SPOILERS FOR THE TV SHOW "MANHATTAN" FOLLOW
I've been watching the TV series Manhattan (great show check it out). While I know for sure it's not the most historically accurate show I still love it but I wanted to know if one of the plot lines in the show was based on anything.
So near the middle of season 2 set in early to mid 1945 two British scientists working on the Manhattan project collude to steal atomic secrets "for King and Country". Now spies, Nazi and Russian espionage etc have all been big aspects of the show so far but this was the first I had ever heard of this sort of thing. I had just assumed that all atomic information was shared between the British and the Americans.
Was this fabricated for the show, or did the British really attempt to steal atomic secrets from the US. To follow up, did the British do anything like this at all during the war IE espionage and counter espionage in relation the US or were they too firm of Allies for that to be needed?
The British were interested in learning as much as they could during the war with an eye to their own future weapons developments, as well as future industrial developments. This was one reason the United States military and scientists were originally very wary about bringing them in — they didn't feel they needed them at that point, and they didn't see how their participation would help the United States win the war, as opposed to the British gaining in the postwar. Churchill charmed Roosevelt into bringing the British in more closely, though (to the dismay of many American scientists and administrators), and allowed the British to have some participation in the project. (In theory it was full participation, but General Groves blocked access to several sites to them. He allowed them to have a reactor laboratory in Montreal, for example, but did not allow that laboratory to get information about the US work on the same topic.)
So they weren't spying quite in the way the show dramatizes it, but there were questions of competing loyalties — the long and the short-term, in part. As with many things on the show, they have taken a grain of little-known historical truth and magnified it for dramatic and alternate-history effect.
On the US efforts to exclude the British, I have written a bit here.