The First War of Physics (39 page)

However, the British did not see fit to share the sources of their intelligence with the Manhattan Project, and Groves was not persuaded. While he acknowledged that a German atomic bomb was perhaps unlikely, he felt that the risk was still too great. There was always the possibility that British intelligence agents were being fed carefully-constructed disinformation.
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Oppenheimer interpreted the now openly published German research results as deliberate, feigned or enforced ignorance of scientific facts which were by now recognised to be crucial to the Allied bomb programme.

Groves was in no mood to take chances. Fourteen civilians soon to perish aboard the
Hydro
would be part of the price to be paid for surety.

Tinker, tailor, catcher, spy

Yet even as Lansdale gained support for the Alsos mission, Groves and another of his intelligence aides, Army Corps of Engineers Major Robert Furman, set in train a parallel mission through the Office of Strategic Services. Created by Roosevelt a few months before America’s entry into the war, the OSS was intended to be America’s equivalent to the British SIS. Under William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a New York lawyer and war hero, the new intelligence organisation was taking its first faltering steps on its way to becoming the Central Intelligence Agency. But its reputation in these early years was poor. Many dismissed the organisation as a bunch of hopeless amateurs.

Groves was hedging his bets. He was now so desperate for information about the German programme that he was willing to back two independent missions to Italy to find out whatever they could. And, in typical Groves style, compartmentalisation meant that the two missions knew nothing of each other.

The OSS mission, codenamed AZUSA, was disguised beneath Project Larson, designed by the OSS to target and ‘liberate’ Italian rocket scientists. Its real target was the German atomic programme. In November 1943 Furman briefed one of the OSS operatives assigned to the mission – former Boston Red Sox catcher Morris (Moe) Berg.

It says something about the OSS recruitment policy in these first few years of its existence that a moderately famous major-league baseball player could find employment as a spy. However, Berg was no ordinary major-league baseball player. He had studied languages at Princeton and the Sorbonne, and was fluent in many. It was at Princeton that he had developed his talent for baseball. Despite his modest fame, he also possessed an unerring ability for disappearing into the background, to come and go with hardly anyone noticing.

Furman told him very little about the Allied bomb programme, but he was also pragmatic: ‘We told people generally what to look for without telling them why’, he later admitted. ‘A guy like Berg could learn more than you wanted him to. He was their hot rod, one of their best.’

Berg figured it out. The newspapers were in any case full of reports about the threat of Nazi super-weapons, based on the principles of energy release from split atoms, which according to speculation could blow up half the globe. While waiting for his travel orders, Berg buried himself in physics textbooks. He studied atomic theory and quantum mechanics, taking particular interest in Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. When William Fowler, a nuclear astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, met Berg shortly after the war he concluded that Berg understood the uncertainty principle at least as well as he did himself. Fowler went on to win the 1983 Nobel prize for physics.

But Groves was still not done. There was yet another way that the Allies could prevent any further German progress. Bohr had confirmed what many Allied physicists had suspected: Heisenberg had taken a leading role in the German programme. Oppenheimer and Chadwick both acknowledged that Heisenberg was Germany’s leading theoretical physicist and the single most powerful mind involved with the German programme. An idea that had been mooted among some of the Los Alamos physicists now resurfaced. Why not simply deny the German programme its most valuable intellectual resource? Why not prevent the Germans from making any further headway by kidnapping the programme’s scientific leader?

Unlike many of the Manhattan Project physicists who had met or worked with Heisenberg, Groves was not saddled with a deep intellectual respect for a former colleague. For Groves, assassination of Heisenberg was also therefore a possibility to be considered. The German Nobel laureate was known to make occasional visits to neutral Switzerland to give lectures on academic subjects. Groves now pondered the merits of taking Heisenberg out of the equation by kidnapping or assassinating him. He
confronted Lansdale with this proposal, which he hinted had come from the OSS.

To Lansdale, this was certainly no recommendation. He was appalled. He robustly rejected the suggestion, citing as reasons political fall-out with the Swiss government and the simple fact that kidnapping or killing Heisenberg would betray the existence of an Allied atomic weapons programme. He thought the proposal uncharacteristic of Groves, and when he heard nothing further of it he presumed the idea had been quietly dropped.

Groves simply passed it to Furman, who continued discussions with the OSS. In February 1944 Colonel Carl Eifler accepted the mission. Six feet tall and a muscular 280 pounds, Eifler had graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy and had served in the US Border Patrol before being called to active service. His jeep had been strafed by Zeros during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He had commanded the OSS’s Detachment 101, which fought a particularly dirty war against the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, before injuries forced a return to Washington.

In Washington he had been tasked with the assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek. Now plans were drawn up to kidnap Heisenberg in Germany, transport him to Switzerland, board an American military plane, parachute into the Mediterranean and rendezvous with a submarine which would bring Heisenberg to America. Even by the standards of the OSS, it was a crazy plan.

If anything went wrong (which, given the plan, was very highly likely), Eifler, a crack shot who would frequently demonstrate his prowess with a pistol after several whiskies, was instructed to ‘deny the enemy his brain’. He left for London in late March.

However, a significant problem had now arisen. Heisenberg had disappeared. Neither American nor British intelligence knew where he was.

Heisenberg’s ‘ambition’

Abraham Esau, the head of the Reich Research Council’s physics section and administrative head of the Uranverein, had made himself unpopular
with many Uranverein scientists. By October 1943 he had also lost the support of Albert Speer. Towards the end of the year he was replaced by Walther Gerlach, professor of physics at Munich University. Göring had approved the change, which formally came into effect on 1 January 1944.

Gerlach was urged to accept the post by both Heisenberg and Hahn. Unlike Esau, Gerlach possessed a physicist’s appreciation for the work in hand and was passionate about ‘pure’ research. No less committed than his colleagues to the German cause, he nevertheless saw his appointment as an opportunity to help salvage German physics from the ‘Schwindel’ of war priorities, starting with the Uranverein.

This, however, would be no easy task, and Gerlach was quickly overwhelmed. He scurried between Munich and Berlin, hurried between meetings with the Uranverein physicists and I.G. Farben, which was building a new heavy water facility next to its chemical plant at Leuna, near Merseberg in Saxony-Anhalt, eastern Germany. He failed to produce timely reports to the Reich Research Council, which grew impatient. As deadlines slipped, Gerlach would unload his troubles to his good friend Paul Rosbaud, with whom he would take lunch two or three times a week.

Despite having sought Heisenberg’s advice about taking the role, Gerlach was wary of Heisenberg’s ‘ambition’. This perception may have stemmed from the politicking that had surrounded Heisenberg’s appointment as director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Or it might have been born from a general inability to fathom Heisenberg’s personal agenda.

Whatever it was, this agenda had taken Heisenberg on many trips to parts of occupied Europe at the invitation of the Reich Education Ministry, or prominent Nazis. As ever, the impression he left with his foreign colleagues was ambiguous at best, odious at worst. In Holland he had lectured Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir on history and world politics, explaining that it was the historic mission of Germany to defend Western culture against the ‘eastern hordes’.

Although many Germans were in denial over the existence of Hitler’s ‘final solution’,
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Heisenberg was at least familiar with aspects of it. In December 1943 he had accepted an invitation to visit his old school friend Hans Frank, now General Governor of Poland in Krakow, and to give a lecture at the cultural propaganda institute. Frank had overseen the ruthless annihilation of the Jewish ghettoes in Krakow and Warsaw.
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Of course, familiarity with mass murder does not imply acceptance or complicity, but Heisenberg’s willingness to embrace the demands of his position, and his insensitive, discomfiting political views often gave the impression that he was very much part of the Nazi establishment.

On 24 January 1944 Heisenberg found himself on the way back to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, this time for a very different kind of mission. Having discovered that Bohr had escaped, on 6 December the German military police had occupied Bohr’s institute and arrested the only two people who had been found inside it at the time, a physicist and a laboratory technician. Heisenberg and Diebner spent three days in Copenhagen trying to sort out what should happen next.

Heisenberg’s proposals all carried conditions that he believed were likely to be acceptable to the occupying authorities. Either the Germans could take over the institute for war research, the institute could be stripped of its equipment, including the cyclotron, and returned to Danish control, or the institute could be returned provided no war research was conducted there. Weizsäcker had already advised Heisenberg that he had no wish to run the institute as a German laboratory on behalf of the Uranverein. It hardly mattered. All the options were roundly rejected by the Danish physicists. Among them was Christian Møller, who no doubt recalled with bitterness Heisenberg’s behaviour during his last visit in September 1941.

An impasse seemed likely. In the event, it was Ernst von Weizsäcker’s Foreign Office which insisted that Bohr’s institute be returned to the Danes without condition and the imprisoned physicists be released.

If the Danish physicists felt any gratitude towards Heisenberg for his role in getting the matter resolved, this must surely have evaporated a few months later, when Heisenberg returned to Copenhagen to lecture at the German Cultural Institute. During this last visit, Heisenberg dined publicly with SS-Oberstürmbannführer Werner Best, the German plenipotentiary in Denmark and a former deputy of Reinhard Heydrich. But for the intervention of the Danish people and the Swedish authorities, Best would have consigned 8,000 Danish Jews to their fate in concentration camps in Germany.

The Allied bombing of Berlin was now making it increasingly difficult to continue research. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry received a direct hit in what Gerlach referred to as a ‘catastrophic’ air raid on 15 February 1944. Hahn’s laboratories were destroyed, together with many of the papers he had collected in a lifetime’s work at the institute. The Institute for Physics had only been superficially damaged, and Heisenberg joined other staff in an attempt to save books from Hahn’s library.

The quiet Dahlem suburb of Berlin was targeted not because of its strategic military or industrial significance. Groves had asked for the area to be bombed specifically to kill the German scientists or at least drive them ‘out of their comfortable quarters’. It worked. Plans to evacuate both the institutes of chemistry and physics were accelerated.

You are looking at the Alsos mission

By the time the Alsos mission had been approved, Allied forces had established bridgeheads in Calabria, the toe of Italy, and in Salerno. The force in Calabria met with little resistance. Salerno was a different matter, the Allies taking heavy casualties in five days of fierce fighting. Nevertheless, within a few weeks the American Fifth Army, commanded by Lieutenant
General Mark Clark, and the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery had advanced and secured control of much of the southern part of the country. Mussolini had already been deposed and imprisoned. The Italians had surrendered on 3 September.

The Germans, however, had not. In a daring raid, Mussolini was sprung from prison and re-installed as a ‘puppet’ dictator. The Italians were largely powerless as the Germans and the Allies now fought for possession of their country.

Although declared a ‘scientific’ mission, the real purpose of Alsos was atomic intelligence. The mission had a long list of potential scientific targets, but its principal objective in Italy was to interrogate Edoardo Amaldi and Gian Carlo Wick, leading members of the nuclear physics group at the University of Rome whose names had been supplied by Fermi. The Alsos team included a number of scientific advisers drawn from MIT, Cornell University and Bell Laboratories.

The team set off for Naples on 16 December 1943 and arrived after a long and tortuous journey. By this time the Allied advance north up the length of Italy’s mainland had stalled. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had made good use of Italy’s mountains and rivers to form a strong defensive line across the width of the country. Behind this defensive line lay an even more formidable obstacle – Monte Cassino, an imposing sixteenth-century Benedictine monastery set atop a mountain above the junction of the Rapido and Liri valleys, about 80 miles south of Rome. Securing Highway 6, the road to Rome, would mean first securing Monte Cassino.

Rather than try to fight their way through Kesselring’s defences, Allied commanders thought to circumvent mem by landing forces at Anzio, a few miles south of Rome and 60 miles behind the enemy line. The British First and American Third Divisions landed at Anzio on 22 January 1944. Kesselring launched a counter-attack on 30 January, as soon as the Allies thought the bridgehead to be secure. A further counter-attack on 16 February nearly forced an Allied retreat. Far from helping the drive towards Rome, the force at Anzio was now effectively neutralised.