Bomb (5 page)

Hitler responded by declaring war on the United States. The sides were set for the biggest and deadliest war in history—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union led the Allied Powers against the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy.

At stake, the future of the world.

*   *   *

P
EARL
H
ARBOR
was a turning point for Robert Oppenheimer, too. From that moment on, he decided to forget about politics and discussion groups. He decided to pour all his energy into beating Hitler in the race for the atomic bomb.

“Just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, I received a phone call from Oppie,” recalled a young physicist named Robert Serber. “He said he was in Chicago and wanted to come down and talk with me about something.”

A former student of Oppenheimer's, Serber was teaching at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He had no idea why Oppenheimer would want to see him. Oppenheimer drove to the campus and found Serber. They walked out of town and into the cornfields.

When they were alone in the fields, Oppenheimer explained his work with the Uranium Committee. He told Serber he was about to be placed in charge of “fast-neutron research”—the study of speeding neutrons and fission. His ominous official title would be “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” He wanted Serber in Berkeley as his assistant.

Serber and his wife packed up their car, drove west, and moved into the apartment above Oppenheimer's garage. At Oppenheimer's office on the Berkeley campus, they began designing the atomic bomb.

The work was thrilling—and frightening. There was no way to know what German scientists were up to, or how far ahead they might already be. Oppenheimer knew that this was a duel the United States could not afford to lose.

“We were aware,” he said of the Germans, “of what it might mean if they beat us to the draw.”

NORWAY CONNECTION

LUCKILY FOR OPPENHEIMER,
he was not in the fight alone. One of his most valuable allies would be a man he didn't know, and would never meet—a twenty-nine-year-old Norwegian named Knut Haukelid.

Haukelid had dark wavy hair and a broad, muscular body toughened by years of hiking and skiing. When the Germans conquered Norway in 1940, Haukelid and a few friends had refused to admit defeat. They strapped guns to their backs and skied deep into the roadless forests and mountains. “There was only one thought in our heads,” he later said. “Hitler and his gang should be thrown back into the sea.”

While crossing a lake on a ferry boat, they found an outlet for their rage. Standing on deck, leaning casually on the rail, was a Norwegian man in a Nazi uniform—some Norwegians were Nazi sympathizers who aided the invading army.

After waiting until the boat was about 300 yards from shore, Haukelid gestured for his friends to follow. He walked up to the Nazi.

“Heil Hitler!” Haukelid said, using the typical Nazi greeting.

“Heil Hitler!” the man said, reaching out to shake hands.

As Haukelid grasped the man's hand, his friends grabbed the Nazi, lifted him over the rail, and dropped him into the lake.

The only thing that floated was his hat.

*   *   *

O
VER THE FOLLOWING YEAR,
Knut Haukelid found a more organized and effective way to fight the Germans. He joined one of the secret resistance groups that were forming all over Norway. He began working as a radio operator and spy.

“No one—not even those nearest to us—could know what was going on,” he said. Anyone caught resisting the German occupation was instantly shot. “In the daytime we had to do our ordinary work,” he explained. “We were dropping with fatigue. What kept us going was a growing pride in doing
something
, little as it was, against the hated invaders.”

By day, Haukelid worked at a German-controlled submarine base. After dark, he gathered his radio equipment, snuck out of town on a bicycle, and searched for a remote electrical pole. He climbed the wooden pole, tapped into the electrical wires, powered up his radio, and sent information on German military movements to British intelligence officers in London.

“We had many wild plans in those days,” Haukelid remembered. Hoping to deal the Nazis a more direct blow, he and his friends concocted a plot to kidnap Vidkun Quisling, leader of the Norwegian Nazis. The plan was to knock Quisling unconscious, drive him into the mountains, call Britain for a plane, fly him to London, and put him on display in a cage.

Haukelid found out where Quisling was staying in Oslo. He rented a room across the hall, contacted a fellow resistance fighter who worked for the telephone company, and arranged to listen in on Quisling's phone line. “The plan was to find out when he ordered a car,” Haukelid said, “so that we could pick him up in one of ours.” Haukelid's men dressed in stolen Nazi uniforms, so Quisling wouldn't be suspicious until it was too late.

But before they could pull the trigger on the operation, German intelligence uncovered Haukelid's crew of radio operators. Some of the men were thrown into concentration camps. Haukelid escaped into the mountains. He managed to get across the border to Sweden by bicycle and traveled from there, by plane, to Great Britain.

Haukelid was safe, but all he could think about was getting back home to continue the fight. He would get his wish, and more. What Haukelid did not yet know was that a remote factory perched on the side of a cliff in Norway was the key to Germany's top-secret atomic bomb project. Someone had to put that factory out of operation. And he was about to get the job.

*   *   *

B
ACK IN
N
ORWAY,
Hitler's secret police force, the Gestapo, got Haukelid's name and stormed his family's house. They ransacked the place for evidence of his undercover work. A Gestapo officer cornered his mother, demanding information.

She wouldn't talk.

A furious S. W. Fehmer, chief of Gestapo intelligence in Norway, stepped forward and ordered her to tell him where Haukelid had gone.

“He is in the mountains,” she responded.

“No!” shouted Fehmer. “He is in Britain. Our contact in Sweden tells us that he has been taken across the North Sea in a fighter plane. And what do you think he is doing there?”

Haukelid's mother had no idea. But she knew her son. She suspected it would be something big.

Staring Fehmer straight in the eyes, she said. “You will find out when he comes back.”

ENORMOZ

EARLY IN 1942,
a young Soviet physicist named Georgi Flerov sat in the library of a military base in southwestern Russia, flipping through a tall stack of physics journals from the United States. When the Germans invaded, Flerov had put his studies aside to serve in the Soviet air force. But he couldn't stop thinking about fission. So when he had a free moment, he snuck off to the library to read of the newest discoveries.

“I hoped to look through the latest papers on the fission of uranium,” he said. Up until that point, American physics magazines had been filled with articles on new experiments and theories about fission.

Suddenly there was nothing.

“This silence is not the result of an absence of research,” Flerov warned his government. “In a word, the seal of silence has been imposed, and this is the best proof of the vigorous work that is going on now abroad.”

Flerov guessed right. The work being done by Oppenheimer and others on the Uranium Committee was top secret. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II. But that's because they were fighting common enemies—not because they liked each other.

Even more distressing to Flerov was the idea of a German atomic bomb. Germany had “first-class scientists,” he said, “and significant supplies of uranium ore.” If Hitler got his hands on atomic bombs, that would be the end of the Soviet Union.

To Soviet physicists like Flerov, this made it vitally important that the Soviet Union develop its own atomic bomb. But the war was making this impossible. Russian forces stopped the German advance just short of Moscow, but the two massive armies were still slugging it out along a battlefront stretching 1,500 miles from north to south. Soviet scientists had to abandon fission experiments to work instead on weapons that could be used right away.

The message to Soviet leaders was clear. If the Soviets were going to get an atomic bomb any time in the near future, they were going to have to steal it.

*   *   *

T
HIS WAS A JOB FOR THE
KGB.

In March 1942, Semyon Semyonov and his fellow KGB agents in New York got a coded telegram from Moscow headquarters explaining the task. “Germany and the USA are frantically working to obtain uranium,” Moscow warned, “and use it as an explosive to make bombs of enormous destructive power, and to all appearances, this problem is quite close to practical solution. It is essential that we take up this problem in all seriousness.”

Soviet spies in American cities began working on what they called “agent cultivation.” In tradecraft, “cultivation” means gathering information on a potential source, feeling him out to see if he might be convinced to cooperate. This was a tough task, since Soviet agents didn't know which American scientists were working on the atomic bomb.

Suddenly, in late March, the KGB got a break. One night, on the New York City subway, a KGB courier named Zalmond Franklin ran into an old friend, Clarence Hiskey. Hiskey was a chemist and professor at Columbia University. The two had gone to college together in the 1930s. Both had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and members of the Communist Party.

The friends went to dinner and talked over old times. “He decided to walk me to the subway,” Franklin reported to his KGB contact. “Our conversation on the way is what leads to the reason for this report.”

As they strolled, Hiskey shocked Franklin by saying: “Imagine a bomb dropped in the center of this city, which would destroy the entire city.”

Franklin laughed.

“There is such a bomb,” Hiskey blurted out. “I'm working on it.”

Trying to appear only casually interested, Franklin asked for a few more details.

Hiskey explained that he and other scientists were “working with desperate haste” to build an atomic bomb. It would be the most powerful weapon ever produced. The Germans, he added, were probably “far ahead on the bomb.”

Then, after this burst of top-secret information, Hiskey went silent.

“Hiskey was sorry he told me about this,” Franklin reported, “and swore me to silence.”

*   *   *

V
ASILY
Z
ARUBIN,
the top KGB agent in New York City, telegraphed Franklin's report to headquarters in Moscow. Moscow responded quickly, telling Zarubin the information “is of great interest to us,” and attaching a long list of technical questions about fission and bomb making. Zarubin gave the list to Franklin, ordering Franklin to get answers from his friend.

Franklin went to Hiskey's apartment but faced a major obstacle: Hiskey's wife was there. Franklin was under strict KGB orders not to discuss the subject of atomic bombs in front of anyone but Hiskey.

The three sat down to dinner. “At no time did Clarence bring up the subject of his work,” Franklin reported, “and following instructions, I did not mention the subject.” After the meal, Franklin tried to get Hiskey alone, with no success. “His wife was present the entire evening,” explained Franklin.

That proved to be Franklin's one and only chance. Hiskey was soon transferred to the University of Chicago. When a Soviet agent in Chicago made contact with Hiskey, the meeting was observed by FBI agents. The FBI informed the U.S. Army that Hiskey had been spotted with a suspected Soviet agent. Hiskey suddenly found himself drafted into the army and shipped to a remote military base in the Northwest Territories of Canada—far from atomic bomb secrets.

Hiskey was never given an explanation. He knew better than to ask for one.

*   *   *

H
ISKEY'S STORY
illustrates just how hard it was for Soviet spies to get at American secrets. “It was difficult because we always felt we were under FBI surveillance,” said KGB agent Alexander Feklisov. “From the moment I arrived in New York, I was always shadowed as soon as I stepped outside.”

Still, the Soviets were absolutely determined to steal the bomb. It was such a high priority, they code named the project “Enormoz”—Russian for “enormous.”

But Enormoz could go nowhere until the KGB got a reliable source
inside
the American bomb project. With this goal in mind, Moscow headquarters made up a list of top American scientists to target for cultivation. “Of the leads we have,” Moscow informed its agents in the United States, “we should consider it essential to cultivate the following people.”

Then came the names. The people on the list were all top scientists the Soviets suspected might be in on the bomb work. They were all known to have been sympathetic to communism before the war.

The first name on the list was Robert Oppenheimer.