Bomb (13 page)

In Moscow, KGB officers were intensely frustrated by how little they'd uncovered about the Manhattan Project. “In the presence of this research work,” Moscow cabled its spies in America, “vast both in scale and scope, being conducted right here next to you, the slow pace of agent cultivation in the USA is particularly intolerable.”

What exactly were the Americans doing? The Soviets would never know—not until the KGB could get a scientist
inside
the Manhattan Project.

Then, in late 1943, the KGB got its first big break. It happened because the work at Los Alamos was proving even more difficult than Oppenheimer had expected. He needed more talent, and fast. The British government agreed to send Oppenheimer a team of top physicists.

In November Klaus Fuchs sailed for America.

*   *   *

A
FEW WEEKS LATER,
Harry Gold got a call from his KGB contact, Semyon Semyonov. Gold was needed in New York City right away.

Gold hurried to the meeting place, a dark restaurant. He saw right away that Sam was “extremely excited—more so than I had ever seen him before.”

Gold asked if this had something to do with the industrial spies he'd been picking up information from over the past couple of years.

“Forget them,” Semyonov said. “Forget everything you ever knew about them. You are never to see them or meet them or have anything to do with them again.”

Gold was too stunned to respond.

“Something has come up,” the Russian continued, “and it is so big and so tremendous that you have got to exert your complete efforts to carrying it through successfully. You have got to concentrate on it completely. Before you make a single move in connection with this, you are to think, think twice, think three times. You cannot make any mistakes.”

FERRY JOB

FOR MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK
on the heavy water plant at Vemork, Knut Haukelid stayed hidden in the mountains of Norway. “It was an uncommonly hard winter,” he later said, “with vast amounts of snow.”

German troops swarmed the area in search of the saboteurs. Haukelid and Arne Kjelstrup managed to stay a step ahead of them, but game was scarce in the barren, snowy mountains. Cold weather causes the body to burn calories quickly in an attempt to create heat. Haukelid and Kjelstrup simply couldn't find the calories.

“One day I managed to kill a squirrel with my skiing stick,” remembered Haukelid. “When I ate him, he was just as miserably thin and undernourished as we were.”

They starved through winter and into spring, dodging German patrols, waiting for their next job.

“When this war is over,” said Kjelstrup after yet another unsatisfying meal, “I shall spend all my money on food. I shan't spend any on girls.”

Haukelid licked his long-since empty spoon.

“Same here,” he said.

*   *   *

F
ROM HIS OFFICE IN
W
ASHINGTON,
D.C., General Leslie Groves followed the news from Norway. “The first reports on this action were most encouraging,” said Groves of the Gunnerside raid. The heavy water equipment had been destroyed, dealing a serious blow to German bomb research.

But by the summer of 1943 things had changed. Sources inside the Vemork plant—Norwegian workers who fed information to the resistance network—reported that the Germans were furiously rebuilding the equipment. In August, Vemork again began shipping heavy water to Germany, under heavy guard.

Groves was alarmed. If the Germans wanted heavy water that badly, he figured, they must be using it in their atomic bomb program. The supply must be cut off.

Just before noon on November 16, about a hundred U.S. Air Force bombers appeared two miles above the Vemork plant. Prepared for an air raid, German soldiers turned on smoke machines, which clouded the blue sky. The bombers released seven hundred bombs into the gorge on which the Vemork plant was perched.

The five-hundred-pound bombs exploded all over the gorge and the nearby town of Rjukan. One hit a bomb shelter, killing sixteen Norwegians. Several landed around Vemork, with just two hitting the heavy water plant. The high concentration room, deep in the basement of the steel and concrete structure, was unscratched.

Yet the bombing was a success, in an unexpected way. German authorities realized their precious heavy water would never be safe in Norway.

In early February 1944, more news reached London and Washington: The Germans were beginning to empty the heavy water machines. All the heavy water—far more than had ever been shipped before—was being loaded into barrels. Very soon it would be taken to Germany.

Groves demanded that those barrels be stopped before reaching German soil. British intelligence gave the job to the man in Norway with the most experience in sabotage: Knut Haukelid.

*   *   *

H
AUKELID ENLISTED
the help of another underground fighter, Rolf Sörlie. In need of much more information, the two snuck into Rjukan, the town near the Vemork plant. In the dark street, they met Kjell Nielsen, an engineer at the plant, and a man they knew could be trusted.

“Haukelid was awful to look at,” Nielsen later said, “with a dense beard, and marked by the tough life in the mountains.”

They hurried to Nielsen's rented room and went inside to talk. Yes, Nielsen confirmed, about forty large barrels were being filled with heavy water. In a few days, they'd be loaded onto railway cars and taken by train from the plant. At Lake Tinn, the rail cars would slide onto a ferryboat for the trip down the long, narrow waterway. Then the cars would continue by rail to the coast, where the barrels would be transferred to a ship and taken across the North Sea to Germany.

The Germans knew an attack was likely. The barrels would travel under heavy guard, and German planes would fly overhead to watch the land on either side of the tracks.

Haukelid relayed the details to British intelligence in London, saying that the job would be tricky and might result in the loss of civilian lives.

“Case considered,” came the immediate reply from London. “Very urgent that heavy water be destroyed. Hope this can be done without too serious consequences. Send our best wishes for good luck in the work.”

*   *   *

H
AUKELID GAVE
S
ÖRLIE
a quick course in sabotage and explosives. In need of a third man for the job, they recruited Knut Lier-Hansen, a surveyor who lived in Rjukan. “A tough young fellow who did not know what nerves meant,” was how Sörlie described Lier-Hansen. “Seldom have I seen anyone become so enthusiastic at the prospect of being involved in an action that might be dangerous.”

In a series of secret meetings, each in a different location, the three men reviewed their options. One was to try another Gunnerside-style commando raid. This was unlikely to succeed, since the Germans now had extra soldiers on patrol. If Haukelid could gather a trained crew of twenty or thirty, he'd give it a try. “But the time was too short for that,” he said.

Another option was to lay dynamite on the track and blow up the train somewhere along the route. But could they plant the charges without being spotted? What if the Germans sent scouts ahead of the train to inspect the rails? Would the explosion be certain to destroy the heavy water? “There were so many unknown factors that we had to give up the plan,” said Haukelid.

They went over the route again—and spotted the weak link. At Lake Tinn, the train cars would be loaded onto a ferryboat. If they could sink the boat over the deepest part of the lake, the barrels of heavy water would come to rest 1,300 feet below the surface.

The Vemork engineer Kjell Nielsen got Haukelid the word. The shipment would be traveling in a few days: Sunday morning, February 20.

Haukelid dressed as a workman and walked around the docks on Lake Tinn. He found out that a boat called
Hydro
would be used Sunday morning. He bought a ticket and traveled down the lake on
Hydro
, leaning over the rail, with one eye on the minute hand of his watch.

Thirty minutes after leaving the dock, the boat was over the deepest part of the lake.

*   *   *

A
T 1:00 A.M. ON
F
EBRUARY 20,
Lier-Hansen parked his car under a clump of trees about a mile from the ferry dock. He cut the headlights, and he, Haukelid, and Sörlie got out and started toward the water with guns, grenades, and explosives hidden under their long coats.

“The bitterly cold night set everything creaking and crackling,” recalled Haukelid. “The ice on the road snapped sharply as we went over it.”

They saw the
Hydro
tied up at the dark dock. From scouting the area, they knew there were about thirty German guards at the nearby railway station. There was no one guarding the waterfront.

The men hurried along the dock and jumped onto the boat. Sounds of shouting and laughing rose from the crew's quarters below deck. “Almost the entire ship's crew was gathered together below,” Haukelid said, “playing poker rather noisily.”

Haukelid led the way down ladders to a hatch leading to the bilge—the ship's lowest compartment. As he opened the hatch he heard footsteps approaching. The men dove behind chairs as the Norwegian night watchman walked up. Lier-Hansen recognized the watchman and stepped out.

“You here, Knut?” asked the startled guard.

“Yes, John,” said Lier-Hansen. “With some friends.”

Haukelid and Sörlie stepped out from their hiding places. The guard looked them over.

“Hell, John, we're expecting a raid,” Lier-Hansen improvised, hoping the guard would assume they needed to hide supplies from the Germans—and hoping he'd sympathize.

The guard pointed to the hatch leading to the bilge, and said, “No problem.”

*   *   *

L
IER-
H
ANSEN STAYED ABOVE,
chatting with the guard, while Haukelid and Sörlie climbed into the bilge.

“It was an anxious job,” Haukelid remembered, “and it took time.”

Through the freezing, foot-deep water sloshing around at the ship's bottom, they crawled to the front of the ferry. Blowing a hole here, they knew, would cause water to rush in. The front of the boat would sink, forcing the back to rise out of the lake. The ship's propeller would spin uselessly in the air.

Haukelid pulled the bomb out from under his long coat—nineteen pounds of plastic explosive molded into a long sausage shape. He and Sörlie taped it to the ship's metal side. Near the explosive they taped two specially adapted alarm clocks—two, just in case one malfunctioned. The clocks were connected by wire to four flashlight batteries.

Then came the dangerous part: connecting the fuse between the clocks and the explosive. Each clock had a little metal hammer that rang its alarm bell. The bells had been removed, but the hammers were still in place. When the hammer hit a metal plate on the clock, electricity would flow from the batteries through the clocks to the fuses, igniting the explosive. Each bell hammer was set just one-third of an inch above the metal plate. “There was a one-third of an inch between us and disaster,” said Haukelid.

Haukelid wound the clocks. He set the alarms to ring at 10:45. He and Sörlie could hear the clocks ticking as they scurried back toward the hatch.

They passed the guard again on their way off the ship. If the man was curious about why they'd taken so long to hide supplies, he showed no sign.

“You on watch now?” Haukelid asked casually.

“Yes,” said the guard, “but I go off when the train arrives.”

Haukelid smiled and said, “Lucky man.”

*   *   *

A
FEW HOURS LATER,
German soldiers lashed flat train cars carrying forty barrels of heavy water to the deck of the
Hydro
. The ferry pulled away from the dock at 10:15, right on time. There were fifty-three people aboard, about half of them Norwegian civilians. For the first half hour, the lake crossing was routine.

The captain was on the bridge, enjoying the cold, clear morning when he heard the explosion. He knew right away it was a bomb.

The ferry tipped forward. The flatcars rolled down the deck, snapped the ropes holding them in place, crashed into the water, and vanished. Terrified and screaming, civilians and German soldiers tumbled and leaped into the icy water, grabbing for chairs, oars, life vests.

The captain saw there was nothing he could do. “I jumped into the water and swam about fifteen feet from the ship,” he later said. “By then the stern was very high and the propeller was still turning.”

Just four minutes from the moment of the explosion, it was all over.

“She went down,” recalled the captain, “bow first, in the deepest part of the lake.”

DIRTY WORK

THE NEXT DAY
Knut Lier-Hansen showed up for work in Rjukan, like it was a normal Monday morning. Rolf Sörlie skied back into the mountains and disappeared. Knut Haukelid took a train to the capital city of Oslo. If anything had gone wrong with the ferry job, his mission was to try again to destroy the heavy water before it sailed for Germany.

On a busy Oslo street Haukelid stopped at a newsstand. It was front-page news in every paper: RAILWAY FERRY HYDRO SUNK

He bought a paper and read. The wrecked ferry lay 1,300 feet below the lake's surface. A rescue boat pulled twenty-seven people from the water. Twenty-six, many of them Norwegian civilians, went down with the ferry. The papers said nothing—knew nothing—about the ferry's cargo.

Haukelid slipped across the border to Sweden, beyond the reach of the German search for the ferry saboteurs. In the capital city of Stockholm, he took warm baths and put on clean clothes and ate in brightly lit restaurants. But he was in no mood for such luxuries.

“I was thoroughly tired of being there,” he said, “and longed to get back to the mountains and our comrades in Norway.”