Hampstead Spies – The Atomic Secrets  New Walk!

The KGB in NW3

We now have two walks under the banner of ‘Hampstead Spies’ about what Soviet intelligence got up to in the Hampstead area. This walk is about the residents of Hampstead who helped the Russians learn the secrets of how to make an atomic bomb in the 1940s. Details of the other walk ‘Philby and Comrades’ are here.

The Atomic Secrets 

Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant physicist, a refugee who came to England from Nazi Germany, who was signed up to work on an Anglo-American-Canadian project which would build an atomic bomb before Hitler did. Fuchs worked on a crucial element of the bomb and began to wonder if he should share his secrets with the Russians. He didn’t know any spies himself so he headed for Hampstead, the home of many exiled German Communists in World War Two,  and linked up with somebody who might be able to help. That man passed Fuchs on to his sister and the rest, as they say, is history. Coincidentally others visiting the area were also involved in atomic espionage. Fuchs was sent to the remote town of Los Alamos in New Mexico to work with Robert Oppenheimer on what was known as the Manhattan Project. This is where the bombs were developed which were dropped on Japan. Soon after the Russians successfully tested their own bomb using the secrets Fuchs passed on. Hampstead Spies authority and former newsman Stewart Purvis CBE has been to Los Alamos to check it out. Now he’s come in from the cold, so to speak.

Here’s Stewart:

“Los Alamos is a small town which nobody outside the state of New Mexico would ever have heard of if the world’s first atomic bomb hadn’t been invented there in the 1940s. It was sealed off so that none of its secrets could leak out. Unfortunately for the Allies a British member of what was called the ‘Manhattan Project’ team passed on the details to the Soviets who built their own version of the bomb.

“80 years later I drove up to the front gate of what is now a giant military and scientific complex to ask for directions. Confronted by four burly soldiers with machine guns I spluttered that I was a sort of historian from England. ‘Well this’, their sergeant replied, ‘is America’.

“It wasn’t a great introduction but he was kind enough to direct me to the original iconic front gate of Los Alamos which survives as a ‘rest room’ for tourists. Then with the help of a lady in the Los Alamos Visitors Centre I was able to find where that British team member had lived and even the house where he babysat for the families of fellow scientists. I even discovered in a local museum the only colour video which exists of Klaus Fuchs, born in Germany, later of the Physics department of Bristol and Edinburgh Universities, and even later of Wakefield Prison where he served 9 years for espionage.

THE NEW HAMPSTEAD SPIES WALK – THE ATOMIC SECRETS

“Now I have returned to London full of the joys of a research trip and keen to mix these ingredients into the recipe for a hopefully successful new Hampstead Spies walk. But what, you may well be asking, has this got to do with Hampstead?

“In his prison cell in 1950 Klaus Fuchs explained to an MI5 interrogator that early on in his research into how to make a bomb he decided he would share the answer with the Soviets. But not being a spy himself he had no idea how to contact Soviet military intelligence. A friend directed him to the Belsize Park area of Hampstead and one resident in particular.

THE REST IS HISTORY – AND A BRILLIANT NEW WALK

“The Hampstead Spies walk I have been guiding for 8 years has always had an element of the Fuchs story but it has been compressed into what is mainly been the tale of the Cambridge and Oxford graduates signed up by KGB recruiters living in the area in the 1930s.  The feedback I got from some walkers was that the Hampstead Spies walk had too many spies.

“Now thanks to my trip to Los Alamos and more research into other Hampstead KGB connections to bomb secrets, ‘The Atomic Spies’ warrants a walk of its own. After talking with my London Walks minder David Tucker ‘Hampstead Spies’ will now become an umbrella title for two different and only slightly overlapping walks about the two biggest spy scandals in British history which both started in London NW3.

HAMPSTEAD – GROUND ZERO FOR PHILBY & COMRADES AND THE ATOMIC SECRETS

We will launch ‘Hampstead Spies – Philby & Comrades’  and ‘Hampstead Spies – The Atomic Secrets’ as separate walks in February (the weekend of February 8th and February 9th). Both walks are already primed and in the bomb bay here on www.walks.com.

Minder David here.

What a hoot. Stewart’s putting it that way I feel like a Case Officer. Or even Head of Station.

The ‘Hampstead Spies – The Atomic Secrets’ walk begins and ends at Belsize Park tube station.