51 “Or maybe he wasn’t”: Much information about Estella Huni comes from interviews with Paul Kahn, New York; Christine Curtis, by telephone; and from Estella’s papers, which Paul Kahn generously shared with me. Charles Owen owns copies of Estella’s letters to Berg during the war.
52 “Madama Butterfly”: Interview with Harry Broley, Washington, D.C.
53 “She also taught him”: Interview with William Klein, New York.
54 “Another time he wrote”: Reference to it in Estella Huni to Moe Berg, June 9, 1944.
55 “Ethel was jealous”: Interview with Elizabeth Shames, Portland, Maine.
56 “He referred to his”: Sam Berg to Samuel Goudsmit, July 23, 1964.
57 “In early May”: Estella Huni to Moe Berg, May 7, 1944.
58 “Three weeks after”: May 25, 1944.
59 “In mid-June”: June 19, 1944.
60 “I look best”: July 1, 1944.
61 “When he did”: July 10, 1944.
62 “Years later she”: Interview with Paul Kahn, New York.
63 “In many ways”: Interview with Christine Curtis by telephone.
Chapter 10. Remus Heads for Rome
1 “They charged”: Richard Dunlop, Donovan, p. 97; Stanley Lovell, Of Spies and Stratagems, p. 197; Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 224.
2 “During prohibition in”: Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, pp. 75–88; Dunlop, pp. 148–51.
3 “He wanted the OSS”: R. H. Smith, p. 35.
4 “He was a rather small”: Interview with Julia Child by telephone.
5 “He didn’t really try”: Lovell, p. 177.
6 “For my activities”: Ibid., p. 7.
7 “Donovan would have”: Interview with Monroe Karasik, Washington, D.C.
8 “He was too talented”: Anthony Cave Brown, pp. 102–16.
9 “I can vouch”: Ellery Huntington to R. Davis Halliwell, June 4, 1943. OSS file.
10 “What the hell”: Sam Berg to Lou Jacobson.
11 “Sam hadn’t known”: Berg to the family, June 9, 1943.
12 “It most definitely”: Ethel Berg, p. 147.
13 “Berg delighted in”: Interviews with Jimmy Breslin, New York; Joseph Crowley, Washington, D.C.; Rick Ferrell by telephone; Ken Gloss, Boston; and Harvey Yavener by telephone.
14 “Yet, when in”: Interview with Irene Goudsmit by telephone; and interview with Max Corvo, Cromwell, Connecticut.
15 “He had a nice”: Interview with Edwin Putzell by telephone.
16 “During his life”: See Spink, Sporting News, November 16, 1939; and Berg personal notes on the subject.
17 “He listened and”: Sam Goudsmit to Ethel Berg, June 21, 1976.
18 “The next day”: Halliwell OSS memo, July 17, 1943, CIA file.
19 “It is evident”: Ibid.
20 “By August 2”: Berg CIA file.
21 “Finally, it was ‘believed”: CIA file.
22 “Recruits were sometimes”: Information for this section comes from Dunlop, pp. 381–82; Corey Ford, Donovan of OSS, p. 138; Henry A. Murray et al., Assessment of Men, pp. 25–100; interview with Earl Brodie, San Francisco; interview with William Horrigan, Tequesta, Florida; interview with William Morgan, Washington, D.C.; interview with Ed Mroz by telephone; interview with Edwin Putzell by telephone.
23 “This capture-the-flag”: Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession, p. 226.
24 “One OSS man”: Interview with Edwin Putzell by telephone.
25 “A forged piece”: Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors, p. 208.
26 “Perhaps because this”: Interview with Edwin Putzell by telephone.
27 “In Washington, Berg”: R. H. Smith, pp. 129–32, 142–44, 152–53, 158–60; Berg undated notes to himself; Berg file, October 13, 1943.
28 “He resorted to”: Interview with Margaret Feldman by telephone.
29 “OSS travel orders”: Casey, p. 16.
30 “ ‘Be careful,’ he warned”: Interview with Aldo lcardi, Winter Park, Florida.
31 “Berg had lunch”: Interview with William Horrigan, Tequesta, Florida.
32 “Toward the end”: Outline from Thomas Powers’s Berg file.
33 “I didn’t need”: Interview with William Horrigan, Tequesta, Florida.
34 “Just before Christmas”: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 253.
35 “She wrote Hahn back”: Ibid.
36 “Gazing out his”: Ibid., p. 275.
37 “Heisenberg had been”: Samuel Goudsmit to Sam Berg, April 11, 1973.
38 “See Fermi, see Heisenberg”: Ugo Fano to Tom Powers, September 18, 1993.
39 “as the Dutch-born”: Samuel A. Goudsmit, Alsos, pp. 3–4.
40 “Worse, they were sure”: Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 66.
41 “Instead, Szilard badgered”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 64; and Rhodes, pp. 305–9.
42 “Fritz Reiche, who”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 107. 158. “Eugene Wigner heard”: Interview with Arthur Wightman by telephone; Wigner, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, pp. 240–42.
43 “Physicists in the U.S.”: Interview with Arthur Wightman by telephone.
44 “Certain the U.S. program”: Daniel Lang, “A Farewell to String and Sealing Wax,” November 7, 1953, p. 47.
45 “many sleepless nights”: Rhodes, p. 356.
46 “Groves was a tendentious”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 177, and Rhodes, p. 425.
47 “I detested General Groves”: Interview with Philip Morrison, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
48 “It took Groves”: Interview with Hans Bethe by telephone.
49 “Bohr’s inference from”: David Irving, The German Atomic Bomb, p. 49.
50 “The nuclear age was”: Interview with Robert Furman, Washington, D.C.; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 217.
51 “In July 1943”: Interview with John Lansdale, Washington, D.C.
52 “The ten-man Alsos Mission”: Interview with Robert Furman, Washington, D.C.
53 “One day when the general”: Interview with John Lansdale, Washington, D.C.
54 “Trying to learn about”: Luis Alvarez, a physicist working for Enrico Fermi at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, designed a scrubber for Groves that could detect the residue of radioactive gases lingering in the air above the German nuclear reactor that produced them. Alvarez’s machine sensed nothing suspicious over Germany. Probably the fault of the machine, was the pessimists’ reaction. Philip Morrison, also at the Met Lab, and Karl Cohen, a young chemist working under Harold Urey at Columbia, were asked to analyze hundreds of recent German scientific periodicals. It all seemed banal; the Germans appeared not to be very far along in their nuclear research. A decoy to deflect attention from the atomic work at hand, Morrison and Cohen decided. Morrison tested water drawn from German rivers, examined the luminous dials on the instrument panels of downed Messerschmitts, and interviewed German scientist prisoners of war. But every tactile piece of evidence indicated that the Germans were doing nothing unusual with their uranium, which American investigators explained as more subterfuge. How could they not? To accept the evidence was to accept that the best physicists in the world were not preparing an atomic bomb for delivery to Adolf Hitler. It was too much to concede, and so the intelligence gathering continued. It was work designed to drive one mad.
55 “Better, then, to supply”: A document dated May 16, 1958, in the Berg FBI file says that the OSS knew about the Manhattan Project in November 1942.
56 “After creating”: Interview with Horace Calvert by telephone.
57 “In late 1943”: OSS Larson file.
58 “What most people”: Ibid., December 27, 1943; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 292.
59 “Soon thereafter”: Berg personal papers, March 12, 1964.
60 “In conversation he”: Interview with Earl Brodie, San Francisco.
61 “They can take us”: Berg personal papers, August 4, 1968.
62 “Find out
what”: Ibid., March 12, 1964.
63 “Most of the talk was”: Ibid.
64 “You’ve got a good spy”: Interview with Robert Furman, Washington, D.C.
65 “On December 22”: Washington Post, December 22, 1943.
66 “Three New York papers”: New York Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York World Telegram, all December 31, 1943.
67 “And in an article”: Newsweek, December 13, 1943. 163. “Before Pash left”: Boris Pash, The Alsos Mission, p. 10.
68 “Berg and Horrigan”: Berg CIA file.
69 “At first, Berg”: Ibid.
70 “William Fowler, a”: Interview with William Fowler by telephone.
71 “Among the people”: OSRD document courtesy of William Horrigan.
72 “Fubini on the other hand”: Interview with Eugene Fubini by telephone.
73 “Toward the end”: Berg CIA file.
74 “Suits had received”: Guy Suits to Heinz Albers, May 1, 1990.
75 “Back in Washington”: Berg OSS file.
76 “The New Year arrived”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 299.
77 “In this conclusion”: Manhattan Engineering Project (MEP) document, December 22, 1943.
78 “The Germans were”: Ibid., January 2, 1944.
79 “Four days later”: Tonawanda Daily Press (in MEP file), January 6, 1944.
80 “Furman’s feeling was”: Interview with Robert Furman, Washington, D.C.
81 “Besides, the last”: Interview with Philip Morrison, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
82 “In late January”: Interview with William Horrigan, Tequesta, Florida.
83 “Boris Pash knew”: Pash, pp. 21–31; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, pp. 298–303.
84 “Elsewhere, there was”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, pp. 211–13; and Rhodes, pp. 512–17.
85 “Heisenberg would be”: OSS document from Thomas Powers, February 27, 1944.
86 “In March, Shaheen”: CIA file. 167. “Feldman, who worked”: Interview with Margaret Feldman by telephone and correspondence.
87 “Moe was a guy”: Interview with Earl Brodie in San Francisco.
88 “He’d never been”: Requests made, for example, April 7 and 13, 1944, CIA file; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 294.
89 “And then, when all seemed”: Berg personal notes.
90 “In February, the”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 337. 168. “Last, he requested”: Berg personal papers.
91 “Heisenberg, for example”: Ibid. 168. “On May 4”: Berg CIA file; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 297.
92 “The general couldn’t”: More likely, Donovan just liked the idea of talking with such a compelling, secretive fellow. The OSS people who met Berg uniformly describe him as the most enigmatic person they ever met. Why should the director, who loved enigmas, be any different?
Chapter 11. A Perfect Spy
1 “Boarding the airplane”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, pp. 298–99.
2 “Malcolm Muggeridge described”: Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, p. 447. In an Esquire magazine article, Muggeridge wrote this phrase a bit differently: “… arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsy old intelligence brothel.” See Knightley, p. 228.
3 “On May 11”: OSS file, May 11, 1944.
4 “More useful was”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 306.
5 “In the U.S.”: Interview with Hubert Alyea by telephone.
6 “Now he was working”: Physics Today, vol. 14, no. 11 (November 1961), p. 90; and interview with Hubert Alyea by telephone.
7 “Robertson was a”: Interviews with Hubert Alyea by telephone; Richard Beth by telephone; and George Reynolds, Princeton. And Robertson to Berg, October 14, 1947.
8 “He resurfaced”: Interview with Geoffrey Jones, New York.
9 “A Sergeant E. G. Pothblum”: Berg CIA file.
10 “On May 29”: From Turkey, Berg could logically have been on his way to Yugoslavia, perhaps to see Tito, although it seems somewhat doubtful the Russians would have permitted it. Still, in his notebooks Berg writes that on June 4, Tito was being brought in by Russians from Yugoslavia. On June 1, in Naples, Berg definitely received a letter of introduction to John Peters Esq. in Istanbul, which means that at one point he was convinced he was headed that way. Whatever the explanation, Berg never went to Turkey. Berg letter to the family, September 20, 1944.
11 “In the event that”: Berg OSS file, June 5, 1944.
12 “Berg may not”: Interview with Earl Brodie, San Francisco.
13 “On June 1”: Berg OSS file.
14 “Three days later”: Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944.
15 “After Berg showed”: Berg personal notebook entry, December 1, 1965.
16 “Then a command car”: Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944.
17 “On June 6”: Edoardo Amaldi told Thomas Powers that he met Berg on the fifth; Amaldi’s son, Ugo, told me the same; and Stanley Lovell cites the fifth in a memo on the subject; but Berg’s letter home says he arrived in Rome on the eighth. Since Rome was liberated on the fifth, and the liberation celebration took place on the sixth, and since the trip from Naples that Berg describes takes four hours, not three days, from Naples, I think he arrived in Rome on June 6.
18 “Berg checked into”: Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 306.
19 “For all that trouble”: Gian Carlo Wick to Thomas Powers, March 7, 1989.
20 “Amaldi told him”: Interview with Ugo Amaldi, Geneva, Switzerland; Pash, p. 31; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 305.
21 “Though he detested”: Ginestra Amaldi, who communicated with me through her son Ugo.
22 “The son of a”: Interview with Jack Steinberger, Geneva, Switzerland; Rhodes, p. 208; and Carlo Rubbia et al., Edoardo Amaldi, p. 3.
23 “Their collaboration had lasted”: Interview with Giuseppe Cocconi, Geneva, Switzerland.
24 “for the others”: Rhodes, p. 241; and Rubbia, p. 3.
25 “At a clandestine”: Rubia, p. 6.
26 “From September 1943”: Amaldi to Berg, June 10, 1944. Document from Powers file.
27 “When a second”: Interview with Ugo Amaldi, Geneva, Switzerland, and correspondence.
28 “That evening”: Pash, pp. 31–32; and interview with Boris Pash by telephone.
29 “Something happened”: Interview with Ugo Amaldi, Geneva, Switzerland.
30 “A hearty meal”: Interview with Ugo Amaldi, Geneva, Switzerland, and correspondence.
31 “Amaldi, Berg reported”: Berg OSS file, June 10, 1944; handwritten copy courtesy of Thomas Powers.
32 “During these early days”: Interview with Jack Steinberger, Geneva, Switzerland; and with Vanna Wick, Torino, Italy. Also, Valentine E. Telegdi, Gian Carlo Wick appreciation, The Independent (London), May 9, 1992.
33 “Once a week”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 164.
34 “Berg took Wick”: Interview with Vanna Wick, Torrino, Italy.
35 “Wick was, says”: Interview with Jack Steinberger, Geneva, Switzerland.
36 “Wick had last seen”: Wick to Thomas Powers, 1990 interview.
37 “Wick said he missed”: Berg to Dix, June 10, 1944; Berg notes September 6, 1962; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 308.
38 “Berg arranged, through”: Thomas Powers gave me a copy of the postcard.
39 “And Wick knew more”: Wick to Thomas Powers, March 7, 1989.
40 “In his cable”: OSS file, June 18, 1944; and Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 308.
41 “the answer came from”: Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944.
42 “The old religious city”: Interview with Aldo lcardi, Winter Park, Florida.
43 “Berg kept in touch”: Berg notes, June 13, 1966.
44 “Traveling to the”: Interview with Philip Morrison, Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is no paper record of Berg’s trip to the Met Lab, and I think it’s possible tha
t someone in the U.S. gave Berg the journal, and that Berg visited Morrison in late April or in the first two days of May, before he left for Europe.
45 “Berg enthusiastically”: OSS cable, June 20, 1944.
46 “These sources were”: See, for example, Shaheen file of January 7, 1944.
47 “In addition to”: OSS cables June 19, 23, 25, 27, 1944.
48 “If documents required”: Ibid., July 5, 1944.
49 “Berg’s pouches went”: See cable from John Teeter thanking Berg, July 18, 1944.
50 “Soon notes of appreciation”: Ibid.; and J. C. Hunsaker to Stanley Lovell, July 21, 1944.
51 “Lovell and Donovan”: Lovell, July 19, 1944; Donovan, July 21, 1944.
52 “Rome wasn’t all work”: Interview with Aldo lcardi, Maitland, Florida; Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944.
53 “the evenings were cool”: Berg to his mother, June 29, 1944.
54 “Sometimes during the day”: Aldo lcardi to Charles Owen.
55 “Robert Furman came to”: Interview with Robert Furman, Washington, D.C.
56 “Furman left Rome”: Powers, Heisenberg’s War, p. 311.
57 “Furman also made sure”: Ibid.
58 “Florence was still”: Interview with Max Corvo, Cromwell, Connecticut.
59 “As they drove north”: Max Corvo, The O.S.S. in Italy, 1942–1945, pp. 172–73.
60 “There he began”: Interview with Martin Bloom by telephone; interview with Paul Libby by telephone; and James R. Hansen, Engineer in Charge, pp. 311–24.
61 “Three days after”: Berg accounts August 4, 1944, and September 6, 1944, OSS file.
62 “Then, one step”: Interview with Renata Ferri, Huntington, New York; and Vladimir Peniakoff, Popski’s Private Army, pp. 319–31.
63 “Rumors of the bandit”: Interview with Renata Ferri, Huntington, New York.
64 “In June, Berg”: Interview with Renata Ferri, Huntington, New York; and interview with Paul Libby by telephone.
65 “When Ferri got back”: Interview with Paul Libby by telephone; and OSS file, July 25, 1944.
66 “On July 25”: Furman to Berg, July 25, 1944.
67 “This was just”: OSS file, July 25 and 27, and August 1 and 2, 1944.
68 “Ferri and Berg”: Interview with Renata Ferri, Huntington, New York.
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