On this day, June 23, in 1959, convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs was released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to East Germany, where he resumed a scientific career.
Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, was interred in Canada at the outbreak of World War II, but later released and sent to the United States to work on the atom bomb.
While at the laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., Fuchs secretly passed on information about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union.
The breach was discovered in 1949 after Fuchs returned to England and intelligence officers cracked the Soviet’s secret code. Fuchs confessed and his testimony led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Fuchs died in 1988.
— Scott McCabe
