one of those present at the Trinity nuclear test on 16 July 1945. He returned to England in January 1946. For his services to the nuclear weapons project, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1946 New Year Honours, and was awarded the US Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm in 1946. Espionage Peierls was responsible for the recruitment of Fuchs to the British project, an action which was to result in Peierls falling under suspicion when Fuchs was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1950. In 1999, The Spectator garnered outrage from Peierls's family when it published an article by journalist Nicholas Farrell that alleged that Peierls was a spy for the Soviet Union. The article was based on information supplied by intelligence historian Nigel West, who identified Peierls as the spy codenamed "Fogel" and later "Pers" in the Venona intercepts, and his wife Genia as the spy codenamed "Tina". However, the association of Tina with Genia did not fit with what was known about Tina, and she was conclusively revealed to be Melita Norwood in 1999. Nor did Peierls fit Pers, as the latter worked at the Clinton Engineer Works, whereas Peierls did not. There were good reasons for the postwar intelligence agencies to suspect Peierls. He not only had recruited Fuchs, and served as his "sponsor" on recruitment and security matters, but had pressed the authorities for Fuchs to be given a full security clearance without which he could not have assisted Peierls in his work. Fuchs lived with the Peierls family for a time. Peierls had a Russian wife, as did his brother, and he maintained close contact with colleagues in the Soviet Union before and after the Second World War. While not a communist like Fuchs, Peierls was known to have left-wing political views, and had colleagues with similar views. He was denied a visa to visit the United States to attend a Nuclear Physics Conference in Chicago in 1951. A similar request the following year was granted, but in 1957 the Americans expressed concerns about him, indicating that they were unwilling to share information with the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell while he remained as a consultant. Post-war Physicists were in demand after the war, and Peierls received offers from several universities. He seriously considered an offer of a position at Cambridge from William Lawrence Bragg,