Scherrer’s interests spread well beyond physics. He read history, literature, and philosophy for hours at home every evening, favoring Herodotus and English novels. So he and Berg had a lot to talk about. They mixed conversations about the whereabouts of German scientists with more whimsical discussions. Scherrer was a teacher, and one of his gifts was the ability to simplify complicated scientific ideas so that nonspecialists could understand them. For Berg, who had to write reports full of science of which he sometimes had only vague comprehension, Scherrer was very helpful. On the day after Christmas, the two men met at the ETH, and after Scherrer taught Berg something about uranium chain reactions, he put down his black pen, and Berg picked up a red one and sketched a diamond. “My explanation to Professor Scherrer of game of baseball,” he wrote beside it afterwards. On other days, Scherrer mused about how long it might take Germany to build its bomb—he guessed two years—and supplied news of Walther Gerlach’s nervous breakdown and rumors of a powerful new German flamethrower.
The OSS had left Berg free to roam, Dix asking only that Berg supply him with an address “so that we can get in touch with you when necessary.” Zurich may not have had much light at night, but the war brought a luster of a different sort. Taking refuge in Zurich were artists from all over Europe and, for a brief time, they transformed the ancient city of bankers and clockmakers into a flourishing artistic center. During this slightly bizarre Renaissance, Scherrer saw the likes of Richard Strauss performing his own operas and Kate Gold acting as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. For some of these events, seated beside Scherrer was his family and “Bushie,” as the Scherrers had taken to calling their new American friend, Moe Berg.
Until the end of the war, Groves and Furman were never completely convinced of what their intelligence operators had been telling them for years—that there was no German atomic bomb. And who could fault their doubts? In Belgium, German-controlled radio broadcasts were urging citizens to flee because “atomic power is about to be unleashed … wherever it is dropped all animals and plants cease to exist, huge areas of land are scorched, woods are consumed, and any human being caught in this hurricane is shattered to smithereens.” Groves’s wad of newspaper clippings on the subject grew ever thicker as well. Under the circumstances, it was good to have Moe Berg at Paul Scherrer’s elbow.
Mostly, that is where he remained. In Zurich, he would drop by Risling Strasse for a long talk about books. When the Scherrers went skiing in the eastern Alps, Berg went too. Once the weather warmed, the Scherrers went to a house they rented for weekends and holidays on Lago Maggiore, a beautiful Swiss lake five minutes from the Italian border, and again Berg accompanied them. To the Scherrers, Berg was “lustig” (full of fun). He and Scherrer took moonlight swims in the lake, and liked to go for long bicycle rides. Across the lake was the Italian village of Pino, and Berg invented a song about Scherrer and himself called “We Are the Boys of Pino.” The Scherrers thought he sang abysmally, but they didn’t mind. He was so “lustig.” “He was really in the family,” says Ines. “A little bit like a cousin.”
Such strange things were going on in the world that the Scherrers readily accepted Berg and didn’t think to wonder much about why he dressed in the same style of clothes every day, much less what he was doing in Switzerland. The Scherrers had plenty of American visitors, and they assumed Bushie was a bodyguard whose job was to protect Paul and to evacuate him if the Germans arrived to take over the Institute. Paul Scherrer never enlightened his family. During his life he seems to have confided in nobody, including his closest colleagues, what he and Berg were really doing, and before his death in 1969, he burned his personal papers. It was only in 1992 that Ines Jucker learned, as this book was being prepared, that her father had been passing secrets to the OSS through Moe Berg.
Berg did not visit the Scherrers again after the war, though for years he faithfully sent a card at Christmas. He would always remember his few months with them warmly, even wistfully, and they felt the same way. “Life in Zurich during the war was a happy time for me,” says Ines. “It’s because of that happy time that I like to think about Bushie. It could be that it was a happy time for him in our family because he had no wife or children.” Ted Williams never saw Berg laugh during his last three seasons with the Red Sox, but in Switzerland the Scherrers knew a different man. “We never saw him sad,” says Ines.
THERE WAS SOMETHING surreal about tranquil Zurich, when elsewhere in Europe there was so much turmoil. Elsewhere for Moe Berg, in 1945, was two hours away in the Swiss capital city of Bern, where the OSS Swiss station chief Allen Welsh Dulles had his offices in an elegant four-story apartment building. Dulles had slipped into Switzerland from France hours before the Swiss borders hissed shut in November 1942, and there he remained, sealed off from the rest of the world, until the end of summer 1944. Dulles was a determined, inventive man, and his isolation did not stop him from accumulating some of the best intelligence Donovan received during the war. Dulles learned about the existence of the German weapons research plant at Peenemünde, and he established ties with resistance leaders from several countries, including the group of Germans who would plot, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Hitler in 1944. He turned American businessmen stranded in Switzerland into valuable intelligence analysts, and cultivated a German foreign office official named Fritz Kolbe, who kept him supplied with documents from Berlin. Long before the German capital was divided, Dulles was sending files out of Bern, arguing that the U.S. should be as wary of Soviet Communism as it had been of European Fascism.
Bern was even quieter than Zurich. But just because he couldn’t hear the screams or smell the blood didn’t mean Dulles could put the war out of his mind. He was fighting a vile enemy that specialized in pogroms and torture, and he never forgot it. Everything he asked other people to do was focused on defeating Germany, to the extent that he forbade his staff from skiing—he didn’t want any broken legs—and when a member of the American legation in Bern announced his engagement, Dulles worried that marriage would interfere with the man’s work. Dulles liked calm, level-headed operatives. He had been hearing about Berg’s imminent arrival since August, and now, when the long-awaited agent finally made his appearance, Dulles found he did not like Moe Berg, did not like him at all.
Berg would pay periodic visits to Bern to pick up communications from Dix, and send off his own. The OSS Bern station was located at 24 Dufourstrasse, a few minutes’ walk from the Aare River, in a wealthy, tree-lined section of Bern. On the first three floors of the building were offices, and the top floor held radio and cable equipment. Twenty-four Dufourstrasse’s front door was always opened by an elderly Englishman who had fought with Lawrence in Arabia and knew where to find Scotch whisky in Bern when shop owners said there was no more. Beyond him was a close-knit, relatively conservative group of analysts, secretaries, and cipher clerks who looked up at Berg with curiosity. “I remember I was in the office and this guy came through,” says one of them, Bill Hood. “Somebody said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ and I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘It’s Moe Berg, the baseball player.’ He was conspicuous in Bern. He didn’t have an Ivy League suit. He looked, if anything, like a cop. He wore a six-button suit, with all the buttons fastened, which brought the suit up quite high. You didn’t really see things like that around the office. I thought he had funny ties. I concocted that he was wearing an old umpire’s uniform, replete with steel-toed shoes. He had no bonhomie. He was very forbidding. There were a lot of strange people in OSS. He was certainly sui generis.”
Bern was full of refugees, travelers, bankers positioning themselves for postwar business with the Americans, and spies—spies of every stripe and nation, who staked out bars and restaurants as their own. The Germans, for example, favored the Hotel Schweizerhof, the Poles liked the Café du Théâtre, and the Americans generally went to the Bellevue. Berg ate alone in cafés, where he read the newspapers and looked around, embellishing, for postwar recitation, accounts of Bern as a
den of iniquity where spies of every country sat having dinner in the same room, faintly acknowledging each other as they worked their knives and forks.
At night, Berg would sleep in a guest room in Dulles’s plush home in Bern. If Berg was following his usual policy of running a personal background check on everyone he worked with, he would have seen that, for all his clucking about discipline, Dulles was a devoted womanizer, who liked to tell exciting stories starring a mildly reluctant and endlessly successful undercover hero—Allen Dulles. The presence of a competing raconteur could not have pleased Berg.
Like all station chiefs, Dulles liked to know what was going on in his backyard, and Berg was saying nothing about what he was doing. From Berg’s point of view, he had been assigned to a top secret project and was accountable only to Dix, Donovan, Furman, and Groves. What he did, and how he did it, was nobody’s business but theirs. Switzerland, however, was a very delicate base of operations. For it to be revealed that Allen Dulles was not really a special representative of President Roosevelt, but an American spymaster, would have outraged the Swiss. Dulles felt responsible for what went on in his bailiwick, and he had no patience with an independent operator who could compromise work that had been careful years in the planning. “Moe was secretive with what he told [Dulles],” says Ned Putzell. “One time I was talking with Dulles and he was furious because Moe hadn’t come clean about something. His face would get red, his mustache would twitch; he foamed to beat hell. If Moe had been able to get into his good graces it would have been different, but they agreed to disagree.”
Nor did it help that Berg treated everyone at 24 Dufourstrasse like his office boy. The staff was irked by this character who came strolling into Bern, insisting upon priority for his work. “There were a lot of other people who thought what they were doing was just as important, so you had inevitable problems,” says Cordelia Dodson, who worked as an intelligence analyst for Dulles and later married Bill Hood. “The main thing about Berg was that he demanded service and everything dropped to take care of him. Everyone thought that Berg was something of a prima donna.”
Dulles certainly did. In a memorandum he sent to Donovan toward the end of March, shortly before Berg was scheduled to make a brief trip to Sweden, Dulles wrote, “Confidentially, he [Berg] is as easy to handle as an opera singer and [it is] difficult for me to find time these days to coddle him along. His work is at times brilliant, but also temperamental. When he leaves here this time, I think it preferable that his contacts be developed by Cabana [Martin Chittick] and [Max] Kliefoth and that he not return here for the time being.” Donovan’s approach in such matters was to pat each man on the back and tell him he was doing a wonderful job. It was common knowledge in Bern that Donovan was personally fond of Berg. Dulles was also a big enough man to recognize the value of Berg’s relationship with Scherrer. He swallowed hard and did not press the issue.
THE INFORMATION BERG was sending to Washington from the top floor of 24 Dufourstrasse wasn’t as dramatic as his cables describing the meeting with Heisenberg, but intelligence work rarely manages such excitation. Berg did spend an afternoon scrutinizing the Swiss scientist and Nazi sympathizer Walther Dallenbach, while concealed behind a curtain in the private Zurich library where Dallenbach was working, but that was an unusually charged moment. The work of espionage has much in common with the dogged days of digging and sifting that archaeologists put in while searching for the remains of a mosaic.
Through the month Berg continued to spend most of his time with Scherrer. Scherrer wanted badly to visit the United States, to take up a temporary assignment either with the Aerojet Corporation or at the California Institute of Technology, and Berg said he would see what he could do.
“This is very urgent,” came Berg’s March 19 dispatch to Washington. “He expects an affirmative answer.” That was understandable and so was Groves’s reply. “Nothing doing,” said the general. As long as there was a war in Europe, Groves wanted Scherrer in Switzerland, where he could provide him with information. At the moment, all Groves would approve for Scherrer was a cache of physics magazines and four Goodyear atom-smasher belts that the scientist had asked for. Berg grew anxious. A trip had been planned for him to Sweden, where he was to interview Lise Meitner. But Scherrer had been very important to him. “Please trust my judgment,” he wired back, “that I should not leave without definite word from you that invitation will be forthcoming when time suitable.” The sense he got from Washington was that Scherrer would be taken care of.
Berg spent Easter Sunday bicycling, swimming, and drinking wine at a Swiss lake with Scherrer. Slim and fit, wearing sunglasses with his dark suit and fedora, Berg cut a sleek figure that contrasted with the skinny-legged, shaggy-maned Scherrer. A few days later Berg was off. With the war obviously ending, another OSS agent, German-born Max Kliefoth, who was a World War I flying ace under the “Red” Baron von Richthofen, was put in touch with Scherrer, and Berg left for Paris by command car.
Everything was now concluding at a breathtaking pace that must have dizzied men accustomed to the sluggish tempo of intelligence work. General Patton and the Third Army were steaming toward Berlin with Pash, Goudsmit, and Alsos right behind them. On April 12, Berg met with Donovan for breakfast in Paris. President Roosevelt had died earlier that day, and, like most Americans, Donovan and Berg were stunned. Many Americans would remember where they were when FDR died the way they would again in 1963, after John F. Kennedy was killed. Berg, a loyal Democrat who loved Roosevelt, was certainly among them. To be sitting across from the commander of the OSS made the occasion all the more memorable for Berg, especially when Donovan, who excelled in sentimental moments, comforted him. “FDR knew what you were doing,” he said. It was as though God himself had smiled on Berg. Twenty years later, Berg was still braced by Donovan’s words. He copied them down in a notebook and added, “And what I was doing was known to few.”
Donovan wanted Berg to visit the physics institute in Göttingen as soon as it was in Allied hands. Then he was to go to the U.S. In Paris, Berg secured travel orders from Washington, and then he left for Germany. An airplane took him from Wiesbaden through Weimar and on to Göttingen by April 18. At the famous laboratories where Scherrer and so many other prominent physicists had been trained, Berg met Furman and Goudsmit and gave them the long version of his rendezvous with Heisenberg in Switzerland. The exciting story contrasted rather markedly with what Furman, Goudsmit, and Berg saw in Göttingen, and indeed with what Alsos would find in Munich, Heidelberg, Hechingen, and every other place they visited—nothing. There had been no German bomb. In fact, the Germans had not even come close. In Hechingen, Alsos dug up two tons of uranium, two tons of heavy water, and ten tons of carbon that the Germans had hastily buried in a field. Hidden in a cesspool were reeking documents that confirmed what Groves’s intelligence had been reporting since he began asking. As Goudsmit would put it in his memoirs, “It was so obvious that the whole German uranium setup was on a ludicrously small scale.”
While Alsos completed its job of destroying or carting off scientific equipment and rounding up Heisenberg and the rest of the German physicists, interviewing them, and sending them off to England, where they would be held at the Farm Hall estate, Berg headed west. He passed back through Paris, was in London on April 23, left the next day, and was home for dinner at his mother’s in Newark on April 25.
12
Always
Good Company
During the waning days of the war in Europe, a fresh conflict, a cold war, was beginning. The United States, the only country that was building and would soon successfully test an atomic weapon, began to take measures to prevent its French, British, and Soviet allies from making one for themselves. Once the American investigation of the small Swabian Alpine towns of Hechingen and Bissingen revealed that German physicists had failed badly in their efforts to build a bomb, the task of American atomic intelligence shifted. The next four months were, in effect, a secret war within a war, a
s the U.S. attempted to hoard the human and material components of atomic bomb building. Physicists and rare earths were conscripted in the way soldiers once plundered pretty women and gold florins. What that pioneering cold warrior Allen Dulles had been saying for a year or more was now implicit; Soviet Communism was the new enemy.
On May 2, while briefly resuming his residence at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Berg received orders from the OSS to go to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and back to Washington. Berg’s itinerary was revised two days later. He was redirected to London, Paris, Naples, Stockholm, and then back through Switzerland and Germany. One of the reasons for the sudden change of plans and the quick departure was that another restless traveler wanted Berg’s company. Bill Donovan didn’t just like to hire interesting characters, he liked to surround himself with them, even in the sky. Donovan was off to Western Europe and Berg went along for the ride, sharing Donovan’s handsomely appointed transport plane with the assortment of bird colonels, navy captains, civilian VIP’s, and OSS officials who made up the general’s entourage. Berg took the front port-side seat, two seats back of the cockpit. Seated directly behind him was his old Camp Wah-Kee-Nah charge, Monroe Karasik, now working for the OSS. Toward the rear of the plane weighty conferences were in session, Donovan presiding. Karasik began to notice that “every now and then, an important person, head bent, would walk up the aisle engaged in serious contemplation. A lot of contemplation was taking place, and every single contemplator would pause at the end of the aisle to take counsel with Moe. I would hear snatches. ‘Moe, what do you think of that young southpaw—can he last more than three innings?’ and ‘Moe, when you saw Tyrus Raymond Cobb on the coast, did he …?’ ” Berg never left his seat, but he had company across the Atlantic.
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