How were unbelievable US nuclear secrets leaked to the Russians?

The United States heavily protected its secrets on how to build a nuclear weapon. How did the Soviet Union obtain this banned knowledge? This is the fascinating story of how spies gained access to the atomic bomb project. They were like a termite infestation in a house that should never have been built. The narrative begins with the well-known phrase "appearance may be deceptive." 🎃🤐🤐🎃

The United States kept its nuclear bomb production techniques a closely guarded secret. This amazing account of how spies compromised the development of the atomic bomb explains how the USSR was able to obtain this classified information. How they resembled a termite infestation in a house that perhaps shouldn't have been constructed. After all, appearances can be deceiving, as the introductory line of the story reveals. She appeared like the kind of elderly lady you'd expect to see standing in the garden explaining to the neighborhood firefighter how her dear cat got stuck up a tree when this dedicated British spy was finally arrested after years of spying for the Soviets. The woman who rose to prominence as the Soviet Union's longest-serving foreign spy was Melita Norwood. The most experienced spy we are aware of, anyway she was 93 years old when she finally passed away in 2005, but she was still alive at the time.

Additionally, she nearly got away with her spying. She was 87 years old in 1999 when a strange man in a black suit knocked on her door. She was then regarded by her neighbors as a sweet old lady who probably hadn't experienced many adventures in her life. Having already left, her husband she was pitied by the neighbors. They brought her cakes and prepared tea for her. When the grass started to grow wild, they assisted her with trimming it. They were ignorant of her past. They were unaware that she used to frequently purchase dozens of copies of the Communist publication The Morning Star and smuggle them through her friends' letterboxes. She was never one to cause a stir, not even when she was young. However, if the people who knew her had done more research into her history, they would have discovered that her father was a supporter of the Russian Bolsheviks.

Even Leo Tolstoy, the renowned author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was familiar to him. The Southern Worker and Labour and Socialist Journal, a publication her father edited and published, frequently featured articles written by Vladimir Lenin, a Russian revolutionary and the first leader of Soviet Russia. As a result, young Melita grew up in a home where communism's benefits were frequently discussed. Melita was a nobody in the 1930s, but she thought she was destined to make a difference. In London during the Great Depression, she observed beggars. She observed how the wealthy, with their snobby accents, lived in homes with eight extra bedrooms while half the population resided in slums.

There was unchecked capitalism. It was unjust. This young lady wished to contribute to the remedy for that. She had attracted the attention of the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, by this point. They were aware that she was a secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. This group spent a lot of time researching metallurgy, which is important for creating weapons. She proved to be helpful, and soon the Soviets gave her the codename Hola and made her a full-fledged spy. She was aware of Stalin's actions, for sure. She was aware of the mass murders and his gulags. She did not, however, imply that you must support all Russian policies and it so happened that she was appointed secretary to a man who was actively engaged in a covert effort to develop an atomic bomb.

She was now indispensable rather than just useful. The project was known as the Tube Alloys Program by the British. Even Americans were ignorant of it. The US's Manhattan Project hadn't even started at the time. The only individuals who were aware of tube alloys were those who worked on them scientifically, along with a few politicians and intelligence agents who circulated in the exclusive circles of higher government. Because of this, when Melita revealed that her boss was working on a bomb that could potentially level entire cities, the Soviets were more than satisfied. When he wasn't around, Melita snuck into the office and took pictures of the files he kept locked in a cabinet. It was not until 1965 that the British believed this woman might be a spy.

However, initially, they did nothing. At first, they weren't sure what she was up to. Her spying career came to an end in 1972, but not before she was praised in her native Russia. Although it's unclear exactly how much useful information she gave them, we assume it was sufficient. She became that quiet widow we previously mentioned when her husband passed away in 1986. Only when a KGB archivist defected in 1992 was Melita exposed for good. It took another 7 years for the law to catch up to her dealings during the Cold War. Her daughter and her neighbors could not believe this friendly, aging woman had been working as a spy for so long. She was never charged with a crime. She did not apologize, either. She said, "I did what I did, not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system that had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and transportation that they could afford, a good education, and a health service."

She wasn't called out for being a traitor. The public didn't issue much censure at all. According to news reports, reporters would turn up at her house, and she would invite them in for a cup of tea as she was drinking her tea from a Che Guevara mug. One time, before closing the door on them, she said, "I never considered myself a spy, but that's for others to judge." For an espionage story, you must admit that this one was cute. The next one isn't. It's dark as hell. This story starts with a man named David Greenglass. Like the woman we just featured, Greenglass grew up at a time when half the world was suffering from depression-related poverty. Capitalism had gone wrong. It seemed that the game was rigged. The winners were picked at the start, and you were supposed to believe the losers had a chance.

The American Dream, thought Greenglass, was a living nightmare for many and so had to be stopped. He grew up with Russian immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York. When he was a teenager, he joined the Young Communist League and later served in the US Army during World War II. Whenever he got the chance, he'd clamor to his fellow soldiers about how Marxism was going to make things right and how the future wasn't capitalism but communism. The Russians, he said, had it right. Viva la revolution! No one really took him seriously. In 1944, he started working as a machinist in California, and later, he went on to do a similar job at a Mississippi Ordnance Plant. According to the New York Times, he was then chosen to replace a soldier who had gone AWOL.

And that's how he ended up working as part of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was being developed. Greenglass' job there was to make precision molds for high-explosive lenses. These would be used in the nuclear core to detonate the bomb. Yep, this was high-clearance stuff. This story, though, was a family affair. That's because the husband of Greenglass' sister was a spy himself. His name was Julius Rosenburg, and his sister was named Ethel. It was these two that got Greenglass into the spying game. Julius was recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union not long after, and the Russian spy he was working for told him that his brother-in-law Greenglass could also be very useful. The spy was Aleksandr Feklisov, who at the time worked for the Soviet consulate in New York City.

Feklisov reported to Moscow about Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, saying, "They are young, intelligent, capable, and politically developed people, strongly believing in the cause of communism and wishing to do their best to help our country as much as possible." They are undoubtedly devoted to us. So, this is how Greenglass and Ruth started spying for the Soviets. Greenglass sneaked around the offices at Los Alamos when no one was watching. He read or copied as many classified documents as possible. Security was lax there, but it's not as if he could just walk out with a bunch of papers. This is why he memorized things. In 1945, he sent the Russians a sketch of the atomic bomb. He handed the Soviets 12 papers filled with highly classified information about the bomb.

Notably, the person who typed his memories onto paper was his sister, Ethel. In September of that year, two atomic bombs decimated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was now officially over. Greenglass was discharged from the Army on February 29, 1946, after which he returned to New York to start a machining business with Julius and his biological brother. A few years later, his wife barely survived a house fire, but it was then that he had some other concerns on his mind. The US had a new archenemy, the Soviet Union. They were both propelled into the Cold War after fighting on the same side against Mr. Hitler and the Japanese. Both sides were busy trying to weed out spies. Both were hiding secrets and doing all kinds of cloak-and-dagger stuff that would go on for decades.

This is when the US discovered that a physicist who had worked at Los Alamos was a spy for the Soviets. Greenglass' heart sank when he heard this. That's because he was well aware that his name might come up through the captured spy. It did, and in 1950, he was arrested along with the Rosenbergs. Trouble was brewing. These people were not going to get a slap on the wrist. This was a time of pervasive paranoia in the US, of witch hunts and Communist nightmares. Greenglass soon spilled the beans, but he didn't spill all the beans. He told the authorities that he had passed secrets on to Julius Rosenburg. He didn't, however, implicate his sister at all. Then things got tricky. Not only did Greenglass not want to face the electric chair, but he was offered a deal in which Ruth would get to stay with their kids and he would only go to prison.

All he had to do was say the Rosenbergs were behind it all. Later in court, Greenglass said, "I had a kind of hero-worship there with Julius Rosenberg, and I did not want my hero to fail." The lawyers representing both couples tried to argue that the other was in the wrong, trying to pin the blame for providing state secrets to the Russians on the person they weren't defending. The Rosenbergs lost. Greenglass spent almost ten years in prison and then returned to his wife. While in prison, he knew that the Rosenbergs would be executed. He even wrote to President Eisenhower asking for their death penalties to be commuted, saying, "If these two die, I shall live the rest of my life with a very dark shadow on my conscience."

What's quite shocking is that many years later, when he was speaking to a reporter, he had this to say about those notes that had been typed from his memory: "I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don't remember." My wife is more important to me than my sister. Okay, or my mother or father. To this day, we don't know precisely what role Ethel played in the spying. It couldn't have been a small one. She might well have been innocent of typing up those notes. This is sadder when you hear that her execution was botched. She refused to say any last words when the time came, even after the Rabbi told her she must say something if only for her kids. She just shook her head. She was given three rounds of volts, only for doctors to say that her heart was still beating.

A reporter, who witnessed it all, Bob Considine, wrote about the Rosenbergs' executions. They died differently, gave off different sounds. Different grotesque manners He died quickly. There didn't seem to be much life left in him. This wasn't how Ethel's execution went. Considine wrote she died a lot harder. The doctors went over and pulled down the cheap prison dress, a little dark green printed job. She was given more electricity, which started the ghastly plume of smoke that rose from her head and went up against the skylight overhead. After two more jolts, Ethel Rosenberg had met her maker. Now you need to know what led to all of this. It would be hard to say which Soviet Union spy contributed the most to the Soviet nuclear program, but many people in the know would put the name Klaus Fuchs high on the list.

Born on December 29, 1911, Klaus came from a family of German academics and folks with a socialist mindset. As he grew up, he took a particular interest in what was happening in the Soviet Union. At the time, he was studying to become a theoretical physicist. He watched in horror as Adolf Hitler delighted his many fans when he spoke on stage, telling them he would rescue them from years of economic turmoil. Fuchs saw what was coming with impressive insight, which is why he became a devout anti-fascist.

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