
Atomic Spy
The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs
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Narrated by:
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Tavia Gilbert
About this listen
"Nancy Greenspan dives into the mysteries of the Klaus Fuchs espionage case and emerges with a classic Cold War biography of intrigue and torn loyalties. Atomic Spy is a mesmerizing morality tale, told with fresh sources and empathy." (Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy and coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
"Enthralling and riveting." (The New York Times Book Review)
The gripping biography of a notorious Cold War villain - the German-born British scientist who handed the Soviets top-secret American plans for the plutonium bomb - showing a man torn between conventional loyalties and a sense of obligation to a greater good.
German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and an infamous spy. He was convicted of espionage by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?
Using archives long hidden in Germany as well as intimate family correspondence, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan brings into sharp focus the moral and political ambiguity of the times in which Fuchs lived and the ideals with which he struggled. As a university student in Germany, he stood up to Nazi terror without flinching and joined the Communists largely because they were the only ones resisting the Nazis. After escaping to Britain in 1933, he was arrested as a German émigré - an "enemy alien" - in 1940 and sent to an internment camp in Canada. His mentor at university, renowned physicist Max Born, worked to facilitate his release. After years of struggle and ideological conflict, when Fuchs joined the atomic bomb project, his loyalties were firmly split. He started handing over top secret research to the Soviets in 1941, and continued for years from deep within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Greenspan's insights into his motivations make us realize how he was driven not just by his Communist convictions but seemingly by a dedication to peace, seeking to level the playing field of the world powers.
With thrilling detail from never-before-seen sources, Atomic Spy travels across the Germany of an ascendant Nazi party; the British university classroom of Max Born; a British internment camp in Canada; the secret laboratories of Los Alamos; and Eastern Germany at the height of the Cold War. Atomic Spy shows the real Klaus Fuchs - who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught. His extraordinary life is a cautionary tale about the ambiguity of morality and loyalty, as pertinent today as in the 1940s.
©2020 Nancy Thorndike Greenspan (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Nancy Greenspan dives into the mysteries of the Klaus Fuchs espionage case and emerges with a classic Cold War biography of intrigue and torn loyalties. Atomic Spy is a mesmerizing morality tale, told with fresh sources and empathy.” (Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames and coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
“Greenspan sheds new light on the character, family, and motives of the notorious spy who gave the Soviet Union a blueprint for the atomic bomb. Klaus Fuchs’s espionage and its consequences raise timely questions about blind devotion to an ideology.” (Cynthia C. Kelly, president, Atomic Heritage Foundation)
“A riveting read. Greenspan skillfully and with nuance describes how one of the Manhattan Project’s prominent physicists, led to Communism by early struggles against Nazism, eventually became a important spy for the Russians. A tale of intrigue, competing moralities and human fallibility.” (Gino Segrè, author of The Pope of Physics and Ordinary Geniuses)
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To fully understand these strange and dangerous times, Jared Yates Sexton takes a hard look at our nation’s history: namely, the abuses committed by those in power and the comforting stories that shaped the way the West has viewed itself up to the present. As reactionaries and authoritarians cling to myths about “Western civilization,” The Midnight Kingdom exposes how political power, religious indoctrination, and economic dominance have been repeatedly weaponized to oppress and exploit, sounding an alarm for what lies ahead as the current order frays.
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A must read
- By Patricia Everett on 05-27-24
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Fatherland
- A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets
- By: Burkhard Bilger
- Narrated by: Burkhard Bilger
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold.
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a window into a little-explored aspect of WWII
- By Marjorie on 09-23-23
By: Burkhard Bilger
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Superior
- The Return of Race Science
- By: Angela Saini
- Narrated by: Hannah Melbourn
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real.
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Lots of great info, underwhelming narrative
- By Amazon Customer on 04-08-21
By: Angela Saini
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Aftermath
- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
- By: Harald Jähner, Shaun Whiteside - translator
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust - and features over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
By: Harald Jähner, and others
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Fantasy Island
- Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
- By: Ed Morales
- Narrated by: Sean Duffy
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.
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Gringo Narrattion
- By shakira julia on 02-08-21
By: Ed Morales
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Time's Echo
- The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
- By: Jeremy Eichler
- Narrated by: Jeremy Eichler, Sherrill Milnes
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”
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Times Echo the lost sound of a people
- By CJand on 05-11-25
By: Jeremy Eichler
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Hidden in Plain View
- A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad
- By: Jacqueline L. Tobin, Raymond G. Dobard, Cuesta Benberry, and others
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1993, Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her. As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad.
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Wonderful listen.
- By Jane Wolfe on 11-27-24
By: Jacqueline L. Tobin, and others
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Enemy of All Mankind
- A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
- By: Steven Johnson
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry Every was the 17th century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular - and wildly inaccurate - reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event - the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew - and its surprising repercussions across time and space.
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Slow
- By Gary V Howell on 06-07-20
By: Steven Johnson
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Money for Nothing
- The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich
- By: Thomas Levenson
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of the Scientific Revolution, when new theories promised to explain the affairs of the universe, Britain was broke, facing a mountain of debt accumulated in war after war it could not afford. But that same Scientific Revolution - the kind of thinking that helped Isaac Newton solve the mysteries of the cosmos - would soon lead clever, if not always scrupulous, men to try to figure a way out of Britain’s financial troubles.
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Financial innovation's first song of the siren.
- By Michael Barnett on 09-06-20
By: Thomas Levenson
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The Rising
- The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center
- By: Larry Silverstein
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 destroyed the World Trade Center, New Yorkers and Americans faced a critical set of questions: What should be done with the site? Could the towers be replaced? And how best to memorialize those lost on that day? For Larry Silverstein, a lifelong New Yorker who had signed a lease for the properties just a few months before the attacks, the answer was clear: America had to rebuild as quickly as possible.
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Starts great before it morphs quickly into Larry Silverstein paying homage to himself
- By Xj517 on 10-11-24
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Road to Surrender
- Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II
- By: Evan Thomas
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who oversaw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the Manhattan Project; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo.
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Why they decided to drop the atomic bombs
- By William R. Todd-Mancillas (Name includes hyphen and capitalized M). on 08-08-23
By: Evan Thomas
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Revolutionary Spring
- Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
- By: Christopher Clark
- Narrated by: Christopher Clark
- Length: 33 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past. Revolutionary Spring is a new understanding of 1848 that offers chilling parallels to our present moment.
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Like the revolutions, it got off to a good start
- By Anonymous User on 06-23-23
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One Square Mile of Hell
- The Battle for Tarawa
- By: John Wukovits
- Narrated by: Gregory Jones
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In November 1943, the men of the 2d Marine Division were instructed to clear out Japanese resistance on the Pacific island of Betio, a speck at the end of the Tarawa Atoll. When the Marines landed, the Japanese poured out of their underground bunkers — and launched one of the most brutal and bloody battles of World War II.
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Brilliant
- By Chandler on 02-17-22
By: John Wukovits
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Untold Power
- The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson
- By: Rebecca Boggs Roberts
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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While this nation has yet to elect its first woman president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. For the first time, we have a biography that takes an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history.
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Readers voice lacked Edith’s strength
- By Heidi on 08-01-24
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On All Fronts
- The Education of a Journalist
- By: Clarissa Ward
- Narrated by: Clarissa Ward
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories. On All Fronts is the riveting account of Ward’s singular career and of journalism in this age of extremism.
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Insights gained!
- By J. Harry on 11-10-20
By: Clarissa Ward
What listeners say about Atomic Spy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- BG
- 02-12-24
Fuchs character however misguided it was because he was unaware of the true nature stalin’s russia.
I thought the narrator had an emotional demeanor inappropriate for the subject matter of the book
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- George Bettasso
- 08-24-24
Atomic spy
Very good well informed book. About espionage on the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. That influenced the Cold War.
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- Irvin L
- 08-29-24
Still a Traitor
No matter how much the tale tried to show his character, in all truth he was still a traitor and should have suffered the consequences.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Eila
- 08-10-21
Excellent profile
Overall, the book is a very strong profile of Klaus Fuchs. I would say that the meat of the book could have been edited down a bit (feels repetitive at times), and the author could have put more into the epilogue or final chapters that speculate Klaus' state of mind and motivations. Overall, great book for anyone interested in the history of the Manhattan Project, WWII, or the development of Atomic Weapons/Cold War arms race.
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- Rick B
- 06-07-20
Understanding the Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs.
This is an amazing story. The book is written with precision and empathy. This story is about the entire life of Klaus and his family. It's a tragic life filled with so many broken pieces that have molded the man and his life choices. I highly recommend this book and the narrator Tavia Gilbert does an excellent read to the listener. You may like me, listen to it more than once to fully appreciate it. I have learned and can begin to understand why and how Klaus became a spy. Before listening to his story, you would probably believe that there should be no reason to forgive him for what he did being an Atomic Spy. When you finish the book, you will understand his choices.
Klaus grew up in a time when German & Russian political challenges were splitting his home land of Germany. The Nazi party was gaining power and the only solution Klaus could imagine was the Socialist or Communist party of Germany. Klaus like so many refugees fleeing Hitler's rein, is eventually sent to Canada along with captured German, Jewish & Russian POW's. Klaus eventually returns to England to become a citizen and complete his education a PHD in Physics. Working for the English, Klaus makes his way to America. First to New York & later to Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, on the Atomic bomb. I will stop here. I don't think you will be disappointed in this book, or the author. I am looking for other books now by Nancy Throndike Greenspan and others read by Tavia Gilbert. This is true history that you don't have to challenge it's authenticity. This is 5 stars all the way for me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Spicy disaster
- 06-11-23
Balanced perspective on a controversial person and confusing time in world politics
This often misunderstood character, that is demonized through the lens of western political theory. This book seeks to provide a balance without playing into this bias. This is a must read for any study of contemporary geopolitics.
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- Lowell
- 08-09-20
One of the best books I have read
I am an 92 yr old retired medical scientist. I have lived thru Klaus Fuchs and his life as a traitor to the US. Nancy Greenspan’s book is amazing for its detailed description of what happened and why. I feel she did amazing research to bring to the reader this amazing man and this amazing book!
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1 person found this helpful
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- R. Stern
- 10-27-21
Would Be OK As A Short Story
The details are overwhelmingly boring; however, the motivation and character of the subject are interesting.
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- anonymous
- 11-24-20
Morally revolting -- a player in mass murder cast as a saint
The truth goes down the Orwellian memory-hole in this whitewash of the murder regime Fuchs worshipped like a twisted insane religion.
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6 people found this helpful