The twenty-three-year-old Philby, recruited into the Russian secret service in 1935, had become, shortly before the TORCH landings, the key man in Section Five of the British Secret Intelligence Service. This dealt with counterespionage. Philby was perfectly placed to do mischief to the Anglo-American alliance in “the first intelligence operation we’d planned together,” as Sweet-Escott described it.
Caught in the middle was Bill Stephenson. All he knew in November 1942 was that understandings between himself and Bill Donovan had been sabotaged in London. The plans to conduct secret warfare as one team had been somehow sidetracked.
“For this to go wrong left an appalling taste,” said Sweet-Escott later. “Donovan lost all confidence in us. We could have postponed the evil day, for instance, when OSS and ourselves went separate ways. We would have had joint operations instead of each side jealous of the other.”
The split began in the Middle East and extended to the Far East. In Europe, Stephenson was able to preserve the BSC-OSS partnership at the top. In the race to build an atomic bomb, the partnership was compulsive. The Soviet Union was treated as an honest ally, and the full extent of subversive activities by Russian agents against the Western alliance was only vaguely understood. In 1942, Kim Philby’s authority allowed him to work through the British establishment. He played on the rivalries of professionals in London, who not only bickered among themselves but resented and resisted the arrival of Americans on their scene.
Before and during the North African landings, Philby was flying busily between Cairo, Gibraltar, Lisbon, and London headquarters. He seemed to some colleagues to be shrewdly outmaneuvering an American threat to British domination of espionage in the region. The French had shown unexpected resistance to American landings in their North African colonies. Philby blamed the failure on U.S. intelligence, with sneers that seemed consistent with his air of English superiority. But what he was doing was pursuing the Soviet aim of driving a wedge between U.S. and British agencies.
“Stephenson thought he’d killed the worms of doubt,” Donovan said later. “And so he had, within our limited circle. David Bruce* was sent over to run OSS/London and smooth things over. At such levels, and between President and Prime Minister, the co-operation went on. But if Hoover’s personal friendship with Stephenson had been less secure, he might have withdrawn the co-operation he was giving with a good heart again.”
A compelling reason to continue sharing secrets was that the British had under their control in 1942 the dean of nuclear physicists, Niels Bohr, and access to the best source of heavy water for atomic experiments. The trouble was that Bohr and the heavy water were inside Nazi territory. It was touch and go whether or not Hitler would exploit his advantage. He had the pieces to put together a nuclear bomb. The British thought they could remove the pieces, with American help.
During the talks prior to TORCH, Churchill and Roosevelt discussed TUBE ALLOYS, the code name for British work on nuclear fission. Churchill’s Scientific Advisory Committee recommended a plant in Canada to construct an atomic bomb of colossal destructive power. Stephenson sketched the problems to Churchill and Roosevelt together.
“You keep abreast of atomic science,” Roosevelt commented.
“I keep in touch with those who do,” Stephenson corrected him. “The most important is Doctor Bohr in Denmark.”
Churchill took a sudden interest in the tip of his cigar.
“Is he a danger to us?” asked Roosevelt.
“Unwittingly.”
“Can you get him out?”
“We have several plans under review,” replied Stephenson.
Anglo-American co-operation in this enterprise was harassed by Communist mischief-making and later betrayed by Soviet spies. There was plenty of material on which troublemakers could seize. There was resentment among British intellectuals, voiced later by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote: “To secure American support, without which the atomic bomb could not be built, we were stripped of all gold reserves and overseas investment. But we saved ourselves and we saved the world.”
Because of the secrecy surrounding TUBE ALLOYS and later American work on the bomb, the resentment festered unseen. Lies and half-truths distorted the picture, and came to the surface too late to be corrected. Thus a distinguished British historian, A. J. P. Taylor, was still repeating a negative version in 1974 when he wrote in the New York Times (April 28): “Churchill received from Roosevelt a formal promise that Great Britain, having revealed how to make a controlled nuclear explosion, should share equally in all further nuclear discoveries. The promise was subsequently evaded by President Roosevelt. . . . Churchill counted on ‘the special relationship’ and put his trust in American generosity. The trust was misplaced.”
Stephenson played a key role throughout the struggle to possess and protect nuclear secrets right up to his own intervention in a Russian spy-ring crisis in Canada that led to the discovery of secrets stolen from the American atomic-bomb project.* He never doubted that Churchill and Roosevelt understood exactly what was involved in Anglo-American co-operation. “Roosevelt’s decisiveness saved us all,” he said later. “Work on the atomic bomb was proceeding in every part of the world. We had a head start. We could have done the job in the Canadian wilderness. . . . It was sensible to seek American co-operation from the start. Without it, we might have been too late. . . . The Germans were already in the race.”
This was the awesome and apocalyptic secret knowledge Churchill shared with Roosevelt from the day Stephenson had first flown from London to Washington. On June 15, 1940, President Roosevelt signed a private letter on “the possible relationship to national defense of recent discoveries in the field of atomistics. . . . The methods and mechanisms of warfare have altered radically. . . .”* In this way, he carried the ball thrown him by Stephenson, during the Dunkirk drama when the British were driven from continental Europe and it seemed that civilization was coming to an end.
The chain reaction of events showed that “the methods and mechanisms of warfare” had indeed changed. The dilemmas created by the explosion of guerrilla bands and atomic bombs were much the same. The clandestine struggle to capture secrets of nuclear warfare involved all branches of the INTREPID organization. Typical of the hard decisions taken by men like Stephenson was Churchill’s when Herbert Morrison made strong objections to the measures to meet a supposed threat from atom-tipped German rockets.
German “flying bombs” finally did strike southern England, but the enemy could calculate precisely only the arrival time, not the place for each missile. The deception plan was to report hits west of London at the time when others struck inside the city or to the east and send these reports to Germany through double agents. The Germans kept correcting their aim. The mean point of impact was thus moved eastward about two miles a week, redirecting the rockets beyond the London region to less densely populated areas.
Morrison, a socialist member of the British War Cabinet, protested against secret-warfare experts deciding that citizens of Kent or Essex should be killed instead of Londoners.
“War is an evil thing,” Churchill said in a secret War Cabinet session. “Do you wish us to surrender, Mr. Morrison?”
Morrison shook his head angrily.
“Then I greatly fear, sir, that in order to live,” replied Churchill, lowering his head, “we must play God.”
* David Bruce, after distinguished service with OSS, became chief of the Marshall Plan mission to postwar France, and later U.S. Ambassador to Paris and then to London. He was U.S. delegate to the Vietnam peace conference and subsequently became the first U.S. diplomat to head a permanent diplomatic mission to China under Mao Tse-tung’s chairmanship. He returned to Europe as U.S. Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council. “He was the perfect example of all that was best in U.S. intelligence,” wrote the British veteran diplomat and intelligence expert Charles Ellis. “His postwar career was devoted to making intelligence work for peace.”
* A Russian cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected in Ottawa in September 1945. The Soviet Union pressed the Canadian government to return him. Stephenson took over, hiding Gouzenko from his pursuers, a group of KGB thugs who would have killed him. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, was anxious to avoid offending Russia and initially wanted to surrender Gouzenko. A subsequent inquiry by a Royal commission exposed Soviet espionage within U.S., Canadian, and British atomic projects. It was INTREPID’S last big case.
* The letter was to Dr. Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, requesting that his fellow scientists review work on the fission of uranium. The text was released by Robert Sherwood after he took charge of the U.S. Foreign Information Service.
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“The greatest intelligence enterprise was the battle for control of the first atomic bomb,” the BSC Papers reported. “The Germans had the man whose theoretical work was the basis of the bomb. We had the eccentricity to make it. A thousand secret threads were drawn together to prevent the Germans developing atomic warheads for the rockets they began to rain on London. . . .” And Churchill said, in 1945: “By God’s mercy, British and American science outpaced all German efforts.”
The man who lectured at a British university on the theory of atomic constitution during World War I was unconsciously pointing the way to nuclear weapons when the Nazis occupied his native Denmark. Niels Bohr was a brilliant scientist, but he had a dangerous passion to share knowledge.* The Gestapo let him proceed with his research. German physicists called upon him, breathing good fellowship, to be led to the solution of their problems, having already captured in Norway a source of heavy water—the peculiar substance with the doubled hydrogen nucleus that acts as a neutron brake in uranium fission. They ordered the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to work exclusively on the German discovery of the explosive properties of the isotope U-235. They guessed the U-235 bomb would be possible, and they suspected that Bohr was working toward a controlled chain reaction of uranium fission that would make conventional blood-letting shrink in significance. When Hitler marched into Russia, Stephenson knew that the Führer’s generals had a more concrete cause for confidence than Nazi claims to mystic infallibility. They felt certain their country could build an atomic bomb.
Stephenson became interested in Niels Bohr in 1922 when the Danish physicist won a Nobel Prize for his pioneer research. Among the brilliant physicists working along similar lines were Steinmetz, who eventually went to Stephenson’s research labs, and the Polish scientist Stefan Rozental, who was also forced by political reasons to leave his native Cracow; he joined Bohr in Copenhagen. Steiny had worked closely with Rozental, and he alerted Stephenson to the significance of the Copenhagen research. International co-operation revolved around Einstein and Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann’s services to Britain and the Allied cause in World War I as a defense scientist gave him freedom to move in these European circles, and he, too, shared news of developments with Stephenson. In 1932, the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick, whose lifelong friendship with Bohr played a vital part in frustrating German progress toward the bomb.
Churchill, of course, had this information, provided by Stephenson and other members of the scientific team formed when Frederick Lindemann first became concerned about German weapons research in the 1920s. They had watched silently while some of the beneficiaries of British scientific institutions were whisked away—kidnapped, in the case of Peter Kapitsa, who had worked from 1921 with atomic scientist Lord Rutherford and then disappeared into the Soviet Union to work under duress on a project to smash the atom. Outside Russia and Germany, the scientific community was slow to recognize the point when work with the nucleus of the atom passed from the theoretical to the practical, and military, stage.
“The year war broke out in Europe happened to be a turning point in atomic research everywhere,” said Stephenson. “The embryo of the atom bomb was concealed in the brains of physicists in the United States, Britain, Russia, and Europe. In the military field, the view prevailed in 1939 that the country with the greatest chance of bringing together the pieces was Germany. Hitler could decree the necessary discipline, sacrifice, and mobilization of resources, including slave labor. Otto Hahn, who had made the decisive German discovery about chain reaction, considered that smashing the atomic nucleus could be done at the cost of enormous effort. This was true. At that time, the prime requirement was a totalitarian state run by a dictator who could demand without explanation the diversion of the major part of society’s power and wealth into the vast machinery then necessary to produce the bomb. There was a slim chance Hitler, who best met the qualifications, might miss his opportunity.”
British attention focused on Bohr and the Norsk Hydro heavy-water plant in Norway. The danger in doing anything about either, then, Stephenson said, was that Hitler might be directed to the very target that everyone hoped he would overlook.
German scientists had not overlooked it; but Hitler was giving their efforts a lower priority than he might have if he had been aware of his enemies’ rivalry. Hans Suess, a German physicist, needed a moderator to control an atomic reaction. Heavy water was tried successfully in small-scale experiments. The German War Office estimated that five tons of it would be required to moderate a practical reactor. In early 1939, Norsk Hydro was the only production center in the world for heavy water in any quantity, and its output was a comparative dribble of ten kilograms a month.
In a study of I. G. Farben interests that same year, Stephenson noted that the German chemical combine had quietly invested in the Norwegian plant, with the requirements of exclusive purchasing rights for an open-ended period and a thousand-percent increase in production. One month after Farben formally submitted this significant demand, in December 1939, the French Secret Service sent Jacques Allier, an international banker and friend of Stephenson, to tell Norsk Hydro’s managing director, Dr. Axel Aubert, that the French were testing an atomic pile under the direction of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The first delivery of heavy water to Paris followed, in February 1940. When the Germans captured the plant three months later, they discovered that Norsk Hydro’s entire supply had vanished.
Stephenson had inspected Barren Mountain, in Norway, which offered a natural barrier against intruders, just before the German occupation. He had recommended an escape route to link London and friendly Norsk Hydro personnel, including Professor Leif Tronstad, the thirty-six-year-old chemist who was to become the key Baker Street Irregular in future atomic missions. Tronstad knew the layout of the heavy-water plant.
In this nervous period prior to the German invasion of Norway, another visitor arrived at Norsk Hydro. This was Dr. Bohr, seeking supplies for his own experiments. On his way back to Denmark, Bohr talked with King Haakon about the correct policy to be followed by neutrals threatened by German occupation. There was an unworldly style in Bohr’s approach to politics. He believed in Gandhi’s nonviolent methods of fighting oppression. His return to Copenhagen in April coincided with German bombers, which put an end to academic discussions about passive resistance. Denmark and Norway were occupied. Suddenly the Uranium Intelligence Committee in London was confronted with two crises. One of the world’s great atomic scientists was lost inside the German fortress, and production of heavy water at the newly captured Norsk plant was to be increased to 3,000 pounds a year, the amount required for “atomistics,” according to captured German military orders. The Norwegian Section of Baker Street kept under lock and key a scientific paper prophesying that it would take a full two years before atomic weapons, if developed, could be brought into military operation. With a great many other pressing problems clamoring for attention, the Irregulars were not in a good position to demand aircraft and equipment to knock out the heavy-water plant in Norway and rescue Niels Bohr from Denmark.
Meanwhile, the theory of nuclear fission was discussed openly by Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark. “He needed to talk with others to develop his ideas,” said Stephenson. �
�Unfortunately, we couldn’t control the people he talked with.” His listeners included German physicists, who heard him define the liberation of nuclear energy during the fission process, and what he regarded as the horrible possibilities of its use for destructive purposes. In a spirit of scientific inquiry, Bohr was discussing the atomic bomb with those who wanted to use it to conquer the world. His practice of dictating most of his work, a fact known to his old colleagues in Britain, added to the risk that he might unwittingly help the Third Reich.
Under the false cover of TUBE ALLOYS, the British had now started the first intensive search for an atomic weapon in laboratories scattered around the countryside and co-ordinated from a Dickensian office on Old Queen Street, near Whitehall. The fruits of these labors were passed along to the United States after it became clear that the development work required immense resources—20,000 workers, half a million kilowatts of electricity, and some $150 million to produce one kilogram of Uranium-235 a day, and absolute security. The British concluded that such an independent effort was beyond the reach of a small democracy. It could be tried by a dictatorship like Nazi Germany. The British drew no comfort from the knowledge that each stage of Bohr’s progress in this direction was available to the Germans. Veiled warnings were sent to Bohr through Danish underground channels, and the results of his dictation were duly concealed among folders and files, misleadingly inscribed to foil German investigators. This schoolboyish attempt to hide the work typified Bohr’s frighteningly simple view of the world outside. In London, a good many people held their breath.
So, too, in Washington, where FDR had independent sources. His earliest intelligence on German use of heavy water came from Sam Woods, whose contacts inside the German hierarchy were maintained after he moved from Berlin to Zurich to become U.S. consul-general there until the war’s end. Through him, Chaim Weizmann was able to talk with a dissident German physicist, Professor Willstatter, on neutral Swiss territory. Willstatter feared Hitler might be galvanized into action if the British intervened, but he feared British inaction even more.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 50