A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Weizmann later confided to Stephenson his fear that the threat was not taken seriously enough. “The two men would take long walks through Central Park,” said Herb Rowland. “They were lost in the Manhattan crowds and used to cut across to watch the squirrels, or so we thought. We’d never heard, never suspected, that an ultimate weapon hung over us.”

  Weizmann recalled stopping at Schwarz’s toyshop on Fifth Avenue one crisp spring day. “There was a construction kit on display for schoolboys. Bill said, ‘Once the Germans know how to do it, they’ll put it together like one of those toy cranes, patiently screwing the nuts and bolts together until they’ve completed it, totally absorbed in the task, like children indifferent to the pain they cause.’

  “I had to point out that not all German scientists were insensitive. I quoted Professor Willstatter, who, although the leading German chemist of his time, refused to be involved.

  “Stephenson peered into Schwarz’s window and shrugged. ‘He did not refuse. He ran off. That leaves the rest free to play.’ ”

  It was harsh but true. Hitler had boasted of a secret weapon against which there was no defense: a weapon his enemies did not have. German scientists who rebelled against this perversion of their work were obliged to escape or lose their positions. Some who might have put up a dumb resistance, including Werner Heisenberg and C. F. von Weizsäcker, were among Bohr’s visitors in Copenhagen. It was said that they submitted a secret plan to prevent the development of the bomb—an underground agreement with Allied physicists. “These stories were untrue,” said Aage Bohr. “Every contact with German scientists strengthened the impression that the German authorities attached great military importance to atomic energy.”*

  So many reports of German secret weapons had been floated by Hitler that it was difficult to assign a priority to this one. Shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, the Führer had said, “Do not deceive yourselves. The moment may come when we shall use a weapon which is not yet known and with which we ourselves could not be attacked.” The British Foreign Secretary at that time, Lord Halifax, noted: “The implication is that . . . Hitler is determined to resort to frightfulness.” In the following month, October 1939, the British Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee considered a list of “weapons with which Germany has been experimenting,” from gliding torpedoes to rockets and “the use of atomic energy as high explosive.” The intelligence chiefs decided that Hitler meant that he would break Britain by the use of air power and “possibly bombs containing a new and secret explosive.”

  When the first conventional bombs fell on London, the British Chiefs of Staff received a report that heavy-water production was being increased again in Norway. Leif Tronstad, destined to die at the hands of a traitor, began seriously to plan Norsk Hydro’s destruction. Many others were to die in the repeated attempts to sabotage this seemingly inaccessible plant.

  There were several secret projects in hand. In Copenhagen, under German eyes, Bohr was swept forward by his own enthusiasm toward a goal that for him meant unlocking fresh mysteries; whereas for the Nazis it meant the key to atomic power. In Stockholm, a Baker Street/SIS station gathered information from Bohr and from Norsk Hydro. Copies of Stockholm bulletins went to Stephenson, who had started the training of agents and a new “school for danger” in the Canadian wilderness, where saboteurs could prepare for a suicidal mission.

  “The western coast of Norway, because of its many indentations, was hard to guard,” said Stephenson later. “Thousands of fjords made the actual length ten thousand miles and so the Germans threw a cordon around the coastal waters. I was looking for American speedboats to run the blockade—eventually they ran with clockwork efficiency between enemy territory and the Shetland Isles, where an uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson had built the lighthouse from which the boats now took bearings. They were so regular, we called the service ‘The Shetland Bus.’ ”

  Odd Starheim, a Norwegian shipowner’s son, escaped to Scotland in a small boat and returned to Norway as a trained agent before the Shetland Bus went into operation. His mission was code-named CHEESE. He began transmitting reports on enemy naval operations while waiting for the moment when he could break through Nazi security around the Norsk Hydro plant. The Gestapo’s radio detectors began closing in on Starheim after he had located the German warships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, waiting to sail into the Atlantic as fast raiders. His hide-out in a farmhouse sixty miles from the German naval base at Kristiansand was surrounded. His courier, a striking girl, Sofie Rorvig, slipped through SS patrols to warn him, then ran the double risk of passing through the patrols again with him, their arms entwined. As young lovers, they passed unmolested among SS troops probing haystacks and barns. Starheim continued the long and dangerous journey alone to neutral Sweden, where he reported to Stephenson’s friends. Sofie stayed behind with the CHEESE network, which was expanded in preparation for the major task to come.

  Starheim was parachuted back into Norway after reporting new details of German security to London, which now wanted him to fetch out one of the Norsk Hydro engineers. Before he could begin work again, he was trapped by the Gestapo in the parlor of a friend’s house. He fought his way into a passage and bolted across the grandmother’s bedroom, leaping through the window before the old lady’s astonished eyes. He scrambled into a truck and was gone before his pursuers recovered their wits. The next day, he reported to the former CHEESE radio center. By the end of 1941, he was installed in an abandoned hut overlooking the factories and laboratories of Norsk Hydro on Barren Mountain. Then, on March 10, 1942, Bletchley received a message: HAVE STOLEN BOAT AND MAKING FOR SCOTLAND PLEASE GIVE AIR PROTECTION CHEESE. He had come down the 6,000-foot glaciers with Einar Skinnarland, the engineer most familiar with the plant’s layout, and hijacked the 620-ton coastal steamer Galtesund. A week later they were being escorted by an RAF bomber into the east Scotland port of Aberdeen. They continued immediately on to London, where Skinnarland went promptly into consultation with intelligence chiefs and atomic scientists.

  After an eleven-day crash course in secret warfare, Skinnarland parachuted back onto Barren Mountain—just three weeks after he had disappeared from the plant. The German managers accepted his explanation that he had been ill. “This was the quickest turnaround and the most vital bit of training we’d ever achieved,” reported the chief of Baker Street’s Norwegian Section, John Skinner Wilson. “No more than three people in London knew the real reason.”

  Skinnarland’s job now at Barren Mountain was to prepare for a sabotage operation so secret that his reports could not be entrusted to radio transmission but had to go through elaborate coding and microdot reduction by way of Sweden. A typical report: “The Germans depend too much on natural defences. . . . Change of guard inside the plant is at 1800 hours. . . . Sentries on suspension bridge between Vemork and Rjukan . . . only approach road can be flood-lit on alarm . . . guards billeted between electrolysis plant and engine halls . . .”

  Terrifying risks were run. “Our orders were to—uh—eliminate the place,” said the Baker Street chief, Colin Gubbins. “It was our top priority.”

  Urgency had been given to the enterprise by that hazardous 4,000-mile journey by flying boat made by Churchill in June 1942 to discuss with Roosevelt the future of atomic weaponry. “The British uranium bomb was within reach,” said Stephenson. “But for many reasons, the construction had to be undertaken in Canada or the United States. A pilot plant had been recommended in Britain by the scientific-advisory committee, with a full-scale plant to be built in Canada. But this meant a duplication of effort. FDR proposed a joint development, with atomic plants sited in the United States. Everything on the basis of fully sharing the results as equal partners. The President and the Prime Minister studied the scientific papers, and concluded everything must be done to delay the Germans. There was a high concentration of physicists from Germany at work on our own atomic programs. Parallel progress inside the Third Reich could not be ruled out.”

  Ste
phenson flew to Canada, where agents of the Norwegian secret army were now in training. Here he linked up with Gubbins and John Wilson, whose position as director and camp chief of the Boy Scouts International gave him an excuse to build up certain informal contacts. They began scouring a region near Toronto known as “Little Norway,” where hundreds of young men and women learned about airborne warfare. Out of these trainees, a tiny handful were to be inserted onto Barren Mountain. The smaller the team, the less risk of detection.

  Wilson had no illusions about the dangers. “Weather is appalling most of the time,” he wrote. “Sudden fogs, unpredictable gales, swift upward air currents. The terrain is mountain peaks with hundreds of dangerous glaciers and precipices, marshes, swamps and impassable streams.” It was not the place for paratroopers or gliders. Wilson had the job of selecting the men who would undertake an impossible mission. “I knew that any qualified Norwegian I approached would agree to carry it out.” The four who did, graduates of the spy school, underwent additional hardening with British Commando instructors. Special ski equipment was hand-crafted in Canada. In September 1942, the men were ready. Twice they were flown from eastern Scotland to the drop zone. Twice they returned because of foul weather. The third time, they landed on a mountain plateau separated by peaks and glaciers from the Norsk Hydro plant. A few days later CHEESE signaled:

  GERMANS TO SHIP ENTIRE STOCK OF HEAVY WATER STOP QUANTITY BELIEVED SUFFICIENT TO SATISFY PRESENT DEMANDS FROM BERLIN.

  This created a mild panic. Time was running out. Stephenson was again summoned for urgent talks in London. The War Cabinet met in emergency session. There were arguments between Baker Street Irregulars and military planners with a traditional dislike of unconventional warfare.

  “The fate of the world seemed to hang on those four young agents,” said Stephenson. “The Germans were using all heavy-water stocks. They must be close to a solution. It was decided to mount a full-scale armed attack by gliding into the area a force of regular commandos.”

  He flew back to New York unconvinced that a commando operation had a fighting chance, and began hunting for new American equipment in another irregular mission. In November another terse message was received from Norway: THREE PINK ELEPHANTS. It meant the four agents were in sight of their target. Meanwhile, the crews of two bombers left the big special operations base at Wick, on the northeast coast of Scotland, to tow thirty-four British commandos across the North Sea in two Horsa gliders.

  Twenty-four hours later, a local German communiqué was intercepted by Bletchley. “Two British bombers, towing gliders loaded with saboteurs, flew yesterday over southern Norway and were forced down by fighter aircraft of the Luftwaffe. The crews of the enemy bombers and gliders were annihilated to the last man in the air fight.”

  This was a lie. One glider crashed when the tow broke under the weight of ice. Eight of the seventeen uniformed commandos crawled out of the wreck alive. Four were killed by the injection of air bubbles into their veins at a German field hospital. The remaining four were executed. The second glider crashlanded after the towing bomber flew into a mountain. The fourteen survivors were shot, starting with the wounded, who were propped in front of their comrades against a wall.

  Another nineteen agents were now in the field, dispatched by Baker Street by air and sea. One, Arne Vaerum, code-named PENGUIN, was part of a radio net busily transmitting back to base, PENGUIN was still at his transmitter key when SS troops caught him. The message he was sending came stuttering through the night to a girl telegraphist in England who not only knew his “fist,” but also was a close friend. The girl belonged to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. On the night PENGUIN died, another FANY heroine was born. She knew what the interrupted message meant and asked to be dropped into enemy territory, where she could relieve her mental pain in physical action. She was trained for special duties in Denmark, and became the courier who was known as TRUDI in the subsequent escape of Niels Bohr.

  The winter of late 1942 was the worst any Norwegian could remember. The four “pink elephants,” code-named SWALLOW, were still in position on the mountain above the target, half starved and suffering from prolonged exposure. A new operation was mounted to reinforce them with six more Baker Street Irregulars, who had gone through even more ruthless training at a so-called gangster school near Southampton. One of them was Knut Haukelid, twin brother of the actress and film star Sigrid Gurie.

  “Knut is first and foremost a hunter,” wrote Gubbins. “He is also a philosopher with a sense of values. . . . I spent two days with Knut in the valley in Barren Mountain: a ravine so deep and precipitous that in winter the sun never touches its depths and workers must be taken by cable car to the peaks to get their daily ration of light.”

  While Haukelid prepared to go back to Norway, new assessments were made in America. “Manhattan Engineer District. Priority: AAA” covered the combined effort of scientist-refugees from Europe and United States and British atomic scientists to build the bomb first. Atomic fission had already been started under the football stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Physicists had mastered a swiftly multiplying chain reaction that would be placed in a weapon of incredible powers.

  The gigantic Manhattan Project had been pulled together by Roosevelt. He knew that far away in Hitler’s Europe, the greatest potential menace was Niels Bohr. In his Denmark labs, Bohr had split the uranium atom with a release of energy calculated to be a million times as powerful as that from an equal amount of high explosive.

  “Could Bohr be whisked out from under Nazi noses and brought to the Manhattan Project?” Roosevelt asked Stephenson.

  “It will have to be a British mission,” Stephenson replied. “Niels Bohr is a stubborn pacifist. He does not believe his work in Copenhagen will benefit the German military caste. Nor is he likely to join an American enterprise which has as its sole objective the construction of a bomb. But he is in constant touch with old colleagues in England whose integrity he respects.”

  From this point, Roosevelt was kept informed on each development of the unfolding drama as it was reported to BSC in New York.

  Knut Haukelid and five companions were parachuted into Norway on February 16, 1943. A carefully phrased message was meanwhile composed by James Chadwick to Niels Bohr, inviting him to England, where “no scientist in the world would be more acceptable.” Chadwick could only hint at “special problems” in which Bohr’s co-operation would be welcome. The letter was reduced to microfilm and concealed in a bunch of keys.

  On February 23, SWALLOW was reinforced by Haukelid’s party. All were partly disabled by frostbite. The ten agents had enough explosives to destroy the Barren Mountain plant but little food and fewer medical aids. They drew up a final operational order: “All men to wear uniform. Positions will be taken at midnight 500 metres from perimeter fence. Attack at 00.30 hours after guards change. If alarm is sounded, covering party to attack guards immediately while demolition party is to proceed. Demolition party to destroy high-concentration plant in cellar of electrolysis hall. Each demolition expert is to be covered by one man with a .45 pistol. If fighting starts before the target is reached, men in the covering party will take over, where necessary, to place explosives Two ‘L’ pills of potassium cyanide are to be carried by each man. Any man about to be taken prisoner will take his own life.”

  The grim order was written in desolation on a windswept glacier during an ice storm. The destruction of the plant had been decided almost a year before. One attempt after another had failed. “If the Germans capture the SWALLOW team alive, they may well deduce that such a suicidal attack has been launched only because the allies have now proved an atom bomb is a practical proposition,” INTREPID informed Roosevelt.

  Two months after the American atomic breakthrough in Chicago, the SWALLOWS descended into that forbidding ravine whose depths were never touched by the winter sun. They knew each detail of the Norsk Hydro complex from a new model built under the direction of the former chief enginee
r, Professor Jonar Brun, who had escaped to Britain with the plans. They crept like creatures of the night through the cable-intake tunnel leading to the electrolysis cellar, negotiating a tangle of ice-sheathed pipes in total darkness. They had decided upon passwords taken from the soldiers’ song, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.” If attacked or lost in confusion, the challenge was “Piccadilly” and the reply “Leicester Square,” an ironic extract from the music-hall lines.

  An hour later, the demolition team returned. The charges were laid, the fuses lit. Haukelid took six grenades from his jacket and guarded the withdrawal. Minutes later a soft whistling sound emerged from the main seven-story building, followed by a deep and muted rumble. “An insignificant little bang,” Haukelid called it. Hours later, back in their mountain hide-out, they mourned the failure of the mission. It was a long time before they learned that the high-concentration installations had been totally destroyed. By then, five of the agents, in full British uniform, had traveled 350 miles across peaks and valleys to Sweden. The rest remained in Norway to continue operations in an area to which the Germans in their rage sent ski squads—Gestapo and SS forces and Quisling’s Hird storm troopers.

  When the plant was back in production again, the RAF tried to bomb it. A series of heavy raids failed to make much impression. The cost was high in bomber crews and Norwegian civilian casualties. The U.S. Air Force tried, with similar results. SWALLOW had demonstrated the value of guerrilla warfare but Allied military leaders were reluctant to draw the lesson. A year after SWALLOW sabotaged the plant, the supply of heavy water had been resumed. This time Knut Haukelid advised against another attempt at sabotage. Instead, he proposed striking at the supply lines. A consignment of some 5,000 pounds of heavy water, about six months’ production, was to be transported to Germany. The weakest point along the route was the train ferry. Haukelid and two members of the secret army boarded the ferry and placed charges set to explode the following noon when the vessel would be in deep water. The ferry and its vital cargo blew up on time, killing four of the Norwegian crew. There was no consolation for Haukelid in this; it was one of many cruel decisions. Against the loss of his compatriots had to be weighed the deaths of eighty-three Allied servicemen in previous operations. He wrote modestly after the war: “Heavy water was not itself part of the atom bomb but it was an important factor in experiments with substances required for use in the bomb.” It had taken three years to destroy finally this source of Nazi atomic-research material—three years since Stephenson first scouted the Norwegian supply lines. President Roosevelt’s backing of secret warfare had been based in part on Stephenson’s report in April 1940 on heavy water and the conclusion that an atom bomb was now in the realm of possibility.