Joseph E. Persico (51 page)

The next day, Churchill closeted himself with the President in the snuggery to describe his twin frustrations. First, he reiterated his conviction that Britain was still not being treated as a full atomic partner. Next, the interfering Niels Bohr rankled him. Churchill raised the matter of Bohr's contact with the Soviet scientist Kapitsa. The only reason the Russians wanted the Dane in Moscow, Churchill warned, was to spy on Tube Alloys. To make his position absolutely clear, Churchill drafted and persuaded Roosevelt to sign an aide-mémoire with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Its first paragraph read: “The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding Tube Alloys, with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy, but when a ‘bomb' is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.” The statement ended even more harshly: “Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians.” That day Churchill left Hyde Park by train to board the
Queen Mary
and return to England, content that he had slain the dragon of ill-advised cooperation on the atom with Russia. While aboard ship, he wrote Lord Cherwell: “He [Bohr] is a great advocate of [atomic] publicity. He made unauthorized disclosure to Justice Frankfurter. . . . The professor [Kapitsa] urged him to go to Russia to discuss matters. What is this all about? It seems to me that Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crime.”

Roosevelt, typically, left no explanation for what appears to be a complete flip-flop on sharing atomic secrets with Russia. For all his determination to keep the Russian war machine grinding on through lend-lease and total fealty to Stalin, FDR, like Churchill, was aware that if this thing worked, this atomic bomb, its possessor would wield the dominant power in the postwar world. The secrets of Los Alamos were not to be donated to the Soviets.

In guarding the secret of the atom bomb, the loyalty of Niels Bohr was the least of Roosevelt's and Churchill's worries. The Russians had other resources. And they understood perfectly the global ramifications of an atomic monopoly. The NKVD code name revealed the rank given to the Manhattan Project: “. . . [W]e call it ‘ENORMOZ.'” The month before Churchill convinced FDR to reject the Danish physicist, a slight, inconspicuous figure with a retreating hairline, a veined forehead, receding chin, and turkey neck reported to the bomb design and assembly laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The mild-mannered Klaus Fuchs instantly impressed Robert Oppenheimer, the project's scientific leader, when he half apologetically pointed out a flaw in a key equation. Thereafter, Oppenheimer invited Fuchs to the weekly meeting of division and group leaders.

Despite his retiring manner, perhaps because of it, the bachelor physicist enjoyed a full after-hours social life at Los Alamos. The shy Fuchs aroused the maternal instincts of Manhattan Project wives, who saw to it that he was invited to their picnics, dinner parties, and dances, where he proved surprisingly light on his feet. The job, nevertheless, remained Fuchs's obsession. As his immediate superior, Hans Bethe, put it, “He worked days and nights. He was a bachelor and had nothing better to do, and he contributed very greatly to the success of the Los Alamos project.” As Fuchs later described his dual existence, in “one compartment I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relationships . . . I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point.” He had an expression for his mind-set, “controlled schizophrenia.” Even before coming to Los Alamos, Fuchs had already begun slipping atomic secrets to his Soviet contact in New York, Harry Gold, code-named Raymond. Now he was positioned deep within the atomic sanctum, able not merely to provide to his Soviet superiors the marginalia of nuclear physics, but the very heart of the bomb's construction.

Fuchs was not alone at Los Alamos in his hidden loyalties. Theodore Alvin Hall, son of an immigrant New York furrier, was a physics prodigy who skipped whole grades in secondary school. He was initially accepted by Columbia University but turned away when it was discovered he was only fourteen. He next attended Queens College and in 1942, at age sixteen, entered Harvard as a junior. There he demonstrated a genius for quantum mechanics. When Manhattan Project recruiters discreetly inquired at Harvard about promising physicists, Ted Hall, now an eighteen-year-old senior, was suggested.

From early youth the precocious Hall had been drawn to radical politics, joining the left-wing American Student Union when he was thirteen. At Los Alamos, the boy physicist, with the slender, handsome looks, soon adopted the moral conviction of several of his colleagues that knowledge of the bomb should be shared with the Soviet Union. As he later described his state of mind, “I was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons if there should be a post-war depression.” In October 1944, while visiting his family in Forest Hills, he went to the Amtorg purchasing office at 238 West Twenty-eighth Street and boldly offered to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Two months later, now assigned a Russian controller, he made his first delivery, pages of handwritten notes jotted down in the privacy of his room at Los Alamos. Some scholars would later rate the notes that Hall handed to the Soviets as superior even to Fuchs's disclosures in that the young physicist was the first to reveal to Russia the implosion method for detonating the bomb. Hall was nineteen when he provided the Soviet Union with possibly its most priceless atomic secret thus far.

*

Nineteen forty-four was a presidential election year, and espionage intruded into the campaign. Once Roosevelt had cleared the third-term barrier, and with the country in the midst of war, a fourth-term bid seemed unremarkable. FDR initially remained coy about his intentions. One person, however, privy to his thoughts was Daisy Suckley. Over the past twelve years, he had exhausted the nation's appetite for liberal politics, he told her. As she recorded in her diary after she and Roosevelt had finished a lone lunch, “. . . [H]e remembers Woodrow Wilson telling him that the public is willing to be ‘Liberal' about a third of the time, gets tired of new things and reverts to conservatism the other two-thirds of the time.” On May 22, 1944, FDR made another admission to his spinster confidant, something he had first raised at Bernard Baruch's South Carolina estate. He knew he was sicker than his doctors had let on. But on this subsequent occasion, discussing a fourth term, he told Daisy, “What will decide me will be the way I feel in a couple of months. If I know I am not going to be able to carry on for another four years, it wouldn't be fair to the American people to run for another term.” Should that be his decision, he claimed, “I have a candidate—but don't breathe it to a soul.” FDR paused conspiratorially, then said, “Henry J. Kaiser.”

Suckley was astonished. No one, she thought, could be more unlike the President. True, the sixty-two-year-old Kaiser was an eighteen-hour-a-day dynamo, a bottleneck breaker, who was on his way to turning out over a thousand Liberty ships, some in just days, a man so hyperactive that he wore two watches, one set to East Coast time and the other to West Coast time. He was known as the New Deal's favorite tycoon. But Kaiser's knowledge and experience of politics were nil and his personality less than magnetic. Suckley could not tell if the President was sincere or merely fishing for encouragement to run again by comparing himself to so unlikely a successor. Nor could she know how sincere this byzantine personality was when FDR told her, “[I]f the election were held tomorrow, he would be beaten by almost any Republican.” That July, however, Roosevelt did accept a fourth-term nomination as naturally as breathing. He chose Senator Harry S Truman as his running mate, shedding Henry Wallace, whose ultra-liberal politics and eccentricities had become anathema to Democrat bosses. FDR's Republican opponent was to be New York's governor and former racket-busting prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey.

The choice of Truman would eventually plug a flagrant security leak. In January 1944, Fritz Kolbe was shocked by a document that came across his Berlin foreign office desk. Vice President Wallace had continued to confide the most delicate secrets to his trusted brother-in-law, Charles Bruggmann, and the Swiss diplomat had continued to cable these conversations to his superiors in the Swiss foreign ministry. What Kolbe came across was Wallace's account of what had happened in the innermost councils of a Moscow conference of foreign ministers in October 1943. This information had found its way to Berlin through Habakuk, the German plant in the Swiss foreign office. Kolbe delivered the incriminating document to Allen Dulles on his next trip to Bern. Upon receiving it, Dulles alerted Donovan, who in turn took the report to the President's military chief of staff, Admiral Leahy. The admiral, stunned by the enormity of Wallace's indiscretion, immediately showed the message to the President. Leahy was equally amazed by FDR's reaction. “The OSS report did not seem to surprise Roosevelt,” Leahy noted. “I do not recall that he commented on it at all except to say that it was quite interesting.” Two possible answers explain the President's bland reaction. Either FDR's powers of concentration were flagging or he knew, come July, that Wallace would not be on the ticket with him.

Arlington Hall's work was not limited to decrypting Japanese ciphers. In April 1944 a broken message sent by the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo to Bern painted a gloomy portrait of Japan's capital in the third year of war with America. The decrypt, sent to FDR, read: “Stores are closing one by one and Tokyo presents a pitiful spectacle. The Japanese are more and more dependent on the black market, and the distress of the people is great. . . . Thousands of families are leaving the capital, driven out by hunger.” The President could only hope that the picture of Tokyo was more accurate than the one the Japanese were receiving about the American home front. A German who had been interned in the United States returned home in early March 1944 aboard an exchange ship and gave this description to Ambassador Oshima: “Living conditions of the people in general in the United States are growing steadily worse. Prices are soaring and quality declining. Distribution of articles, particularly necessary for daily use, is poor. Foods, particularly meats, vegetables, sugar and fresh fish, are scarce. It is the same with goods of secondary necessity. Such things as shoes are almost unobtainable.”

The collision of presidential politics and espionage occurred less than two months before the 1944 election. James V. Forrestal, the Navy secretary, who had succeeded Frank Knox after the latter's death that year, first sounded the alarm. “My Dear Mr. President,” Forrestal wrote in his neat longhand on September 14, “Information has come to me that Dewey's first speech will deal with Pearl Harbor.” An unidentified anti-Roosevelt Army officer, it turned out, had informed Dewey that FDR had access to broken Japanese codes long before December 7, 1941. Therefore, the President had to have known of the impending attack and had done nothing to prevent it. Consequently, the Dewey camp reasoned, FDR was guilty of criminal negligence at best and treason at worst. General Marshall, aware of the leak, and given his visceral loathing of politics, dreaded entering into this political sinkhole, but saw no choice. Without saying anything to Roosevelt, he proceeded with his own counterattack.

On September 25, Dewey, then campaigning in Tulsa, Oklahoma, received a visitor, Colonel Carter Clarke, dressed for the day in a recently reactivated civilian suit. Ushered into the candidate's hotel suite, Clarke handed Dewey an envelope stamped in red “Top Secret.” As the former prosecutor eyed the envelope warily, Clarke explained that he had come directly from General Marshall. Dewey, with the trademark black mustache and a cold-eyed gaze, a shorter man than the officer had expected, extracted a letter from the envelope. “Well,” Dewey said, after reading it with a lawyer's scrutiny, “Top Secret—that's really top, isn't it?” Clarke could not tell if the candidate was genuinely impressed or being sarcastic.

Marshall's letter began, “I am writing to you without the knowledge of any other person except Admiral King. . . . The conduct of General Eisenhower's campaign and of all operations in the Pacific are closely related in conception and timing to the information we secretly obtain through . . . intercepted codes. They contribute greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives. . . . Our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron Oshima's messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler and other officials. . . . These are still the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events.” He went on to explain that Magic had provided the edge in the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The heavy shipping losses inflicted on the emperor's fleet, he explained, “. . . largely result from the fact that we know the sailing dates and routes of their convoys and can notify our submarines to lie in wait at these points.” He warned of the disastrous impact of compromising the secret of the broken codes with an unadmiring reference to the OSS: “. . . Some of Donovan's people, without telling us, instituted a secret search of the Japanese embassy offices in Portugal. As a result, the entire military attaché code all over the world was changed, and though this occurred over a year ago, we have not yet been able to break the new code. . . .” The last point, while persuasive, was not quite true; and given Marshall's reputation for probity, it had probably been fed to him by Donovan's enemies in Army intelligence. The Japanese had not changed their codes after the OSS black bag job inside the Lisbon embassy.