EARLY IN 1942, a young Soviet physicist named Georgi Flerov sat in the library of a military base in southwestern Russia, flipping through a tall stack of physics journals from the United States. When the Germans invaded, Flerov had put his studies aside to serve in the Soviet air force. But he couldn’t stop thinking about fission. So when he had a free moment, he snuck off to the library to read of the newest discoveries.
“I hoped to look through the latest papers on the fission of uranium,” he said. Up until that point, American physics magazines had been filled with articles on new experiments and theories about fission.
Suddenly there was nothing.
“This silence is not the result of an absence of research,” Flerov warned his government. “In a word, the seal of silence has been imposed, and this is the best proof of the vigorous work that is going on now abroad.”
Flerov guessed right. The work being done by Oppenheimer and others on the Uranium Committee was top secret. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II. But that’s because they were fighting common enemies—not because they liked each other.
Even more distressing to Flerov was the idea of a German atomic bomb. Germany had “first-class scientists,” he said, “and significant supplies of uranium ore.” If Hitler got his hands on atomic bombs, that would be the end of the Soviet Union.
To Soviet physicists like Flerov, this made it vitally important that the Soviet Union develop its own atomic bomb. But the war was making this impossible. Russian forces stopped the German advance just short of Moscow, but the two massive armies were still slugging it out along a battlefront stretching 1,500 miles from north to south. Soviet scientists had to abandon fission experiments to work instead on weapons that could be used right away.
The message to Soviet leaders was clear. If the Soviets were going to get an atomic bomb any time in the near future, they were going to have to steal it.
*
THIS WAS A JOB FOR THE KGB.
In March 1942, Semyon Semyonov and his fellow KGB agents in New York got a coded telegram from Moscow headquarters explaining the task. “Germany and the USA are frantically working to obtain uranium,” Moscow warned, “and use it as an explosive to make bombs of enormous destructive power, and to all appearances, this problem is quite close to practical solution. It is essential that we take up this problem in all seriousness.”
Soviet spies in American cities began working on what they called “agent cultivation.” In tradecraft, “cultivation” means gathering information on a potential source, feeling him out to see if he might be convinced to cooperate. This was a tough task, since Soviet agents didn’t know which American scientists were working on the atomic bomb.
Suddenly, in late March, the KGB got a break. One night, on the New York City subway, a KGB courier named Zalmond Franklin ran into an old friend, Clarence Hiskey. Hiskey was a chemist and professor at Columbia University. The two had gone to college together in the 1930s. Both had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and members of the Communist Party.
The friends went to dinner and talked over old times. “He decided to walk me to the subway,” Franklin reported to his KGB contact. “Our conversation on the way is what leads to the reason for this report.”
As they strolled, Hiskey shocked Franklin by saying: “Imagine a bomb dropped in the center of this city, which would destroy the entire city.”
Franklin laughed.
“There is such a bomb,” Hiskey blurted out. “I’m working on it.”
Trying to appear only casually interested, Franklin asked for a few more details.
Hiskey explained that he and other scientists were “working with desperate haste” to build an atomic bomb. It would be the most powerful weapon ever produced. The Germans, he added, were probably “far ahead on the bomb.”
Then, after this burst of top-secret information, Hiskey went silent.
“Hiskey was sorry he told me about this,” Franklin reported, “and swore me to silence.”
*
VASILY ZARUBIN, the top KGB agent in New York City, telegraphed Franklin’s report to headquarters in Moscow. Moscow responded quickly, telling Zarubin the information “is of great interest to us,” and attaching a long list of technical questions about fission and bomb making. Zarubin gave the list to Franklin, ordering Franklin to get answers from his friend.
Franklin went to Hiskey’s apartment but faced a major obstacle: Hiskey’s wife was there. Franklin was under strict KGB orders not to discuss the subject of atomic bombs in front of anyone but Hiskey.
The three sat down to dinner. “At no time did Clarence bring up the subject of his work,” Franklin reported, “and following instructions, I did not mention the subject.” After the meal, Franklin tried to get Hiskey alone, with no success. “His wife was present the entire evening,” explained Franklin.
That proved to be Franklin’s one and only chance. Hiskey was soon transferred to the University of Chicago. When a Soviet agent in Chicago made contact with Hiskey, the meeting was observed by FBI agents. The FBI informed the U.S. Army that Hiskey had been spotted with a suspected Soviet agent. Hiskey suddenly found himself drafted into the army and shipped to a remote military base in the Northwest Territories of Canada—far from atomic bomb secrets.
Hiskey was never given an explanation. He knew better than to ask for one.
*
HISKEY’S STORY illustrates just how hard it was for Soviet spies to get at American secrets. “It was difficult because we always felt we were under FBI surveillance,” said KGB agent Alexander Feklisov. “From the moment I arrived in New York, I was always shadowed as soon as I stepped outside.”
Still, the Soviets were absolutely determined to steal the bomb. It was such a high priority, they code named the project “Enormoz”—Russian for “enormous.”
But Enormoz could go nowhere until the KGB got a reliable source inside the American bomb project. With this goal in mind, Moscow headquarters made up a list of top American scientists to target for cultivation. “Of the leads we have,” Moscow informed its agents in the United States, “we should consider it essential to cultivate the following people.”
Then came the names. The people on the list were all top scientists the Soviets suspected might be in on the bomb work. They were all known to have been sympathetic to communism before the war.
The first name on the list was Robert Oppenheimer.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes Prime Minister Winston Churchill for a drive in Hyde Park, New York, during a later visit by the prime minister, September 3, 1943.
ON THE CLIFF
ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt sat in the driver’s seat of his Ford convertible, parked beside an airstrip in Hyde Park, New York. He watched a small U.S. Army plane descend toward the runway. The plane hit the ground hard, bounced several times, and rattled to a stop.
The plane door opened, and out hopped Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, a fat cigar in his hand. Roosevelt smiled and waved. Churchill walked over to the car and got into the passenger seat. The two leaders shook hands warmly. Then Roosevelt gunned his car engine and sped off.
“He took me to the majestic bluffs over the Hudson River on which Hyde Park, his family home, stands,” Churchill remembered. But as the car raced along the edge of the cliff, the prime minister had a tough time keeping his mind on the gorgeous view. He kept glancing over at the American, wondering how exactly the man was controlling the vehicle. Roosevelt had had polio as a young man and had lost the use of his legs.
Roosevelt saw the worry on his friend’s face. He explained that he’d had this car specially rigged, allowing him to work the gas, clutch, and brakes with his hands—while also steering, of course. Churchill was impressed, but still terrified. Smiling, Roosevelt assured Churchill his arms were more than strong enough to do the job.
“He invited me to feel his biceps,” Churchill recalled, �
�saying that a famous prize-fighter had envied them. This was reassuring.”
As Roosevelt drove, the two men began talking over the state of the war. “And though I was careful not to take his attention off the driving,” Churchill said, “we made more progress than we might have done in a formal conference.”
*
LATER THAT DAY the conversation continued in a small office inside Roosevelt’s family mansion. They focused on the subject Churchill called “overwhelmingly the most important”—the race to build an atomic bomb. British and American scientists were both exploring the science. Both had come to the conclusion that a fission bomb was technically possible.
“I strongly urged that we should at once pool all our information, work together on equal terms, and share the results, if any, equally between us,” Churchill said of the meeting.
Roosevelt agreed. The project would be enormously expensive, they knew, and it would mean pulling top scientists off other high-priority weapons projects. It was worth the risk, they decided. With Britain still under attack from German bombers, they agreed the actual work of building a bomb would be done in America.
There had been a lot of talk so far, and some research. Now it was time for action. “We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing,” Churchill recalled. “What if the enemy should get an atomic bomb before we did!”
*
THREE MONTHS LATER, a six foot, two-hundred-fifty-pound army colonel named Leslie Groves was walking down the hallway of a congressional office building on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. Groves had one thing on his mind: getting out of Washington. “I was,” he later said, “like every other regular officer, extremely eager for service abroad as a commander of combat troops.”
When he saw General Brehon Somervell walking toward him, Groves stopped. The men were alone in the hall.
“The secretary of war has selected you for a very important assignment,” Somervell told Groves. “The president has approved the selection.”
“Where?” asked Groves.
“Washington.”
“I don’t want to stay in Washington.”
“If you do the job right, it will win the war.”
Groves felt his heart sink. He’d heard rumors about a project to build some kind of super-bomb. He was not impressed.
“Oh,” he sighed. “That thing.”
“You can do it,” Somervell assured him. “If it can be done.”
*
FORTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD LESLIE GROVES was an engineer by training. He’d just finished managing the construction of the Pentagon, the biggest office building in the world. Groves brought the job in on time and on budget. As a reward he was put in charge of the atomic bomb project.
“My initial reaction was one of extreme disappointment,” he confessed.
Groves was a big man, with a big personality—loud, bossy, demanding, quick to criticize. “He had no hesitation in letting others know of his own high opinion of himself,” said one former staff member.
Another put it simply: “Groves is the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for.”
And yet everyone agreed that to lead a huge project, involving the juggling of dozens of complex tasks, Groves was the right choice.
“If I can’t do the job,” said Groves, “no one man can.”
In meetings over the next few days, Groves was given the complete picture. Roosevelt wanted the U.S. Army to take over the atomic bomb project—code named the Manhattan Project, because its first offices were located in Manhattan. It was Groves’s job to make sure the bomb got built quickly, and in complete secrecy. Groves was promoted to general and took command of the Manhattan Project on September 18, 1942.
“I was not happy with the information,” Groves grumbled about what he’d learned so far. “In fact, I was horrified. It seemed as if the whole endeavor was founded on possibilities rather than probabilities. Of theory there was a great deal, of proven knowledge not much.”
When Groves met with Uranium Committee members in Chicago, they told him it would take somewhere between ten and one thousand pounds of uranium to make an atomic bomb. The wide range infuriated Groves. It would be like trying to plan a wedding, he shouted, and telling the caterer, “We don’t know how many guests are coming—maybe somewhere between ten and a thousand—but see to it that you have the right amount of food for them!”
Groves knew he could handle the planning and logistics. The problem was, he was going to have to rely on physicists to figure out how to build the bomb. Groves needed to quickly gather a team of the best scientists in the country—and he needed to pick someone to lead it.
*
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER WANTED THE JOB.
Oppenheimer first met Groves on October 8, on the Berkeley campus. Groves was traveling around the country, meeting people who’d been working on the Uranium Committee. He and Oppenheimer chatted at lunch, then Oppenheimer invited Groves back to his office for a longer talk.
Oppenheimer laid out his vision for getting the bomb built. Work was being done at universities all over the country, he told Groves. Scientists were wasting time doing the same things on different campuses. And, because of security worries, they weren’t allowed to share information over the phone or by mail. That had to end.
“A major change was called for in the work on the bomb itself,” Oppenheimer later explained. “We needed a central laboratory devoted wholly to this purpose, where people could talk freely with each other.”
Groves was impressed. “He’s a genius, a real genius,” Groves told a reporter years later. “Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly, I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”
Groves also liked the fact that Oppenheimer had been born in the United States. Most of the top physicists in the country were from Europe. That made it nearly impossible to carefully check their backgrounds, to make sure they could be trusted with American secrets.
But Oppenheimer presented problems, too. “No one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director of the project,” Groves lamented. First of all, he was a famously absent-minded scientist, living in an abstract world of ideas and numbers. Could he really be a disciplined, focused team leader? Probably not, said most who knew him.
“He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people,” said the German-born physicist Hans Bethe. A Berkeley colleague put it more bluntly: “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand.”
Groves had a gut feeling Oppenheimer could rise to the challenge. The more he thought about it—and the more potential candidates he met—the more convinced he became that he wanted Oppenheimer. But there was a bigger problem.
Oppenheimer couldn’t work on the Manhattan Project until he got security clearance from the army. Thanks to a report from the FBI, army intelligence officers knew all about Oppenheimer’s past associations with Communists. Oppenheimer shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the most dangerous secret in the world, argued the FBI, because he might leak the information to his Communist friends, and from there, to the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer insisted he was a loyal American. He swore he’d never actually joined the Communist Party and that, in any case, his interest in Communism was a thing of the past.
Groves believed him. FBI agents and army intelligence officers did not.
Groves made the call. “It is desired that clearance be issued for the employment of Robert Oppenheimer without delay,” ordered Groves. “He is absolutely essential to the project.”
Oppenheimer was given an army physical—and failed. Nearly six feet tall, he weighed just 128 pounds. His chain smoking gave him a chronic cough, causing army doctors to declare him “permanently incapacitated for active service.” Again, Groves pulled rank. He ordered the doctors to make Oppenheimer eligible for active duty.
Oppenheimer wasn’t fit to be a soldier, Grove
s acknowledged. But he just might be able to win the war.
INTERNATIONAL GANGSTER SCHOOL
WHEN KNUT HAUKELID stepped off the train in London, he was met immediately by two British officers. They knew Haukelid had been battling the Germans in Norway and had barely gotten out alive. They had special orders for him.
Haukelid climbed into a car with the British officers, and they drove though a city battered by German bombs. “Ruined houses and bombed blocks of flats made gaps in the vista,” remembered Haukelid. “One area in the heart of the city was just a desert of ruins. Only the street remained, running empty and purposeless between heaps of fallen masonry.”
Haukelid was taken to meet with an officer of the Special Operations Executive. The S.O.E. was a secret British organization tasked with carrying out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines all over Europe.
The S.O.E. officer suggested that perhaps Haukelid would be interested in returning to Norway on a secret mission.
“Can I have more instruction in the use of weapons?” Haukelid asked.
“Yes,” said the officer. “There’s a section which is just the thing for you.”
Haukelid was sent to a remote spot in the south of England and enrolled in Special Training School No. 3. The Germans, who’d heard rumors about the place, called it “International Gangster School.”
“From a purely practical standpoint,” Haukelid conceded, “they were undoubtedly right.”
*
“HERE I FOUND nearly thirty Norwegian boys from all parts of the country,” Haukelid said of Special Training School No. 3. The men all had one goal in mind: to get back home and liberate their country from the Germans.
“This is the only friend you can rely on,” said their instructor, holding up a pistol. “Treat him properly, and he’ll take care of you.”
The men were taught to pick locks, crack safes, set booby traps, and use poison. They were taught to kill with their hands and feet.
“Never give a man a chance,” the instructor told them. “If you’ve got him down, kick him to death.”
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