by Sam Kean
Finding no help in Sweden, the Danes decided to smuggle Bohr to Great Britain in an airplane—a risky venture. To respect Sweden’s neutrality, the Royal Air Force had to strip the plane, a Mosquito, of all weapons. It would have to fly dangerously high as a result, to dodge the German antiaircraft batteries in Norway; but this seemed safer than keeping Bohr in Stockholm. So on October 5, his handlers snuck him into a car (his family stayed behind) and rushed him to the airport. They bundled him into the Mosquito at 10 p.m. and left the scene, not wanting to draw attention to the plane. Relieved and exhausted, his main Danish guard went home, poured himself a generous glass of champagne, and collapsed.
An hour later he heard a knock on the door. No doubt fearing the worst—had the plane crashed? had the Nazis shot it down?—he rushed to open it. There stood Bohr. Apparently the plane had had engine trouble, an oil leak, and had been grounded. Bohr had blithely hailed a cab and puttered back to Stockholm by himself, oblivious to the danger. The guard yanked him inside and spent all night outside Bohr’s door with a revolver.
The underground arranged for another plane the next night, and if anything, the second run proved an even bigger fiasco. Just before the flight, the RAF crew handed Bohr a parachute, a Mae West life jacket, and some flares, in case they got shot down over the sea. Bohr also received a lesson on how to use an oxygen mask. He’d be sitting on a mattress in the unpressurized bomb bay of the Mosquito during the flight, and because they had to fly so high over the antiaircraft guns, everyone aboard would need supplemental oxygen. Alas, blabbermouth Bohr talked so much during the preflight lesson that he absorbed none of the instructions. Worse, he realized after takeoff that the standard-issue flight helmet didn’t fit over his gargantuan noggin. As a result, when the plane reached a dangerous height and the pilot announced through the helmet’s headset that Bohr should strap on his oxygen mask, the physicist didn’t hear him. A few minutes after they’d cleared twenty thousand feet, the pilot radioed back to check in on Bohr—and heard dead silence. He tried again, and got nothing, over and over.
After clearing the German lines, the pilot shot back down to a breathable altitude, but there was still no sign of life from Bohr. It must have been a sickening feeling: the Allies had snatched one of the world’s great scientists from the clutches of the Nazis, only to see him die in the cargo hold of an airplane. When it landed, the ground crew threw open the doors and rushed in to offer medical care—and found Bohr sitting upright, alert and chipper. I’ve just had the most wonderful nap, he said, and proceeded to talk and talk and tell them all about it.
Because Bohr had been cut off from developments in nuclear physics, a few colleagues and government officials soon met him at the Savoy Hotel in London to update him on their atomic research. “Never in history,” one historian noted, “had so much secret information been discussed by so few.” According to some accounts of the meeting, one of them also mentioned Bohr’s clever “Maud Ray Kent” / “radyum taken” telegram from earlier in the war. When asked about it, Bohr wrinkled his brow in bafflement. There was no anagram, he said. He’d simply been reaching out to an English nanny who’d cared for his children before the war and had grown close to them. Her name was Maud Ray, and she lived in Kent.
That wasn’t the only surprise Bohr had in store—he also had news about Heisenberg. Unbeknownst to the Allies, Heisenberg had visited Bohr in Copenhagen in September 1941 to discuss nuclear fission. The fight that broke out that night has since passed into the annals of scientific legend, and historians have never quite parsed exactly what happened, in part because Bohr and Heisenberg remembered the conversation so differently. One problem was that openly discussing fission research with Bohr would have been treason, so Heisenberg tried to be subtle and elliptical, counting on Bohr to read between the lines and infer his true meaning. Unfortunately, for all his love of conversation, Bohr was one of history’s worst listeners and absorbed nothing. His sudden anger at Heisenberg—who was working energetically for the Reich, after all—probably distorted what he heard anyway. Regardless, we do know a few things: that they discussed uranium fission, however obliquely; that Heisenberg asked whether it was “morally permissible” to engage in such research during wartime; and that Heisenberg sketched a crude design of what Bohr thought was an atomic bomb. They ended up quarreling, and when Heisenberg finally left that evening, Bohr despaired. The two men had been close for over a decade, less friends than father-son; but those few hours destroyed their relationship. And no matter what Heisenberg said (or meant to say), Bohr walked away convinced that German physicists were working on atomic weapons.
Bohr relayed this news to the group at the Savoy. His only consolation was the fact that nuclear weapons were impossible to build, since no one could ever enrich enough uranium. That’s when the meeting turned awkward. Actually, the scientists told him, not only were bombs possible, but the Americans were building one. For once, Bohr was speechless. As the scientists laid out their calculations and explained the vast scale of the Manhattan Project, Bohr saw the truth at last: atomic bombs would soon be a reality.
CHAPTER 33
Heavy Water under Fire
In August 1943, catcher Moe Berg officially joined the misfits of the Office of Strategic Services and shipped out to a former Girl Scout camp in rural Maryland for training. True to OSS style, it was demanding, innovative, and kooky all at once.
No record exists of Berg’s course of study there, but the Sorbonne this wasn’t. An agent typically learned to pick locks, crack secret messages, bug telephones, gouge people’s eyes out with his fingers, and kill enemy patrols without making a sound. In the morning he might construct hidden cameras out of matchboxes, and in the afternoon learn the finer points of blowing up stone versus metal bridges—a lesson taught by a munitions expert who was missing several fingers. The most memorable OSS exercise was the “funhouse.” After being shaken out of their bunks at midnight, recruits had to break into this ramshackle home and, gun in hand, navigate its twisting passages in the dark. The floors dropped unevenly underfoot in places, and OSS deliberately tried to disorient them by piping in German voices through hidden speakers. To complete the “mission,” recruits had to disarm booby traps and shoot papier-mâché Nazis that popped up like monsters at a carnival house of horrors.
On a more serious note, agents like Berg got briefed on how to use L-pills—cyanide capsules coated in rubber. (L stood for lethal.) Thanks to the rubber coating, you could hold the pills safely in your mouth for hours if necessary; you could even swallow them and they’d pass through you undigested. But if you bit down with your teeth, the cyanide would squirt out and you’d seize up and die within seconds. Agents were instructed to slip the pills under their tongues if taken prisoner by the Nazis. When the inevitable torture started—teeth smashed in, fingernails pulled out, ears ripped off—they could commit suicide honorably rather than give away secrets.
After a few weeks of training, OSS instructors turned the recruits loose in the real world. One exercise involved sneaking onto a bridge or dam, clobbering some poor night watchman, and setting dummy charges at vulnerable points to simulate a demolition. Several trainees ended up in jail after such stunts, which presumably counted against their grades. As a final exam the recruits had to infiltrate an American defense plant and filch something classified, to prove they could perform under pressure. One man forged the signature of the U.S. commerce secretary, talked his way into a munitions plant, and walked out with a top-secret bombsight—an A+ job. Berg tried something similar, forging a note on White House stationery and weaseling his way into an airplane factory. Alas, an astute worker confronted him, and the legendary Berg charm failed to mollify him. Berg finally confessed that he was working undercover, and the OSS suffered a black eye over the incident.
Despite flubbing his final, Berg passed the training course and was assigned to a few high-profile missions in the fall of 1943. One paired him up with famed astronomer Edwin Hubble. The two men, a
long with five other agents, were supposed to parachute behind enemy lines in Europe to carry out unspecified undercover work. No one knows exactly why Wild Bill Donovan thought it a good idea to send a fifty-something telescope jockey and a forty-something ex-catcher careening into hostile territory on their first mission, but that was Donovan for you. He never let his judgment cloud his enthusiasm. Sadly for history buffs, nothing ever came of the Hubble-Berg mission. Berg’s next assignment, though, to the Vemork heavy-water plant in Norway, had real and deadly consequences.
Word of the brilliant Gunnerside commando raid reached General Leslie Groves in April 1943, five weeks after it happened. Being kept out of the loop on Vemork miffed him, as did having to piece the story together from news reports in the media and announcements by the Nazi government—two groups he hated with roughly equal ardor. Once Groves confronted the British, however, they happily explained the raid to him, bragging that they’d knocked the plant offline for two years.
The very next day the British issued a correction. Maybe they hadn’t knocked it out for two years, but it was down for one year at least, you could count on that. This hasty revision alarmed Groves. Why had they cut their estimate in half? The British told him not to worry. They had it all taken care of, yessiree, and there was no need—none—to ask any follow-up questions. Groves pressed for more information and got stonewalled, which irritated him further.
That July the British honored the Gunnerside commandos—all of whom had escaped the desolate Hardanger plateau after the raid—with a lavish dinner in London. It took place at the Ritz, and the saboteurs were delighted to see that the main course was grouse. Each man earned a medal of some sort, and they raised toast after toast to their success. It was one of the grandest nights of their lives.
It was also a sham. The British had been hearing rumors for months that Vemork was producing heavy water again, and one week before the Ritz gala a report from a resistance fighter confirmed their fears. It turned out that the pathetic, striving Kurt Diebner had sent his top assistant to the plant shortly after the raid to hasten the clearing of wreckage and the installation of new equipment. Plant engineers had worked “with a knife at our throats,” one remembered, and Diebner’s man got the heavy-water cells functioning again in just six weeks. In fact, the Nazis took advantage of the downtime to expand from eighteen high-concentration cells in the basement to twenty-six. Production at Vemork increased accordingly, from eleven pounds of heavy water per day before the assault to almost fifteen by mid-June. The British kept mum about all this during the dinner for the Norwegian commandos. But the truth was, their brave mission had gone for naught.
In the end, the only thing the commando raid did destroy was the remaining goodwill between American and British officials working in atomic intelligence. Early in the war the British and Americans had exchanged information freely, but the security-obsessed Groves had put a stop to that, for both sound and petty reasons. Oddly, Groves’s father, although born in 1856, had never quite gotten over the British monarchy’s treachery toward the American colonies, and his son had inherited his old man’s hatred for the Union Jack. More rationally, Groves knew the Americans were doing all the heavy atomic lifting now, and if the British didn’t have the decency to inform him about things like the Vemork raid, then to hell with them. The United States would build a nuke alone.
Most frustrating of all, the British hadn’t even crippled the plant properly. Production had barely slowed, and Groves grew determined to wipe out Vemork for good. No longer trusting British intelligence, he decided he needed his own man on the ground in Norway to assess the situation. That’s how OSS became involved in atomic espionage.
The agency was going through a tough period at the time. Given its freewheelin’ ways, most officials in Washington viewed it with suspicion if not disgust. (We’re turning these yahoos loose in foreign countries?) Donovan desperately needed credibility, so when Groves dropped by his office one day in October 1943—the first senior military official to deign to meet with him—Wild Bill did all he could to impress Groves. After they talked, he ordered his personal chauffer to drive Groves home, then ran out to the parking lot to hold the door open for the general, like a clumsy high-school sophomore on a date. After the visit Donovan could refuse Groves nothing, and when Groves inquired about sending someone to Norway to scout Vemork, Donovan suggested one of his most promising agents, Moe Berg.
A scant few weeks later, Berg boarded a plane in England and parachuted out over Norway. Luckily, no blizzard hampered his landing, and Norwegian freedom fighters whisked him off to Oslo. There he interrogated various scientists associated with Vemork, and they confirmed that the Germans had resumed producing heavy water. After being smuggled back out of Norway, Berg alerted Donovan, who relayed the intel to Groves.
Groves didn’t hesitate: it was time to destroy Vemork. No cutesy glider mission, no commando raid. Like an archangel, he would rain down vengeance from above and bomb the hell out of the place. As historians have noted, he’d spent his career building things in the Army Corps of Engineers, so the decision to reduce Vemork to rubble was a curious departure. But Groves had always longed to lead troops in battle, and this was as close as he’d probably ever get. So on November 16, he ordered one of the army’s elite bombing groups, the Bloody Hundredth, to attack.
To minimize casualties, the attack was scheduled for shortly after 11:30 a.m., when most plant workers left for lunch. But the planes of the Bloody Hundredth—Bigassbird, Hang the Expense, Raunchy Wolf, and 142 others—encountered so little resistance on the flight over that they arrived at the Norwegian coast twenty minutes early and had to dawdle in the air. Bombs finally started dropping at 11:43 a.m., with a barrage of 700 thousand-pounders. Twenty minutes later, thirty-nine additional planes, which had been scheduled to bomb Oslo but found the conditions there too cloudy, also swung through. Mistaking a nearby nitrogen plant for Vemork, they dropped hundreds more five-hundred-pounders on the village of Rjukan.
But if Groves set out to destroy Vemork, he failed. Only twelve bombs hit the plant buildings, and while the raid did knock out several generators and the suspension bridge over the gorge, the mountainous terrain and the plant’s layout had rendered it fairly immune to bombing, just as the Norwegians had predicted long ago. What’s more, the bungling secondary raid on Rjukan killed twenty-two villagers, with at least one bomb hitting an air-raid shelter. (Witnesses reported finding stray limbs and a decapitated head outside.) The exiled Norwegian government in London was furious. And with the filtration cells in the basement still bubbling away, heavy-water production at Vemork continued unabated.
Vemork proved an exercise in impotent rage for the Allies. The only benefit was that it forced Leslie Groves to confront some hard truths about his own operation: that he knew virtually nothing about the German atomic bomb project, and that the little he did know came filtered through the bloody British. Both situations were intolerable, and he decided to rectify this deficit in two ways. The first involved setting up an eclectic team of scientists and soldiers to gather intelligence on the front lines in Europe. Groves also needed a sort of spy-at-large to slink into the shadows of Europe and ferret out rumors. He again consulted Donovan, who offered Moe Berg to the Manhattan Project on a long-term loan.
Groves hesitated at the suggestion. However admirably Berg had performed in Norway, he was one of the most famous athletes in the country—his picture had appeared in newspapers hundreds if not thousands of times, making undercover work tricky. Still, Berg had upsides, too. He spoke several languages, and he could charm both military officers, who were awed by his intelligence and advanced degrees, and scientists, who fawned over his athletic prowess. It’s possible, in fact, that Groves himself was dazzled by Berg’s wit and accomplishments. (Berg would later claim that Groves had secretly wanted to be a pro ballplayer—a catcher, even—but couldn’t throw.) So like many a Major League ball club in the 1930s, the general overlooked the catcher’s fault
s and added him to his roster, making Berg the first dedicated atomic spy in history.
Given that Berg stood a strong chance of being captured and interrogated, Groves refused to brief him on work going on at Los Alamos. An atomic spy clearly needed to know some technical details, however, and Berg spent the next several months cramming to learn the strangest language he’d ever encountered, that of quantum mechanics. To help Berg out, OSS arranged for physics tutors, and as with Joe Kennedy, Berg got only the best, including several Ivy League professors. (According to a dubious legend, these tutors included Albert Einstein. The wild-haired one supposedly even promised that if Berg would teach him “the theory of baseball,” then he’d teach Berg theoretical physics. After a moment’s further thought, Einstein said never mind: “I am sure you will learn relativity much faster than I will learn baseball.”)
Berg eventually learned enough science to start reading papers by the colossi of twentieth-century physics—Chadwick and Fermi, Meitner and Hahn, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. He grew especially enamored with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and its disturbing philosophical implications. In short, the uncertainty principle puts a limit on how well we can know both the position and the speed of any particle at the same time. And in drawing such limits, it makes these basic, fundamental quantities seem unreliable, even slippery. By extension (or so some people claim) the principle also undermines our certainty about the world in general, because if even bedrock physics is uncertain at its core, can we really be sure of anything? Could any knowledge have a true foundation now? Such questions fascinated Berg, and this fascination would serve him well during the next year, as Heisenberg himself would become the number one target of American atomic espionage.