These were sensible precautions, but the truth is that Groves had more than safety on his mind. Many of Groves’s intelligence officers still didn’t trust the Los Alamos director. They believed he was secretly a Communist, and perhaps even in touch with Soviet agents. They wanted him under constant surveillance.
Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents hid microphones in Oppenheimer’s office. They listened in on his phone calls and read his mail. Even Oppenheimer’s personal driver and bodyguard—the one Groves insisted he have—was actually an undercover agent. Oppenheimer sensed he was being watched, but he never guessed how closely.
On June 12, he traveled to Berkeley to recruit more brains for Los Alamos. CIC agents followed him every step of the way.
LABORATORY NUMBER 2
BY EARLY 1943, the Soviet army had finally halted the massive German invasion just short of the Soviet cities of Stalingrad, Moscow, and Leningrad. “The greatest military achievement in all history,” praised Douglas MacArthur, a top American general.
But the fighting raged on, with some of the biggest battles in the history of war taking place on the blood-soaked Soviet soil that spring. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier, called desperately for the Americans and British to launch an invasion of German-held Western Europe. This would force Hitler to fight on two fronts, taking pressure off the Soviets.
President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Stalin it was coming. American and British troops were just beginning their attack on Germany’s ally, Italy. And American forces were locked in ferocious battles with Japan all over the Pacific. A major invasion of Western Europe was still a year away.
Americans continued shipping weapons to the Soviets, but the atomic bomb remained a secret. In fact, Roosevelt and Churchill signed a special agreement, vowing to keep it that way. It was the job of Army Counter-Intelligence to guard the world’s most dangerous secret—not just from the Germans, but from the Soviets as well. So CIC officers were determined to investigate any suspicious behavior.
Especially when it came from the director of Los Alamos.
*
ON JUNE 14, CIC agents tailed Oppenheimer onto a train heading from Berkeley to San Francisco. At the San Francisco station, they watched as Oppenheimer was greeted by a tall woman with dark hair. They recognized her as Jean Tatlock, a former girlfriend of Oppenheimer’s and a member of the Communist Party.
Oppenheimer and Tatlock walked arm in arm to Tatlock’s car, got in, and drove off. The agents followed the car to a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco. Oppenheimer and Tatlock went inside, had dinner and drinks, then drove to her apartment, and entered together. The agents sat in their car, watching the windows. Tatlock’s lights went out at 11:30. “Oppenheimer was not observed until 8:30 a.m. next day,” the agents reported, “when he and Jean Tatlock left the building together.”
The agents sent their report to Lt. Colonel Boris Pash, the top army intelligence officer on the West Coast. He’d already suspected Oppenheimer of disloyalty. Now he was seriously alarmed.
Pash reported to General Groves’s office in Washington, D.C., suggesting that the “subject still is or may be connected with the Communist Party.” Pash believed that Oppenheimer was either handing secrets directly to the Soviets, “or he may be making that information available to his other contacts”—Jean Tatlock, for instance.
Pash strongly recommended that Oppenheimer “be removed completely from the project and dismissed from employment by the U.S. Government.”
Groves refused. He had no idea what Oppenheimer and Tatlock had been up to in her apartment. He didn’t want to know. He trusted Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Besides, his number one worry was to build an atomic bomb before Hitler did. For this, he said, “Oppenheimer is irreplaceable.”
“If anything happens to Oppenheimer,” he added, “the project will be set back at least six months.”
Groves’s word was final. But if Army Counter-Intelligence couldn’t get rid of Oppenheimer, they could certainly let him know how they felt.
“In the future, please avoid seeing your questionable friends,” Colonel Kenneth Nichols told Oppenheimer. “And remember, whenever you leave Los Alamos, we will be tailing you.”
This frightened Oppenheimer. He had no idea how long intelligence agents had been following him, or what they already knew about his private life. Suddenly worried about losing his position at Los Alamos, he decided to tell Colonel Pash about the time, six months earlier, that his friend Haakon Chevalier had approached him about sharing information with the Soviets. Oppenheimer repeated the brief conversation he had had with Chevalier. He assured Pash the subject had not come up again.
Oppenheimer hoped this confession would convince Pash of his loyalty. Instead, Pash was more suspicious than ever. Had the Chevalier meeting really been that innocent? Pash wondered. If so, why did Oppenheimer wait so long to tell us about it?
Pash dashed off another memo to Groves, this time accusing Oppenheimer of “playing a key part in the attempts of the Soviet Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the security of the United States.”
Again, Groves defended the man he’d chosen.
*
ARMY COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE and the FBI still believed Oppenheimer was sneaking information to the Soviets. There’s no evidence that he was. Soviet memos and cables from the time show that the KGB never gave up hope of cultivating Oppenheimer—but never made any progress, either.
Meanwhile, the Soviet atomic bomb project was moving ahead. In mid 1943, the Soviet government established “Laboratory Number 2,” a secret lab in the pine woods outside Moscow. The job of building the Soviet bomb was put in the hands of a forty-year-old physicist named Igor Kurchatov.
With resources short during wartime, Kurchatov and his team badly needed help from Soviet spies. Intelligence was still coming in from Klaus Fuchs in Britain, and it was good stuff. “The material as a whole,” reported Kurchatov, “shows that it is technically possible to solve the entire uranium problem in a much shorter period than our scientists believed.”
But what Kurchatov really needed was specific information on bomb design, and there was only one place to get it. “It is extremely important,” he said, “to receive detailed technical material on this problem from America.”
In Moscow, KGB officers were intensely frustrated by how little they’d uncovered about the Manhattan Project. “In the presence of this research work,” Moscow cabled its spies in America, “vast both in scale and scope, being conducted right here next to you, the slow pace of agent cultivation in the USA is particularly intolerable.”
What exactly were the Americans doing? The Soviets would never know—not until the KGB could get a scientist inside the Manhattan Project.
Then, in late 1943, the KGB got its first big break. It happened because the work at Los Alamos was proving even more difficult than Oppenheimer had expected. He needed more talent, and fast. The British government agreed to send Oppenheimer a team of top physicists.
In November Klaus Fuchs sailed for America.
*
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Harry Gold got a call from his KGB contact, Semyon Semyonov. Gold was needed in New York City right away.
Gold hurried to the meeting place, a dark restaurant. He saw right away that Sam was “extremely excited—more so than I had ever seen him before.”
Gold asked if this had something to do with the industrial spies he’d been picking up information from over the past couple of years.
“Forget them,” Semyonov said. “Forget everything you ever knew about them. You are never to see them or meet them or have anything to do with them again.”
Gold was too stunned to respond.
“Something has come up,” the Russian continued, “and it is so big and so tremendous that you have got to exert your complete efforts to carrying it through successfully. You have got to concentrate on it completely. Before you make a single mo
ve in connection with this, you are to think, think twice, think three times. You cannot make any mistakes.”
FERRY JOB
FOR MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK on the heavy water plant at Vemork, Knut Haukelid stayed hidden in the mountains of Norway. “It was an uncommonly hard winter,” he later said, “with vast amounts of snow.”
German troops swarmed the area in search of the saboteurs. Haukelid and Arne Kjelstrup managed to stay a step ahead of them, but game was scarce in the barren, snowy mountains. Cold weather causes the body to burn calories quickly in an attempt to create heat. Haukelid and Kjelstrup simply couldn’t find the calories.
“One day I managed to kill a squirrel with my skiing stick,” remembered Haukelid. “When I ate him, he was just as miserably thin and undernourished as we were.”
They starved through winter and into spring, dodging German patrols, waiting for their next job.
“When this war is over,” said Kjelstrup after yet another unsatisfying meal, “I shall spend all my money on food. I shan’t spend any on girls.”
Haukelid licked his long-since empty spoon.
“Same here,” he said.
*
FROM HIS OFFICE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., General Leslie Groves followed the news from Norway. “The first reports on this action were most encouraging,” said Groves of the Gunnerside raid. The heavy water equipment had been destroyed, dealing a serious blow to German bomb research.
But by the summer of 1943 things had changed. Sources inside the Vemork plant—Norwegian workers who fed information to the resistance network—reported that the Germans were furiously rebuilding the equipment. In August, Vemork again began shipping heavy water to Germany, under heavy guard.
Groves was alarmed. If the Germans wanted heavy water that badly, he figured, they must be using it in their atomic bomb program. The supply must be cut off.
Just before noon on November 16, about a hundred U.S. Air Force bombers appeared two miles above the Vemork plant. Prepared for an air raid, German soldiers turned on smoke machines, which clouded the blue sky. The bombers released seven hundred bombs into the gorge on which the Vemork plant was perched.
The five-hundred-pound bombs exploded all over the gorge and the nearby town of Rjukan. One hit a bomb shelter, killing sixteen Norwegians. Several landed around Vemork, with just two hitting the heavy water plant. The high concentration room, deep in the basement of the steel and concrete structure, was unscratched.
Yet the bombing was a success, in an unexpected way. German authorities realized their precious heavy water would never be safe in Norway.
In early February 1944, more news reached London and Washington: The Germans were beginning to empty the heavy water machines. All the heavy water—far more than had ever been shipped before—was being loaded into barrels. Very soon it would be taken to Germany.
Groves demanded that those barrels be stopped before reaching German soil. British intelligence gave the job to the man in Norway with the most experience in sabotage: Knut Haukelid.
*
HAUKELID ENLISTED the help of another underground fighter, Rolf Sörlie. In need of much more information, the two snuck into Rjukan, the town near the Vemork plant. In the dark street, they met Kjell Nielsen, an engineer at the plant, and a man they knew could be trusted.
“Haukelid was awful to look at,” Nielsen later said, “with a dense beard, and marked by the tough life in the mountains.”
They hurried to Nielsen’s rented room and went inside to talk. Yes, Nielsen confirmed, about forty large barrels were being filled with heavy water. In a few days, they’d be loaded onto railway cars and taken by train from the plant. At Lake Tinn, the rail cars would slide onto a ferryboat for the trip down the long, narrow waterway. Then the cars would continue by rail to the coast, where the barrels would be transferred to a ship and taken across the North Sea to Germany.
The Germans knew an attack was likely. The barrels would travel under heavy guard, and German planes would fly overhead to watch the land on either side of the tracks.
Haukelid relayed the details to British intelligence in London, saying that the job would be tricky and might result in the loss of civilian lives.
“Case considered,” came the immediate reply from London. “Very urgent that heavy water be destroyed. Hope this can be done without too serious consequences. Send our best wishes for good luck in the work.”
*
HAUKELID GAVE SÖRLIE a quick course in sabotage and explosives. In need of a third man for the job, they recruited Knut Lier-Hansen, a surveyor who lived in Rjukan. “A tough young fellow who did not know what nerves meant,” was how Sörlie described Lier-Hansen. “Seldom have I seen anyone become so enthusiastic at the prospect of being involved in an action that might be dangerous.”
In a series of secret meetings, each in a different location, the three men reviewed their options. One was to try another Gunnerside-style commando raid. This was unlikely to succeed, since the Germans now had extra soldiers on patrol. If Haukelid could gather a trained crew of twenty or thirty, he’d give it a try. “But the time was too short for that,” he said.
Another option was to lay dynamite on the track and blow up the train somewhere along the route. But could they plant the charges without being spotted? What if the Germans sent scouts ahead of the train to inspect the rails? Would the explosion be certain to destroy the heavy water? “There were so many unknown factors that we had to give up the plan,” said Haukelid.
They went over the route again—and spotted the weak link. At Lake Tinn, the train cars would be loaded onto a ferryboat. If they could sink the boat over the deepest part of the lake, the barrels of heavy water would come to rest 1,300 feet below the surface.
The Vemork engineer Kjell Nielsen got Haukelid the word. The shipment would be traveling in a few days: Sunday morning, February 20.
Haukelid dressed as a workman and walked around the docks on Lake Tinn. He found out that a boat called Hydro would be used Sunday morning. He bought a ticket and traveled down the lake on Hydro, leaning over the rail, with one eye on the minute hand of his watch.
Thirty minutes after leaving the dock, the boat was over the deepest part of the lake.
*
AT 1:00 A.M. ON FEBRUARY 20, Lier-Hansen parked his car under a clump of trees about a mile from the ferry dock. He cut the headlights, and he, Haukelid, and Sörlie got out and started toward the water with guns, grenades, and explosives hidden under their long coats.
“The bitterly cold night set everything creaking and crackling,” recalled Haukelid. “The ice on the road snapped sharply as we went over it.”
They saw the Hydro tied up at the dark dock. From scouting the area, they knew there were about thirty German guards at the nearby railway station. There was no one guarding the waterfront.
The men hurried along the dock and jumped onto the boat. Sounds of shouting and laughing rose from the crew’s quarters below deck. “Almost the entire ship’s crew was gathered together below,” Haukelid said, “playing poker rather noisily.”
Haukelid led the way down ladders to a hatch leading to the bilge—the ship’s lowest compartment. As he opened the hatch he heard footsteps approaching. The men dove behind chairs as the Norwegian night watchman walked up. Lier-Hansen recognized the watchman and stepped out.
“You here, Knut?” asked the startled guard.
“Yes, John,” said Lier-Hansen. “With some friends.”
Haukelid and Sörlie stepped out from their hiding places. The guard looked them over.
“Hell, John, we’re expecting a raid,” Lier-Hansen improvised, hoping the guard would assume they needed to hide supplies from the Germans—and hoping he’d sympathize.
The guard pointed to the hatch leading to the bilge, and said, “No problem.”
*
LIER-HANSEN STAYED ABOVE, chatting with the guard, while Haukelid and Sörlie climbed into the bilge.
“It was an anxious job,” H
aukelid remembered, “and it took time.”
Through the freezing, foot-deep water sloshing around at the ship’s bottom, they crawled to the front of the ferry. Blowing a hole here, they knew, would cause water to rush in. The front of the boat would sink, forcing the back to rise out of the lake. The ship’s propeller would spin uselessly in the air.
Haukelid pulled the bomb out from under his long coat—nineteen pounds of plastic explosive molded into a long sausage shape. He and Sörlie taped it to the ship’s metal side. Near the explosive they taped two specially adapted alarm clocks—two, just in case one malfunctioned. The clocks were connected by wire to four flashlight batteries.
Then came the dangerous part: connecting the fuse between the clocks and the explosive. Each clock had a little metal hammer that rang its alarm bell. The bells had been removed, but the hammers were still in place. When the hammer hit a metal plate on the clock, electricity would flow from the batteries through the clocks to the fuses, igniting the explosive. Each bell hammer was set just one-third of an inch above the metal plate. “There was a one-third of an inch between us and disaster,” said Haukelid.
Haukelid wound the clocks. He set the alarms to ring at 10:45. He and Sörlie could hear the clocks ticking as they scurried back toward the hatch.
They passed the guard again on their way off the ship. If the man was curious about why they’d taken so long to hide supplies, he showed no sign.
“You on watch now?” Haukelid asked casually.
“Yes,” said the guard, “but I go off when the train arrives.”
Haukelid smiled and said, “Lucky man.”
*
A FEW HOURS LATER, German soldiers lashed flat train cars carrying forty barrels of heavy water to the deck of the Hydro. The ferry pulled away from the dock at 10:15, right on time. There were fifty-three people aboard, about half of them Norwegian civilians. For the first half hour, the lake crossing was routine.
The captain was on the bridge, enjoying the cold, clear morning when he heard the explosion. He knew right away it was a bomb.
Bomb Page 9
