father suggesting that in July 1949, he knew he might be uncovered as a spy. His realization pre-dated MI5 or the FBI having any knowledge. This discovery created more questions for me than it answered, the main one being: How did he find out?

b) Fuchs was the director of Division of Theoretical Research at the British nuclear center, Harwell. A physicist named Oscar Buneman worked for him. The two had a reserved relationship. A fact no one knew—not even MI5—they shared a past. I discovered that in 1940 the British had interned them in the same camps in Canada. Buneman witnessed Fuchs the communist activist become alive. At Harwell, Fuchs hid his communist past. Did they ever talk about the implications of Fuchs’s actions in internment? 

c) Another fellow internee in Canada was Hans Kahle, the leader of the communist group in the camp. I found a memo from the intelligence officer describing Fuchs as Kahle’s deputy. What influence did Kahle, who was actually a Russian agent, have on Fuchs’s becoming a spy?

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What do you hope readers take away from your work?

Klaus Fuchs betrayed Britain, his adopted country. He took an oath of loyalty, and he intentionally broke it. He lied to his country, to his friends, to his colleagues. He was a man molded by his roots and the cataclysmic events of history that still bedevil the mind. When his path as a serious student of mathematics crossed these perils, he took life-threatening risks and made grave choices. Reaching a deeper understanding of who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught allowed me to reflect on what this extraordinary life—a cautionary tale about morality and the prisms through which we perceive it—means today. I hope the reader does too.