Bomb (11 page)

“It was as if we were being pursued across the river by the shrieking sound itself,” Ronneberg reported. “We slipped and fell, grabbing on to rocks and blocks of ice.”

They made it across and immediately started up the far side of the gorge. They reached the top and ducked back down just as a car raced past on the road in front of them. Then they crossed the road, found their skis and poles, jumped into their white camouflage suits, and sped across the snow away from the road.

“German cars and trucks kept zipping past us,” remembered Jens Poulsson. “That was all to the good. Those Nazis were in too much of a hurry to get to Vemork to look right or left as they raced along.”

*   *   *

T
HE
G
UNNERSIDE TEAM SPLIT UP,
most heading on skis to the Swedish border, 250 miles to the northeast. Knut Haukelid and Arne Kjelstrup stayed behind in Norway to help organize the anti-German resistance. They skied to a mountain hut, found radio equipment that had been stashed by other resistance fighters, and wrote out a short, coded message for London: “High concentration installation at Vemork completely destroyed on night of 27–28—Gunnerside has gone to Sweden.”

Then they headed deeper into the wilderness. “You can bet the Germans are in a fury,” Haukelid told Kjelstrup. “And you can be sure that they'll search every corner of the mountains.”

Only later did Haukelid learn how right he was. Enraged German commanders were already sending out a ten-thousand-man German force to track down the saboteurs.

Not a single one of the Norwegians was ever caught.

The Main Gate of the Los Alamos campus in the early 1940s.

 

THE GATEKEEPER

ONE AFTERNOON IN LATE MARCH 1943,
Dorothy McKibben, a forty-five-year-old single mother, was crossing the street in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Halfway across she ran into Joe Stevenson, a local businessman she knew casually. There were no cars coming, so they talked in the street.

“How would you like a job as a secretary?” asked Stevenson, who'd heard McKibben was looking for work.

“Secretary to what?” she wanted to know.

He smiled. “Secretary,” he said.

She knew he was doing something for the government, something to do with the war.

“Well, what would I do?” she asked.

“You would be a secretary,” he said. “Don't you know what a secretary does?”

“Not always.”

“Well, think it over. I'll give you twenty-four hours.”

Intrigued, McKibben agreed to meet her potential employer the next day in the lobby of La Fonda, the nicest hotel in town. She was standing there, waiting, when she saw a man enter. He wore a trench coat. He had wiry black hair and bright blue eyes. He strode directly to her and introduced himself as “Mr. Bradley.”

Then he fired quick questions about her background, her skills, her knowledge of Santa Fe. As she answered he leaned forward and stared intensely at her.

“I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast and so completely,” she said later. She had no idea who this man was, or what he was doing in town. She didn't care. “I knew anything he was connected with would be alive,” she said. “I thought to be associated with that person, whoever he was, would be simply great!”

She took the job. When she reported for work the next day, the man was waiting for her. Only when they got inside and closed the door did he tell her that his real name was Robert Oppenheimer.

*   *   *

A
WEEK LATER, CONFUSED
scientists began showing up in Santa Fe, wandering the streets holding a letter that read: “Go to 109 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you will find out how to complete your trip.”

Friendly locals directed the strangers to an ancient wrought-iron gate that opened onto a courtyard built by Spanish settlers in the 1600s. In one of the buildings surrounding the courtyard was a door marked with the number 109. When newcomers knocked they were greeted by Dorothy McKibben—“the Gatekeeper,” as she quickly became known.

“They arrived, breathless and sleepless and haggard, tired from riding on trains that were slow,” she remembered. “The new members were tense with expectancy and curiosity.”

Those were the ones who found the address. McKibben often got calls from nearby drugstores that began, “There is a party here who is lost.”

She'd say, “Send him over right away.”

In a small office crammed with desks and boxes, McKibben wrote out security passes for the scientists. She told them that from now on their mailing address was Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. To avoid drawing attention to the arrival of so many scientists, she cautioned them never to refer to each other as “doctor” or “professor” while in town. Then she gave them directions to Los Alamos.

Scientists continued arriving throughout April. “The office was a madhouse,” said McKibben. Famous physicists were given code names—Enrico Fermi, for example, was supposed to tell people his name was Henry Farmer. But Fermi had a hard time remembering his new name and felt absurd pronouncing it with his thick Italian accent. Like Fermi, much of Oppenheimer's scientific dream team was European, many of them Jews who had escaped from Hitler. This gave America a huge advantage in its race with Germany, but it also presented a security problem. The people of Santa Fe, a city of just twenty thousand, began to wonder why so many men with European accents were suddenly walking the streets.

And there were other clues that something was going on. Long lines of army trucks were seen driving up the narrow road to Los Alamos. They always went up the hill loaded. They always came back empty.

“Some amazing rumors began to circulate through Santa Fe,” remembered Leslie Groves. Some guessed that Los Alamos housed a secret military project. They were making submarines according to one rumor, death rays according to another. Others claimed Los Alamos was home for pregnant military personnel—or possibly a nudist colony.

The crazier the rumors got, the more they worried Groves and Oppenheimer.

*   *   *

U
P ON “THE
H
ILL,”
as Los Alamos became known to its residents, Oppenheimer asked Charlotte Serber to step into his office. He needed her help, he told her.

Charlotte was married to Robert Serber, the physicist and former student who'd become Oppenheimer's right-hand man the year before. Oppenheimer knew Robert and Charlotte well. He trusted them completely.

The rumors in Santa Fe were getting wilder and wilder, Oppenheimer told Serber. The danger was that sooner or later someone might stumble onto the truth, and the story could spread. And if the Germans learned how seriously the Americans were working on an atomic bomb, they'd surely double their own efforts.

Oppenheimer's solution was to plant a false, but believable, story about what was happening at Los Alamos. “Therefore,” he told Serber, “for Santa Fe purposes, we are making an electric rocket.”

Charlotte Serber was unsure what this had to do with her.

“Go to Santa Fe,” Oppenheimer continued. “Talk. Talk too much. Talk as if you had too many drinks. Get people to eavesdrop. Say a number of things about us that you are not supposed to. Finally, I don't care how you manage it, say we are building an electric rocket.”

Charlotte explained the mission to her husband, and they drove from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. They walked into the bar at La Fonda at about 9:00 p.m., sat at a table, and ordered drinks.

“Our conversation was singularly dull as we each wondered how to bring electric rockets into it,” Charlotte recalled. “We told little stories about Los Alamos, mentioning the forbidden name boldly and loudly. But no ears cocked in our direction.”

Unable to attract attention, they walked down the street to Joe King's Blue Ribbon Bar, which, Robert described as “jumping, jammed, and crowded.”

A young man immediately approached Charlotte, bowed, and asked her to dance. She agreed.

While they danced, she got the conversation started by asking if he lived in Santa Fe.

“Yes,” he said.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“How come you're not in the service?”

“Four F,” he said—a military classification for those physically unfit for service. “Want to get a job on a ranch.”

“We're up at Los Alamos,” she said, steering toward the target.

“Uh-huh.”

“It's quite a place, don't you think?” she asked. “So mysterious and secret.”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “You know, I sure want to run a ranch someday.”

“But what do you suppose they're doing at Los Alamos?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Come to town often? You sure dance fine.”

“We come to town as often as we can, but they don't like to let us out much. What's your guess about what cooks up there?”

“Beats me. Don't care. May I have another dance later?”

Robert Serber watched it all from a booth near the dance floor. Seeing that things were going badly for his wife, he walked up to the tightly packed bar, turned toward the man next to him, grabbed the lapels of his jacket, and shouted: “Do you know what we're doing at Los Alamos? We're building an electric rocket!”

The man grunted and sipped his drink.

*   *   *

D
RIVING BACK
to Los Alamos that night, the Serbers knew their mission had failed.

“The FBI and Army Intelligence never reported picking up any rumors about electric rockets,” Robert said. “The spy business isn't as easy as it appears in the movies.”

And so the rumors in Santa Fe kept flying. Something big was obviously going on, and locals wondered if jobs might be available. Almost every day someone knocked on the door at 109 East Palace and asked Dorothy McKibben for work on the new government project in town.

“I can't understand wherever you got that idea,” said the smiling Gatekeeper. “There's nothing of that sort in Santa Fe that we know of.”

THE GADGET

ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 15, 1943,
about forty physicists gathered in what used to be the library reading room of the Los Alamos Ranch School. A small blackboard on wheels stood at one end of the room. In front of the blackboard were several rows of folding chairs. Everyone took seats, except for Robert Oppenheimer and his assistant, Robert Serber.

“Buildings were still under construction,” remembered Serber. “There was a hammering off in the background, carpenters and electricians working out of sight but all over the place.”

Oppenheimer introduced Serber and sat down. Serber looked down at his notes and began reading quietly, with a slight stutter. But he opened with a bang: “The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction.”

There was a second of stunned silence. Until that moment, many men in the room had not known exactly why they'd been dragged to this remote mountaintop.