The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  You can imagine the flabbergastation of Vemork officials, then, when they received an order for several hundred pounds of D2O from Germany in January 1940. Kurt Diebner, the pathetic, striving head of the Uranium Club, sent an agent to Norway to buy up the entire stock of heavy water there—408 pounds—plus sign a contract for 220 more pounds per month. Given that heavy water had no real use beyond nuclear research, the Vemork officials asked the agent about the Nazis’ plans for it. The agent was evasive, never giving a straight answer, and the officials could only assume that something nefarious was in the works—probably a radioactive poison gas. They managed to put the agent off, and when the firm’s general counsel visited Paris a month later for a meeting, he alerted an official there named Jacques Allier.

  Although nominally a banker, Allier worked as a spy for French military intelligence during the war. He also understood nuclear science: Frédéric Joliot had approached him earlier about buying up stocks of Norwegian heavy water for his and Irène’s experiments in Paris. (Allier’s bank owned two-thirds of Norsk Hydro, so he was in good position to carry out negotiations.) Allier thanked his Norwegian colleague for the intel on Germany and dashed off to tell Joliot. The banker and physicist met in secret in a hotel a few hundred yards from the Arc de Triomphe, and decided they needed to take drastic action.

  So in one of the most daring heists of World War II, the tall, balding, bespectacled Allier shipped out for Oslo in early March 1940. He traveled under the name of Freiss, his mother’s maiden name, and the bank gave him permission to spend up to 36 million francs ($25 million today) to secure every ounce of heavy water at Vemork. If he couldn’t secure it—or if he did secure it and then got double-crossed or captured—Joliot had given him a vial of water laced with cadmium. Cadmium gobbles up neutrons at a fantastic rate, and even a few drops would irredeemably poison a tank of heavy water.

  To heighten the drama, the Nazis caught wind of Allier’s mission and sent a cable to their agents in Norway: “At any price intercept a suspect Frenchman traveling under the name of Freiss.” These were pretty unambiguous instructions. Arrest him, kidnap him, murder him in the street—nothing was verboten. Allier knew what he was facing, too: friendly Norwegians tipped him off to the German dragnet. He plunged ahead anyway, trusting his wiles to elude capture.

  After arriving in Oslo on March 4, he called Vemork officials from a pay phone and arranged a rendezvous on a street corner. Negotiations began the next day, with Allier prepared to spend all 36 million francs—fifteen times the product’s market value. But the payment proved unnecessary. To keep the heavy water out of Nazi hands, the Vemork officials offered to turn over every ounce they had to France, as well as all future stocks, for free. Moved by their generosity, Allier disclosed the reason for the sudden interest in heavy water—not poison gas, but explosives of unimaginable strength. The Norwegians nodded soberly. One then told Allier: “If later, by bad luck, France should lose the war, I shall be shot for what I have done today. But it is with pride that I run that risk.”

  A few days later Allier and the officials crossed the desolate, frostbitten plateau west of Oslo and arrived at Vemork. At the suitably clandestine hour of midnight, they began decanting the heavy water into stainless-steel canisters for transport. A local welder had fabricated them secretly inside his home over the previous few days; they were custom-built to fit inside suitcases.

  On the drive back to Oslo, the smugglers took evasive maneuvers to lose any tails. Allier no doubt had the vial of cadmium ready, too, to poison the stocks if the Nazis pounced. But the coast looked clear, so they hurried to a French safe house and rushed the canisters inside—a risky move, since the house stood next to a Nazi military institute. For the next two days they hid indoors and plotted how to smuggle the heavy water out of Norway. They considered ordering a submarine to the Oslo harbor, but that would violate Norwegian neutrality in the war. Their only other plan seemed daft, even desperate, but with no other options, they made arrangements for a caper at the Oslo airport on March 12.

  Allier and a fellow spy arrived at the airport early that morning with tickets to Amsterdam. They also had several suspiciously heavy suitcases, which they made a huge fuss about at the ticket counter. Nazi agents watching the airport took notice and alerted the German air force. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, however, Allier and his colleague had also purchased tickets to Scotland using aliases. Because the Scotland and Amsterdam flights left at roughly the same time, Allier hoped that the planes would be parked next to each other on the tarmac. Sure enough, when he and his companion finally finished up at the counter and walked outside, they saw the propellers spinning on both planes, ready to take off. They began loading their bags onto the Amsterdam one.

  As they did so, a taxi came roaring up to the airport gate. A man who’d purchased tickets to Scotland demanded to be let onto the runway or he’d miss his flight. Airport security being a little more casual then, the guards on duty agreed. The taxi drove up and parked between the planes, out of view of everyone in the terminal. In a great rush, the man flung open the taxi’s trunk and began tossing his bags onto the Scotland-bound plane. During the uproar, Allier and his partner managed to duck onto the Scotland flight themselves with their fake tickets.

  Both planes took off a few minutes later. The Amsterdam passengers had a memorable flight. As soon as their plane left Norwegian airspace, German Luftwaffe fighters intercepted it and diverted it to Hamburg. Upon landing, Nazi officials flung open the cargo hold and seized Allier’s luggage. It was filled with gravel.

  Meanwhile, the heavy water—concealed inside the luggage of the man from the taxi—was soaring toward Scotland. Before it reached British airspace, however, Allier noticed a tail following them, an unidentified plane. He talked his way into the cockpit (again, lax security back then) and leveled with the pilot, explaining that he was a French agent fighting for the Allies. The pilot thanked him and began taking evasive action, flying inside clouds as much as he could. No one ever figured out what the second plane was—possibly Luftwaffe—but the pilot eluded it and landed safely.

  The precious heavy water was hustled through customs and rerouted to France. By March 18 every last canister was tucked away in the bombproof cellar of Joliot’s institute, safe and sound and secure. Provided the Nazis never reached Paris.

  CHAPTER 11

  Phoney to Real

  After Joe Kennedy Jr. left London in September 1939, his father insisted that he re-enroll at Harvard and pursue a law degree. Kennedy Senior even hired a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice to tutor him. But Joe found the work dull, and after the war in Europe took a dark turn in the spring of 1940, he began to think seriously about enlisting in the military.

  Before the spring of 1940, World War II had been something of a dud. Hitler had invaded Poland, yes, and Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany, making them official belligerents. But no actual battles or skirmishes had taken place, and the cheeky British press began referring to this state of affairs as the Phoney War. They would soon rue their cleverness. In April 1940, the Reich suddenly invaded Denmark and Norway, with Holland and Belgium and much of France falling in May. Along the way the Wehrmacht routed the British army and nearly annihilated it at Dunkirk. Most frightening of all, the air-raid sirens in London—last heard crying wulf in September 1939—began wailing in earnest at teatime on September 7, 1940, when a thousand German planes swept in to bomb the city, kicking off the famous Blitz—nine months of unrelenting air attacks. The phony war had become all too real.

  Joseph Kennedy Sr. was still the American ambassador in London at the time. His clashes with President Roosevelt had continued, but Roosevelt refrained from firing him for a simple reason: If Kennedy was going to spout off about appeasement and isolation, better he do so abroad than at home. But when the Blitz started, Kennedy gave in completely to despair, telling one member of his staff, “I’ll bet you five to one, any sum, that Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two w
eeks.” A furious FDR kept Kennedy in London long enough to eliminate any chance that he’d challenge him for the 1940 presidential nomination, then curtly recalled him in October.

  Far from feeling chastened by the dismissal, Kennedy began preaching appeasement and isolation even more widely. And in doing so, he managed the neat trick of infuriating both liberals and conservatives in Washington. Kennedy Senior had long harbored hopes of sitting in the White House himself someday, but his performance in 1940 dashed those dreams. Both Joe and Jack watched helplessly as their old man became a pariah in government circles, effectively committing political suicide.

  Joe took this especially hard, since he harbored political ambitions of his own. Mind you, these ambitions didn’t arise out of any deep-seated convictions. As a matter of fact, Joe was pretty muddled politically. One night in 1934 he’d come home to dinner and declared himself a communist, which enraged his father. (When you sell your boat and horse, he’d roared, then you can call yourself a communist.) Swinging to the opposite pole a few years later, Joe began praising Hitler’s eugenic sterilization laws as forward-thinking. Groaning, his father reminded Joe that his sister Rose, who suffered from behavioral and emotional problems, would probably run afoul of such laws, and that maybe he should rethink his stance.

  Despite these, shall we say, evolving beliefs, Joe Junior knew a few things for sure: that he as a Kennedy had a God-given right to hold office, and that war heroes had a leg up in getting elected. So with his father’s political fortunes waning, Joe decided that becoming a war hero was the surest way to land a Kennedy in the White House.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mad Jack

  Several members of the German atomic bomb project considered heavy water every bit as vital to their ambitions as uranium. The French heavy-water heist in March 1940 therefore left them fuming. But the invasion of Norway the very next month quickly bucked the Germans up. Oslo fell immediately, and although the feisty men and women of central Norway continued to fight for weeks, when the resistance there collapsed in May, the Third Reich seized the Vemork power plant. Adolf Hitler now commanded the only heavy-water production facility in the world.

  Meanwhile, German Panzers were steamrolling France as well, roaring past the Maginot Line and crushing every pocket of resistance they encountered. Although still at some remove from the front, the people of Paris panicked. Thousands fled, and once sober government officials began tossing whole cabinets of documents out their windows to the lawns below, to burn in gigantic bonfires. Anarchy reigned.

  Although calmer than most, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie received orders in mid-May to evacuate the heavy water in their possession. Under no circumstances could the Nazis get their talons on it. So one night at 10 p.m., two of Joliot’s assistants grabbed a pistol, loaded the canisters into a Peugeot truck, and began rumbling south. Jacques Allier, the banker-spy who’d pulled the airport heist, had made some calls and arranged for the assistants to deposit the canisters in a bank vault 250 miles away. Refusing to say what the material was, the assistants registered the heavy water as “Product Z.” It stayed there five days before the bank manager got itchy and demanded its removal. The assistants located a temporary home in a nearby women’s prison, then transferred it again to a maximum-security jail. Some of the inmates helped haul the canisters inside, placing them in a reinforced cell on death row normally reserved for violent offenders.

  Joliot and Irène lingered in Paris as long as they could. (And meanwhile evacuated their children, Pierre and Hélène, to the family cottage in the fishing village of L’Arcouest, where young Irène had spent the beginning of World War I.) With the Germans just fifty miles away, the Joliot-Curies finally retreated on June 12. As they drove south, the smoke from burning oil refineries filled the sky. They carried with them some equipment from their lab, as well as Irène’s birthright—the 130-pound lead-lined case containing the gram of radium that the women of America had given Marie Curie.

  Early on the sixteenth, the Joliot-Curies reached the prison town, where they hoped to set up a new lab with the heavy water. But while Joliot was taking a stroll that afternoon, scoping out the town, a car pulled up and Allier jumped out. The French army had crumbled even more quickly than expected, and they had to evacuate again. Allier ordered Joliot to send the heavy water to Bordeaux, in western France, and from there ship it to England for safekeeping. Although reluctant, Joliot agreed. Allier then went to the jail to retrieve the canisters—not without difficulty, since the jailor refused to relinquish them at first. He came around to Allier’s point of view when the banker shoved a pistol into his ribs. The doughty prisoners once again helped out by loading Product Z onto a truck.

  Two other Joliot assistants escorted the D2O this time, leaving the prison at dawn on May 17 and winding their way through the hilly countryside between central France and Bordeaux. Exhausted, they arrived at 11 p.m. and checked with military officials about an evacuation ship. They were assigned to the Broompark, a Scottish coal steamer under the command of Charles Henry George Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk.

  The next morning, the assistants wandered down to the dockyard to find the Broompark. What they found instead was bedlam. Half a million refugees had swamped Bordeaux, every last one of them desperate to flee. To make matters worse, the diabolical Germans had mined the harbor, and every so often a squadron of planes swept through to strafe. The day before, an aerial bomb had bull’s-eyed an ocean liner and killed three thousand passengers.

  The situation seemed even more hopeless when the assistants found the Broompark and met the captain. Although a peer of the realm—his family line predated the House of Windsor—the Earl of Suffolk was known to most people as Mad Jack. That day the assistants found him stripped naked to the waist on deck, whacking his thigh with a riding crop and showing off his myriad tattoos (a bizarre affectation then). He had a woman hanging on each arm, one blond and one brunette, and was cracking dirty jokes in an excruciating French accent. With his noticeable limp and full beard, he looked like an “unkempt pirate,” one witness recalled. Swallowing their misgivings, the assistants asked him if the Broompark planned to sail soon—they needed time to load the canisters. Never fear, said Mad Jack. The Broompark should have sailed already, but he’d taken the crew out the night before and gotten them stinking drunk, buying round after round until they’d collapsed. They were currently nursing the worst hangovers of their lives, and it would be at least a day before their stomachs were shipshape. So there’s plenty of time to load everything, he assured them. This was what passed for a plan in Mad Jack’s world.

  That same day, May 18, the new prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, gave one of his most famous speeches, the “finest hour” talk. (“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”) Few people remember that he also warned against “a new dark age made more sinister… by the lights of perverted science.” Those unlucky few who understood the threat of atomic weapons must have swallowed hard.

  The Broompark finally sailed at 6 a.m. on June 19 with 101 souls aboard, each one clutching the inner tube of a car tire as a life preserver. In addition to the heavy-water canisters, Mad Jack had taken on two crates of diamonds from Amsterdam and Antwerp worth $15 million ($250 million today); they represented the bulk of the European diamond market. To protect this precious cargo, the earl had also scared up two 75mm guns and three machine guns. He hadn’t found any ammo yet, but he wasn’t worried. Bordeaux sat at the mouth of an inlet, seventy miles from open ocean, and he planned on stopping at a city along the coast for bullets and shells.

  When they arrived at the coast, around noon, the tide was changing, and while Mad Jack limped off to ask about ammo, disaster nearly struck: a ship anchored next to the Broompark drifted into a mine and blew sky high. The scientists were actively trembling by this point, but when M
ad Jack returned, he slapped them on the back and told them not to worry: he figured they had at least a fifty-fifty shot of reaching England alive. In fact, the explosion gave him an idea for a project. They would build an “ark” out of wood scraps to save the heavy water and diamonds in case the worst should happen. Work would take their minds off bombs and torpedoes anyway.

  Leading by example, Mad Jack stripped to the waist again and lit up two cigarettes, which he smoked simultaneously using a special filter. He then grabbed a hammer and began pounding nails for the ark. Others joined in. A born raconteur, perhaps he took advantage of the crowd to regale everyone with the story of his life. Craving more adventure than the family estate near Oxford could offer, he’d sailed for Australia in a merchant ship while still a teenager, and had begun acquiring tattoos on far-flung isles as souvenirs. After a few years bouncing back and forth between Australia and England (a period that included his dismissal from the Royal Navy for insubordination), he’d decided to study chemistry and pharmacology in Edinburgh. Lest anyone should think he’d become conventional, he married a notorious nightclub dancer from Chicago. A few years later, in June 1935, he fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis, which hobbled his legs and left him with a limp. When World War II broke out, the army wouldn’t take him, so he volunteered to work as a scientific spy in Paris. He quickly proved the most flamboyant secret agent in Europe, throwing champagne-soaked parties at the Ritz and showing off the twin .45 automatics he kept in shoulder holsters beneath his tuxedo jacket. He’d named them Oscar and Genevieve. (One of Joliot’s assistants recalled thinking, “All this was completely in keeping with the ideas of British aristocracy I had gathered from the works of P. G. Wodehouse.”)