MI6, Hitler’s atom­ic bomb project and Cherie Booth QC — it was a potent mix­ture that was guar­an­teed to make head­lines. The Guardian’s was: “Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried hero­ic exploits of agent Grif­fin”.

Paul Ros­baud was a physi­cist and the edi­tor of the sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Die Natur­wis­senschaften. Ros­baud encour­aged Otto Hahn to pub­lish the news of the fis­sion of ura­ni­um in Jan­u­ary 1939 thus ensur­ing that this break­through was shared with sci­en­tists around the world. He was friends with Ger­many’s top atom­ic physi­cists through­out the war and was there­fore well placed to keep the British intel­li­gence ser­vice briefed on Ger­man progress towards an atom­ic bomb. For Ros­baud was an MI6 agent, code­named Grif­fin.

Now his nephew — rep­re­sent­ed by Ms Booth, wife of the for­mer prime min­is­ter — is try­ing to force the secu­ri­ty ser­vices to declas­si­fy all its files on Ros­baud so the full sto­ry can be told. And this is one sto­ry that will cer­tain­ly be worth read­ing.

You can get a flavour of what Ros­baud was like from this remark­able pas­sage from Paul Lawrence Rose’s excel­lent book Heisen­berg and the Nazi Atom­ic Bomb Project: A Study in Ger­man Cul­ture (U of Cal­i­for­nia P, 1998):

“Dur­ing the war Ros­baud had real­ized per­fect­ly well how Heisenberg’s self-serv­ing moral sophistry was shared by his col­leagues on the ura­ni­um project. A few days after the big Speer-Heisen­berg meet­ing at Har­nack-Haus in June 1942, the sci­en­tists learned of Speer’s deci­sion not to press ahead with the bomb project. One evening at Restau­rant Ori­ent, on Fasa­nen­strasse near the Kur­fürs­ten­damm, a group of twelve physi­cists were pro­fess­ing their moral relief at not hav­ing to devel­op a bomb. A rather intox­i­cat­ed Ros­baud was final­ly pro­voked by the cant he was hear­ing to shout out: ‘If any one of you knew how to make the bomb, he would not hes­i­tate a minute and tell your Führer how to destroy the rest of the world in order to get the high­est order of the Iron Cross.’ Ros­baud admits ‘they were decent enough not to denounce me after this, but my remark was fol­lowed by [icy silence].’ The stunned sci­en­tists, evi­dent­ly fright­ened that Ros­baud might be an agent provo­ca­teur who would report their reac­tions to the Gestapo, quick­ly split up and van­ished. But, of course, Ros­baud had hit both nails on the head – the first, that their advice to Speer stemmed from tech­ni­cal igno­rance about how to build a bomb, and the sec­ond, that their mor­al­iz­ing was emp­ty cant.”

The legal hear­ing is set to con­tin­ue. Per­son­al­ly I hope Ros­baud’s nephew is suc­cess­ful.