Was There a Fifth Man?

Was There a Fifth Man? Quintessential Recollections presents the author's personal account of his professional life as an experimental physicist in the service, at different times, of each of the three countries that joined forces at the Quebec Conference in 1943 to produce the atom bomb. The author has been identified, though always in a way which was just short of actionable, with the so-called ""Fifth Man"" of the long-running British spy saga. For his sake and that of his family, he felt duty-bound to set the record straight before myth had time to trespass on history. Making extensive use of dated correspondence and publications, he shows precisely where he was at the times that an individual called ""Basil"" was supposed to have been operating in collusion with Donald Maclean at the British Embassy in Washington. He claims that the misfit between ""Basil"" and himself is epitomized by the fact that when Basil was supposed to be entering the scene in Washington for an extensive sojourn, the author was actually leaving Washington for the United Kingdom.