by Sam Kean
Goudsmit hoped to redeem himself with Jansen. To increase the intimidation factor, he and Pash broke out their crispest uniforms, with Pash adding several ribbons and medals. Jansen proved a tough nut, however, revealing almost nothing under questioning. All they squeezed out of him was that his firm had shipped some of the missing thorium to Belgium for safekeeping, and in the chaos of the war, several train cars’ worth had disappeared. Jansen claimed he’d gone to Belgium to track them down, and when he found himself in the neighborhood of Eupen, he’d decided to swing by his secretary’s home for a little hanky-panky. Alas, the German defensive lines had collapsed during his visit, and he’d hidden at her parents’ house for safety. That’s why Pash had found him there. As for what the thorium was for, Jansen claimed to have no idea.
For Goudsmit this story didn’t add up. Yet he couldn’t press Jansen about anything related to atomic weapons, lest he tip the German off about American interest in them. His only hope now lay with the suitcase of documents Pash had confiscated. So after striking out with Jensen, Goudsmit sat down that night and began paging through them for clues.
A cold snap had descended on Paris that week, so Goudsmit crawled into bed with the bundle, burrowing under his blanket for warmth. The first few dozen pages were tedious and irrelevant; he must have been on the verge of nodding off. But he soon came across something, he said, that made him “almost fall out of bed from excitement.”
It was a hotel bill from Hechingen, a village in the Black Forest region of southern Germany. Moe Berg and other sources had already traced Uranium Club members to the area, and here was evidence that Jansen—whose firm was smuggling thorium—had visited, too. What’s more, a personal letter in the suitcase referred to Hechingen as a “restricted” area, closed to outsiders. What were the Germans hiding there?
When confronted with the hotel bill, Jansen responded that he’d been visiting his mother, who lived nearby. Bullroar, Goudsmit thought. As for the “restricted” status, Jansen claimed it was a misunderstanding. That simply meant that no refugees from bombed-out cities up north could resettle there. Likely story. With Jansen stonewalling, Goudsmit kept digging through the documents and finally discovered where the thorium had ended up, in a medieval castle just two miles south of Hechingen. In addition, another scrap of paper in the suitcase contained the address of a woman named Carmen. When asked about her, Jansen at first denied all knowledge. He then broke down and claimed she was a prostitute who’d cheated him. Goudsmit knew better: Carmen was clearly a secret agent, “a Nazi Mata Hari.”
Every detail of the Jansen case fit together beautifully. A highly radioactive element had been stolen from France and rerouted to secret lairs in southern Germany, lairs where the world’s top nuclear scientists just happened to be stationed. It was scary and exhilarating all at once, and Samuel Goudsmit was having a grand old time piecing it all together—right up until the bottom fell out of everything.
One set of documents he came across confirmed the transfer of the thorium to the Hechingen castle. But after scrutinizing some shipping papers, and cross-checking with other scraps, he finally learned the real reason the firm had stolen it: to make toothpaste. Jansen’s bosses had grown rich manufacturing gas masks and searchlight filaments for the Wehrmacht, but with the end of the war looming, they wanted to diversify and shift into cosmetics. One promising product in their portfolio was a thorium-infused toothpaste called Doramad, whose radioactive properties supposedly whitened and brightened teeth. (A Doramad ad from the time declared, “My rays massage your gums. Healthy rays—healthy teeth!”) The thorium heist had simply been a dirty trick to corner the postwar market. As for the hotel bill, Jansen really had been visiting his mother.
In a way this was great news: the Nazis hadn’t developed a shortcut for making nuclear bombs. (Research later revealed that thorium wasn’t much use for bombs anyway, because making uranium-233 produces by-products that cause chain reactions to fizzle.) Still, Goudsmit’s crew felt pretty sheepish for whipping themselves into a frenzy over toothpaste. Even worse, they’d still learned nothing useful about the Nazi atomic bomb.
CHAPTER 52
The Deadliest Hombre
In 1944 the much-discussed plan to kidnap Werner Heisenberg suddenly gained momentum and took off at a gallop. Spies had finally traced the physicist to Germany’s Black Forest, a name right out of Grimm’s, and with their top scientific target in sight, General Groves and Wild Bill Donovan began plotting to lay hands on him.
The soldier they chose to lead the mission was Carl Eifler, once described as “without a doubt the toughest, deadliest hombre in the whole OSS menagerie.” Eifler, who’d joined the army at age fifteen, had all the pugnaciousness of Boris Pash and none of the scruples. “Consider yourself a criminal,” he once advised OSS recruits. “Break every law that was ever made.” He stood well over six feet tall and weighed 280 pounds, and his size and demeanor regularly drew comparisons to a grizzly bear. His hobbies included shooting shot glasses off the tops of people’s heads while drunk.
Eifler made his reputation in 1943 while battling the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. Despite starting with just a few dozen soldiers (including film director John Ford, who recorded several live ambushes), Eifler soon commanded an army of 10,000 angry Burmese natives, and dollar for dollar he ran one of the most successful campaigns of the war. Using hit-and-run tactics, the Burmese irregulars destroyed dozens of airfields and railroad stations across 10,000 square miles of jungle; they also killed and wounded 15,000 Japanese troops, compared to 85 deaths on the Burmese/American side. (One favorite trick involved planting bamboo spikes in the weeds alongside a road and ambushing Japanese soldiers, who impaled themselves when they dove for cover.) Many Burmese natives kept shriveled brown ears from Japanese corpses as souvenirs, which they carried in bamboo tubes slung around their necks. Some had several dozen.
In his most famous exploit, Eifler and a few men set out to raid a Japanese base along the Burma coast one day in March 1943. But choppy seas prevented their boats from landing, and they risked being dashed on nearby rocks or swept out to sea. Just before they lost control, Eifler grabbed a towline, leapt into the water, and started thrashing for shore. The chop slammed his head against the rocks several times, and the undertow almost dragged him down for good, but several minutes later he managed to stagger ashore, bloody and woozy. He then used the towline to drag all five boats to safety before passing out. In terms of sheer bravado, it surpassed even JFK’s exploits.
Although he saved the mission, Eifler woke up with ringing in his ears and an excruciating headache. (In smashing against the rocks, he’d probably suffered several concussions, if not outright brain damage. He would later experience seizures and other neurological problems.) Over the next few weeks his thinking grew foggy, and he had so much trouble getting to sleep that he had to scarf painkillers and gulp bourbon each night in order to black out. This didn’t exactly improve his mental state, and he sometimes burst out crying for no reason. Rumors of his erratic behavior finally reached Wild Bill Donovan, who had little choice but strip him of his command, a humiliating development.
The demotion pained Donovan, too: as a fellow reckless warrior, he sympathized with Eifler’s plight. Moreover, Eifler was too valuable an asset to let sit idle. So at some point over the next few months Donovan mentioned another adventure that he thought might appeal to the deadly hombre—a little lark to hunt down a certain scientist in Germany.
After some much-needed rest, Eifler began meeting with OSS officials in early 1944 to discuss the mission, which was so secret it never received a code name. Accounts of the meetings differ, but Eifler first sat down with one of Groves’s deputies, who briefed him on Heisenberg and nuclear bombs. Eifler had no idea what “fission” meant and even less of a clue who Heisenberg was, but he understood dirty warfare. He finally interrupted, “So you want me to bump him off?”
Groves’s man winced. “By no means.” Instead Eifler should “
deny the enemy his brain,” the euphemism they’d settled on for abduction. “Do you think you can kidnap this man and bring him to us?”
Eifler didn’t hesitate. “When do I start?”
“My God,” Groves’s man marveled, “we finally got someone to say yes.”
A few days later Eifler met with Donovan and other officials. By this time he’d conjured up a cover story, a tale meant to fool the Allies as much as the Germans. He planned to launch the mission from Switzerland. He’d pose as an American customs agent there, claiming that he wanted to study how neutral countries handled border control during wartime. “This gives me the opportunity to observe their borders,” he explained, “and figure out how to violate them.” For the actual kidnapping, he suggested using a dozen commandos to raid Heisenberg’s new lab, located just fifty miles from the Swiss border. After bludgeoning the physicist into submission, they’d smuggle him back to Switzerland, steal a plane, and fly to England. No sweat.
Donovan immediately objected—not to the manhandling of Heisenberg or the gross violation of Swiss neutrality, but to landing in England. Under no circumstances did they want the bloody British involved. Eifler accepted this limitation. He then began thinking out loud and came up with an even wackier scheme. Instead of steering the stolen plane for England, they could fly toward the Mediterranean. Then maybe they could ditch the plane over the water and parachute into the freezing sea. Oh, and then rendezvous with a submarine in the darkness, which would whisk them through the phalanx of U-boats there to safety.
Lacking any limeys, this plan suited Donovan just fine. Ironically, it was Eifler who started thinking it through more, and pointed out some potential difficulties. What if the submarine got delayed? Or what if storms prevented the rendezvous? Donovan merely chuckled. Carl Eifler, he said, you’re the last man on earth to be worrying about undue risks. That was probably true, Eifler conceded. But he did have one more question: What if we get caught?
The answer sounded familiar: “Deny Germany the use of his brain.” But the meaning of the euphemism had shifted, taking on a darker cast. Eifler now had permission to shoot Heisenberg rather than risk him falling back into German hands.
Eifler nodded. “So I bump him off and get arrested for murder. Now what?”
“We deny you.” Deny they’d ever heard of him.
Okey-doke, said Eifler. It was the answer he’d expected, and it didn’t trouble him. Time to get to work.
For once, though, OSS had second thoughts about a nutty scheme. Donovan admired Eifler’s gifts, such as they were, but the man was simply too gung-ho for a mission like this. Germany wasn’t a jungle where you could butcher your way out of a tight spot. Kidnapping Heisenberg would require tact and subtlety—less smash and more dash. So in the summer of 1944 Donovan once again had to yank command from his top warrior, and this second demotion proved even more gut-wrenching than the first. For privacy, they met on the balcony of OSS headquarters in Algiers, where Eifler was training. Donovan gave some bullshit excuse about how the Manhattan Project had “cracked the atom,” which supposedly rendered the kidnapping moot. Still unclear about the physics, all Eifler understood was that he’d been relieved of command again. He managed to keep himself together in front of Donovan, but a few days later, during a conversation with a friend, he lost it. The embarrassment, the stress, the continuing mental turmoil from his injuries in Burma—it proved too much, and he broke down sobbing.
Eifler might have been even more upset if he’d realized something else: that contrary to what Donovan had told him, the plot against Heisenberg had not been canceled. Groves and Donovan had simply reworked it, enlisting other, less volatile hombres to carry it out.
One was Paul Scherrer. Code-named Flute, he worked as a physicist at the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Albert Einstein’s alma mater. It was the ideal cover for an atomic spy. Switzerland had remained neutral during the war, so Axis and Allied citizens alike could travel there freely. Switzerland also bordered France, Germany, and Italy, which made it a convenient central location. Zurich became the epicenter of wartime espionage as a result, a hotbed of spies and double agents. Only a fool trusted the strangers he met in bars and cafés there.
Flute and Heisenberg had once been friends, and Heisenberg still trusted him completely. For Flute, things were more complicated. The war—and especially Heisenberg’s refusal to denounce German aggression—had driven a wedge between them. Flute didn’t cut off his friend entirely, but he did feel obligated to feed information about his whereabouts to the Allies, including his occasional trips to Switzerland. Two years earlier, in fact, in November 1942, Flute had invited Heisenberg to give a lecture at ETH on something called S-matrix theory. (It described how elementary particles collided; S stood for scattering.) This lecture had actually been the impetus for Samuel Goudsmit’s friends to suggest kidnapping Heisenberg in the first place. That plot had died of inattention, but as luck would have it, Flute invited Heisenberg back to ETH in the fall of 1944—and this time Groves and OSS pounced. Apprehending Heisenberg in neutral Zurich would eliminate the need for an Eifler-type raid into hostile territory.
Besides Flute, the other agents enlisted in this plot were Moe Berg and Samuel Goudsmit, who’d formed an unlikely friendship. The two probably first met in Paris. Although Alsos folks and OSS folks normally kept their distance—Berg and Boris Pash were outright enemies, for instance—Berg quickly warmed to the urbane, multilingual physicist, and Goudsmit more than reciprocated this feeling for the dapper catcher. “I was intrigued,” Goudsmit remembered, “that a professional baseball player would be so effective in this totally different sphere of activity [i.e., espionage].” Once again, Berg’s athletic prowess left an intellectual swooning.
The new plot to seize Heisenberg called for Berg to slip into Zurich and make first contact. Goudsmit, who knew Heisenberg personally, would follow a few days later. Beyond this, details were sketchy. They talked sometimes of merely grabbing and interrogating Heisenberg before ultimately letting him go. Other times, they planned to spirit him away to Allied territory. In either case, they’d need more muscle: Berg and Goudsmit were hardly seasoned bounty hunters. And the plot would violate nearly every international law in existence about wartime neutrality. The Swiss tolerated spying unofficially, but you had to be discreet; you couldn’t shanghai Nobel laureates on the street. Indeed, one top OSS official in Switzerland (Allen Dulles) vehemently protested the kidnapping on these grounds, fearing that the Swiss would sever diplomatic relations with the United States and thereby endanger the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus abroad. But as usual, fear of an atomic Hitler overwhelmed every other consideration.
In preparation for the mission, Berg mostly behaved himself and kept OSS informed of his whereabouts. After finally leaving Italy in September 1944, he’d split most of his time between London and Paris. It probably helped his mood that OSS advanced him more than $3,000 ($41,000 today) for hotel rooms and meals during those months, in addition to a 20 percent raise in salary, to $4,600, in anticipation of his dangerous assignment. To further placate the catcher, OSS officials did their utmost to keep him updated, via telegraph, on Major League Baseball standings.
The mission came together smoothly at first. Heisenberg accepted Flute’s invitation to lecture and they settled on a date in mid-December. Berg would attend the lecture and listen for clues about Germany’s progress with nuclear fission. Flute would then arrange a meeting between Berg and Heisenberg to establish contact, with Goudsmit joining later. Flute of course knew that Berg was working for American intelligence and wanted to feel Heisenberg out about nuclear bombs. But he assumed the meeting was a straightforward interview. He would have been horrified to learn that he was abetting a kidnapping. Suspecting as much, OSS kept him in the dark.
For his part, Heisenberg accepted Flute’s invitation for several reasons, none of them related to physics. He was feeling more isolated than ever from the world scien
tific community and longed to reconnect with an old friend. Visiting in mid-December would also give him a chance to pick up new winter clothes and better Christmas presents for his wife and children. As a neutral country, Switzerland faced no shipping embargo, and Swiss manufacturers (unlike German ones) didn’t have to divert all their energy into producing war goods, which meant that toys and chocolates and other treats were readily available in Zurich. In short, Heisenberg had visions of sugarplums dancing in his head, and had no inkling he was walking into a trap.
But the trap soon experienced a snag. In addition to inviting Heisenberg, Flute had also invited the diplomat’s son Carl von Weizsäcker to speak in Zurich on November 30. Weizsäcker knew that his visit would be controversial, given his father’s status, so he tried to mitigate his presence by lecturing on an innocuous topic, the evolution of the solar system. The ploy didn’t work. A mob of ETH students turned out to protest the Nazi’s son, and a riot nearly broke out. ETH officials had to lock the lecture hall for safety, and Weizsäcker returned to Germany shaken.
Hearing this, Heisenberg put strict stipulations on his appearance: the crowd had to be small, so he could speak freely, and only other physicists could attend. This presented difficulties for Berg, who as a six-foot-one, 200-pound nonphysicist was likely to attract scrutiny at an intimate gathering. Still, Flute had no choice but to give in to Heisenberg’s demands.
Then, just days before the mission started, the plot endured another, more serious blow. For security reasons, Samuel Goudsmit had to be cut out.
CHAPTER 53
Nazi U
Among the spicy appointment books and desk ledgers, the Alsos crew in Paris recovered a university course catalogue, a paperback booklet whose cover showed the handsome cathedral and stout medieval walls of the city of Strasbourg. The Third Reich had opened a university there in 1941 as a propaganda outfit to spread fascism in France—Nazi U, essentially. It had quickly grown to 3,500 students.