Was this Oxford nuclear scientist, dubbed ‘Mr Neutrino’, spying for the Soviets? A new biography meticulously traces his disappearance and life in Russia
Of all the precious military secrets of the second world war, none was guarded more zealously than the Manhattan Project. Winston Churchill was determined that neither the German enemy nor even the Soviet allies should know anything about the gigantic, American-led venture to build the first nuclear weapons. He had no idea that a spy network had long been efficiently dispatching British work on the atomic bomb to grateful authorities in the Kremlin. Among the leakers were several nuclear scientists, including a few who had been given security clearance in Britain. The Soviets later had a rather better record with their nuclear project – it was never penetrated by even a single western spy.
In the decade following the war, the west – especially the American public – was shocked when nuclear spies were unmasked. Most notorious of all the traitors was Klaus Fuchs, a former Manhattan Project scientist who was guilty of the “crime of the century”, according to the FBI’s director J Edgar Hoover. Fuchs’s treachery enabled the Soviet Union to produce nuclear weapons – and break the US monopoly – at least two years earlier than experts expected. This helped to turbocharge the cold war.
Five months after the Fuchs confession, a curious incident occurred at the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire. One of its leading nuclear researchers, the Italian-born communist Bruno Pontecorvo, disappeared after leaving with his family to go on a continental vacation. Five years elapsed before this previously limelight-loving man resurfaced in Russia. He and his family were then living in Dubna and working at what is now the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. He denied that he had been guilty of espionage in the west, although he was contradicted by Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect. For 65 years no one has been able to give a definitive answer to the question: was he a spy?
The story has been told before, notably by the historian Simone Turchetti, who concluded that Pontecorvo left the west simply to escape persecution and a lawsuit in the US. Now the physicist and prolific populariser Frank Close brings a fresh perspective to the story, armed with new archival findings, interviews with Pontecorvo’s family and former associates in Abingdon (where Close also lives) and with a deep appreciation of Pontecorvo’s considerable scientific achievements.
Of all the people who have been accused of being nuclear spies, Pontecorvo was perhaps the most accomplished and imaginative physicist. Born into an Italian Jewish family in 1913, he was a likable young man, intellectually able, handsome and an athlete (he aspired to be a national tennis champion). An outstanding career seemed assured. He made an excellent start by earning his research spurs in Rome working with the great nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, and later moved to Paris alongside two other world-class scientists, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Even with that pedigree, Pontecorvo was not invited to join the Manhattan Project, almost certainly because of his communist beliefs. But his scientific knowledge and skills were put to good use in the related venture at the Chalk River laboratory in Canada, where he had access to material that would have been very useful to the Soviets. After the war, he moved to Harwell and became a colleague of Fuchs, though they were not close friends.
In July 1950, at what would turn out to be roughly halfway through Pontecorvo’s life, he and his family seemed well settled in Oxfordshire, so their move to Russia was a great shock. Close meticulously traces the story of their disappearance, though without the benefit of any clear insights into Pontecorvo’s feelings and thinking (no tell-tale private letters have survived). Close’s coup is to have found archival evidence that it was almost certainly Kim Philby who tipped off the Soviets that the FBI was on Pontecorvo’s trail. This comes as no great surprise, as Philby had previously alerted the Kremlin to the western intelligence community’s interest in Fuchs and in another less important spy, Alan Nunn May.
Pontecorvo did some of his best work in the second half of his life. He had a remarkable feel for the behaviour of the extremely elusive subatomic particles known as neutrinos, billions of which rain down on us every second, though only a minuscule number interact significantly with human beings or indeed any other matter. His most outstanding achievement was to be the first to predict correctly that they should exist in more than one variety, an important contribution to the physicists’ Standard Model of the innermost workings of atoms. Sometimes called “Mr Neutrino”, Pontecorvo was rightly regarded as a world authority on his subject but was not given the recognition he deserved. Although he was undoubtedly a leading figure, his contribution is somewhat exaggerated by Close, who titles one of his subsections “Bruno conceives the Standard Model”.
Pontecorvo’s life was far from ideal in Dubna, where he became “a prisoner, albeit in a gilded cage”. He was materially more comfortable than most Soviet citizens, but his travel was restricted and he was accompanied by guards whenever he left home. His wife, Marianne, already in a fragile state of mind, suffered terribly: her mental health deteriorated and she was repeatedly admitted to psychiatric institutions. Pontecorvo took full advantage of her absences by spending more time with his mistress.
During most of his time in Russia, he was loyal to its government and to the memory of Stalin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was predictably more relaxed about criticising his government and apparently regretted his own actions. He died in 1993 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, having told an interviewer from the Independent three years earlier, “I was a cretin.”
That interview may have been read by Rudolf Peierls, a pioneer of nuclear weapons, later a campaigner against nuclear proliferation. He had been poleaxed when he heard that his friend and colleague Fuchs had confessed to being a spy. Peierls subsequently thought deeply about the motivations of the nuclear traitors and was struck by the absence of spies on the Soviet nuclear project. He suggested to his confidant and fellow pioneer Niels Bohr that the lesson of the Fuchs tragedy was that secrecy can be guaranteed only in “a totalitarian country in which everybody is ready to suspect his best friend of being an informer”. If the Russians’ solution was the only effective one, he mused, “should we not say that, at that price, security is not worth having?”
Peierls told me shortly before he died that he was unsure whether Pontecorvo was a spy but was “prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt”. I suspect that Close’s impressively researched book would not have changed his mind and that the Pontecorvo case will be closed only after the Kremlin gives scholars full access to its 1950s security files. I’m not holding my breath.
Graham Farmelo’s Churchill’s Bomb is published by Faber. To order Half Life for £16 (£RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over £10. A £1.99 charge applies to telephone orders.
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