Bomb (17 page)

In the dorm, Fuchs's only visitor was the scientist in the adjoining room, Richard Feynman. They often sat up late together, Fuchs smoking, Feynman sipping orange juice.

“Klaus,” Feynman teased, “you're missing a lot of fun in life.”

In spite of Fuchs's reserve, people liked him. He seemed so gentle and generous. Women often asked him to babysit on Saturday nights, and Fuchs always agreed. He put the kids to bed, then sat and read, listening to classical music.

And Fuchs did open up a bit over time. He bought a beat-up blue Buick and gave people rides into Santa Fe. He tagged along on hikes and picnics. At one late-night party, he stunned everyone by downing a bottle of whisky and leading a conga line. Then he excused himself politely, stepped behind the bar, and passed out. Friends tucked a sheet over him and went on with the party.

“In the course of this work, I began naturally to form bonds of personal friendship,” Fuchs later said. “I had to conceal from them my inner thoughts.” The solution, he explained, was to establish two separate compartments in his mind. “One compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations, to help people, and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be.” This is the Fuchs people saw. They sensed there was something more, something beneath the surface. No one guessed it was Fuchs's “second compartment”—the one he used for his secret mission.

“Everyone thought of him as a quiet, industrious man who would do just about anything he could to help our project,” Hans Bethe said. “If he was a spy, he played his role beautifully.”

Paul Tibbets stands in front of the Enola Gay
on Tinian Island, August 6, 1945.

 

THE PILOT

LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1944,
at the Alamogordo Air Force Base in New Mexico, a fighter pilot named Paul Tibbets got a strange phone call from his father in Miami.

“Are you in some kind of trouble, son?” his father asked.

Tibbets could hear the concern in his father's voice. “Not that I know of,” he answered. “What makes you think so?”

“Well…” his father began, sounding unsure of whether or not to continue. “I hear some investigators—I think they were from the FBI—have been down here asking questions about you.”

Tibbets assured his father it was just a routine check. But he knew better. This was not normal.

Twenty-nine years old, Colonel Paul Tibbets was an experienced pilot who'd flown combat missions over Europe and North Africa. Now he was back in the States working as a test pilot, helping engineers design the new B-29 bomber. He was one of the best flyers in the country. So he couldn't help but wonder:
What exactly have I done wrong?

The mystery intensified a few days later when he got another call, this one from Air Force General Uzal Ent, telling him to report right away to Ent's office in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“He told me to pack my bags,” Tibbets recalled. “I would not be returning.”

*   *   *

T
IBBETS FLEW TO
C
OLORADO AND WALKED
into Ent's headquarters the next morning. He was met by Colonel John Lansdale of Army Counter-Intelligence. Lansdale led Tibbets into a small side office.

“I'd like to ask you a couple of questions before we go in to see General Ent,” said Lansdale.

“Without explaining his purpose, he began talking about my personal history,” remembered Tibbets. “His ‘couple of questions' stretched into an interrogation from which I soon discovered that he knew more about me than I could possibly remember about myself.”

“Have you ever been arrested?” Lansdale finally asked.

Tibbets's mind raced back ten years to a night on the beach in Florida. He and his girlfriend had driven to a dark spot and climbed into the backseat. A while later they were startled by the sudden glare of a policeman's flashlight. Could Lansdale really know about that?
He must
, figured Tibbets,
he knows everything else
.

Tibbets decided to tell Lansdale the story. Lansdale listened without comment.

Then he stood and said, “Now let's go see General Ent.”

Tibbets followed Lansdale into Ent's office, where the general sat at his desk. There were two other men there: a naval officer and a man in a suit.

Ent introduced Tibbets to Navy Captain William Parsons and Dr. Norman Ramsey, a professor of physics.

“I'm well satisfied with Colonel Tibbets,” Lansdale announced.

“That's good,” said Ent. “I felt sure you would be.”

Ent then told Tibbets he had been chosen for a vital mission. A top-secret mission. Everything Tibbets was about to hear, Ent cautioned, would have to be concealed, even from his wife—even from the pilots and crews who would be working under him.

Then Ent turned to Professor Ramsey, saying, “Now you take over.”

Ramsey asked Tibbets: “Did you ever hear of atomic energy?”

*   *   *

O
PPENHEIMER'S SCIENTISTS
had not yet built an atomic bomb. It was far from certain they could. But U.S. military planners had to think ahead. If a bomb were built in time to affect the outcome of the war, it would need to be dropped by plane. A pilot needed to be chosen and given special training. Paul Tibbets got the job.

Tibbets learned the basics of how the atomic bomb would work and approximately how powerful the explosion might be. Using this information, it was his task to devise a strategy for flying the bomb over enemy territory, releasing it on target, and getting away before the massive blast killed everyone in the plane.

Given the freedom to pick his own training site, Tibbets selected a base in Wendover, Utah, a remote spot surrounded by salt flats. “There was no place nearby for fun-loving men with six-hour passes to get into trouble and possibly leak information,” explained Tibbets.

Then Tibbets chose his flight crews, hand-picking many of the men he'd flown with earlier in the war. He wouldn't tell them what their new mission was and warned them never to ask. “We didn't want them even to speculate,” said Tibbets, “or to give out a hint that our operation was different from any other.”

Known as the 509th Composite Group, Tibbets's mysterious team was officially activated on December 17, 1944. “At the age of twenty-nine, I had been entrusted with the successful delivery of the most frightful weapon ever devised,” Tibbets recalled. “Although the weapon was beyond my comprehension, there was nothing about flying an airplane that I did not understand. If this bomb could be carried in an airplane, I could do the job.”

SWISS DEAL

CARL EIFLER STOOD ON THE BALCONY
of the Office of Strategic Services office in the city of Algiers, Algeria. Loud honks and shouts rose from the hectic street below. OSS director General William Donovan stepped onto the balcony. He closed the door behind him.

Eifler had spent the past few months perfecting his plan to kidnap the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and putting together his team for the job. Everything was set, he told Donovan, for “my proposed entry into Country X.”

“Carl, there's a change in your orders,” Donovan informed Eifler. “We have broken the atom secret with our Manhattan Project. We beat the Nazis. Your mission is scrubbed.”

“I see, sir,” said Eifler, blinking back tears of disappointment.

Donovan assured Eifler he'd be given a new assignment, one just as dangerous, penetrating Japanese-held territory in Korea.

Eifler walked back to the room he was sharing with another OSS operative. Unable to sleep that night, he paced the room, muttering, “I can't get him out of my mind … I can't get him out of my mind…”

“Who?” asked the other man, annoyed at being kept awake.

“The last guy I bumped off,” said Eifler.

“Well,”—the roommate yawned—“what can you do about it?”

“Bump off another one.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Carl! Turn out the light and go to bed.”

*   *   *

D
ONOVAN HAD
not been truthful with Eifler. The Americans had not yet “broken the atomic secret” and did not know if they would “beat the Nazis” to the atomic bomb. Donovan just wanted to take Eifler off the job without hurting the man's feelings.

But the job was still on.

By December 1944, American and British forces were driving toward Germany from the west. The Soviets were coming on fast from the east. Hitler was about to be crushed—unless he could pull out an atomic bomb. So it was still necessary, reasoned Donovan, to target German physicists, especially Heisenberg.

But Donovan had changed his mind about Eifler's fitness for the mission, worried the man's loose-cannon style could draw unwanted attention to the delicate operation. He gave the job instead to a forty-one-year-old former baseball player named Moe Berg.

Berg had been a mediocre ballplayer at best, hitting .243 over fifteen big league seasons as a backup catcher. To Berg, baseball had just been a way to make a living. In the off-season he worked as a lawyer, studied languages, and traveled the world. In 1943, his playing days over, he took his talents to the OSS.

Berg was soon assigned to a secret operation, code-named Alsos. The Alsos mission's job was to follow close behind advancing Allied forces in Europe, searching for any scraps of information about the German atomic bomb program.

Berg spent some time in London studying atomic physics. In early December he was told to report to Paris. Walking the streets, he was spotted by a sportswriter he knew from his previous career. The man smiled with surprise and opened his mouth to speak.

“Don't ask me what I'm doing here,” Berg warned.

Actually, he didn't know himself. He found out the next day at a meeting at the Ritz Hotel with Samuel Goudsmit, a physicist who was the scientific head of the Alsos mission. Goudsmit told Berg that based on reliable information coming out of Germany, Werner Heisenberg would be leaving the country on or about December 15, traveling to Switzerland for a scientific conference. He would be giving a lecture at Zurich University on December 18. Berg, explained Goudsmit, would be there too.

“Nothing spelled out,” Berg wrote in his notes. “But Heisenberg must be rendered
hors de combat
”—French for “out of the battle.”

What exactly was Berg being ordered to do? Neither he nor Goudsmit ever talked publicly about the secret mission referred to in OSS documents as the “Swiss Deal.” But after the war, Berg confided in a fellow secret agent, Earl Brodie.

“He'd been drilled in physics, to listen for certain things,” Brodie explained. “If anything Heisenberg said convinced Berg the Germans were close to a bomb then his job was to shoot him—right there in the auditorium. It probably would have cost Berg his life—there would have been no way to escape.”

*   *   *

W
ITH HIS DARK
complexion and gift for languages, Moe Berg had the ability to pass for a number of nationalities. On one earlier assignment he'd been a French merchant; on another an Arab businessman. On the afternoon of December 18, 1944, in Zurich, Switzerland, Berg was a Swiss student, curious to hear a lecture by the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg.