It’s not certain how much instruction Berg received, but he did take the final training test, which was to slip inside a heavily guarded American defense plant and come away with classified information. One OSS man forged a letter of introduction as an engineer, with FDR’s confidant Harry Hopkins’s signature on it, filled out a job application at a factory that made bomb sights, was given a tour, and walked out at the end of the day with a bomb sight in his pocket. Berg wasn’t so fortunate. A forged piece of White House stationery got him into the Glenn Martin aircraft factory, where he aroused suspicions and was confronted. When Berg revealed who he was and what he was doing, the incident caused a mild scandal in Washington, where there was much concern that the OSS would be used for surveillance of American citizens. The situation also didn’t help refute the notion that the OSS was a bunch of bunglers. Perhaps because this supreme OSS test was more of a stunt than anything else, or possibly because Berg was, as Putzell says, “so valuable in other ways,” Glenn Martin was treated as a peccadillo, and in September Berg was assigned to the Secret Intelligence (SI) branch of the OSS and given a place at the OSS Balkans desk.
IN WASHINGTON, BERG followed the movements of Peter, the exiled teenage king of Yugoslavia, who had fled the country for England in 1941, and was now a student at Cambridge; he monitored intelligence reports from the Balkans, and reviewed mission proposals, such as an October plan to sabotage shipping on the Danube by arming Romanian agents with speedboats, bazookas, and Stanley Lovell’s explosive shellfish. He was also responsible for looking out for the second-generation Slavic Americans and Slavic-born aspiring U.S. citizens whom the OSS had recruited and trained for missions to rival factions of the Slav resistance, led by the Serbian Chetnik nationalist General Draža Mihajlović and the Communist Croat Josip Broz, known as Tito. The fatality rates on these parachute drops were extremely high, and when one mission was repeatedly delayed, Berg found himself saddled with a group of terrified Slavs. He resorted to playing bursar, handing out beer money every night so the men could go off and distract themselves.
Finding himself tied to a desk, proctoring other people who were bound for hazardous missions, could not have satisfied Berg. He thrived upon motion. OSS travel orders were usually as easy to come by as war bonds, but through summer and into fall they eluded him.
Instead, he traveled the corridors of Q Building, feeling out his peers. During these tête-à-têtes, Berg was his usual self, ferreting as much as he could from the person he was talking with, while veiling himself in yards of gossamer wit and erudition. Berg treated Q Building like a Borgian villa, fixing everyone he met with quiet suspicion. “Be careful,” he warned an OSS man he met later in Europe. “Many of our own people are not to be trusted.”
Ballplayers might not have been aware of what Berg was doing, but here he was dealing with spies whose job was to notice, and some did. Not that they held it against him. The people Berg met in the OSS, like William Horrigan, were as enchanted by him as everyone else was. Berg had lunch or dinner a few times with Horrigan, but meals were all. “We weren’t poker players,” says Horrigan. “We didn’t date, and the reason we didn’t date was that Moe never had a date. He did for chrissakes, but he didn’t with you or me. He did by himself. I don’t know where the hell Moe was living.”
Toward the end of the year there were plans to send Berg to Turkey, but before that could happen, Horrigan intervened. Horrigan was a New York lawyer who had become friends with Donovan when Donovan argued a case for him before the Supreme Court. Horrigan had been training agents in Algiers, but had recently been called back to Washington for a pressing assignment, a delicate job that would require a partner. “I didn’t need a muscle-boy, a guy who could jump out of parachutes or take submarines,” he says. “I needed a bright, competent fellow. They wanted me to see a bunch of people around the world. That’s why I got Moe. I brought Moe in, and they were very happy with him. At that time, what they were talking about was the greatest mystery of life.” It was also the greatest secret in the world. Who better to help guard it than a man who didn’t trust his own brother?
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS in 1938, Otto Hahn, a German radiochemist, was experimenting with uranium by bombarding it with neutrons and getting results that were, as he wrote his collaborator, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, “fantastic.” Delicate and soft-spoken, Meitner was also of Jewish descent, and she was in Sweden because of it. Earlier in the year she had slipped out of Germany by train, one step ahead of the Gestapo. Meitner could keep her emotions clasped as tight as the bun into which she wrapped her hair, but not now. She wrote Hahn back immediately to tell him that his “results are very amazing,” and indeed they were. Hahn had discovered that the strange transformation of uranium atoms under neutron bombardment was fission. Meitner then explained that, as the nucleus of an atom fissions, it releases tremendous amounts of energy. Atomic physics at the time was an intimate community of scientists to whom the implications of Hahn’s discovery were immediately apparent. Gazing out his Columbia University office window at the bustle of a New York City afternoon, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi made a small cup of his hands. “A little bomb like that,” he said, “and it would all disappear.”
Hahn had not simply split the atom, he had divided physics. At least that is how the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard saw it. Between 1933 and 1941, more than one hundred prominent scientists, including Szilard, Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe, fled countries all over Europe for the United States. But others, including Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Fritz Houtermans, Paul Harteck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg, were still in Germany. Heisenberg, a short man of freckled, boyish mien, who played the piano beautifully, doted on his children, and kept photographs of scientific friends on his desk, was the greatest theoretical physicist in the world. Heisenberg had been offered several jobs in the U.S. during the 1930s, but always refused, saying “Germany needs me.” Under Hitler, the Germany he knew had been contorted into something he hardly recognized. Yet, painful as that was for him, the ground was still German, and for Heisenberg that meant you were loyal to it.
To Szilard, Fermi, and the rest, Heisenberg’s patriotism was troubling. Late in the summer of 1939 at a party at the University of Michigan, the Italian physicists Ugo Fano and Edoardo Amaldi watched Fermi and Heisenberg talking together off in a corner. “See Fermi, see Heisenberg, sitting in that corner,” whispered Amaldi. “Everyone in this room expects a big war and the two of them to lead fission work on opposite sides, but nobody says!” German science had supplied Adolf Hitler with some of the most lethal and expensive military technology in world history, from tanks to submarines, which he had always thrust at Europe with enthusiasm. And as the Dutch-born physicist Sam Goudsmit put it, “In science, as everyone knew, the Germans were way ahead of everyone else.” Heisenberg was the man physicists in the U.S. counted most likely to husband a successful atomic bomb project. Worse, they were sure he was well along in the process. Once he got wind of what an atomic bomb could do, Hitler would have left him no choice.
The refugee and American scientists did not, of course, share these concerns with their neighbors or discuss them with journalists. Instead, Szilard badgered Albert Einstein into addressing a confidential letter to President Roosevelt, informing him that the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Institute for Physics) in Berlin-Dahlem had been taken over by the military, and urging him to pour more funds into the incipient American atomic bomb program. Fritz Reiche, who left Germany in 1941 for a job at New York’s New School for Social Research, carried a message from Houtermans, playing Cassandra, that said, “Heisenberg will not be able to withstand longer the pressure from the government to go very earnestly and seriously into the making of the bomb … they should accelerate if they have already begun the thing.” Eugene Wigner heard about this and, says Arthur Wightman, the Princeton physicist, “he was scared silly.”
Wigner wasn’t alone. The Germans ha
d conquered Czechoslovakia, the site of Europe’s only uranium mines. They had Norway, too, and thus the heavy-water plant at Rjukan, where, in 1941, production was said to be increasing. (Heavy water slows down neutrons, encouraging fission in uranium 235, the pure form of uranium necessary for a chain reaction.) Physicists in the U.S. placed macabre bets upon when the Germans would finish. Certain the U.S. program was lagging, scientists in Chicago moved their families to the suburbs, since the city seemed a likely German target. A miasma of rueful calculation accompanied every advance by the atomic scientists working in universities scattered across the U.S. If we are here now, and Heisenberg had three years’ head start, he must be … It was the stuff of thwarted sleep and tormented dreams. “I had many sleepless nights,” the British physicist James Chadwick remembered in 1969. “But I did realize how very, very serious it could be. And I had [in 1941] to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy.” It was into this rarefied world of brilliant, sleepless men that William Horrigan ushered Moe Berg in late 1943.
In June 1942, the American bomb project became a military program, and in September it was taken over by Colonel Leslie Groves. Groves was a tendentious man with a penchant for stuffing his pockets with chocolate turtles, and had dunes of flab at his waist to show for them. He didn’t look like an agile organizer, but he was. Trained as an engineer, Groves had overseen the construction of the Pentagon. Now forty-six years old, he wanted to lead troops, not scientists building a fantasy weapon. When he accepted the assignment, Groves extracted a promotion to general out of the military, and during the next few months made even less effort than usual to curb his bilious humors. Still, the physicists came grudgingly to appreciate him. “I detested General Groves, but I admired him,” says Philip Morrison, then a consultant at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. “A narrow, bigoted, stubborn, vain, tireless, resolute person.”
It took Groves a while to come around on the physicists, too. For many of them, the impetus to engage in morbid work behind barbed wire fences in remote Los Alamos, New Mexico, was the fear of a German bomb. Groves seemed unconcerned. He and his scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, concentrated on building their own bomb instead of worrying much about someone else’s. It wasn’t until the fall of 1943 that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr told British intelligence officers that Heisenberg had asked him whether it was moral for a physicist to build an atomic bomb. Bohr’s inference from this was that Heisenberg’s progress was already significant. Groves finally took note.
Secrecy was a fetish with Leslie Groves. When he invited twenty-eight-year-old Army Corps of Engineers Major Robert Furman to his office to discuss atomic intelligence, he removed from his safe a physics textbook and referred Furman to a section on atomic energy. “I told him, ‘I already got this in college,’ ” says Furman. “That upset him. He thought it was a secret.” Groves needn’t have worried. In Furman, Groves, who habitually browbeat everyone from Szilard to New York Times editors to keep everything about the American atomic bomb mum, had hired a Manhattan Project intelligence aide for whom secrecy became such a consuming habit that, forty-five years after joining the Manhattan Project, when all of the atomic secrets were out, Furman still could not bring himself to talk about some of it. Furman was a civil engineer, who had worked for Groves during the construction of the Pentagon. He had no special knowledge of atomic science, but then, who did? “A very unusual time we were living through,” he says. “The nuclear age was just breaking upon us. It was as if you were Wilbur Wright and hadn’t yet flown.”
IN JULY 1943, John Lansdale, a Texas-born lawyer working as Groves’s army counterintelligence aide, felt he could not ignore information from British intelligence that the Germans were working on an atomic weapon in southern Germany. He devised a plan to send a military force to Europe, equipped with scientific expertise, to see what the Germans were doing. The ten-man Alsos Mission—made up of soldiers and of MIT, Cornell, and Bell Labs scientists—was designed as a multi-tiered scientific intelligence operation so that nobody, not even most of the men who were part of it, would know that its real objective was to learn about atomic weapons. Groves approved the Alsos Mission, although when he heard the name Lansdale had given it, he reacted with an irritation that went beyond even Groves’s routinely truculent standards. “Alsos” is the Hellenic name for groves, and in his zeal for secrecy, the general could not abide the allusion. Still, to change the name would call attention to it, and so Alsos it was. Colonel Boris Pash, a White Russian by birth and a swaggering martinet by nature, was given command. In early 1944, Groves made his relationship with Lansdale permanent, hiring him away from the army as his security and intelligence chief. One day when the general idly asked Lansdale what he thought about kidnapping Werner Heisenberg, Lansdale was shocked. “I regarded that as an absurd thing to do,” he says, “and I would have no part of it.”
Trying to learn about Hitler’s atomic bomb program without letting slip anything about theirs was a subtle task for Groves and Furman. Groves’s intelligence policy was similar to that of a hunter who looses a pack of sturdy hounds on the same vague scent and waits to see which dog will scare up the fox. With one exception: the dogs all know about one another. A number of people helped Groves determine the extent of the German bomb program, but such was the general’s passion for secrecy that he didn’t always tell them about one another. Groves’s reasoning was that he had a pressing need to know what Heisenberg was doing, he couldn’t divulge much about what he thought Heisenberg was doing, and he certainly wasn’t telling anyone what he was doing. Better, then, to supply a number of people with sketchy information and see what they came up with. After creating the Alsos Mission to track down Heisenberg, Groves approached Donovan, at the OSS, with the same task.
In late 1943, Horrigan and Berg were assigned to Project Larson, an OSS operation designed by OSS Chief of Special Projects John Shaheen, in which the stated purpose was to spirit Italian rocket and missile experts out of Italy by boat and bring them to the U.S. What most people at the OSS didn’t know was that Larson was a subterfuge which had quietly been altered to accommodate Groves and Furman. Groves and Furman didn’t care about missiles or rockets. They wanted the OSS to go to Italy and interview Italian physicists to see what they knew about Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Larson, then, was largely a smokescreen, another of Groves’s careful strokes to obscure his real objective, a project within the Larson project, filed under the name AZUSA.
Soon thereafter, on an early November evening, at 5:00 PM, Moe Berg was called into the office of Colonel Howard Dix. Major Furman—no affiliation announced to Berg—was there as well, watching silently while Dix handled the meeting. A New York patent lawyer and an engineer in peacetime, Dix ran the OSS Technical Section for Donovan, and all AZUSA files went directly to him. His large, somewhat oblong head was balding, and he wore spectacles. The combination gave him an owlish appearance, which was nicely complemented by his sober, businesslike demeanor. Nobody joined the OSS without some taste for intrigue, however, and Dix was no exception. In conversation he liked to speak in a personal patois, in which, for example, Moe Berg was known as “the Black-Haired Boy” and the Soviet Union was “the North Country.” Here, with the Mysterious Major and the Black-Haired Boy on hand, Dix mustered a dramatic flourish appropriate to a most dramatic occasion. “They can take us at a second to midnight if they get this thing first,” Dix told Berg. “Find out what they’re doing, and we’ve got it won.” With that, Dix ushered Berg into the company of those who were privy to the deepest secret of the war. Under Furman’s gaze, Dix didn’t explicitly say what that “thing” was, but Berg got the idea. “Most of the talk was cryptic,” he wrote later in notes to himself. “But enough was said to reveal to Moe Berg his newest mission without spelling it out.” Berg’s job, as he understood it, was to go to Italy, talk with a series of scientists, most of them at the University of Rome, and try to learn from them where the German physici
sts were and what they were doing. Furman says that Berg was told “damn little” about the Manhattan Project, but he concedes, “You’ve got a good spy like Berg, a big organization like the OSS, they probably figured it out. We told people generally what to look for without telling them why. A guy like Berg could learn more than you wanted him to. He was their hot rod, one of their best.”
He also still read the newspapers, which were filled that December with lurid speculation about the wonder weapons that Nazi propaganda was always touting. On December 22, the Washington Post’s Earnest K. Lindley mused that “the Berlin radio’s reference to blowing up half the globe would seem, to a layman, to hint at progress in the release of atomic energy.” Three New York papers, the Daily News, the Herald-Tribune, and the World Telegram, carried a United Press report out of Lisbon on December 31, which reported that the “latest travelers to arrive here from the Reich said today that Germany’s long-vaunted ‘secret weapon’ is based upon the principle of energy released from split atoms.” And in an article headlined “Can the Nazis Blow Up Half the Globe?” Newsweek magazine imagined a scene where a single, high-flying airplane dropped bombs that made an explosion “so tremendous and all-inclusive that in a fraction of a second the entire community had been wiped from the face of the earth.” It was an exciting, frightening time, and Berg had real, urgent, and highly confidential responsibility. In his grave, furtive way, he was ecstatic.
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