With H. P. Robertson, the talk, at least, was bawdy. Berg had resumed his informal physics seminar with the Princeton scientist, conversations that were inevitably spiced with Robertson’s boisterous accounts of, say, an English butler who instructed overnight male guests to push a button on the wall if a mistress was wanted during the night. Hall, who also knew Robertson, says that “Moe was having the time of his life during the war.”
The OSS European Headquarters was moved to Paris in September, and Berg went there at least once in early fall, but mostly he was in London. He saw Robert Furman in London when he passed through, as well as Groves’s man in the United Kingdom, Major Horace “Tony” Calvert. Calvert valued the company of someone with whom he could speak freely about his work, and he and Berg strolled for hours, going into bookstores and talking. Berg was wearing a gray fedora to ward off the damp, musty chill of autumn in London, and Calvert thought he looked “the picture of what you’d think a spy would be.”
Estella was also on Moe Berg’s mind. He mailed her newspaper clippings and theater programs, and asked Howard Dix to forward his regards. Dix sent word back to Berg that he had told her that Berg was “behaving himself and having a good time, and that above all … doing an excellent job for us.” Dix sensed Berg’s need for flattery and encouragement, and played a version of the doting grand-uncle, stroking his black-haired boy, off in the thick of things, by providing him with modest services—passing along the baseball standings, the latest gossip from Q Building, and word from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics that Ferri was doing well at his work.
IN 1942, MEMBERS of the Manhattan Project began floating the idea of abducting Werner Heisenberg from Germany. By the time the OSS became involved, these impolite suggestions became two kidnapping missions, where the unspoken option was murder. The first involved a burly former Mexican border patrolman named Carl Eifler. The second designated kidnapper was a man who had once caught for a living—Moe Berg. We know about these plans because old records suggest them, and old men talked about them. Carl Eifler did, and so did Moe Berg.
The first Heisenberg kidnapping proposal came from a pair of refugee scientists. Heisenberg had plans to give a lecture in Zurich in December 1942. “I have to confess that Victor Weisskopf and I thought of kidnapping Heisenberg at the latest in 1942,” says Hans Bethe. At that early stage in the war, the scientists that Groves and Furman consulted for counterintelligence purposes were virtual looms spinning out fresh ideas, most of which were dispensed with like so many pillings and nubbins. Kidnapping and murder present problems of turpitude beyond the difficulties of execution, and so Bethe and Weisskopf were flatly rejected.
Yet, smart men were racked with fears of what Heisenberg might be doing, and relieving such concerns with one brief, violent gesture was more appealing than most people liked to admit. Behind closed doors, in hushed tones, proposals like Bethe’s and Weisskopf’s were made repeatedly. It was probably in the last days of 1943 that Groves sat in Robert Oppenheimer’s office and listened as the Manhattan Project scientific director quietly suggested that “if [he] was fearful of German progress in the atomic field [he] could upset it by arranging to have some of their leading scientists killed.” Groves sent the idea along to Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who responded sourly. “Tell Groves to take care of his own dirty work,” he said. In January 1944, Philip Morrison weighed in, suggesting to Furman that “it would be wise to kidnap such a man as Von Weizsäcker.” That was soon dismissed, but by Valentine’s Day, Groves had passed his Heisenberg dirty work along to General Donovan, who found nothing vulgar about any opportunity to increase the OSS role in the war. The job called for someone unbothered by fear or scruple, and Donovan knew a man like that.
Carl Eifler never liked to be far from trouble. Just over six feet tall, broad as a brown bear, at 280 solid pounds, Eifler was a graduate of the elite Los Angeles Police Academy and had worked for a time as an undercover U.S. customs inspector, tracking smugglers through the Mexican mountains. After several Scotch whiskys, he once shot a three-inch-square cigarette box off a man’s head. Another time, standing in a barn lit only by a dim lantern, he blasted a glass off the head of a loudmouth who dared him to try it. Eifler was more than a crack shot. He considered himself “well qualified in the art of boxing,” and his threshold for pain was such that when flying scraps of metal were imbedded deep in his leg, he found a scalpel, and “I operated on myself.”
Eifler became friendly with General Joseph Stilwell in California in the 1930s, during his days in the army reserve, and it was “Vinegar Joe” who urged Donovan to hire him for the OSS. Stilwell commanded the American troops in Burma, India, and China, and in May 1942, he had approved Detachment 101, an OSS guerrilla mission based in India and extending deep behind Japanese lines in the northern Burmese jungle. He recommended Eifler as the leader of the mission.
The plan was for the American agents to train Kachin tribesmen and then work alongside them, disrupting Japanese supply lines by sabotaging airstrips, bridges, and railroad tracks, and by sniping at troop columns. When Donovan paid Eifler a visit to see how things were going, most of what he saw in Burma impressed him. Nonetheless, Eifler, who had suffered an injury when he lost his balance in a pounding surf and was thrown head first against some rocks, was soon back in Washington. In February 1944, Donovan sent Eifler in to see Robert Furman. Furman had talked over an upcoming assignment with a few other men and rejected them. Now he sketched it for Eifler. A German scientist was making a dangerous new weapon, and Furman wanted him stopped. Eifler doesn’t like to discuss killing—“it’s nobody’s business how many men I killed,” he says—and Furman didn’t ask him to. In somewhat ghoulish terms, he made it clear that Heisenberg should be kidnapped. Eifler was told “to deny Germany his brain.” Would that be possible? Furman asked.
“I said yes,” says Eifler. “This was the first time someone had just said yes to him.”
“My God,” said Furman. He had his man.
Over the next few months, Eifler was allowed to design a mission that nobody would have mistaken for either a likely success or just a kidnapping. Eifler would capture Heisenberg, presumably in Berlin, lead him out of the country on foot, and put him on an airplane in Switzerland. They would fly over the Mediterranean, ditch the plane, and parachute into the water, where both men would be picked up by a waiting submarine. Stanley Lovell supplied Eifler with guns for silent killing, and in late June, ever game, Eifler was in Algiers, on his way to Germany, when Donovan met him on a balcony above a busy street and called it off. Eifler was told “We got the secret,” meaning that the atom had been split, but that was just politesse. The real reason was common sense.
That cautious men like Furman and Groves should have temporarily gone along with such a wild scheme suggests how badly they wanted to be rid of Heisenberg. What now changed was the kind of man they chose to pursue him. Moe Berg was not the ruthless field soldier Carl Eifler was, but he was a very intelligent man—not a bad quality when you are in the business of denying brains.
This time, things would be more subdued, developing at a measured pace over the course of several months, until a sudden turn of events hurried years of concern into sudden climax.
BY THE AUTUMN of 1944, Berg’s translation of Werner Heisenberg’s postcard to Gian Carlo Wick had been supplemented by enough other intelligence from the Alsos Mission in France and from the OSS Bern bureau for General Leslie Groves to feel certain that Heisenberg was living in Hechingen, a village on the edge of the Black Forest in southern Germany. In his autobiography, Groves writes that Tony Calvert intended to send Berg to the Black Forest via Switzerland, until Groves interceded: “When I heard of Calvert’s plan for Berg to go into the Hechingen-Bissingen area, I immediately stopped it, realizing that if he were captured, the Nazis might be able to extract far more information about our project than we could ever hope to obtain if he were successful.” Groves’s account is somewhat misleadi
ng. Groves and Furman kept firm control of the AZUSA Mission, and no plans of this importance got beyond the suggestion stage without their participation. Further, the mission to Germany that was plotted toward the end of 1944 was by no means intended to send Moe Berg into Germany on his own. Several other men were to join him, and in October they began trickling into London, with no idea what they were there to do.
One of them was Jack Marsching, a graying World War I veteran with heavy jowls who was dispatched to the OSS London offices at the end of September to serve as the head of technical reports. Berg and Marsching sniffed the air and detected the same thing: bad chemistry. They hated each other instantly. Berg soon complained that Marsching was withholding AZUSA information from him, and Marsching responded with an aggrieved memo to Dix: “If Mr. Berg did not receive information promptly, he was to blame because he only paid the office infrequent visits and after finally obtaining his address, it was necessary to phone him when information or instructions for him were received. His attitude was inclined to be impatient, critical and extremely independent.” If Marsching seems a bit like an old prune, Berg was hardly gracious. Sounding not a little self-important, he told another London OSS man that he would rather quit than work with Marsching. It is a measure of how much Dix, Donovan, and Groves had come to value Berg that Dix’s solution to the catfight was to pull Marsching out of England.
With Marsching gone, the AZUSA roster at the beginning of November included two OSS agents, Earl Brodie and Edmond Mroz, and one scientist, Martin Chittick, the chemist who had gone to Paris for Berg in June when Berg had been unable to extricate himself from Italy. It would have been only natural for Berg to want to meet them all, but Moe Berg didn’t meet people, he investigated them, looking them over the way a shopper examines a supermarket tomato. Marsching he rejected. Brodie he’d already spent time with in Washington and liked fine. He reminded himself of this during their one brief encounter in London. Brodie was on his way back to his room one night when a large man emerged in his path from the dimly lit doorway of an Italian restaurant, scaring the wits out of him. It was Berg. “Can you get anything back to the States?” he whispered to Brodie. Brodie said he could. Berg handed him an envelope and melted away into the evening. Brodie got the envelope back. “He knew all about me, had me totally figured out,” says Brodie.
Chittick hadn’t yet arrived in London, so only Mroz remained to be examined. Mroz was a chemical engineer who had spent the first part of the war as an air force navigator. In January 1944, the OSS asked for him, rushed him through training school, and put him on the Aquitania, bound for London in September. Nobody told him why, and Mroz didn’t ask. Mroz was working at the OSS office in Grosvenor Square, under Marsching, when one day he received a telephone call from Berg, inviting him to lunch at Claridge’s Hotel. They met in Berg’s suite, where a succulent mixed grill was delivered to them. As they ate, they talked. Mroz recognized Berg from newspaper photographs, but he didn’t really follow baseball. When Berg brought up the game, Mroz said that baseball was too slow for his taste. Berg raised his thick eyebrows. He told Mroz some of his Trans-Siberian Railroad stories, which Mroz enjoyed, and then, gradually, the direction of the conversation turned to fission. Mroz said he’d used a mass spectograph to separate isotopes, but other than that, he didn’t know much about it. He knew chemistry, not nuclear physics. After two hours, the lunch was over. “I didn’t ask him why he wanted to talk with me,” says Mroz. “We were both fighting the same war. That was it. We were all compartmentalized. We didn’t know what the other guys were doing.” Berg might have liked working with a man who thought like that, but he never got the chance.
WHILE BERG WAS dining on grilled sausage and lamb chops with Ed Mroz, Boris Pash, Samuel Goudsmit, and the Alsos Mission were visiting the liberated northeastern French city of Strasbourg, where Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker taught physics at the university. The professor’s files contained a large sheaf of correspondence, diaries, notes, and computations, and Goudsmit began reading through it all at once. On one letterhead was printed Werner Heisenberg’s secret address and telephone number in Hechingen. After all the effort expended in looking for Heisenberg, now you could just ring him up! Goudsmit kept reading in silence until, suddenly, he startled Pash by blurting, “We’ve got it!”
“I know we have it,” said Pash, who preferred to do the yelling. “But do they?”
“No, no,” he was told. “That’s it. They don’t.”
When he calmed down, Goudsmit could put it more cogently. “Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable time” is the jubilant summary of the situation in his memoirs.
Washington was informed immediately, and soon, inevitable as sunset, came the doubts. Was Goudsmit absolutely certain? Well, he was virtually certain. Could he prove the documents weren’t decoys, plants? No, he couldn’t do that. And so forth. Meanwhile, General Groves had seen a photograph of a new industrial complex in the Hechingen area. Immediately he was sure that it was the German uranium separation factory. A bit of digging by the British revealed that this was no Oak Ridge, but rather an act of desperation. German geological engineers were trying to squeeze fuel from a seam of shale. That a country this strapped for oil could be supplying the necessary resources for an atomic weapon did not seem impossible to Groves, and as long as there was possibility, AZUSA and Moe Berg were still in business.
IN LATE NOVEMBER, Berg’s position at the heart of the American atomic intelligence mission was strengthened even further as he was fully briefed by the OSS and Furman on Flute, the code name for Paul Scherrer, the director of the Physics Institute at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. Berg had discussed Scherrer with Guy Suits during his visit to General Electric, before leaving the United States, so he knew something about him. As a young man, Scherrer had done exciting atomic investigation, but at the moment, in middle age, he had a reputation as a man grown indifferent to research who was now preoccupied with organizing physics lectures that were famous throughout Switzerland.
Scherrer was well placed for espionage within the intimate community of the world’s great physicists. With its shops, museums, concert halls, and restaurants, Zurich had always been a popular spot for scientists’ lectures and conferences. During the war, Switzerland’s neutrality made the country the single permissible destination outside Germany for the German physicists, meaning that Scherrer had access that nobody else did to Gentner, Von Weizsäcker, and his trusted friend Werner Heisenberg. With this in mind, the OSS Bern bureau chief, Allen Dulles, and one of his favorite agents, an oil company lawyer named Frederick Reed Loofbourow, cultivated Scherrer’s friendship. Over time, Scherrer became a prized OSS source. This was brave of him. Nazi spies were ubiquitous in Swiss cities, and the Swiss government dealt harshly with citizens who compromised the country’s neutrality. Scherrer told nobody that he cooperated with American agents, but he did, making Flute an OSS asset of incredible value.
At times, however, Scherrer seemed uneasy. After Dulles warned Donovan that the scientist was “heavily overworked” and would respond well only to those who approached him with “the greatest care and tact,” Furman decided that Scherrer might be more comfortable if one man from the OSS or Alsos was assigned to work with him. The choice for the job was Berg. At the same time, on Dix’s recommendation that “his work since assignment to this section has been of high caliber and exceptional importance,” Berg’s annual salary was raised $800, to $4,600. Much as he always liked signs of approval, what Berg really wanted was something to do. He had been beached in London for a long time, and after the excitement of Italy he was impatient for more.
On December 8, word out of Bern announced that Werner Heisenberg was planning to give a lecture in Zurich on or about December 15. Two days later Berg was in Paris, where a GI named Bud Leavitt, in peacetime a sportswriter from Maine, spotted Lefty Groves’s old catcher ambling down the Champs-Elysées, with five newspapers under his
arm. “Don’t ask me what I’m doing here” was Berg’s greeting. “What are you doing here?”
For most of the four or five days he spent in Paris, the truth was that Berg couldn’t have answered his own question. The plan had been for him to go to Germany to search for an industrial complex, in the company of Mroz, Brodie, and Chittick. Now, suddenly, he was on his own. Only on his last day in Paris, during a meeting at the Ritz Hotel with Sam Goudsmit, were Donovan’s and Groves’s instructions forwarded to him.
Berg and Goudsmit probably met for the first time in Paris, and they would stay loosely in touch for the next three decades, mostly at Goudsmit’s behest. Goudsmit was fascinated by a man who liked to probe other people’s souls even more than he did. The scientific head of the Alsos Mission was a Dutch Jew from the Hague. He and another Dutchman, George Uhlenbeck, discovered in 1925 that electrons are not static but are always spinning. Two years later, Goudsmit became a professor at the University of Michigan. “That fellow Goudsmit,” another physicist once said, “he talks physics, but he talks a lot of other things, too.” Goudsmit was particularly curious about secrets. While in Holland he had studied detective techniques, and there is reason to believe that Alsos began a sideline career for him in espionage that lasted all his life.
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