Joseph E. Persico (39 page)

The President had an idea that would continue Welles's usefulness while easing his exit from public life honorably and gradually. He offered his old friend a temporary assignment as his special representative in meetings in Russia between Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the British counterpart, Anthony Eden. If Welles was prey to blackmail in the United States, where even railroad porters turned him in, one can only speculate how vulnerable he would have been in Moscow, where the NKVD would have been far more imaginative at enticing him into homoerotic traps. Welles thanked the President for the offer, but decided, “If I go to Moscow, I'll not have support and I can't do an effective job.” Instead, he withdrew to private life.

Chapter XVIII

Distrusting Allies

IT WAS the premier secret of the war. The President had personally cautioned physicist Robert Oppenheimer to guard zealously what was happening in the barren wastes of New Mexico. Still, the Germans, imagined rivals in the race for an atomic bomb, appeared to be evidently on to something. The intelligence chief of the Luftwaffe, Josef Schmid, had written a colleague eight months before the Manhattan Project was formally launched: “As far as it is known, work in the field of nuclear physics is already so far advanced, especially in the United States, that if the war were prolonged it could become of considerable significance.” Schmid added, “It is therefore desirable to acquire through the Abwehr additional information about American plans and the progress made in the United States in the field of nuclear research.” The Abwehr agreed to a plan to infiltrate a spy into the United States, “preferably a physicist.” The candidate settled on was Walter Koehler, a man of mixed strengths and weaknesses. As for shortcomings, Koehler was no physicist, but rather a jeweler by profession, with a rusty degree in engineering. His knowledge of nuclear science barely exceeded that obtainable in a course in Physics 101. Nor was Koehler's past unblemished. He had once served six months in prison for stealing a friend's briefcase containing six thousand guilders. But Koehler did have strengths. He was a Dutch citizen and a Catholic, two good covers for a person fleeing Europe as a presumed refugee from Nazism. He had relevant experience, having spied for Germany in the First World War. And Koehler, who had lived in New York until June 1941, knew America well. Just as helpful, he did not remotely resemble anyone's image of a spy. He was fifty-seven years old, squat, overweight, and shy, with watery blue-gray eyes squinting behind glasses as thick as a bottle. When he smiled he exposed rotting teeth with the front two missing. Koehler was briefed by the Abwehr on his assignment—to find out the processes used in the production of uranium, any raw materials used in related processes, and where American nuclear scientists conducted their research. His first stop en route to the United States was Madrid, where, posing as an anti-Nazi refugee, Koehler was to apply for an entrance visa from the American consulate. Instead of hearing still another story of fear and oppression, the young consular official who handled this servile and inconspicuous applicant gasped at what Koehler told him. He said nothing at all about being a refugee. Instead, Koehler told the official that he was supposed to be going to America to spy for the Abwehr. To validate his story, he opened a battered suitcase and dumped onto the astonished American's desk a kit for assembling a wireless radio, a codebook, and a camera for microfilming documents. He had accepted the Abwehr assignment, he explained, only to get out of Germany. He was ready to work, not for the Nazis, but against them. His offer was radioed ahead to the FBI, which took an instant interest in Walter Koehler. Thus, as soon as a neutral Portuguese steamer out of Lisbon deposited him in the United States, Hoover's men took Koehler in hand. They set him up at the phony German radio station on Long Island from which he transmitted to Germany a mixture of harmless truths and outright fabrications about the American nuclear effort.

Koehler's defection proved a boost to the Manhattan Project. J. Edgar Hoover sent to FDR the questions Koehler had been assigned by the Abwehr, adding, “This information is being made available to you as possibly indicating the degree to which the Germans have progressed in the development of atomic explosives.” The answer, unknown to the Allies, was that Germany was going nowhere. But simply knowing what the Germans were trying to find out suggested that the race was still on and reinforced White House backing for whatever the Los Alamos scientists wanted.

Keeping the secret of the bomb from the enemy was child's play compared to protecting it from an ally. Thirty British scientists had been chosen to go to America as a result of Churchill's insistence to FDR that the United States and Britain must share nuclear secrets equally. Among them was the German-born Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs's salient characteristics were professional brilliance and personal reserve. As a young Communist in Germany hunted by the Gestapo, this minister's son had fled to England in 1933. The sophistication of his published papers in mathematics caught the eye of British scientists, who recruited Fuchs in 1941 for their embryonic atomic weapons program. While engaged in this work, Fuchs continued to believe the party line that the British and Americans were hoping the Germans and the Russians would bleed each other to death, thus destroying Nazism and communism while saving capitalism. Before the year was out, Fuchs had passed his first secrets to a London agent of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.

Fuchs was admirably suited for the role of spy. He was inconspicuous in appearance. More important, he possessed imagination and self-reliance, had no need for the approval of others, and exhibited the rare ability to live a split life. When he learned in 1943 that he was going to America, he informed his Soviet controller, whom he knew only as Sonya. She was, in fact, Ruth Kuczynski, a German refugee Communist herself, dark-haired and sultry, who shared her sexual favors with other party faithful but apparently not with the monastic Fuchs. Sonya explained to Fuchs how to establish contact on his arrival in New York with an American controller, known only as Raymond. Thus, Fuchs, in a scene out of pulp fiction, found himself on a crisp Saturday afternoon early in 1944 strolling down Manhattan's Lower East Side clutching a tennis ball in his left hand. A pudgy, pasty-faced, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, wearing one pair of gloves and carrying another, came up to Fuchs and asked, “Can you tell me the way to Grand Central Station?” Fuchs had connected with Raymond. His new controller was actually Harry Gold, also the contact for two other Americans enlisted in Soviet espionage, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Gold, a chemist by profession, had been passing industrial secrets to the Russians since 1936.

*

Several years before, on September 1, 1939, President Roosevelt's appointments secretary, Marvin H. McIntyre, had received a visitor in his White House office. McIntyre was a former newspaperman who had impressed FDR while working in the Navy Department's press office during the First World War. He was an outgoing soul whom reporters enjoyed dropping in on for a chat and a bit of White House gossip. His visitor this day was Isaac Don Levine, a forty-seven-year-old Russian-born naturalized American, now a magazine writer and editor. Levine confided to McIntyre that he had a source who knew a great deal about Soviet penetration of the American government and that the man was prepared to talk. But his source insisted on immunity from prosecution and would speak only to the President. World peace at that moment hung suspended by a badly frayed thread, with Germany having just invaded Poland and Britain pledging to go to war if the Germans did not withdraw. McIntyre explained that this might not be the best time for the President to be distracted, but that he would happily arrange for Levine's informant to speak confidentially to Adolf Berle of the State Department.

On Saturday night, September 2, Berle and his wife received Levine and another dumpy, furtive figure at their luxurious Woodley Place home, formerly owned by Henry Stimson. Levine introduced his visibly uncomfortable companion only as “Karl.” They were meeting at Berle's because the stranger had said that if he could not talk directly to the President, he did not want to be seen in any government office. Berle, working fourteen-hour days on the world crisis, was exhausted and had only reluctantly agreed to see these visitors. After a desultory conversation about the Polish situation, Mrs. Berle withdrew, and the three men moved onto the lawn to catch a cooling breeze. Karl, Levine explained, was an ex-Soviet spy who was willing to tell Berle his story. The man, tense and uneasy, began to talk, barely opening his mouth in order to conceal his bad teeth. He had been part of a Communist underground cell from 1934 to the end of 1937, he said. He had broken with the party after growing disillusionment with Marxism capped by his disgust over Stalin's show trials of the late thirties. He was, as a result of his former role for the Soviets, aware of several American government officials spying for Russia. Levine urged the man to provide names, and Karl proceeded to do so, identifying several highly placed officials. These people, he claimed, removed classified documents from their files, photographed them, and turned the copies over to their Soviet underground contacts. Karl stressed that the whole point of this conversation was that he expected Berle to place this information before the President. Berle promised he would do so.

After his guests left, Berle, more tired than ever after the bizarre three-hour visit, did not go directly to bed. He remained in his study and began to jot down Karl's charges. He headed his notes “Underground Espionage Agent.” Among the names Karl had mentioned were Alger Hiss, then with the State Department and described as “Member of the Underground Com.—Active,” Hiss's wife, Priscilla, and brother, Donald. Also mentioned by Chambers were Laurence Duggan, another official at State, a “Mr. White,” and, most surprising to Berle, Lauchlin Currie, a valued member of FDR's personal White House staff alongside whose name he added Karl's description, “Fellow Traveler—helped various Communists—never went the whole way.”

Did Berle keep his promise and lay Karl's allegations before FDR? Isaac Don Levine later claimed that Berle did so, as did the radio gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who also heard Karl's recital and claimed to have informed FDR himself. The President was reported to have scoffed at the idea of Soviet spies penetrating his administration. After all, Berle had checked with respected figures such as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, about the Hiss brothers. According to Berle, Acheson claimed he had known them since they were boys “and he could vouch for them absolutely.” Felix Frankfurter gave the Hisses an equally clean bill of health. Oddly, however, Berle, the President's chief advisor on internal security, did not make these inquiries until 1941, almost two years after Karl's disclosures to him. And Berle's otherwise detailed diaries make no mention of briefing FDR on the Karl matter. Whether informed or not, Roosevelt would have had trouble accepting the accusations of an obscure, unappealing, and anonymous informant. The people Karl had denounced were FDR's kind of people, and vouched for by FDR's kind.

Berle's foot-dragging may have two explanations. First, like the President, he was bound to wonder about charges brought by so seedy a figure as Karl against solid members of the New Deal establishment. Further, by the time Berle got around, in 1943, to answering the FBI's request for the notes he had taken that odd September night four years before, the Soviet Union was America's ally and few in FDR's circle were looking to make waves that might swamp this fragile alliance.

Karl, it turned out, was Whittaker Chambers, indeed an ex-Communist who, six months after the meeting with Berle, went to work for
Time
magazine as a writer and who in the 1950s was to emerge as the right-hand icon to Alger Hiss's left in the heavily symbolic trial of Hiss for perjury.

*

The lengths to which Roosevelt and Churchill would go not to imperil the alliance with Stalin emerge in their secret correspondence regarding the Katyn affair. On April 12, 1943, when German radio first announced the discovery in the Katyn forest near Smolensk of the bodies of an initial 4,143 Polish officers, the Nazis and Russians blamed each other, claiming the mass murders had occurred when the other side occupied the territory. The world at the time had scant reason to doubt that the massacre of Poles was merely another in the mounting catalogue of Nazi atrocities. Yet, through secret sources, FDR and Churchill knew otherwise.

Stalin, nevertheless, acted quickly to blunt the charge that his regime was responsible for the deaths of the Poles. FDR was in Monterrey, Mexico, on a goodwill visit when Cordell Hull forwarded to him a blistering “Confidential” message from the Soviet leader dated April 21. In it, Stalin told Roosevelt, “The campaign of calumny against the Soviet Union, initiated by the German Fascists regarding the Polish officers they themselves slaughtered in the Smolensk area on German occupied territory, was immediately taken up by the [Polish General Wladyslaw] Sikorski government [in exile] and inflated in every possible way. . . . In view of these circumstances, the Soviet government has come to the conclusion of the necessity for breaking relations with the present Polish government.” The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was like a tightrope. Stretched just taut enough, it provided a link over which help could pass. Pulled too hard by suspicions, recriminations, or mistrust, it would surely snap. This was an outcome that FDR was determined to avoid. From Monterrey, he drafted a message to “Mr. Stalin, Moscow” all but begging the Soviet leader not to end relations with the Polish government-in-exile and exhibiting a willingness to gloss over the deaths of thousands of Poles in a Russian forest. If anyone was to blame for the ugly issue, it was, in FDR's view, General Sikorski, who “has made a stupid mistake in taking up this particular matter with the international Red Cross.” Secretary of State Hull managed to persuade the President to drop only the word “stupid” from the cable. On April 29 the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Maxim Litvinov, came to the White House with Stalin's reply, marked “Private and Confidential.” Stalin was unmoved. It was too late, he said. He had already broken off relations with the Poles. “Since the Polish Government, throughout nearly two weeks, not only did not discontinue, but actually intensified, in its press and radio, a campaign which was hostile to the Soviet Union and advantageous only to Hitler. . . .” In Stalin's telling, Sikorski was a dupe who “allowed himself to be led by certain pro-Hitler elements within the Polish government or in its entourage, and as a result the Polish government . . . became a tool in Hitler's hands.”