by Sam Kean
Incidentally, von Thoma was correct in guessing that something had delayed the production of V-weapons. Several things, actually. The components used to launch and steer the rockets required extensive testing, and their construction involved something like eighty different chemical elements and alloys, many of them rare and hard to procure. Then a series of fires during some test launches in February 1943 hampered progress further. Given von Thoma’s cynicism, he also would have chuckled over a third reason. In early March of that year, Hitler had a vision while sleeping one night, and the gods apparently revealed unto him that the V-2 missile program would fail; a few days later he suspended the entire project. This left the head of rocket production at Peenemünde shaking with fury: not only do we have to battle wartime shortages and technical challenges, he fumed, but also “the dreams of our Supreme War Lord.”
Albert Speer, the one sane Nazi in Hitler’s circle, talked some sense into the Führer over the next few weeks, and just after von Thoma and Crüwell’s conversation, work at Peenemünde resumed. Slowly but steadily, then, the V-weapons were getting close to deployment. And unslowly and unsteadily, the Allies began to panic.
CHAPTER 29
Seeing Red
After running spy missions in Baja Mexico, newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash took over West Coast security for the Manhattan Project in late 1942, and he spent the next several months investigating security breaches throughout the western United States. Little did he realize that the biggest threat the project faced was right under his nose, in Northern California.
Although the United States and Soviet Union had formed an alliance to fight Germany in 1941, the Soviets had no compunctions about spying on American laboratories, especially the famed Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. The Rad Lab was a vital component of the Manhattan Project because it had the world’s most powerful cyclotrons, which were essential for enriching uranium. So when the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned up evidence that Soviet spies had infiltrated the Rad Lab, officials were horrified. Especially because every last spy seemed connected with Robert Oppenheimer, who’d worked at the Rad Lab before taking over at Los Alamos.
The FBI first drew a bead on Oppenheimer after (illegally) wiretapping the home of a prominent communist in the Bay Area named Steve Nelson. During the most serious incident, which took place at 1:30 a.m. in late March 1943, a student of Oppenheimer’s revealed to Nelson the results of several secret fission experiments. From him and other contacts Nelson eventually pieced together detailed knowledge about research at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos. Worse, Nelson was then observed passing information to Soviet agents. During the conversation with the student, Oppenheimer’s name came up several times. To be sure, Nelson explicitly denied Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage; he in fact complained about the physicist’s resistance to spying and called him “jittery.” But the context also made it clear that Nelson knew Oppenheimer personally, which in the slippery world of FBI intelligence cast further doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty. The bureau began trawling through Oppenheimer’s phone records and posting agents in trench coats and fedoras outside the Berkeley Faculty Club to monitor him (very subtle). It also prepared transcripts of Nelson’s most damning conversations and forwarded them to Boris Pash.
To say that Pash was alarmed is an understatement. “Even by the standards of military security officers,” one historian noted, “[Pash] was passionately and belligerently anticommunist,” and this was the worst possible news he could imagine. The Reds had penetrated the most secret project of the war—and in his backyard, on his watch. Within twenty-four hours of receiving the transcripts, Pash flew to Washington to brief General Leslie Groves in person. Groves then threw his considerable bulk around and forced the FBI to turn over its files on Oppenheimer and channel all intelligence to Pash in the future.
Rushing back to the Bay Area, Pash rented a house in Oakland as a command center, just south of the Berkeley campus, and opened a three-pronged attack on communism at the Rad Lab. First, his team installed $6,000 worth of spy equipment in the house, including a telephone switchboard to monitor all the wiretaps they established at people’s homes, especially Oppenheimer’s. Second, they flooded Berkeley and Los Alamos with security agents—aptly nicknamed “creeps”—to follow suspects around and monitor their comings and goings. Finally, they placed spies of their own at the Rad Lab. These included two “bodyguards” for Oppenheimer, to drive him around and protect him from supposed assassins. Their real job was to report everything Oppenheimer did to Pash.
As these tactics suggest, Pash’s office wasn’t afraid to trample legal niceties. Pash himself had once proposed “shanghaiing” the most flagrant of Oppenheimer’s student-spies and taking them out to international waters, where pesky U.S. laws didn’t apply. There, he vowed to interrogate them “in the Russian manner” to extract their secrets. It’s not clear if he was joking, but the threat proved unnecessary. Between the wiretaps and the tails, Pash and the FBI caught several Rad Lab students (as well as scientists at other sites) meeting with Soviet agents. As for punishing them, government officials had to get creative. Because the wiretaps were illegal, they couldn’t prosecute the scientists in court; they resorted to drafting them and shipping them off to remote military sites instead. One scientist was banished to a base above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, the American gulag, where he spent the balance of the war folding long underwear.
Because he’d insisted on hiring Oppenheimer, Groves took special interest in the Rad Lab case—a fact that caused security problems of its own. While visiting the Oakland spy house with Pash once, Groves arrived in full uniform. Problem was, this was a nice, quiet residential area, and people would surely wonder why a general had showed up. Realizing his error, the tall, pudgy Groves grabbed the bantamweight Pash’s raincoat from the back seat of the car and stuffed himself inside. He then sprinted for the house with all the grace of a buffalo. Pash hooted over the incident for years, but he wasn’t much smoother in the field. One day while reconnoitering the Berkeley campus, Pash bumped into a former student of his from Hollywood High. “Coach, what are you doing here?” the boy asked. After a few seconds of sputtering, Pash turned and ran.
Although he busted several of Oppenheimer’s students, Pash never caught Oppenheimer himself doing anything suspicious—in part because Oppenheimer realized he was being watched and took countermeasures. With his driver-bodyguards, for instance, he would lower his voice and roll down the windows in the back seat whenever he wanted to talk with someone, creating a protective bubble of noise. Still, the stress of being under constant surveillance got to Oppenheimer. Already a waif, he dropped from 130 pounds to a skeletal 110; friends remember, bizarrely, that he could slip his frame inside a toddler’s high chair and sit down in it. As a precaution he also stopped speaking with his brother, Frank, a dues-paying member of the Communist Party. Things got so bad that, just months after arriving at Los Alamos, he confessed to a friend that he wanted to quit the Manhattan Project altogether.
To relieve the pressure on himself, Oppenheimer decided to submit to an interview with one of Pash’s colleagues in August 1943. His thinking seems to have been this: They know I ran with a dubious crowd in my past. So to prove my loyalty, I’ll submit to an interview and explain everything—maybe even give up the names of some subversives. That will win their trust, and they’ll stop harassing me. The plan backfired spectacularly, with one moment during the interview proving especially damning. A British engineer living in Berkeley had been sniffing around for technical secrets to hand over to the Soviets. The engineer thought Oppenheimer would play ball, so he asked a mutual friend of theirs—a professor of French at UC-Berkeley—to sound Oppenheimer out at a dinner party. This had happened six months earlier, and Oppenheimer assured Pash’s assistant that he’d refused to help.
To Oppenheimer, the point of the story was the British engineer—he wanted Pash’s people to turn the glare of their scrutiny onto h
im. He apparently didn’t grasp that, in relating this tale, he was also implicating his friend, the professor of French, in treason. When asked for the professor’s name, Oppenheimer deflected the question, but when Pash heard about the incident later that afternoon, he demanded his own meeting with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer reluctantly agreed, and the two antagonists met face-to-face on the Berkeley campus the next day, in a room that Pash had hastily wired with hidden microphones.
Even Oppenheimer’s defenders would concede that he had an arrogant streak, and he considered Pash his intellectual inferior, which was no doubt true. That didn’t mean Pash was a dunce. He didn’t interrogate the physicist in the Russian manner, but he did ask several pointed questions. He also deftly turned the focus of the interview away from the British engineer (whom Pash knew about anyway) and onto Oppenheimer himself. Why had he waited so many months to come forward with this story? And if he was so loyal and so concerned with security, why wouldn’t he name the go-between, the professor who’d approached him?
Cornered, Oppenheimer tried to talk his way out of the jam and only entangled himself further. At one point he admitted that he would “feel friendly” about sharing atomic secrets with Russia, just not through backdoor channels. Pash was aghast. Oppenheimer then started speculating—completely unprompted—about what the British engineer would do with any top-secret documents he obtained. Probably shrink them onto microfilm, Oppenheimer guessed, and deliver them to the local consulate. Which left Pash wondering how on earth a supposedly innocent scientist would know the Soviet protocol for delivering documents to Moscow.
If Oppenheimer had hoped to reassure Pash, he miscalculated badly. He later called his testimony that day a “tissue of lies” and a “cock-and-bull story,” and in refusing to answer the thorniest questions, he looked shifty and evasive. Always a little histrionic, Oppenheimer ended the interview by saying, “I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong.” Pash was unmoved. Earlier in the interview he’d compared himself to a bloodhound, and he let Oppenheimer know that he didn’t intend to give up the scent now that he had it.
Pash spent the next few months keeping this promise. “We never let Oppenheimer out of our sight,” he said. “We knew his every step. Every letter was read, every telephone call was overheard, every contact checked and studied.” Once, when Oppenheimer left a suitcase in his car while eating at a restaurant, two creeps broke into the sedan and wrenched the bag open. They found a fifth of gin, a bottle of twenty-seven-year-old brandy, underwear, batteries, and diarrhea medication—but alas, no spy documents. In another solid legal move, agents took sworn testimony against Oppenheimer from a twelve-year-old boy.
For his part, Oppenheimer continued trying to prove his loyalty. In a third interview, he named several more supposed communists for security officials—students of his, a secretary, a close friend and his wife. He also suggested that the Manhattan Project plant undercover agents in a local scientific union to further spy on his colleagues. All this might come as a disappointment to those who, based on the harassment he suffered in the 1950s, consider Oppenheimer a martyr to McCarthyism. But in these early days, when he was desperate to make his reputation, he comes off as a real fink sometimes, willing to betray almost anyone.
Pash’s fanaticism served him no better. In tracking Oppenheimer and other suspects, he often adopted extreme measures, like stopping a passenger train to hunt for subversives, which infuriated railroad officials. He also had a bad habit of stealing classified documents from the offices of his superiors, which he’d then return the next day with a smirk, to teach them a lesson about security. They were not amused. Indeed, Pash pissed off pretty much every senior officer he worked for that year, and by late 1943 several of them were looking for a way to get him out of their hair—overseas if possible, and preferably in the line of fire. It just so happened that Groves had an assignment that met those qualifications.
CHAPTER 30
Beautiful Peenemünde
In the second half of 1943 the British began seeing signs that, as the German generals had promised, the “fun” with the V-weapons was about to start. Common sense held that the Nazis would launch the rockets from northern France, the closest point of attack to London. And in a sickening noncoincidence, reconnaissance planes caught the Germans hard at work building massive infrastructure there. In some cases they erected what looked like huge skis—launch rails to guide rockets to their targets. In other cases they were excavating trenches the size of canyons, to build gigantic bunkers. Even scarier, an escaped French prisoner who turned up at the American embassy in Switzerland in June 1943 claimed to have escorted a cask of heavy water to Peenemünde recently. He didn’t know what it was for, but given that heavy water had no conceivable use in rocketry, only nuclear research, connecting the dots wasn’t hard. The Nazis were clearly developing atomic rockets at Peenemünde, then building the apparatus in northern France to hurl them at London.
Still, not everyone reached such dire conclusions. A powerful faction within British intelligence thought the whole rocket danger overblown, and they dismissed Peenemünde as a factory for making airplane bombs, or even harmless sledge pumps. Between Nazi tanks and fighter planes, they argued, we have enough to worry about without inventing new threats. Pretty soon a civil war broke out within British intelligence, and things got so heated that Winston Churchill finally had to arbitrate during a late-night meeting on June 29. It took place in a subterranean chamber deep beneath the government offices at Whitehall. There, behind a thick green door with an observation slit, stood the Cabinet War Room, a dark windowless space with a U-shaped table covered in blue cloth.
The antagonists that night were two of Churchill’s confidants, Duncan Sandys and Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell. The German-born Cherwell was an accomplished Oxford physicist with a nasty temperament: he reportedly despised Jews, women, and Africans, and instead channeled all his affection toward Churchill, whom he practically fell in love with. He served as the prime minister’s personal scientific advisor, and in that capacity had been downplaying the threat of Peenemünde. Opposed to him was Sandys, who was both an intelligence officer and Churchill’s son-in-law, having married Diana Churchill eight years earlier. Sandys had nearly lost a foot early in the war after his driver fell asleep at the wheel one night and crashed. He endured several grueling months of rehab, and Churchill took pity on him and appointed him head of a committee investigating Peenemünde. This sign of favor gave Cherwell fits, and from that moment forward he despised his young rival.
Sandys presented his case first that night, recapping all the evidence his team had gathered: prisoner testimony, spy reports, the conversation between von Thoma and Crüwell, reconnaissance photos of rockets at Peenemünde, pictures of the concrete bunkers being built in northern France. He capped his argument with a chilling statistic. Given their apparent size, the V-rockets could kill or wound an estimated four thousand people per strike; at just one rocket per hour, two million British citizens could suffer casualties in the first month alone.
After the prosecution rested, Cherwell began the defense. He wanted to humiliate Sandys, but had to be cagey about undermining Churchill’s son-in-law. So that night he claimed he merely wanted to play the “avocatus diaboli,” the devil’s advocate, and raise a few points about Sandys’s evidence. First of all, prisoners and spies were notoriously unreliable, he said. We shouldn’t trust them too far. As for the reconnaissance photos, they were taken from such great heights that the details were ambiguous at best. Where Sandys saw “rockets,” he saw only fuzzy white blots—they might be anything. Plus, if the Germans really were testing huge, explosive rockets on the Baltic coast, then British agents in Sweden—just ninety miles away—would surely have heard something by now. Finally, in a fit of pride, he insisted that the Germans couldn’t have developed such sophisticated rockets yet because, well, British engineers hadn’t developed anything similar, and the Krauts surely couldn’t outpace o
ur boys. Cherwell concluded that the tube-shaped blots in the photos were probably not rockets at all but “aerial torpedoes” to launch from airplanes, quite conventional. Or perhaps the whole site was a hoax, intended to distract the Allies from the real danger elsewhere.
Churchill mulled all this over. He understood precious little science, and he had just watched his two closest technical advisors make diametric cases. Luckily, Churchill had a third vote to help him decide, courtesy of R. V. Jones. Originally a protégée of Cherwell, the thirty-one-year-old Jones now worked in intelligence with Sandys and could therefore provide a balanced view. Jones had already impressed Churchill with his acumen on other matters, and at this point the prime minister turned to the young man and shook his finger. “Now, Dr. Jones,” he boomed, “may we hear the truth!”
Jones gathered himself—this was the biggest presentation of his career. He was especially nervous because he was about to eviscerate his mentor Cherwell’s case. He started by pointing out that, however unreliable individual spies or prisoners might be, in this case they’d provided too much corroborating detail to dismiss everything as hearsay. And if the construction sites or rocket-testing grounds were a hoax, they seemed a singularly stupid one. Why pour millions of Reichsmarks and literal tons of precious concrete into dummy bunkers and fake launch pads? The sheer scale of the sites argued for their authenticity. He also rebutted the argument about the tubes in the photographs being aerial torpedoes: given their apparent size and mass, no known plane could have lifted them.
At this point Churchill yelled “Stop!” and turned to Cherwell with a malicious grin. “Hear that?” he said. “That’s a weighty point against you.” Churchill also delighted in the irony that Cherwell had discovered Jones in the first place: “Remember,” he chortled, “it was you who introduced him to me.”