The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  “I have learned since,” Goudsmit added, “that mine was an emotion shared by many who lost their nearest and dearest to the Nazis.” He could only thank God, once again, that things had turned out as they had—that the most vicious regime in modern history, despite having all the initial advantages in scientific talent and industrial might, had somehow lost out on the race to build the most awful weapons the world had ever known.

  EPILOGUES

  1946 and Beyond

  When they first heard the news about Hiroshima, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were waiting out the end of the war at—where else?—their little family cottage in Port Science/L’Arcouest. Irène later said, repeatedly, that she thanked God her mother never lived to see her beloved radioactive elements turned into weapons.

  Despite their heroics during the war, Irène and Joliot found themselves increasingly marginalized afterward, mostly for their unabashed support of communism. Irène was refused entry to the United States in March 1948 for her political beliefs and spent a long night in an Ellis Island detention center darning old socks. Joliot was evicted from a hotel in Stockholm in 1950 because the owner despised Reds—the same hotel he’d stayed at fifteen years earlier when collecting his Nobel Prize. At times even France proved unwelcoming, especially to Irène. Despite all her accomplishments, the hidebound French Academy of Science refused to admit her (or any other woman) as a member, just as they’d denied the honor to Marie. “At least they’re consistent,” Irène deadpanned.

  Meanwhile, Irène’s health continued to deteriorate. “To breathe, to eat—the most elemental functions are painful to me,” she told a friend. Little wonder that by 1955 she was rapidly losing weight again. To revive her spirits, the family took an extended vacation that summer to L’Arcouest. While the trip did buoy her for a while, she kept repeating an ominous phrase: “How tired I am.” Marie had often said the same thing during her final months.

  While Irène rested, Joliot would go fishing or sailing, usually alone—he still felt like an outsider there. And although her symptoms were more acute, he could feel his own grip on life weakening. One day in the summer of 1955, he decided to go hunting in the woods surrounding the family cottage, the same woods through which Boris Pash had stalked his ghost a decade earlier. Joliot had always been an avid outdoorsman, and when a bird suddenly appeared before him—a perfect shot—he snapped up his rifle. But when he saw that the bird was tending several chicks in a nest, he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He’d been a hard man during the war, when the times called for it. Now, that man was slipping away. “The old hunter in him,” his biographer said, “was gone.”

  Irène finally died of leukemia in March 1956. After thirty years of living with and loving her, Joliot was broken by the loss and died of liver damage two years later. Both their maladies were the result of decades’ worth of exposure to radioactivity. Even in cause of death, the Joliot-Curies remained united.

  After their release from Farm Hall in January 1946, Werner Heisenberg and Carl von Weizsäcker faced some pointed criticism about their conduct during the war—especially about doing fission research for the Third Reich. Oddly, though, what upset Heisenberg most wasn’t the charge that he’d collaborated with a monstrous regime. It was a charge leveled by Goudsmit, that the Germans had failed in part because they didn’t understand the physics of atomic weapons. This insult Heisenberg would not stand for, and he defended his scientific honor vehemently. Goudsmit later admitted that he’d exaggerated the scientific shortcomings of the Uranium Club, but he nevertheless remained baffled that, as he put it, “They find it much worse to be accused of stupidity than of Nazi sympathies.” Historians have since debated the failure of the Nazi atomic bomb program ad nauseam, with some accepting the Heisenberg/Weizsäcker version of events and others finding it self-serving and misleading.

  Regardless, the war did change Heisenberg. The laddish physicist of before disappeared, and a middle-aged man took his place; people made whispered references to the ending of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And although he tried to patch things up with colleagues in other countries, the old warmth between him and his friends had evaporated: stories spread in the 1960s that, whenever Heisenberg visited the CERN particle accelerator, he ate alone at the cafeteria each day. One of his few consolations in old age was that—decades after Weizsäcker’s sister Adelheid had spurned him—his son ended up marrying Adelheid’s daughter, uniting the families at last.

  Heisenberg visited the United States several times after the war, and even called on Samuel Goudsmit once or twice. He always stayed at hotels, however, never Goudsmit’s home. And Goudsmit never could summon up the courage to ask his sometime idol about the tepid letter he’d written in defense of his parents. When Heisenberg died in 1976, Goudsmit penned a generous obituary, concluding, “In my opinion he must be considered… in some respects a victim of the Nazi regime.”

  When the Alsos mission ended, Boris Pash transferred to Tokyo to help the Japanese people transition to democracy. But the old White Russian in him couldn’t resist pulling one over on the Reds while he was there. Shortly after arriving, he learned that the Soviets had hatched a scheme to infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church in Japan by sending over communist agents disguised as bishops. The very idea disgusted Pash, himself the son of an Orthodox holy man, and he outmaneuvered Moscow by arranging for an American bishop to come instead. The Soviets were livid, and when the American bishop arrived to say his first Mass, rumors flared that Russian provocateurs would make trouble at the church, maybe even riot. So Pash made a show of force in response: “I entered… the House of God” that day, he reported in a letter to his father, “with a prayer in my heart and a blackjack in my pocket.” The troublemakers backed down, and the new bishop began his reign in peace.

  In 1946, Coach Pash accepted a teaching job at a Los Angeles high school. But after the thrill of war, teaching had lost its luster, and he eventually quit to join the nascent CIA in Washington. (Unlike Moe Berg, Pash was exactly the sort of professional spook they were looking for.) No one quite knows what Pash did there, although E. Howard Hunt of Watergate infamy later accused him of running a “wet affairs” unit that specialized in liquidations and assassinations in communist Europe. (Pash hotly denied this.) Documents also hinted that Pash was involved in efforts to overthrow the Albanian government, and he reportedly tried to develop a poisoned cigar to knock off Fidel Castro. No charges ever stuck, and after his retirement Pash died at his home in California in May 1995, age ninety-four. Given his murky dealings, both during and after Alsos, latter-day conspiracy theorists have had little trouble linking him to everything from the rise of the Illuminati to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  With his namesake dead, Joseph Kennedy Sr. channeled his political ambitions into his second son, who won the presidency in 1960. But Joe Junior’s spirit was always lurking in the White House. During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy helped enforce the blockade of Cuba with a destroyer named after his brother. And when JFK pledged to put a man on the moon, NASA’s top engineer on the project was none other than Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist whose deadly V-weapons had spooked the Allies into launching the mission that killed Joe in the first place.

  Over the years the Kennedys kept in touch with the family of Bud Willy, the engineer whose faulty arming panel probably doomed the final flight of Zootsuit Black. Willy’s death had left the family destitute, so Kennedy Senior established a college fund to educate his three children. After becoming president, JFK even met Bud Willy’s widow and daughter at a breakfast one morning while visiting Texas in 1963. Dallas, Texas. It was the last breakfast of his life.

  JFK’s favorite ballplayer as a boy, Moe Berg, received several offers to return to the Major Leagues as a coach. He spurned every one of them. Instead he tried to get back into the intelligence game through various freelance gigs for the CIA and NATO, such as interviewing scientists in Europe about missile defense. B
erg being Berg, however, he racked up huge bills in hotels and restaurants on these trips, or blew off meetings in order to, say, eat fondue with Flute in Zurich. Not surprisingly, Berg’s employers didn’t appreciate this lackadaisical attitude (“This operation is going down the toilet,” the CIA once complained), and the freelance gigs began drying up in the 1950s. By then Berg was living with his older brother Sam in Newark, and whenever the postman came, Berg would ask, “Any mail from Washington?” Increasingly, the answer was no.

  Between gigs Berg rarely worked, preferring instead to mooch off people. He treated his brother’s house like a storage unit for books and “live” newspapers, piling them up by the hundreds on tables and chairs and beds. When his brother finally kicked him out, he moved in with his sister, Ethel, a borderline schizophrenic who lived a few blocks away. Berg also traveled relentlessly, buttering up train conductors for free fares and showing up unannounced at the houses of old friends, carrying little more than a razor and a toothbrush. Many a sportswriter checked into his hotel room on the road to find Berg already taking a bath there, having sweet-talked the front desk into letting him in. He accompanied one friend on his honeymoon.

  Things nearly turned around for Berg in the 1960s, when a publisher offered $35,000 for a memoir about his life as an atomic spy. But at some initial meeting, an ignoramus junior editor confused Moe Berg with Moe Howard of The Three Stooges (“I loved all your pictures”), and Berg stomped off in a huff, refusing to write a word. In reality, Berg was probably looking for an excuse to wriggle out of the deal. He’d already tried several times to piece together a memoir, jotting down stray paragraphs on envelopes, napkins, public library slips, train schedules, and page-a-day calendar sheets. (One entry refers to Einstein’s famous equation as m = Ec2. Berg still needed a little tutoring, apparently.) But the scraps never added up to anything coherent, and he finally gave up. However gifted a raconteur, the lonely drudgery of writing was not for him, and it no doubt proved easier to blame a junior editor than to try again and fail.

  Berg continued to mooch off friends and travel, singing for his suppers and swapping stories about Tokyo or Babe Ruth for a place to stay that week. Most of his tales were lighthearted, but among close friends he occasionally delved into darker material. He seemed especially haunted by the near assassination of Werner Heisenberg, and ruminated on those three hours in the freezing lecture hall for the remainder of his life. During one memoir draft, from 1966, he scribbled, “Would I have disposed of them?” Perhaps he didn’t want to think of himself as a coldblooded, deadly-hombre killer. Or perhaps he feared the opposite—that deep down he was a coward and never could have taken Heisenberg out. Regardless, the stress continued to gnaw at him, and he never quite got over Zurich. Once he even showed his brother the cyanide-filled rubber L-capsule he’d taken to the lecture, which he kept his entire life.

  Berg had always had a paranoid streak, and as he got older it became more pronounced. He started cutting off friends for no reason, either refusing to write them or sending cryptic postcards that lacked a return address. (One from Havana read “Castro fiddles while Moe burns.”) He also let his once-impeccable appearance slide: several hosts caught him washing his increasingly seedy suit in their bathroom sinks. The only reliable place to find Berg in later years was at the World Series. Major League Baseball had given him an engraved, silver-plated card that granted him free lifetime admission to any ballpark, and Berg took full advantage. But whenever an old chum spotted him in the stands and waved, he’d put his finger to his lips, whisper shhh, and melt away.

  In May 1972, at age seventy, Berg contracted a viral infection that left him weak and dizzy. A few days later he fell at his sister’s home and struck a low table. He began bleeding internally—his torso looked like one gigantic bruise—and upon admission to the hospital, his heart began failing. He died shortly after. His last words, spoken to a nurse, were, “How’d the Mets do today?”

  After the war in Europe, Samuel Goudsmit found the prospect of returning to Michigan dreadful—it seemed too dull, too provincial. He eventually accepted a job at the Brookhaven particle accelerator in New York, where he continued to research and became editor of Physical Review Letters. Beyond science, he served as an advisor for Upton Sinclair’s novel O Shepherd, Speak!, about an Alsos-like mission in Europe. He also revived his love of ancient Egypt by writing an introductory hieroglyphics text (Ramses’s First Reader) and by developing a scheme to search for hidden chambers inside the pyramids at Giza with cosmic rays (nothing ever came of it).

  “I sometimes look back, a bad habit,” he wrote his daughter in 1973, “and am surprised… that so many of my infantile childhood dreams have come true, but not the more important mature wishes.” Among the infantile dreams, he mentioned studying Egyptology and “indulg[ing] in secret intelligence operations.” But he never did secure a prestigious physics post in Europe. And while his fellow physicists nominated him forty-eight times for the Nobel Prize, the award always eluded him. Most disappointing of all, he lived long enough to see himself forgotten in some circles, his worst fear. In 1977 a branch of the American Physical Society held a special meeting to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of quantum spin, his great discovery. Yet neither Goudsmit nor his old partner George Uhlenbeck received an invitation; they weren’t even mentioned during the program. No wonder that, as Goudsmit wrote his daughter, “I am very depressed about my retirement.” You can’t help but wonder sometimes, reading Goudsmit’s letters, whether his melancholy and cynicism might be an act, a put-on. This is not one of those times.

  As he got older, Goudsmit increasingly took refuge in friendships. Whenever he could, he attended the Alsos reunions that took place every few autumns in Washington, D.C. The old troops would attend a boozy party Friday night, then hit the links Saturday morning for a golf scramble; the winners claimed the coveted Pash Cup. Goudsmit also grew quite close to Moe Berg, whom he considered one of the few “real friends” he ever had, “someone with whom you can discuss everything, no matter how personal.” One personal matter they discussed was Goudsmit’s wife. After years of disenchantment—foreshadowed by her refusal to write him letters during the war, no matter how much he begged—Goudsmit decided to divorce her. They were already living apart, and he established part-time residency in Nevada to expedite the process. She resisted, however, and when it came time to serve her papers, she refused to reveal her address. All Goudsmit knew was that she lived on Cape Cod and that he sent a monthly check to a bank in Boston. So he paid Berg $100 to dust off his old spy tricks and track her down. Berg got friendly with a Cape Cod sheriff and postmistress and found her in no time.

  But as Berg did with everyone, he eventually cut Goudsmit out of his life and stopped answering his letters. No one knew why, Goudsmit least of all. He began writing desperate messages to Berg’s brother and other acquaintances, begging for news. Aware that Berg loved newspaper puzzles, Goudsmit also crafted a cryptogram and sold it to the New York Herald; when solved, it read “Moe Berg, where are you?” Berg never responded, and the breach left Goudsmit despondent. He’d already lost the friendship of Werner Heisenberg to the war. Now Moe Berg had slipped away, too.

  It wasn’t just friendships that the war upended. Goudsmit believed that physics itself had changed, and not for the better. Before the war physicists were nobodies—benignly neglected savants putzing about in the lab, blissfully ignorant of the larger world. After the war—in large part because of atomic bombs—physics was too important to leave to the physicists. Generals and politicians got involved, and annual budgets ballooned to millions of dollars. Gone were the days of “string and sealing wax,” as Goudsmit put it, when experiments were cheap and rickety, and two bozo graduate students could stumble into a fundamental discovery like quantum spin.

  A colleague of Goudsmit’s once observed that “Sam never did recover the very light touch that he had before the war,” and you could say the same of almost everyone wrapped up in atomic espionag
e—the Joliot-Curies, Werner Heisenberg, Moe Berg, the Kennedys. Fission was one of the seminal discoveries of twentieth-century physics, but it proved as much a social phenomenon as a scientific one. In their desperation to keep the Bomb away from a madman, Allied scientists inaugurated a new kind of madness: the madness of heavy-water raids and geological commandos, of assassinations and radioactive toothpaste—not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At every step, the men and women involved believed they were doing the right thing. But in splitting the atom, they’d riven the world.

  A general note: We didn’t have room in the book for all the great pictures out there, so I’ve made them available on my website instead. Visit http://samkean.com/books/the-bastard-brigade/extras/photos/

  Polyglot Moe Berg, a former Major League Baseball catcher, would become America’s first atomic spy. (Photo courtesy Baseball Hall of Fame)

  No matter how cluttered things got, Moe Berg never let anyone touch his “live” newspapers. (Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Moe Berg collection)

  Lou Gehrig (right), Babe Ruth (center), and Moe Berg (next to Ruth, staring at the camera) traveled to Japan in 1934 on an all-star baseball team. Ruth starred on the diamond, while Berg took the opportunity to spy. (Photo courtesy Charlie A. Barokas Collection)

  A young Irène Joliot-Curie works in the lab with her mother, Marie Curie. (Photo courtesy Wellcome Library, Wellcome Images)