The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  He and Berg hit it off immediately. Robertson was a jolly, irreverent soul who liked Ivy League football, difficult crossword puzzles—he raced through them—chess, Greek literature, Scotch—he drank and consumed it the way a ten-year-old boy does strawberry pop—ribald jokes, and outrageous clothing ensembles, such as black shirts with road-stripe yellow ties. Berg found his company infectious, and they had begun a promising friendship when Berg disappeared. Even the people at the OSS office at 70 Grosvenor Square had no idea where he was.

  He resurfaced in late May, wearing a trench coat on an airplane bound from Casablanca to Algiers. Berg was seated on the aisle, and across from him was a tall young man wearing an 11th Airborne Division uniform. Geoffrey M. T. Jones, not an 11th Airborne man at all but an OSS major, thought Berg was a war correspondent. Then he saw Berg’s OSS-issue wristwatch, identical to the one he himself was wearing. Jones made sure Berg got a look at his watch too, and as they walked off the plane, Berg said to him, “I’m Moe Berg. I’m supposed to go to the Aleti Hotel.” That was the best hotel in Algiers, on the level of the Ritz in Paris. All the generals stayed at the Aleti. Jones, on the other hand, had a room at a fleabag hotel. He told this to Berg. “Why don’t I come stay with you,” said Berg, and to Jones’s amazement, he did. The hotel had no restaurant, so the two men went across the street to a dingy café and drank muddy Algerian coffee. Berg told Jones he was on his way to Yugoslavia by submarine. “Would you like to come with me?” he asked. Jones’s mission had been scrubbed, leaving him with no posting, so he said, “Sure.”

  On his own, Berg visited the OSS Algiers bureau, where he met the head of the French intelligence desk there, yet another patrician New York lawyer, named Henry Hyde. Berg didn’t volunteer anything about where he was going, but Hyde had a pretty good idea. There were only two places U.S. military transport planes went from Algiers in June 1944, Cairo and southern Italy.

  New orders, meanwhile, came through for Geoffrey Jones, sending him to the south of France to smuggle in equipment before the Normandy invasion. Jones was on his way, and he didn’t see Berg again until after the war.

  Back in Washington, the last Howard Dix had heard was that Berg was bound for Turkey. Istanbul was a valuable OSS listening post, but it is nowhere near Italy, and why Moe Berg was headed that way when he was preparing for important business in Rome, the meager OSS paper trail leaves unclear. A Sergeant E. G. Pothblum was convinced that Berg was in Istanbul, though, because he forwarded some books and dictionaries Berg had left in Washington to him there on May 12. On May 29, he fired off a cable for Berg in Istanbul, reminding him to send in his reports as quickly as possible.

  The Germans had been falling back from Rome, and the city was at last liberated at the end of the afternoon of June 4. The OSS, screened out of so much of the war, was finally in on something crucial, and the whereabouts of the agent in charge were unknown. Dix was frantic. On June 5 an urgent cable from him arrived at the OSS offices in London, Cairo, and Algiers: “In the event that Berg has not taken action in Italy … he should leave immediately … he will be too late if he does not do so.”

  Berg may not, as Earl Brodie says, have felt he was “in anybody’s control—he was in business for himself,” but his assignment was always his guide. On June 1, he was not in Turkey at all, but at the OSS base in an old Caserta, Italy, castle, near Naples. Three days later he had crossed Italy by Jeep to Bari, on the Adriatic Sea, where, on the fifth, he was having dinner with Air Force General Nathan Twining and another general when word arrived from Rome that the city had been liberated. After Berg showed Twining his letter from Vannevar Bush and explained how important it was that he get to Rome, Twining gave him a plane back to Caserta. Then a command car sped Berg on a four-hour ride from Caserta to Rome. After the rubble-strewn cities he’d seen out the command car window en route, Rome seemed to him “a ray of sunshine, no sign of war.”

  On June 6, Berg checked into the Hotel Excelsior, a sumptuous accommodation not far from the Villa Borghese, and met with an OSS operative who knew his way around the city. That afternoon, Berg was led through streets crowded with euphoric Romans to 50 Via Parioli, a handsome home not far from the University of Rome physics institute on Via Panisperna. This was where the occupant of the chair in experimental physics, the man with a “1” marked beside his name on Berg’s list of scientific contacts, Edoardo Amaldi, lived with his wife, Ginestra, and their children.

  Berg was at least the second American to visit Amaldi that day. Boris Pash had already paid a call to Via Parioli. Pash’s Alsos scientists had gone their separate ways back in the U.S., but with Mark Clark on the fringes of Rome, Pash had scurried back across the Atlantic on his own. For all that trouble, it was a brief conversation, and one that filled the colonel with rage. After accepting some food that Pash had brought for his children, Amaldi told him that he had never once heard from the OSS while Pash was in Naples that winter, which meant that all the OSS tales of woe and submarines were so much rotten fish. Pash did his best to keep his anger in check, instructed Amaldi that he was not to leave Rome, and departed.

  Pash need not have worried that Amaldi was going anywhere. Amaldi was the only member of the famous Gruppo di Roma, University of Rome, physicists not to flee Fascist Italy during the war. Though he detested Mussolini, Amaldi had refused teaching offers in the U.S., remaining behind, he said, “to help Italy.” The son of a University of Padua mathematics professor, Amaldi was a first-class experimental physicist who had worked closely with Fermi, studying the effects of bombarding the atomic nucleus with neutrons. Their collaboration had lasted until 1938, when Fermi left for the U.S. because Fascist racial laws threatened his Jewish wife, Laura. Once he was gone, so was the group, for the others had been dispersing as well. Emilio Segrè went to California, Bruno Pontecorvo to Paris, and Franco Rasetti to New York. As for Amaldi, he was drafted into the Italian army in 1939, for a year of African service. Then, after the university managed to coax his discharge, in 1941, Amaldi censored himself. At a clandestine meeting he attended with several other physicists, it was decided that they would do no more work with fission, because they saw only one way that it could lead, and they did not want to become involved with the construction of weapons. From September 1943 to February 1944, Amaldi was forced to abandon his family and go into hiding from the Germans. Eventually he would become known as the man who saved Italian physics. Now, early in June, with the city at long last liberated, weary as he was, he felt elated.

  When a second unexpected knock came at her door that day, Ginestra Amaldi opened it to find another American standing outside, asking for her husband. Whereas the first had worn a military uniform, this one had on a white nylon shirt and a black tie. She invited him in and went to get Edoardo. Amaldi usually rode a bicycle to work, but he had hidden it in a wardrobe during the German occupation. At the moment, he was in the process of removing and reassembling the bicycle, so Berg’s first glimpse of this scientist he had waited so long to see found him covered with grease. Berg was brief. After presenting the Amaldis with chocolate, coffee, and greetings from Fermi, he got down to business. Amaldi had to go immediately to the United States. The physicist demurred, saying that he would be glad to talk with Berg in Rome.

  That evening, Boris Pash says, he was drinking chianti at the Albergo Flora when a shaken Amaldi arrived at his table. Amaldi told Pash that he was sorry but, in spite of Pash’s wishes, he was leaving Rome for Naples with an American army captain under orders directly from President Roosevelt. The captain, said Amaldi, was awaiting him in the lounge downstairs. Pash got up from his table, descended to the lounge, and there found a large man sprawled in an easy chair. Pash says he introduced himself to the “sloppy, smug” captain, who remained seated and said, “Colonel, looks like you and I are going to have to reach an understanding.” Pash says he thought this “attitude was unfriendly and domineering,” and felt compelled “to call him down.”

  “Attention!” barked Pas
h, by this point feeling not a little unfriendly and domineering himself. This was an understandable reaction for a man who felt he had been gulled by the OSS all winter and now sensed another “bluffer.” This “big hulk” of a captain, according to Pash, was Moe Berg, who now clambered to his feet, protesting that he had to escort Amaldi to Naples. It was important. The Alsos Mission was waiting for him there. Pash, of course, was the Alsos Mission, which he made clear to Berg with a fine spray of invective that concluded, “You have no business in Rome. If I run across you again, I’ll bring charges, and I can think of plenty. Now get out.”

  Strange things occur between spies, especially spies who, unknown to each other, have been given the same job. Yet elements of this skirmish strain belief. Berg might not have known about Pash, but Furman did, and while briefing Berg in Washington before he left for Europe, Furman would not have told Berg to take a precious source like Amaldi to Alsos in Naples when Alsos had cleared out long ago. At one point, there had been plans for the OSS to transport Amaldi to the U.S. from Caserta, so that might have been it, except that the OSS could have done that without Alsos. Then there is the matter of the captain’s bars. To date, Berg had refused to wear a uniform, and had dressed in his usual clothes that afternoon when he visited the Amaldis. Even if he did intend to take Amaldi south for interrogation at the Naples OSS station, located outside the city in Caserta, he wouldn’t have needed a captain’s uniform to do so.

  Something happened that night, however, because the next morning Berg was back at the Amaldi house, nonplussed. Amaldi wasn’t home. He had gone to the university and, slave to schedules that Amaldi was, Berg was assured that he would not be back for lunch until 1:15. Berg could wait if he liked. Roman summer is sweltering, especially if you are in a white nylon shirt. Berg agreed to wait. With one of Amaldi’s young sons, Ugo, watching, Ginestra ushered Berg into her husband’s study and left him there. Berg sat at Amaldi’s desk for two hours, staring out a small window at the family garden and trying his hand at smoking cigarettes. Berg’s method of smoking was to take three or four puffs, stub the cigarette out, and light up a new one.

  He had done this ten times when, promptly at 1:15, Edoardo Amaldi walked through the door. Amaldi delayed his lunch for no man, so his conversation with Berg was brief. Berg asked again if Amaldi would not get onto a plane and go to the U.S. to help the Allied war effort, and again Amaldi refused. Berg tried to insist, and Amaldi was firm. He would be glad to help, but in Rome. If Amaldi was perturbed about the imbroglio with Pash, he and Berg smoothed it out, and Berg left, relieved. Ginestra then went into the office, emptied Berg’s ashtray, and presented the barely smoked cigarettes to Marco, the family porter. Tobacco was scarce in wartime Rome, and Marco was delighted. He unwound the cigarettes and put the tobacco in his pipe. It was those cigarettes that forever endeared Moe Berg to the Amaldi family.

  A hearty meal helped too. Amaldi, like almost everyone else in Rome, had been eating very little, and was glad to accept Berg’s offer of a large dinner. They went to eat at the Arturo Restaurant, on Via di Ripetta, where pasta and meat were eaten with gold forks. Berg spoke in English, probably, or French, but not in Italian, for he spoke no Italian with any of the Amaldis. His patient questioning during this dinner and in subsequent meetings gradually disclosed what Amaldi knew about the German bomb program, which was very little, but in its own way revealing.

  Amaldi told Berg that he had not worked on atomic physics since 1941, because the University of Rome was not properly equipped for such experimentation. His opinion—he stressed it was only that—was that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb, but he thought that it would take them ten years to complete it. Amaldi’s only contact during the war with the German scientific community had come in 1941, when Otto Hahn visited Rome for three days at the behest of the German Cultural Institute. Amaldi rated Hahn the most likely German to lead an atomic bomb construction project, and said he was also concerned about the chemist Walther Bothe. Although Heisenberg was a first-class theoretical physicist, he was not an experimental physicist, and hence seemed to Amaldi less capable of managing a large industrial project. Amaldi, Berg reported in his cable to Dix, “was somewhat surprised and delighted in our interest in him … he would be willing to go to the United States for a reasonable length of time on AZUSA.” Evidently, gold forks and Marco’s tobacco had helped change the professor’s mind.

  During these early days in June, Berg was also spending time with Gian Carlo Wick. Wick was a fine theoretical physicist. He got his probity from his mother, Barbara Allason, a Piedmontese journalist and translator of Goethe’s Faust, who had been jailed in the late 1920s after a letter of support she wrote to the Neapolitan anti-Fascist intellectual Benedetto Croce fell into the wrong hands. As a teenager, when asked by a friend to ski across the French border and help carry anti-Fascist leaflets into Italy, Gian Carlo Wick had readily agreed. Later, while he was teaching at the University of California during the fever of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy’s popularity in the 1950s, the university ordered its faculty to take a loyalty oath. Wick was no Communist, but such rituals reminded him of Mussolini, and he chose to resign rather than comply.

  In 1931, Wick had gone to Germany to study physics. One of the professors he got to know there was Heisenberg. Heisenberg liked the young Italian theoretician—they shared a common interest in classical music—and treated him with an affection that Wick never forgot. Once a week, Heisenberg had invited Wick and other students to his home for spirited evenings of talk and Ping-Pong. Back in Italy, Wick had served as Fermi’s personal assistant for five years. Still, it was Heisenberg who had first encouraged the young physicist’s ideas about the magnetic moment of the neutron, by referring to them in one of his articles. Fermi was less demonstrative initially, but he thought highly of Wick too. When he left for Columbia in 1938, Fermi recommended Wick for his chair at the University of Rome.

  Berg took Wick to a trattoria, perhaps the same at which he hosted Amaldi, and made an effort to get acquainted. At one point, Berg informed Wick that he was a Renaissance man, explaining that, among other things, he knew Latin well. Berg did know some Latin, but it was soon apparent to Wick that Wick knew much more. This was nobody for Berg to be engaging in a duel of scholarly one-upmanship, for Wick was a highly cultivated European intellectual. His first language was French, as a boy he had spoken in German with his Austrian grandmother, he read Greek and Latin, and he knew some Russian and Danish besides. For pleasure, he listened to Brahms or Verdi, read Huxley in English and Flaubert in French. Berg seemed superficial to Wick. He thought Berg postured to give the impression that he knew more than he did. But Berg was lucky. Wick was, says the physicist Jack Steinberger, “a very dear guy and kind, much more than most of us are.” Wick wished to offend no one, especially a host, and so, while any number of physicists would have dispensed with a man who put on such airs, Wick answered Berg’s questions in excellent English, giving no hint of annoyance.

  Wick made it clear that he had done no atomic research, but that the subject, of course, interested him as a physicist. Wick had last seen Heisenberg in the summer of 1942, when he traveled to Munich and Berlin-Dahlem to deliver a series of lectures on cosmic rays. They had spent time together in Berlin and Munich. Wick had not broached the subject of politics—he didn’t want to snoop—but his feeling then was that Heisenberg was anti-Nazi. At one point Heisenberg had said to him, “Must we wish for a victory of the Allies?” Wick felt that Heisenberg had said this rather pointedly. Still, Wick believed that Heisenberg’s feelings for his country were too strong for him not to serve it. Wick told Berg that during his visit, the Germans had been extremely secretive on the subject of atomic energy, but Heisenberg’s teacher, the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, had assured Wick that Heisenberg did not think it possible to build a reactor in the near future. Could anyone else? Wick mentioned Bothe, as Amaldi had, and Klaus Clusius.

  Wick said he missed Heisenberg, but at leas
t they had managed to keep in touch by letter. He said that a postcard from Heisenberg had come dated January 15, and he allowed Berg to see it. Berg’s pulse must have quickened. A piece of mail from Heisenberg! He decided to neglect to return it, and when he and Wick parted that day, the postcard went with Berg.

  Berg arranged, through the U.S. Naval Intelligence unit in Rome, for a photostat of the filched postcard to be made and sent to Washington. He also translated it himself, and included excerpts in his June 17 cable to Howard Dix. The complete postcard is only one subdued paragraph. Heisenberg tells Wick that his Leipzig institute has been destroyed, but that the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft is “still standing.” Heisenberg’s Leipzig home and his father-in-law’s home in Berlin-Dahlem are damaged, so he has moved his family to the Bavarian Alps, while he sleeps at the Harnack Haus in Berlin-Dahlem. “The time in which one could think calmly on physics is so far away,” he writes at one point, “that it seems as if ages had passed in between.”

  And Wick knew more. He told Berg that Heisenberg had since left his temporary quarters in Berlin and was now living in the southern part of Germany. Could Wick be more specific? The scientist seemed flustered. Probably he was grappling with several things. He felt personal loyalty to Heisenberg and he was ashamed to be leaking information about him to people who were indifferent to Heisenberg’s fate. There was also Wick’s reluctance to believe that Heisenberg could be doing something as hideous as giving the bomb to the Fascists, an instinctive aversion to Berg, and his strong sympathy for the American’s cause. Instead of sorting all this through, Wick compromised. He explained that Heisenberg had gone to “a woody region” of southern Germany, but he would say no more. In his cable, Berg supposed that Wick’s reticence was because he was afraid of bringing “harm to Heisenberg.”