Goudsmit was a good-natured man, but the war made him bitter. In March 1943, his mother and father sent him a farewell letter from a Nazi concentration camp. Loyal Germans were not people for whom Goudsmit had any sympathy. Detestation is more like it. As for his old friend Werner Heisenberg, Goudsmit was irritated by his refusal to leave Nazi Germany, and privately faulted Heisenberg for not trying to use his influence to save his parents. That may explain why Goudsmit, after reviewing documents in Strasbourg that, he says, made him certain that Germans were not building an atomic bomb, did not now hesitate to tell Berg that he might have to kill Heisenberg.
Late in his life, in one of his several brief attempts at writing an autobiography, Berg jotted down bits of what Goudsmit told him in Paris. He also discussed his orders—sometimes in oblique terms—with several people, so the situation can be pieced together. Goudsmit told Berg that Heisenberg would soon be in Zurich to give a lecture. “Gun in my pocket,” wrote Berg in his notes. Goudsmit was European and Berg, he would have known by now, was interested in foreign languages. So Goudsmit dramatically switched to spoken French while presenting Berg with the option of using that gun to murder Heisenberg. “Nothing spelled out,” noted Berg, “but—Heisenberg must be rendered hors de combat.”
Berg didn’t like to talk about himself in any language, but even he eventually found the facts of his Zurich assignment impossible to keep a secret. Toward the end of his life, Berg became friends with George Gloss, the owner of a book shop in Boston. Berg roamed the store, piling up tall stacks of books, which he would ask Gloss to hold for him behind the counter so that he could buy them at a later date. That date, Gloss knew, would never come, but he didn’t mind. Gloss liked Berg. When Berg had finished his browsing, Gloss would always bounce off his stool, propose a meal, and off they would go. For one of those meals, Gloss’s fifteen-year-old son, Ken, accompanied the two men to Patten’s Restaurant in Boston, where he ate and listened, wide-eyed, as Berg told his father what Goudsmit had told him. “He said he definitely was there to assassinate Germans if they were inventing the bomb,” says Ken Gloss.
Except for the evening when he stopped him on the sidewalk and asked him to mail a letter, Berg avoided Earl Brodie when they were both in London in 1944. But five years later, quite unexpectedly, Brodie learned what had pulled Moe Berg out of England so suddenly. Brodie was visiting Washington from his home in California, attending a convention at the Mayflower Hotel. It was nearing ten o’clock one night when he felt like smoking a cigar. He went into the Mayflower’s tobacco shop and was selecting a Cuban panatella when he sensed a presence. He turned and saw Moe Berg. Something about Berg’s manner told Brodie not to recognize him, so he paid for the cigar, walked outside, and, as he was lighting it, Berg appeared at his side again. “Have you time to take a walk with me?” he asked.
Berg was obviously feeling low, and so Brodie kept him company, walking beside him mile after mile, hour after hour. Berg was in better shape than Brodie, who had to strain to match his pace. Brodie began to feel worn out, and nervous as well about an early-morning meeting, but he could tell that Berg was down and had not the heart to abandon him. It was good that he didn’t, because the conversation began to grow very interesting. Berg was doing most of the talking, and Brodie noticed that “while not many people knew much about him, Moe seemed to have made it his business to learn a great deal about everyone. He was his own FBI.” But eventually on this night, Berg did have something about himself to reveal. He told Brodie that Werner Heisenberg had been lured out of Germany to give a lecture in Zurich in late 1944. The lecture would be open to the public, and Berg was told to attend. “He’d been drilled in physics, he’d had a lot of one-on-one training and had been told to listen for certain things,” Brodie says Berg told him. “If anything Heisenberg said convinced him the Germans were close to a bomb, then his job was to shoot him—right there in the auditorium.”
The last person to see Berg in Paris was Tony Calvert, who was staying with him at the Ritz. Calvert handed Berg a cannister of heavy water, to present to Scherrer as a token of American appreciation. Calvert and Berg had dinner together and then talked late into the night. Groves, who wanted his intelligence staff to know as little as possible about what he was doing, hadn’t bothered to mention to Calvert that Berg had been authorized to shoot Heisenberg. Berg didn’t tell him either. That was characteristic too. Berg kept a secret as well as Groves did, one of the reasons that the general grew to trust him.
As BERG HURRIED toward Switzerland, strange things had been happening elsewhere. In Rome, liberation sent the university into a happy delirium of gratitude, which took form in a liberal bestowal of honorary degrees upon several “Allied officers,” who were recognized for “services rendered to the university.” Berg was not an officer, and what a spy who arrived after the liberation and spent most of his time interviewing people and even trying to convince some of them to leave the University of Rome for new work in the United States did to merit the titles “Grand Benefactor” and “Honorary Doctor of Laws” is unclear. The doctorate’s Greek and Latin inscriptions are no help. They say that Berg was “eminently deserving of this honor” and laud the “intelligent and affectionate work he performed toward the reconstruction and rebirth of the maximum cultural institute of Rome.” Part of the explanation may be the familiar one with Moe Berg: people just liked him.
WHEN MOE BERG arrived at the ETH small lecture hall in Zurich on December 18, he had not come as Moe Berg. Berg believed that one of his most useful personal qualities for spy work was a dark, saturnine complexion, which allowed him, as he once put it, “to fit in,” with equal success in Tokyo, Berlin, or Morocco. To support this impression of himself, he liked to tell the story of something that had happened to him in Rome. He was walking down the street one day, when two American officers pulled up alongside him in a Jeep. “Let’s ask this guinea where the hotel is,” one of them said. Before they could say anything more, Berg said, “You can’t miss it, it’s three blocks up with a green awning.”
“Where’d that guinea learn to speak such good English?” one of the officers said to the other.
“Princeton, Class of 1923,” said Berg, and walked away.
At Werner Heisenberg’s lecture in Zurich he was equally convincing. By various accounts, Berg identified himself as a Swiss physics student, an Arab businessman, and a French merchant from Dijon. Berg was forty-two years old that day, so the student’s would seem to have been the least plausible mask, but that is the one he chose, and Heisenberg did not question it.
It was an interesting choice of identity for Berg, and a revealing one. With the exception of his three years at war, from the time he injured his knee as a member of the Chicago White Sox most of Moe Berg’s adult life was spent reading, observing, and asking questions. For his most stressful assignment, he would pose in a role that was for him no role at all. He was comfortable as a student and this was no time to be flustered.
Berg arrived for Heisenberg’s presentation in the company of another OSS agent, Leo Martinuzzi. They left their winter coats and hats in an anteroom, walked into the lecture hall, and joined the modest audience of twenty professors and graduate students who had come to hear the world’s greatest physicist discuss his recent thoughts on S-matrix theory. Berg’s German was passable at best and no better than his knowledge of physics. He would have had difficulty following such an advanced scientific colloquium in English, never mind in a foreign language he hadn’t studied since Princeton, and so he didn’t really try. Instead, he looked around and, as usual, he saw more than most people would have.
After struggling to set up a blackboard, Heisenberg began speaking at 4:15 P.M. from typewritten sheets of paper and, like any good student, Berg took copious notes. Initially, he was entranced by the sight of this man he had been hearing about for so long. To Berg, Heisenberg appeared frail, about five foot six and no more than 110 pounds. Berg knew the physicist to be forty-three, but he decided
he looked a few years past that. Heisenberg wore a dark, three-button suit, a ring next to the pinkie on his right hand, and a quizzical smile; he kept his left hand in his pocket and paced as he talked. For a while, Berg played Holbein, embellishing and perfecting a vivid description. He gazed at Heisenberg’s “artistic” hands; his heavy eyebrows, which seemed to him to “emphasize movement of that part of bony structure over the eyes”; and then at Heisenberg’s reddish bristle of hair gone bald at the crown. Berg made a quick sketch of the last. “Looks like Furman,” he wrote, but that wasn’t it. He tried again. “Like Irish author Gogarty.” The recondite allusion was to the poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.
Berg’s scrutiny did not go unnoticed by Heisenberg. “H. likes my interest in his lecture,” Berg jotted. Heisenberg, of course, had no idea of what Berg was really up to, an irony that was not lost on Berg. “As I listen, I am uncertain—see: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—what to do to H.,” he wrote to himself. “Discussing math while Rome burns—if they knew what I’m thinking.”
It must have been frustrating not to understand what was being said, so Berg looked around the room and took solace from Scherrer, seated in the front row and, it seemed to Berg, “despairing because he doesn’t understand the mathematical formulas on the board.” Scanning the audience, Berg noticed a man with deepset eyes who was shivering in the drafty room. It wasn’t until after Heisenberg had finished speaking that Berg realized this was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. In his notes, Berg drew up a seating chart, and beside Von Weizsäcker’s name he wrote “Nazi.”
Berg’s assignment had been to look Heisenberg over. He was to fire only if he heard indisputable evidence that a German bomb was nearing completion. Berg wasn’t exactly sure what he had heard, but it didn’t seem terribly threatening, and nobody else seemed to find anything amiss either. Heisenberg was no Scherrer, but he was a good speaker, and most of the Swiss professors and students in attendance agreed with young Herman Waftler, who listened intently and found Heisenberg’s presentation “very interesting because it was quite new for us.” You didn’t murder a man for that. The pistol stayed in Berg’s pocket, so did the “L”—lethal cyanide—tablet Berg was carrying in case he needed to dispose of himself. The lecture ended, and he and Martinuzzi went to get their wraps.
After collecting the coat and hat, Berg returned to the seminar room to greet Scherrer. “Dr. Suits sends his best regards from Schenectady and I have a little bundle for you,” he said. It was 6:40. Scherrer told Berg to meet him in his office in fifteen minutes.
Reassured by the presence of Martinuzzi, whom he knew, and the letter from Suits, which Berg would now have presented, and pleased by the cannister of heavy water, Scherrer was frank and animated. Scherrer said that he had spent the past few days with Heisenberg, who had confided in him.
There was plenty of interesting news from Heisenberg, and Scherrer passed it on to Berg at a brisk clip. A friend of Heisenberg’s had seen Hitler recently and described him as “well and working.” Scherrer was convinced, he said, that Heisenberg was an “anti-Nazi.” Heisenberg’s family was living in a small Bavarian town outside Munich, and Heisenberg saw them only once every five months. That was one of the reasons he was so glad to be in Switzerland. He could buy them chocolate and other treats for Christmas in the Zurich shops. Heisenberg himself was working in Hechingen, “on cosmic rays, not AZUSA.” Berg underlined the latter phrase for emphasis. It amused Berg to learn that Heisenberg had spotted an American reconnaissance plane flying above Hechingen, taking photographs.
Berg was convinced by Scherrer’s portrait of Heisenberg as an “anti-Nazi.” So, instead of now scheming a denial of his mind, Berg proposed to “transplant” Heisenberg and his family to the U.S. He didn’t mention the original plan, which, almost certainly, he always kept from Scherrer. This was a wise choice. Heisenberg and Scherrer disagreed politically, but the war was only a caesura in their lifelong friendship.
Scherrer seemed to think transplanting Heisenberg to the U.S. a fine idea, and told Berg he would pass the invitation along to Heisenberg. He also asked Berg to come to a dinner he was hosting for Heisenberg at his large Zurich home later that week. Berg said he would be there.
HEISENBERG HAD ACCEPTED Scherrer’s dinner invitation with the provision that he would not have to talk politics. But at the party he found himself confronted by a number of angry men and women who had agreed to no such restraints and immediately put Heisenberg on the defensive. Werner Zünti asked Heisenberg what he was doing. “I am working on theoretical problems of ballistics” was the reply. “We assumed that wasn’t true,” says Zünti. Another inquisitor wanted to know how Heisenberg could remain in a country led by Adolf Hitler. “I am not a Nazi but a German,” came the familiar justification. Something else Heisenberg was not was a diplomat, and eventually it showed. When Gregor Wentzel all but sneered, “Now you have to admit that the war is lost,” Heisenberg replied, “Yes, but it would have been so good if we had won.” This was one of those piquant remarks that makes tasty gossip for years to come, and few heard about it sooner than Howard Dix, courtesy of a Moe Berg file a few days later.
At the end of the evening, Berg timed his departure to match Heisenberg’s, and when the scientist left the house, Berg joined him on the sidewalk. Together they set out, walking through the cold and quiet of a Zurich winter night. Artificial lighting was used sparingly in Zurich during the war, so the few lamps that were on at that hour shone like stars against a sky of pitch. It was an ideal moment for murder, but again Berg resisted. He had just heard Heisenberg say that the war was lost for Germany. Were Heisenberg poised to unfurl an atomic bomb, he would probably have spoken differently or not at all. Berg asked more questions, “pestered” Heisenberg with them, in the scientist’s words, and mixed in a few bromides as well. Apparently, Berg’s Swiss-accented German aroused no suspicions in Heisenberg. In fact, if it is possible to ignore someone while maintaining a conversation with him, Heisenberg managed it. He didn’t know who Berg was and did not bother to ask. Eventually, he and Berg parted company, never to see each other again. It had been a marvelous exercise in anticlimax.
Anything else would have been absurd, for the whole situation was charged with improbability. If Heisenberg was supervising a bomb project, it seems unlikely that Hitler would have permitted him a long public visit to Switzerland. Besides, only a large dose of OSS wishful thinking finds Heisenberg, with his bomb nearly built, telling a lecture hall full of foreigners about it. Then there is the matter of timing. It might have made sense to steal and shoot Heisenberg in 1942 when Bethe and Weisskopf first suggested it, but by December 1944, it was too late. “I have no doubt that those were [Berg’s] orders and that he would have done it, but it would have made no difference,” says Philip Morrison. “With our project you could shoot Fermi in 1944 and it would have made no difference. A year before the [American] bomb, 100,000 people were working on it. By 1944, Heisenberg was no longer very valuable.”
HOWARD DIX WROTE a letter to Berg on December 22 that sounds more like a note from father to son than spymaster to spy. “It is our hope that you will have an interesting time at your present location,” he said at one point. Referring to Berg’s $800 raise, he instructed, “You should now feel like a millionaire.” And then in closing came, “May you have lots of fun doing the work.” Mixing lighthearted sentiment with secret business was a specialty in the devotedly collegial OSS, but in fact, Berg did live it up for the rest of the war, and his nearly constant companion in play was Paul Scherrer.
There were several reasons for this friendship, and chief among them was Scherrer’s boundless enthusiasm for the United States. Scherrer had returned from his first visit there, in the late 1920s, brimming with praise for everything American, from the physics to the theater to the chewing gum. After that, he began encouraging former students to go to the U.S. “Everything from America is good” was Scherrer’s assistant Georg B
usch’s dry assessment of his boss. Scherrer’s daughter, Ines Jucker, agrees. “That Moe Berg was an American and was a way for [my father] to help America was what interested him about Berg,” she says. “He was interested in the progress of physics.”
If affection for America prompted Scherrer to supply information to the U.S., it was Moe Berg who put him at ease while doing so. Scherrer had been assisting Allen Dulles and Frederick Reed Loufbourow before meeting Berg, but Scherrer was not always comfortable with them. He and Berg were more compatible. Scherrer was not Jewish, but he was more than tolerant of Jews. There were several German Jewish refugees working illegally in the ETH physics department, and Scherrer protected them from the Swiss police and from pro-Nazi colleagues. Personally, Berg and Scherrer shared the near-contradictory qualities of being both secretive and ebullient. “When my father and Berg were together, they were always alike, they were fun,” says Ines Jucker. “Both liked bicycling, swimming, and a good late dinner. Berg would always say, ‘We will have good food!’ ” And they were simpatico in at least one more respect. Both were fiends for newspapers, happily beginning their day with as many as could be supplied.
Berg took a room in a hotel not far from Scherrer’s house, and apparently came to know him during frequent meetings at three places in Zurich: Scherrer’s home, his office at the ETH, and the Kronenhalle, Scherrer’s favorite Zurich restaurant. Hulda Zunnsteg operated the Kronenhalle for sixty-four years, during which it became, in equal parts, literary café, art gallery, and purveyor of exquisite European cooking. Zunnsteg had a fondness—and an eye—for good painters, and they liked her, too. Among the regulars who ate the Kronenhalle’s rich chocolate mousse and supplied the no-less-renowned wall decorations were Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. In the bar are two Picasso paintings and a series of lamps designed by Giacometti. Between 1915 and 1919, a table was reserved for a visiting writer from Ireland, and every day James Joyce would come in, sit down, and scribble away at Ulysses. Between 1912 and 1916, Albert Einstein held colloquiums with his students in the billiard room upstairs. Berg’s pocket full of OSS-issue Swiss francs made it easy to repair there often.
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 21
