Joseph E. Persico

by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR;World War II Espionage

  After the North African landings succeeded, the President went to Casablanca and, in a meeting with the French resident general at Rabat, delivered an astonishing opinion. “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions—law, medicine etc.—should be limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population,” he urged. “This plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.” He had echoed the rationale that the Nazis had carried to barbaric limits.

  After the war, after images had been burned into the world’s consciousness of skeletal, hollow-eyed concentration camp survivors and heaps of pallid corpses bulldozed into mass graves, it is difficult to accept that Roosevelt could not have done more for the Jews. But these images were yet to come. And, late in the day, he did do more. At the time Hitler took power, 525,000 Jews lived in Germany. Of these, nearly three quarters managed to get out before the war. The largest number, nearly 105,000, were allowed into the United States. By late 1941, in contrast to the dismal fate of the St. Louis’s passengers, ships were permitted to debark Jewish refugees in the United States. One, the Portuguese Serpa Pinta, arrived in New York one week after Pearl Harbor, and was allowed to land all its passengers, almost entirely Jewish refugees. The harsh truth is that, after 1940, once Hitler had conquered much of Europe, it was as if a massive gate had clanged shut imprisoning millions of Jews and other victims of the Third Reich. Once that gate closed, little could be done to rescue them. Ideas were put forth. One stratagem, still widely cited, was that Allied bombers could have struck the rail lines leading to major death camps, such as Auschwitz. This seemingly simple solution ignored certain realities. Throughout the war, the Germans were to display a dismaying swiftness in restoring rail lines just hours after a bombing. And when lines were ruptured, the Jews and other Nazi victims were marched to their deaths.

  On December 8, 1942, FDR finally and publicly condemned the Nazi extermination of the Jews and declared America’s policy—those perpetuating mass murder would be dealt with as criminals when the fighting ended. In the meantime, Roosevelt’s principal response to ending the mass murder of the Jews was to win the war.

  Chapter XVI

  An Exchange: An Invasion for a Bomb

  THE BETRAYAL of the greatest secret of the war, the development of the atomic bomb, follows a sinuous path leading to Winston Churchill.

  On June 19, 1942, FDR sat waiting in his Ford Phaeton convertible alongside a rudimentary landing strip near Hyde Park. He watched a small aircraft drop from a cloud-dappled sky and come to a bumpy halt practically next to the car. Out stepped a short figure of comfortable bulk waving an outsized cigar. Winston Churchill was making his second wartime visit to the United States. He entered the passenger side of the car, and the President, with a bucking takeoff, started to demonstrate how the manual controls worked, as he whipped the car around the family estate. They spurted past Springwood, the Roosevelt home, and came to a halt on a grassy bluff behind the house affording a stunning panorama of the Hudson River Valley. FDR backed out and darted into the thick woods carpeting the decline between the house and the river. He took sudden twists and turns through familiar terrain, trying to give the Secret Service the slip. Noticing Churchill’s uneasiness at his extravagant whipping of the steering wheel, FDR told him not to worry. He had biceps that a boxing champion had once envied, he said, and asked Churchill to feel his muscle while he steered with the other hand.

  After the drive and lunch, they retired to a small, stuffy room off the portico, FDR’s “snuggery.” The President pointed out a recent installation, an RCA television set with a twelve-inch screen and magnifying mirror to enlarge the picture, a model introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair. After an initial look at the flickering images beamed from New York City, the President had quickly lost interest in the set. The Prime Minister seated himself alongside the President in the small room which was almost filled by FDR’s desk, and which he described as “dark and shaded from the sun.” After reviewing the current military situation, Churchill edged the discussion toward something troubling him. Research on the atomic bomb was now well under way. Churchill asked where they ought to construct the large-scale uranium-processing plants vital to the bomb’s development. Britain had already been battered from the sky by the Luftwaffe, and “vast and conspicuous factories” there, as Churchill put it, would offer irresistible targets. Canada might do, he suggested. But, as he later recorded of their talk, he was relieved “when the President said he thought the United States would have to do it.” That matter settled, Churchill brought up Britain’s right to full partnership in the pursuit of atomic weapons.

  The Prime Minister had every reason to expect parity. Separate operations would amount to wasteful duplication that neither Britain nor America could afford. Besides, the British considered themselves leading the United States in nuclear physics, and in a position to help, rather than be helped by their American colleagues. Two American physicists, Harold Urey and G. B. Pegram, had gone to England in the fall of 1941 and been given free run of British laboratories. What the British had shared with their American colleagues had been decisive in persuading FDR that a bomb was feasible. And it was FDR who had first written Churchill urging that they develop the bomb together, a joint project code-named Tube Alloys.

  After the two leaders met at Hyde Park, the partnership seemed to be sailing smoothly until storm warnings arose early in 1943. The Manhattan Project was now under the direction of a security-obsessed Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who wanted the rules changed in mid-game. His intermediary was the eminent Dr. James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Conant presented the new U.S. position to Wallace Akers, director of the British Tube Alloys project, at the very moment that Akers had come to America expecting to share atomic secrets. On January 7, Conant handed the Briton a memorandum that read: “[I]nterchange on design and construction of new weapons and equipment is to be carried out only to the extent that the recipient of the information is in a position to take advantage of this information in this war.” The British might still be carrying out theoretical physics, but under the present arrangement they would not actually be building the bomb. That part of the enterprise belonged to the Americans. Therefore, there was no need to tell British physicists how a bomb might be constructed. Toughness in wartime, with allies or enemies, came easily to Conant. Serving with the Army Chemical Warfare Service in World War I, he had been in charge of manufacturing the deadly gas lewisite. Conant expressed General Groves’s position that bringing in the British simply increased the risk that the secrets of the Manhattan Project might be compromised. Besides, the project’s guardians believed that the United States had a proprietary interest in the bomb since millions upon millions of American taxpayer dollars, not British pounds, were underwriting the project.

  Upon learning that FDR approved the restrictive new policy, Churchill objected vociferously. On February 16, 1943, he rose from his sickbed to fire off a complaint through Roosevelt’s confidant Harry Hopkins, a straight shooter whom Churchill knew would relay his displeasure to the President. “The War Department is asking us to keep them informed of our experiments,” Churchill wrote Hopkins, “while refusing altogether any information about theirs.” The message was signed “Prime” and classified “Secret.” Churchill evidently felt that he had been too gentle, and followed up the next day with another message to Hopkins marked “Personal, Immediate and Most Secret.” The Prime Minister now charged FDR with bad faith. “There is no question of breach of agreement,” he said. He cabled Hopkins yet a third time, complaining that the change “… entirely destroys the original conception of a coordinated or even jointly conducted effort between the two countries.” The A
mericans had chucked the British concept of fair play and reneged on a deal.

  The issue was batted back and forth over the next several months. Late in May 1943, Churchill again came to America, sailing the Queen Mary, whose lower decks carried proof of rising Allied fortunes, thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war captured in North Africa. The Prime Minister bypassed the British embassy and chose to stay again at the White House, where he could work his will directly on FDR. The imperiled Tube Alloys partnership was still much on his mind. Vannevar Bush had become the President’s shield in deflecting British ire. On May 25, Bush and Harry Hopkins met with Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s friend and chief science advisor, who had accompanied the Prime Minister. Cherwell told the Americans that it was the PM’s intention to build his own weapon, a profligate duplication of resources, if the Americans continued to balk at sharing the bomb-manufacturing process. Further, should lack of cooperation slow the program, Churchill feared that the Germans could win the atomic race and threaten Britain and America into submission. He was only slightly less appalled by the prospect that the Russians might get the bomb first. Cherwell frankly confessed another British motive. His government wanted to share in all atomic secrets so that Britain would also emerge as an atomic power after the war.

  Churchill thus far had stubbornly resisted Roosevelt’s pressure for a second front to be spearheaded by a massive assault across the English Channel. The issue might appear unrelated to the PM’s insistence on full British partnership in the quest for an atomic weapon, but the two became intertwined. Privately, Churchill disparaged the cross-Channel strategy, now code-named Overlord, as “impossible [and] dangerous.” At one point, he told General Eisenhower, with tears in his eyes, of his nightmarish visions of an English Channel choked with Allied corpses. So obvious was British foot-dragging that the American general, Albert Wedemeyer, concluded the British “never had any intention of executing a cross channel operation if they could avoid it.” On the evening after Hopkins, Bush, and Lord Cherwell met, Churchill unexpectedly began tempering his objections to Overlord. And a conciliatory FDR began brushing aside the dire warnings of Vannevar Bush and the others opposed to sharing atomic research.

  A month later, on June 24, FDR summoned Bush to the White House where, over one of Mrs. Nesbitt’s uninspired lunches, they again discussed Tube Alloys. Where did they now stand? the President wanted to know. Bush stuck by his earlier position, telling a nodding FDR that the British still need not be told anything, “since our program is not suffering for lack of interchange … and the British had practically quit their efforts.” Henry Stimson buttressed Bush’s argument. The secretary of war advised Roosevelt that since Americans were doing nine tenths of the work, why give away ten ninths of the secrets? But Harry Hopkins appealed to the President’s conscience. “I think you made a firm commitment to Churchill,” he reminded FDR, on July 20, “… and there is nothing to do but go through with it.”

  Vannevar Bush, unaware that the influential Hopkins had reached FDR, had gone to England still thinking his mission was to see how little the United States could give away to the British. While in London, he received a coded message from the President, sent immediately after Hopkins had spoken to Roosevelt, containing fresh instructions. “Dear Van, while I am mindful of the vital necessity for security in regard to this,” FDR began, “I wish … that you renew, in an inclusive manner, the full exchange of information with the British government regarding Tube Alloys.”

  On August 17 the President and Prime Minister met again, this time in Quebec. There, Churchill withdrew completely his objections to Overlord. Stimson described the Prime Minister as “magnificent in reconciliation as he was stubborn and eloquent in opposition.” But was it all one-sided? A dividend that Churchill extracted for ending his opposition to Overlord was formal affirmation that Britain and America were full atomic partners. On the same night that he withdrew his objection to the cross-Channel strategy, the PM and President closeted themselves in their quarters in Quebec’s Citadel. When they emerged, Churchill had in hand that rarity, a written agreement between himself and FDR “to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition at the earliest moment… . This may be more speedily achieved if all available British and American brains and resources are pooled.”

  Churchill’s bulldog tenacity had paid off, but Bush, Conant, and other U.S. atomic policy advisors were still unhappy at sharing America’s expensively gained secrets. Conant suggested a compromise: “It would be in the best interests of the total war effort to have professor [James] Chadwick and perhaps one or two other British subjects come to the United States and join Dr. Oppenheimer’s work.” This concession would mean that instead of America exporting the Manhattan Project, British brains would be imported to strengthen it in the United States. Churchill snatched at the opportunity and immediately had British Tube Alloys officials assemble a small team of physicists to travel to that compound of drab buildings sprouting at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert, the heart of the Manhattan Project. Among them was a slight, high-domed, bespectacled and reclusive thirty-two-year-old bachelor selected for his expertise in resolving a tough obstacle to atomic fission, the separation of uranium 235. The man was Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs, a German-born alien living and working in England and a dedicated Communist. As a result of Churchill’s pressuring Roosevelt to make Britain a full partner in building the bomb, Klaus Fuchs would eventually gain entry into General Groves’s atomic fortress of Los Alamos.

  *

  The most persuasive argument propelling FDR into the exorbitant and uncertain quest for an atomic bomb was his fear that Germany would get there first. As he had told Alexander Sachs three years before, “[W]hat you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” Nazi persecution had driven distinguished Jewish physicists into exile and ultimately to the Manhattan Project. Still, plenty of brainpower remained in Germany, where the uranium atom had first been split in experiments at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1938. Otto Hahn, Carl von Weizsäcker, Max von Laue, and, above all, Werner Heisenberg, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work in quantum theory and nuclear physics, were all in Germany conducting atomic research. Though, as Albert Speer had said, Hitler had a slim grasp of the fundamentals of physics, the Führer counted an atomic bomb among the Wunderwaffen, the wonder weapons, he expected to hurl against Germany’s enemies. Hitler told Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in September 1942 that Germany was developing a secret explosive so powerful that it “would throw a man off his horse at a distance of over two miles.”

  On April 4, 1943, Vannevar Bush was horrified by a story appearing in The New York Times. Under a headline reading, NAZI HEAVY WATER LOOMS AS WEAPON, the Times reported that Allied saboteurs had blown up the huge electrochemical Norsk-Hydro plant at Rjukan in Nazi-occupied Norway. The plant produced a “queer chemical known as ‘heavy water’ … and it can be used in the manufacture of terrifically high explosives” by splitting the atom, the article read. Bush sent the story, along with a hastily scribbled note, to Harry Hopkins, chiding him for urging FDR to share atomic secrets. “The attached clipping shows what can happen when control is loose and security insufficient,” Bush wrote. In an I-told-you-so tone he reiterated his position: “Knowledge be given only to those who really need it.”

  The Times article indicated how far along the Germans were in atomic science. But what was the likelihood that Germany might win the atomic race? Hitler and his arms czar, Speer, essentially had to depend on the Nobel laureate Heisenberg to advise them on the probability of readying an atom bomb in time for the war. Heisenberg was a loyal German but no Nazi and had refused to join the party. According to Thomas Powers, chronicler of Heisenberg and the German atomic program, “At every point during the argument where his voice can be heard, he is saying two things—yes, a bomb is theoretically possible; no, it can never be built in time to affect the outcome of the war.” Speer claimed after the war, no doubt self-servingly, that he feared, e
ven if the energy of the atom could be released, it might not be contained. “Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction,” he noted. Hitler, too, he maintained, feared releasing the genie of the atom. “Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star,” Speer recalled. Thus, at the very time in the summer of 1942 that FDR was ordering full speed ahead on the Manhattan Project, Speer recalled, “… [W]e scuttled the project to develop an atom bomb.” Henceforth, Heisenberg and his colleagues were scaled back to investigating the potential of atomic energy rather than atomic weaponry. Consequently, when two hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from England to bomb the already sabotaged Norsk-Hydro plant, they were flogging a dead horse. With Germany out of the game, the rush to produce an atomic bomb had turned out to be a race with only one entry. The raid may have been most notable for exploding the myth of surgical pinpoint bombing. Of 1,006 bombs dropped, only twelve damaged the target, but twenty-two Norwegian civilians were killed.

  Ironically, the nuclear research that the Reich did continue to conduct contributed unintentionally to the Manhattan Project. While Bill Donovan was raining down memoranda on FDR on every subject from Austrian clothing stocks to a scheme for bombing enemy water supplies with human feces, his staff occasionally produced an idea of simple brilliance. Possibly the least flamboyant was the creation of an entity with a ho-hum title, the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications. The committee’s job was to smuggle scientific journals out of Germany and occupied Europe. The President, a voracious consumer of every form of information, instantly recognized the potential of the OSS scheme and approved it. Running the scientific smuggling operation fell to an energetic Harvard chemistry professor recruited into the OSS, twenty-nine-year-old Frederick Kilgour. Kilgour recruited private citizens in neutral Switzerland, Sweden, and Portugal to subscribe to German technical publications. Since, unknown to the Allies, the Germans had given up on the atomic bomb, its scientists were allowed to publish papers on nuclear fission previously kept secret. Between 1942 and 1943, eleven major papers were published in the German Zeitschrift für Physik and Die Naturwissenschaften alone. Kilgour’s subscribers slipped the articles to OSS agents in the neutral countries, who microfilmed them and rushed the film back to the United States. So eagerly awaited by Manhattan Project scientists were the microfilms that upon their arrival in New York a Kilgour aide placed a call from a safe house to an anonymous phone number, saying only, “I have received a package.” Within minutes, a mysterious “Dr. Cohen” would arrive in a taxi and disappear with the microfilm, bound either for Los Alamos or the Manhattan Project’s laboratory at Columbia University.