The Manhattan Project. Anyone who stayed awake through high school history class knows about the Manhattan Project. The American WWII super-secret research-and-development program to develop the first atomic bomb. But was it really all that secret?
Funny thing about that.
I recently finished the second draft of my new WWII spy thriller, The Last Saboteur. Its plot was inspired by a recently declassified wartime British intelligence report stating that despite claims by the American FBI that it had captured every Nazi spy and saboteur sent to the U.S., one had actually escaped. In my novel, this “last saboteur” is part of a last-ditch Nazi attempt to sabotage the Manhattan Project.
But how would the Germans know about such a top-secret program? Simple, they read about it in an American newspaper.
While doing research for the book, I came across the story of Cleveland Press reporter John Raper. In early 1944, Raper was vacationing in New Mexico when he noticed an unusual amount of military traffic, military personnel, and Europeans in the state’s capital city of Santa Fe. He also learned that just outside Santa Fe was a mysterious hilltop military establishment called Los Alamos.
Los Alamos, if you’ve forgotten, is where the first nuclear bombs were manufactured and, as such, it was the most secret and secluded of the Manhattan Project’s facilities. Being an enterprising reporter, however, Raper decided to take a drive up to Los Alamos. That, of course, did not sit well with the U.S. Army which detained him, interrogated him, and … released him.
Returning to his newspaper in March, Raper wrote an article titled, “Forbidden City: Uncle Sam’s Mystery Town Directed by 2nd Einstein.”
The article began, “New Mexico has a mystery city, one with an area from eight to 20 square miles … a population of between 5000 and 6000 persons, not more than probably half a dozen of whom can step outside of the city except by special permission of the city boss.”
Raper described Los Alamos as “a thoroughly modern city. It has fine streets, an electric light plant and waterworks … a service department that really services, public library … schools, recreation centers, hospital, apartment houses, cottages, dance hall, an enormous grocery, refrigeration plant, factories and (a) jail.”
The article even provided Los Alamos’ location. “This city’s site, or at least part of it, at once time was occupied by a private school for boys, and is not far from the village of Los Alamos, which is 53 miles almost due east from Santa Fe.”
“Mr. Big of the city,” Raper wrote, “is a college professor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, called ‘the Second Einstein’ by the newspapers of the west coast.”
The article provided any curious intelligence service with enough information to identify the location (there was only one boy’s school outside of Santa Fe) and to guess at its activity. Even back then Oppenheimer, now famous as the father of the A-bomb, was already a well-known theoretical physicist, and an associate of Dr. Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate and director of the German nuclear bomb project, as well as many other famous physicists. Comparing him to Albert Einstein, father of the E=MC2 equation which led to the A-bomb’s development, was simply another piece of evidence as to the type of activity at Los Alamos.
Did the Germans see this newspaper article? In my opinion, without a doubt. Even if the FBI’s dubious claim that it had captured all Nazi spies were true, there were other ways German intelligence could obtain the article. Though supposedly neutral, fascist Spain’s intelligence service had agents throughout the United States who worked closely with the Nazi spy services. There were also Nazi spies in Mexico, and despite the war, the U.S.-Mexico border was still wide open. Perhaps most appalling, there was still a Fifth Column of American Nazi-sympathizers in the U.S.
Of course, after the war U.S. intelligence agencies learned how deeply the Soviet Union had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, but that’s a story for another time.