Making Enemies by Francis Bennett Page A

Corless’s chairmanship, and with his dogged protection of our sphere of interest, we flourished. Painstakingly we built up a picture of tyranny, its people crushed into servility, its economy remorselessly directed towards the creation of a gigantic war machine on which the success of its political policy rested. Our central concern was the Soviets’ progress on their nuclear bomb. How close were they to emulating the Americans’ nuclear achievement? One year? Two? More? Any activity that speeded up the process was seen as strengthening the threat posed by the huge Soviet army which already cast its dark shadow westwards, a vast bird of prey. Slowly but inexorably we imagined it coming our way. Greece. Italy. France. Sometimes in my nightmares I heard tanks and the crunch of marching boots.
    *
    ‘The question we are faced with,’ Corless tells us, ‘is which of our two professors is stealing secrets for the Soviets? Professor Geoffrey Stevens, nuclear physicist and Nobel prizewinner, or Professor Edgar Lodz, theoretical physicist? Both are leading lights in our thermonuclear development programme.’ Corless’s gaze settles on me. ‘Cambridge is your parish, Monty. What can you tell us about Stevens and Lodz?’
    Unexpectedly I am the centre of attention. I am quite unprepared for this.
    ‘The first thing that anyone connected with the university will tell you is that these two men hate each other’s guts. They’re bitter rivals.’
    I tell the Committee what I know.
    Stevens is a professor of nuclear physics whose work in the ’thirties, with a Finn called Laurentzen, earned him a Nobel Prize in the year before war broke out. In his early years in Cambridge Stevens made his reputation working with Rutherford and Kapitza at the Cavendish before setting up his own laboratory with Laurentzen, a partnership that lasted until 1938. During the war, he did not go to America to join the Los Alamos Project, though he made a number of visits to New Mexico and is well known to Oppenheimer and his colleagues there. He is generally recognized as the source of inspiration behind much of British nuclear research. He and his small team are rumoured to be working on the initial design of a ‘superweapon’, a thermonuclear device of prodigious destructive capacity to replace the atomic bomb.
    ‘In your opinion,’ Arthur Gurney asks, ‘is Professor Stevens a likely candidate to betray secrets to an enemy?’
    ‘I have known Professor Stevens for twenty years,’ I reply. ‘He is many things I heartily dislike, but I cannot see him giving secrets to the Russians.’
    ‘Selling secrets?’ Corless asks. ‘He’s got a second wife, a young family. Does he have money worries?’
    Even after years in the department I am still not used to the way in which, because of the nature of the work we do, any evidence, however intimate, is grist to the intelligence mill. I shrug my shoulders and say nothing. I make a note that Corless will expect me to check Stevens’s bank account.
    ‘What about Lodz?’
    I tell the Committee that I’ve never met Lodz. What I know of him I have gathered second-hand from Stevens and my other Cambridge connections.
    ‘Eddie Lodz is Austrian by birth. Brought up in Vienna. Went to university in Germany, studied with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and came to England as a political refugee in the early ‘thirties just before things got tough for Jews in Germany. Cambridge snapped him up because of the reputation he had already established. Married an English woman, the daughter of the master of his college. Of the two, he’s reckoned to be cleverer than Stevens, but less pushy, less forceful. A kinder man, in every respect.’
    ‘He could be a communist. Vienna was a hotbed of communist activity before the war,’ Benton says.
    I tell the Committee that there is no evidence whatsoever to link Eddie Lodz in any way with communism. Corless thanks me for my contribution and moves the discussion forward. Full