Houseguests

House guests leaving The Nursery…. 

Wait! Something's Wrong -- 

One of them's a girl!

Say again, lookout? 


One of them's a girl! 

They're the wrong ones! 

Rat Trap! 

Rat Trap now!

“Arthur Martin chased suspects through clues on paper : studying the messages, reviewing the files, and slowly filling in the pieces of the puzzle. The tighter the pieces fit, the clearer the patchwork scheme became, and the more effectively field agents could operate. For this assignment, he had to penetrate the clues available in the decoded messages of the Russians and try to ferret out the traitor and what secrets he had betrayed. Hamstrung from lack of information, he could do little until the endless blocks of numbers in the coded messages yielded treasure. He waited. 

In a move to lift the veil, British intelligence officers in Washington told Martin that they were keen to dig into the 1944–45 files on the Manhattan Project. Their information was still fragmentary, but using the specifics they had—a scientist, perhaps British or British sponsored, working in the United States on a project probably related to atomic energy in 1944 — they thought they could link the clues and identify the scientist who had betrayed them. A week later, they cabled Martin that they had come up empty, and any notion of an easy solution had evaporated. As the second week of the hunt rolled in, some light peeked through the clouds. 

The relentless chipping away of the code breakers in Arlington had extracted more information hidden in the blocks of numbers. The embassy sent Martin actual text from ten partially deciphered messages. But with the mixed bundle of fully deciphered sentences, partial ones, and large chunks of code that defied best efforts, he had plenty of head-scratching ahead. 

A message from New York to Moscow dated June 15, 1944, typified the decoded material he had in hand : 

To VIKTOR. 

[1 group unrecovered] received from REST the third part of report MSN-12 Efferent Fluctuation in a Stream [STRUYA] [37 groups unrecoverable] Diffusion Method—work on his specialty. 

R. expressed doubt about the possibility of remaining in the COUNTRY [STRANA] without arousing suspicion. 

According to what R. says, the ISLANDERS [OSTROVITYaNE] and TOWNSMEN [GOROZhANE] have finally fallen out as a result of the delay in research work on diffusion. . . . * 

* Only the latter part of the word has been recovered, but “Diffusion” is probable from the context. 

The code breakers had to turn seemingly random number blocks into Russian words and then into English, with specific code names requiring identifiers as well. Some of the identifiers were clear —“COUNTRY” was the United States, “ISLANDERS” were the British, and “TOWNSMEN” were the Americans. 

R, “REST,” was The Mystery. 

— 

Martin was different from most other officers in counterintelligence. He didn’t belong to the class of “gents” recruited from Oxbridge by way of Eton or Harrow, the toffs who dominated the intelligence establishment. His education was plebeian, and he belonged to no clubs. Baby-faced and a heavy smoker, he kept a bottle of scotch in the desk drawer and drank it out of a coffee cup when needed. But he was a dedicated professional and a lawyer with meticulous focus, good intuition, and an analytical mind. The director of B Branch, Dick White, had brought him in, and they had a close relationship, both professionally and personally. Martin had married White’s secretary, Joan. Of course, in the symbiotic underworld of spying, the connection didn’t stop there. Before her marriage to Martin, Joan had carried on an affair with White. 

Scrutinizing the text of the ten new messages, Martin carefully extracted and listed the certainties along with the uncertainties. He could document that The Spy called Rest was male, had been in the United States between March 1944 and July 1944, had worked on an Anglo-American scientific project, had contact with the report “MSN I-Efferent Fluctuations in the Stream,” and had a sister who probably lived in the United States. At least, the sister’s time in the United States overlapped with his. In 1944, an unknown Soviet agent visited this woman in October and possibly again in November. 

The key uncertainties were the nationality of the scientist, his possible transfer back to the U.K., the location of his sister, and the nature of the scientific project he’d worked on. The messages indicated that the British had considered transferring their researchers back to the U.K. because of tensions with the Americans. When confronted with this, the Americans countered that it would be a violation of the secret, scientific agreement that was part of The Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt. The messages didn’t indicate a decision about the transfer. 

Had Rest been posted to another position in the United States or sent back to the U.K.? Martin was left hanging. 

The British security officers in Washington worked closely with the FBI, the British shuttling between their embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and the FBI’s Washington field office housed in the Old Post Office Building near the White House. 

They both concluded that Rest had most likely infiltrated The Manhattan Project on the atomic bomb. 

MI5 and the FBI agreed on a concerted effort, to protect the top secret decoding project Venona, even if it slowed down the discovery of the spy. Initiated on February 1, 1943, and continuing for decades, Venona was run by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed into the National Security Agency) as a means of decrypting messages transmitted by Soviet intelligence agencies. The longer the Russians stayed in the dark about Venona and the extent of Venona’s access, the longer Washington and London had an intelligence edge. Five-year-old messages could still betray valuable secrets. 

Martin met with his counterparts in MI6, the military’s division of foreign intelligence, to pinpoint the best entry into the maze of Rest’s identity. On September 1, the embassy in Washington cabled him that the FBI had identified two possibilities. 

Following the trail of clues from the report “Efferent Fluctuation in a Stream” that Rest had handed over, they made a breakthrough. That report had originated from the British scientific team. 

A particular physicist had written some papers for a research series, and his movements matched Rest’s. 

The FBI offered up the name of one Karl Fuchs, a naturalized British subject of German origin. 

According to their information, he had arrived in New York on December 3, 1943, and had then been transferred to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on August 14, 1944. The Washington team requested all information on this man. 

Their main questions : Did he have a sister in the United States? 

And if so, where was she?”