London, July 4,
1999
British
scientist 'sold atom secrets to
Stalin' By Nick Anning and Paul
Lashmar ONE of the most eminent
and honoured British physicists of the
century has been accused of supplying
vital details of the atom bomb's secrets
to the Russians. Rupert Allason,
the former Tory MP, believes Sir
Rudolph Peierls betrayed his
adopted country during the 1940s. He says
Peierls and his wife Genia were Soviet
spies. Mr Allason, who writes under the name
Nigel West, bases his allegations on the
recently released "Venona" decrypts of
Soviet diplomatic traffic. Venona was the name given to the file
of some 2,000 intercepted Soviet cables
between Moscow and its intelligence
officers at embassies and consulates in
Washington, New York and London between
1940 and 1948. Decoders in the US National
Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ worked
for years to unravel the contents, and the
results of their work were made public by
the National Security Agency in 1995. Rudolf
Peierls, knighted in 1968, was born in
Berlin in 1907 and died in 1995. He
came to Britain in 1933 to escape the
anti-Jewish excesses of Germany's new
Nazi regime. He became professor of
physics at Birmingham University, where
he worked until the outbreak of war
with the equally distinguished Otto
Frisch. Sir Rudolph and Professor Frisch
compiled a historic memorandum to the
British government's top secret "Maud
Committee" describing the possibility of a
uranium bomb. As a result, both worked on
the early "Tube Alloy" British bomb
project and later transferred to the
hush-hush US Manhattan Project at Los
Alamos. In 1931 Sir Rudolph had married
Genia Kannegisser, a Russian
student he met at a conference in the
Soviet Union. He managed to get her out of
the country and they settled in England in
1933. Mr Allason says the agents referred to
in Venona cables as "Pers" (the Persian)
and his wife code-named "Tina" bear strong
circumstantial resemblance to Sir Rudolph
and his wife. "Pers" provided vital
information about the Manhattan Project to
the Soviets. But Sir Rudolf's family,
friends and former colleagues have rushed
to his defence. His daughter,
Jo Hookway, says Mr Allason is
dragging up old allegations. Her father
was awarded an out-of-court libel
settlement in 1979 against the author
Richard Deacon who suggested
that he might have worked for the
Soviet Union. Professor Hans Bethe is
outraged. "I knew Rudi Peierls from 1927
and being a spy was totally out of
character for him," says the 93-year old
fellow physicist, veteran of Los Alamos,
Nobel Prize-winner and an emeritus
professor of Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York. "The life of Rudi and Genia Peierls was
an open book," he adds. "Klaus
Fuchs was a man who could be a spy --
he would never talk openly about his own
life. But the Peierlses would talk openly
to all their many friends. The allegations
against them are nonsense." Mr Allason
says "Pers", a partial anagram of Peierls,
was in the right place at the time of key
leaks of atomic information to the
Soviets. He also says Genia easily
obtained permission to emigrate to Germany
with her new husband, unusual in Stalin's
Russia. There is no doubt the authorities
harboured suspicions about Sir Rudolph.
When he returned to Birmingham University
in 1945 he worked as a consultant for the
Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell.
But in 1957 his security clearance was
withdrawn after the Americans asked for a
bar on his access to their secret nuclear
papers. He resigned from his consultancy. But
his academic life prospered and from 1963
to his retirement in 1974 he was Wykeham
Professor of Physics at Oxford.
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