By this time, the Fifth Army had taken over the Excelsior, and Berg had relocated to another plush hostelry, the Savoia, nearby on Via Ludovisi. He was in the heat of his first assignment, and if he was wondering how good a job he was doing, the answer came from Donovan himself, who passed through Rome with his entourage on the twenty-seventh. The general was in town for only twenty-four hours, but he made a point of seeing Berg and soaking him in a profusion of praise of the sort that was calculated to keep a man with Berg’s weakness for hyperbole going all summer. Now Berg could report to his mother, “I am in the best of health, having a great time and very happy.” Berg couldn’t yet say exactly where Heisenberg was or what he was doing, but he had already provided Groves with the most useful atomic intelligence of the war thus far, and he had only just begun to look.
THE OLD RELIGIOUS city of Rome was sultry with summer and boisterous with gratitude in June 1944, and Moe Berg took full advantage. The OSS supplied him with a handsome black and white Alfa-Romeo sedan and Aldo lcardi, a twenty-three-year-old OSS major and former University of Pittsburgh cheerleader, to drive it for him. Five or six days a week they swept around the city together, from address to address. Leaving lcardi parked behind the wheel, Berg would get out of the car by himself, ring at the door, and disappear inside. Berg never told lcardi what he was doing, and lcardi, under orders not to pry, never asked.
Berg visited more than a dozen scientists during June and July, but none seemed to know about the Germans. He kept in touch with Amaldi, who permitted Berg to look through his files. It was probably there, between June 11 and 15, that Berg turned up an issue of the German physics journal Zeitschrift Physiks that contained an article on neutron diffusion. Somehow Berg got it into his head that Philip Morrison, back at the Met Lab in Chicago, needed to have a look at it, and instead of pouching the periodical off to Morrison, Berg chose to deliver it personally. Traveling to the U.S. from Italy was no puddle jump under the best circumstances, and now it required Berg, at minimum, to change planes in Casablanca or Algiers and again in Washington. Yet Morrison swears that one day in mid-June, direct from Rome, Berg appeared at his office, sweaty, fetid, and very tired, clutching the journal. Morrison recognized Berg’s name. For years he’d been hearing about this “linguist and man of daring.” Morrison took the magazine from Berg and saw immediately that he’d read it. Zeitschrift Physiks came to the Met Lab library every month through a Swiss distributor. Privately he thought the situation ludicrous, Berg not a little naive, and the deficiencies in his briefing appalling. But Morrison didn’t inform Berg that his trip was pointless. Something in Berg’s eyes told him not to do that. Instead, Morrison courteously thanked Berg for his trouble and sent him back to lcardi.
In Rome, it was more knocking on doors. Berg enthusiastically reported everything by triple-priority cable, and on June 20, a cable for him from Washington arrived, via Algiers, telling him to “radically condense” his reports if he wanted to keep such priority. Berg didn’t listen. Throughout the war, his reports are consistently longer and more detailed than those sent in by most OSS operatives. Berg was curious and it showed. He was also fascinated with the human side of things, the tiny plots and subplots, the nuances and details that turn the quotidian into something revealing. When he could, he went back to his sources time and again, asking further questions, sorting, and embellishing until complicated matters seemed to him complete.
These sources were not only physicists. Throughout World War II the OSS was also soliciting word on an array of German and Italian weapons, rumored and real. In addition to his AZUSA files, from late June through July and into August Berg pouched lengthy reports on new German radar technology and radar jamming equipment, infra-red radar detectors, countermeasures against U.S. radar, the Luftwaffe’s radio-directed missiles, and collaborations between German and Italian factories. He supplemented his reports by sending in logbooks, microfilm, blueprints, and diagrams that he’d sifted from Italian military files. If documents required translating, he did it himself. When he needed something explained, he consulted Italian scientists and engineers until he understood.
Berg’s pouches went first to Stanley Lovell, the OSS Research and Development chief, and then were distributed by Lovell to military development committees, including the National Defense Research Committee and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Soon notes of appreciation began arriving at the OSS, expressing enthusiastic thanks for the documents from Italy. Lovell and Donovan, in turn, both wrote to Berg in July, saluting him for “an outstanding job” of pouncing upon Rome. They meant it. By sending home the details of new Italian military technology, Berg was performing the primary task of an intelligence organization, which is to eliminate surprises. Lovell and Donovan were pleased because Berg was making the OSS look good.
Rome wasn’t all work for Berg. Even war couldn’t change some things, and so his mornings began with a walk to the Excelsior, where he read the newspapers, six Italian one-sheet dailies, French papers when they were available, Stars and Stripes, and the British military publication, Union Jack. Then he had breakfast at the Excelsior or back at the Savoia, and walked to the office he was using on Via Sicilia. At noon he might return to his hotel room for one of the two or three showers he took every day. After work, he explored.
If the days were warm, the evenings were cool that summer, and Berg took advantage, visiting the Forum and the Colosseum in the purplish Roman twilight. One night he took a boat ride on the Tiber. On another, he and Captain Max Corvo, the OSS Secret Intelligence chief for Italy, went to hear a symphony orchestra. Probably it was by himself that Berg visited what he referred to as “the old ghetto,” the Jewish section of Rome. He met a group of Italian Jews there who told him stories of Catholics sheltering Jews behind fake walls in their homes during the German occupation. Berg refrained from commenting on the atrocities in his conversations, letters, and notebooks. His tone sounds as matter-of-fact describing the Jewish ghetto to his mother as it does when he tells her about his appointment to meet the Pope. If Berg had a strong emotional reaction to the Jewish genocide, he was true to form and kept it to himself.
Sometimes during the day in Rome, instead of giving lcardi an address, Berg would take the young major sightseeing. They went to the Baths of Caracalla, to the Colosseum, and for a leisurely stroll through the Vatican, with Berg pausing frequently to tilt back his head and read aloud the Latin inscriptions. Berg also liked to visit Roman cemeteries, where he pointed out to lcardi the graves of famous poets, writers, and soldiers. Robert Furman came to Rome on June 19, and Berg treated his boss to the Vatican tour as well, guiding him through the religious, artistic, and social history of Saint Peter’s in his distinctive grave, low-pitched nasal voice, which Furman always found “a very sincere way of talking.” With both lcardi and Furman, Berg laughed as he noted the irony of a Jew explaining the Catholics to a Christian. Furman left Rome for Naples on the twenty-fifth, and after Donovan had come and gone two days later, Berg had been through a rite of passage. Not only had he submitted excellent reports; his superiors had met his eyes, measured his reserve, and found that they trusted him.
In one of their conversations, Furman told Berg that, as soon as possible, he was to investigate the Galileo Company, an optical laboratory in Florence. The principles of lens assembly depend on a system that is much like the one used to compress fissionable material in the building of plutonium bombs, and there was much concern that the Galileo Company was in close contact with Germany. Furman also made sure that Florence would be spared any further unseemly conflicts between Berg and Pash by sending the Alsos Mission to France.
Florence was still German-held territory, but Corvo was headed that way to inspect the front lines, and when Berg told him how anxious he was to get to Galileo, Corvo gave him a seat in his Jeep. As they drove north on July 3, an old Latium road took them through Viterbo and Bolsena and into Acquapendente, in time for lunch at the Hotel Milano. Some of the hotel’s r
ooms had been wrecked by bombs, and the restaurant menu had suffered too. It read in full: barley soup and fried eggs. After eating, they followed brightly clad Algerian troops astride mules into Siena, just as the city was liberated. Corvo photographed Berg at Siena’s medieval central square, the Piazza del Palio, standing erect and uncomfortable in the mid-afternoon heat, his suit jacket buttoned, his shoes covered with dust. Beyond Siena, the German retreat had slowed, and the Americans could advance no farther. Berg went back to Rome.
There he began the business of recruiting the serious young Italian aeronautical engineer he’d been told about in Washington, Antonio Ferri. Until the German occupation, Ferri had worked at the Italian aeronautical research center at Guidonia, not far from Rome, where he had been in charge of the supersonic wind tunnel, which simulated high-speed flight conditions. Ferri’s specialty was supersonic flow (air flowing at speeds higher than Mach 1), which made him of great interest to the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, where the secret testing of high-speed aircraft was going poorly. NACA wanted someone like Ferri to help usher in the jet age by improving its wind tunnel in Langley, Virginia.
The problem was finding Ferri. Three days after the Germans occupied Rome on September 10, 1943, Ferri had gone to Guidonia, bluffed his way inside, destroyed what equipment he could, and departed with a trunk full of documents. Then, one step ahead of the Germans, he fled 150 miles north, to a tiny Apennine Mountain grain-farming village where his family owned land. After installing his wife, Renata, and their three young children in his grandfather’s farmhouse, Ferri disappeared into the mountains and, along with his brother, a history professor, organized a group of local people, refugees, and soldiers into an anti-Fascist partisan guerrilla band. They spent the better part of the next year blowing up bridges and preying upon German patrols. Rumors of the bandit scientist reached the Germans, who came looking for Ferri in March. They burned the farmhouse to the ground, but the Ferris had been warned. Renata escaped with the children to an Adriatic fishing village, where she was told that her husband had been seen lying dead on a bridge. In July, word came from Antonio. He was not dead, but in liberated Rome, and eager to see his family.
In June, Berg had gone to the Ferri house in Rome, and found nobody there. He asked around, and was sent on to the home of Ferri’s mother-in-law, with whom he left his name and address. When Ferri got back to Rome in July, he was glum about the state of the world and what science was doing to it. He told friends he was considering becoming a fireman. Ferri contacted Berg, though, and began to work with him, translating some of the documents he’d removed from Guidonia the year before.
On July 25, a cable arrived from Furman, urging Berg to get to Florence and investigate Galileo. But the British and the Russians were courting Ferri, and Berg was reluctant to let him out of his sight. He was also now dispatching information, culled from Italian military files, on radio-guided bombs, German radar, bomb sights, and aerial torpedoes. This was just the sort of intelligence that had won him approbation earlier in the month. Berg decided that it was more important that he stay where he was.
Ferri and Berg seem to have liked each other from the start. Berg further ingratiated himself by befriending the Ferri children, whom he taught to play baseball. “My children loved him,” says Renata Ferri. “We hadn’t heard of baseball. It was something those crazy GI’s would do.” On August 4, Berg sent a twelve-page report to Washington that included blueprints of the Guidonia wind tunnel, Ferri’s experimental records, and flight test data. There were also accounts of what Ferri had seen during his visits to inspect German wind tunnels in 1938, 1940, and 1942. Berg concluded by reporting Ferri’s willingness to work in the U.S.
During the next week, Berg received a flurry of technical questions from London and Washington, which he distributed among his Italian scientific and military contacts. On August 10, he sent word to Furman that he intended to fulfill his Florence mission, but seven days later he was still immersed in enemy tank communications. Then, at last, he headed north toward Florence.
It turned out he hadn’t been wasting time after all. Florence still belonged to the Germans, which Berg learned when he got to the Allied camp in Poggibonsi, a small town near the city. There he was reunited with lcardi, who had left Rome toward the end of June, and was now in charge of small groups of Italian agents who conducted nighttime infiltrations behind the German lines, looking for fuel and ammunition dumps. While he waited for the city to fall, Berg stayed in a GI tent, played boccie with the soldiers—he was no better than anyone else—and indulged his near mania for cleanliness by rigging up a shower. He hung a five-gallon tin can from a trellis and punched small holes in the bottom. Then, two or three times a day, he filled the can with water and stood beneath it and scrubbed himself as though he were crawling with vermin.
The soldier’s life briefly intrigued Berg. He asked lcardi about the evening infiltrations, and lcardi told him that the scouts traveled by dead reckoning, plotting their route by using the stars. Berg knew how to do that. One night he asked if he might go along, and lcardi said he could. He found Berg a uniform and some boots and off they went, through fields and over stone walls and fences. The evening was uneventful, but traveling across unbroken ground raised terrible blisters on Berg’s flat, tender feet, and he never went again.
Berg seems to have liked wearing the uniform, though, and did so as long as he was in camp. The days of waiting grew tedious, and so Berg and lcardi went sightseeing. By August 20, the Allies were in Florence, which became the setting for one of the more fantastic of the many apocryphal Berg stories. Wearing a German officer’s uniform, he is supposed to have entered a still-occupied Florence and slowly toured the Galileo factory, wielding a swagger stick and an arrogant sneer. This never happened. Groves would not have permitted such a risky stunt, and Berg knew it. Besides, with the city about to be liberated, there was no point in taking such chances. When Berg entered the sand-colored stone headquarters of the Galileo Company, a business suit was on his back and lcardi was at his side.
Shell and sniper fire was still audible from some sections of Florence as Berg, Corvo, and lcardi crossed the Ponte Vecchio and drove into the lovely old city of the Medicis. Florence was nearly without food and water, and as they checked into the Excelsior Hotel, the OSS men were troubled by the incongruity of a string quartet doggedly playing Boccherini and Bach at teatime in the hotel’s main salon while most of the city scavenged for crusts.
Berg went straight to work. He spoke with the owner of the Galileo Company, Dr. Paolo Martinez, who told him that the company produced range finders, periscopes, searchlights, and telescopes, but nothing Groves would have found threatening. Furman’s gaze meanwhile had shifted west. After Eisenhower’s successful invasion of France and the subsequent drive toward the Seine, France and Switzerland were now accessible. Berg’s long but meatless Galileo report arrived in Washington on the desks of men who were preoccupied by these new opportunities and impatient for Berg to attend to them.
On August 21, the same day Berg was transferred from the OSS Special Operations to the Technical Section, Howard Dix instructed him to hurry to Paris and find the French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Berg was also asked to interview a French pathologist said to have information on German bacteriological warfare. There were other plans brewing, to send him on to Stockholm, where Lise Meitner lived, and to Zurich. But there was a problem with getting Berg to do any of this. The OSS had lost track of him again. As far as Howard Dix knew, Berg might be anywhere between Rome and Algiers. He sent him urgent cables to both cities. But in fact, Berg was still in Florence.
By the time he got back to Rome, Stanley Lovell had received a formal request from a delighted National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, requesting that Antonio Ferri be brought to the U.S. at once. Berg would not receive instructions to this effect until September 2. By this time, Boris Pash and the new Alsos scientific chief, Samuel Goudsmit, were in France, tracking Jol
iot-Curie; another OSS agent, Martin Chittick, was looking for the French pathologist; and Moe Berg, who loved Paris, had vexed his superiors by fiddling in Rome.
On September 6, Antonio Ferri signed a ninety-day contract for $2,500 and travel expenses to go to the U.S. Sixteen days later, an OSS agent named Peter Tompkins brought Ferri into the U.S. The scientist had no passport and very little English, but both came to him, as did his family, for he never left.
As for Moe Berg, on September 14 he reported to the OSS headquarters in London. It was the beginning of a rather calm three months.
A FEW DAYS after returning to London, Berg sat down to write his mother and sister a letter. Berg’s feelings for his family were always the most affectionate when there was an ocean between them, and now he was solicitous, asking after everyone, including the neighbors, promising to write to Dr. Sam in the Pacific, begging them to pardon his “seeming negligence,” and enclosing photographs of himself in Italy. “Have a wonderful job and enjoy doing it,” he told them. “Rome,” he said, “was beautiful. I worked hard, but enjoyed it.” He closed by telling them where he was—“at Claridge’s Hotel, London, living in luxury at the moment.”
This was true. With nothing pressing him, he gamboled around London, sightseeing, foraging in old bookshops, and dropping in on people like Michael Burke, Robert Thompson, and Henry Ringling North at an OSS flat on Sloane Street. As life in cities being pelted by buzz bombs goes, theirs was tranquil. North liked to tease Berg about his clothes and noticed that Berg liked women, especially a young Finn named Helvi, whom Burke had introduced him to. Not that Burke or North ever felt particularly close to Berg. He seemed to them charming but remote. Burke thought Berg an ideal undercover agent, because he “possessed an unusual capacity to live alone contentedly for long periods of time.”
In London, Berg was not so much solitary as hither and thither. During a dinner party outside London at Soames House, a mansion with sunken bathtubs and gold faucets made famous in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, he met a blue-eyed captain named Clare Hall. Hall was working as an advisory liaison between scientists and the military. Berg had a car and driver that night, and he gave Hall a ride home to her apartment near Marble Arch. After that they began dating, going out to dinner or to an occasional play. Contrary to the testy British descriptions of Americans in London during the war—“overpaid, oversexed and over here”—between Berg and Hall matters remained chaste. At the end of each evening, Berg would peck her on the cheek and leave.
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