The code name of the individual perched at the submarine’s open hatch was Cheese. Agent Cheese would go on to be one of former Scoutmaster Wilson’s star agents. But right now Cheese—one of the first SOE operatives ever inserted into occupied Europe—was preparing to infiltrate the area of the Hardanger Plateau overlooking the Vemork heavy water facility.
That’s if he managed to get ashore.
The submarine had already made one abortive attempt to bring him in to land. Early on their third day at sea, Odd Starheim—Cheese’s real name—had been called to the periscope, to see if he could pick out his intended landing point amidst the ice-bound peaks and fjords. The vessel had surfaced, only to be pounced upon by a German warship, depth charges tearing apart the waters to either side of her.
They had dived to depth and succeeded in evading the enemy, and there they awaited nightfall. Under cover of darkness the vessel had sneaked in as close as the captain dared before surfacing, and then Starheim’s collapsible canoe had been lowered into the heaving blackness of the sea. Unfortunately, the submarine’s crew had mistakenly placed Starheim’s heavy rucksack in the bow, which drove the canoe down at the front, and the frail vessel had shipped a good deal of water.
Eager to be off, Starheim jumped in and paddled away, only to find that he was getting swamped. He searched, but there was no bailer. Turning for where land had to be, though he could make out precious little amidst the sea spray and the darkness, he paddled for all he was worth. Successive waves swept over the vessel, threatening to capsize her. The ordeal was made all the worse by the fact that Starheim had caught flu during the submarine’s crossing: he was feverish, and the water crashing over his flimsy craft chilled him to the bone.
It was January 1941, and he could hardly have chosen a more perilous time of year to attempt such a landing. Ice ringed much of the Norwegian coastline, and he would need to choose his landing point most carefully. As well as his bulging rucksack, Starheim carried with him a leather suitcase, containing one of the SOE’s newly developed portable wireless kits for making contact with London.
He couldn’t put ashore just anywhere; he needed to make an unobserved arrival. But due to the perilous state of his canoe—now sloshing inches deep in water—his favoured landing spot proved unreachable. Battling bitter seas and freezing winds, Starheim was finally able to reach a remote stretch of coastline on the island of Ulleroy.
Soaked to the skin and miserably cold, he dragged his heavy vessel ashore. With the help of a sympathetic local fishermen he was able to ferry himself and his pack from there to one of the few ice-free stretches of the mainland. Leaving his radio set with the fisherman, and having made arrangements to retrieve it later, he shouldered his pack and headed off on foot.
The long and exhausting trek inland was all the more difficult in that Starheim passed by several houses of people that he knew, but he could halt at none of them—not even the home of his grandparents. He needed to find somewhere remote, where no one would recognize him, before he commenced operations, for he had already earned a degree of infamy in occupied Norway.
Superficially, there was nothing immediately striking about Agent Cheese. He had a shock of wild sandy hair above pronounced brows and a prominent nose. But look a little closer, and it was the firm, steely determination in his eyes that marked him out as something rather extraordinary: he was cool and unflappable, as quiet men sometimes are.
Starheim was the son of a Norwegian ship owner, and an experienced seaman in his own right. He was also a wanted man. Having fought against the Nazi invaders of Norway, Starheim had commandeered a boat, which he christened The Viking, and escaped—navigating the long and perilous voyage to Scotland. There he was amongst the first to sign up with the Linge Company, where his exploits had drawn the Germans’ attention, making him a marked man.
Starheim’s task on returning to Norway was to recruit an intelligence-gathering network, so he could report back to London on all aspects of the German occupation. He was also to arm and train cells of resistance fighters, so they could take action against specific targets if called upon by London to do so. A vital element of Cheese’s mission was to penetrate the security around Vemork, in an effort to ascertain exactly what the Germans were doing with the heavy water produced there.
On 9 April 1940 German forces had rolled into neighbouring Denmark. In one of the shortest campaigns of the war, the Danish government capitulated after just six hours. Pockets of Danish fighters had battled heroically, but they were outgunned on all fronts. With Denmark taken, Norway was left open to attack.
The very next day German parachutists had landed at Oslo’s main airport, and the Norwegian king and his government were forced to withdraw to a base near the Swedish border. There they had received an ultimatum from the Germans: if they didn’t cease their resistance against the German Army and Navy in Norway, the nation’s capital, Oslo, would be bombed to ruin.
With Luftwaffe warplanes darkening the skies, the threat was very real. The Norwegian king, decisive and unyielding, issued his riposte: ‘No’. The subsequent fighting raged for several weeks, but the German military, under the command of General von Falkenhorst, proved unstoppable. And on the heels of the soldiers had come the scientists—nuclear physicists making a beeline for the Vemork heavy water plant.
In a little over a year the Third Reich had seized control of the two raw materials essential to building a nuclear weapon: uranium, and now heavy water. In theory, there was nothing to stand in the way of their producing the world’s first atomic bomb. All they needed was to overcome the scientific challenges, and even in that respect their recent territorial conquests had yielded further advantage.
In the Danish capital, Copenhagen—a city now occupied by German troops—lay the Institute of Theoretical Physics. Its founder was Niels Bohr, who many considered to be the grandfather of atomic research. In 1922 he’d won a Nobel Prize for his work on atomic structure and quantum theory. Amongst other top scientists that Bohr had mentored during the pre-war years was Werner Heisenberg, now the chief mover and shaker at the Uranverein.
Bohr’s career was distinguished by a seemingly unshakeable passion for sharing scientific knowledge, and a somewhat unworldly belief in pacifism and non-violent resistance. Craftily, the German occupiers allowed Bohr to continue uninterrupted with his work. A string of German scientists called at Bohr’s laboratory, breathing good fellowship. Bohr was encouraged to press forward with research that was now quietly under their command.
In Bohr, the ‘Germans had the man whose theoretical work was the basis of the bomb’, warned Stephenson. ‘One of the world’s great atomic scientists was lost inside the German fortress … In a spirit of scientific inquiry Bohr was discussing the atomic bomb with those who wanted to use it to conquer the world.’
In May 1940, just a month after the German invasion of Norway, British intelligence received a disturbing report. The Germans had demanded an increase in heavy water production to 1,500 kilos a year. German scientists made it clear that SH200 was considered ‘vitally important for their war effort’. There was worse to come.
On 10 May Germany invaded Belgium, with Holland and France shortly to follow. As their troops overran Olen, a town to the north-west of the country, they seized the largest stocks of uranium in all of Europe. Olen was the headquarters of the Belgian mining firm, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, a company that then controlled the world’s richest uranium deposits. The company had its main refinery at Olen, and it was there that German forces had just seized well in excess of one thousand tonnes of uranium ore.
Intelligence on this potentially catastrophic development made for grim reading. A report chronicled how ‘several hundred tonnes of crude concentrates had been removed from Belgium’. The destination for that ore was the Auer Gesellschaft refinery at Oranienburg—the same facility that was taking the Czech ore.
Bar a handful of nations—like neutral Spain and Switzerland—Hitler’s Germany now controlled the whole of Western Europe, plus all her uranium and heavy water. The Führer’s lightning advance yielded one significant boost for Britain: it propelled Winston Churchill to power. In Parliament Neville Chamberlain was confronted by Conservative politician Leo Amery, a longtime opponent of appeasing Hitler. Pointing an accusatory finger, Amery quoted Oliver Cromwell: ‘You have sat too long here … In the name of God, go!’
In May 1940, just days before German forces swept to the Channel, Churchill was made prime minister. He offered the British people nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ With his eleventh-hour ascent to power, science moved to centre stage. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy, compiled a central register of 7,000 scientists who might contribute to the war effort. Britain’s new leader appointed the physicist Frederick Lindemann to be his personal scientific adviser.
The two men were hugely dissimilar, and to many their long and enduring friendship was an enigma. Lindemann was a tall, ascetic, chicken-necked individual, contrasting markedly with Churchill’s compact, bulldog-featured, cigar-chomping vibrancy. Teetotal, vegetarian and deeply intellectual, Lindemann would be called to lunch by Churchill with the irreverent cry of ‘beetroot time!’ Lindemann’s sarcasm and cold reserve made him unpopular, but Churchill was fiercely protective, for Lindemann made complex science accessible.
He could ‘decipher scientific developments on the far horizons,’ Churchill would remark, ‘and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were.’ Yet in the spring of 1940, neither man was under any illusions as to how great a march the Germans might have stolen in the race to obtain the atom bomb. Recently, two eminent scientists had penned what became known as the ‘Frisch-Peierls Memorandum’. In it, Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls—German Jews who had fled to Britain—outlined the scientific basis upon which a ‘radioactive super weapon’ could be built. The report was groundbreaking, revelatory and frightening in equal measure.
The energy liberated in the explosion of such a super-bomb is about the same as that produced by … 1,000 tonnes of dynamite … It will … produce a temperature comparable to that in the interior of the sun. The blast from such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area … it will probably cover the centre of a big city.
It went on to describe the horrific effects of the radiation such a blast would cause. ‘It decays only gradually and even for days after the explosion any person entering the affected area will be killed. Some of this radioactivity will be carried along with the wind … several miles downwind this may kill people.
‘The super-bomb would be practically irresistible’, the report concluded. ‘If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this weapon, it must be realized that no shelters are available that would be effective … The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb.’
Frisch and Peierls had been working in Germany until the mid 1930s, and so their warning came from the heart of that nation’s nuclear endeavour. They predicted that such a weapon might be achievable within a two-year time frame. Lindemann—Churchill’s ‘beetroot time’ scientific adviser—was sceptical about the time scale, but not about the science. He added his voice to Frisch and Peierls’ warnings, and Churchill listened.
Stephenson—Intrepid—added urgency to those warnings. Initial research suggested that it would require the labour of 20,000 workers, half a million watts of electricity and $150 million in expenditure to build such a bomb. A totalitarian state run by a dictator who now controlled most of Western Europe could command such resources, and in the concentration camps Hitler had access to millions of slaves.
Churchill was aghast at the thought of such a ‘super-bomb’ in Nazi hands. It would enable Hitler to conquer continents, making world domination a terrifying reality. No one knew how advanced the German nuclear project might be, but two things were certain: they had stolen a year or more’s start on the Allies, plus they had seized control over the key raw materials—the uranium and the heavy water.
On 19 July 1940, Hitler had made Britain what he termed his ‘final peace offer’, posing as a ‘victor speaking in the name of reason. The response was flung back at him via a broadcast in German on the BBC: ‘Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal … Herr Führer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you. Right back into your evil-smelling teeth.’
Hitler reacted by issuing Directive No. 17 to his commanders: ‘Establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest of England.’ The Führer added the following, chilling rider: ‘I reserve to myself the right to decide on terror tactics …’
A large part of Churchill’s ‘hurling it right back’ into Hitler’s ‘evil-smelling teeth’ would be the founding of the SOE. ‘How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next,’ Churchill declared, ‘instead of forcing us to try to wall in the Island and roof it over.’ That July he formed the euphemistically named Ministry for Economic Warfare, a cover organization for the Special Operations Executive.
From the very first, the SOE’s remit was to think the unthinkable and to tear up every known rule of warfare. Churchill’s first minister of this newly founded outfit was Dr Hugh Dalton, a Labour member of his coalition government. Though hailing from a very different political background, Dalton was as willing as any to consider unconventional means of striking down the enemy.
‘We have to organize movements in enemy occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland,’ he declared. ‘We must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage … continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots … We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, and willingness to work with people of different nationalities.’
SOE’s unremarkable, grey-faced 64 Baker Street headquarters had a brass plaque set into the wall. It announced this to be the ‘Inter-Service Research Bureau’—the most innocuous-sounding cover name that Dalton et al. could think of. SOE operators—plain-clothed, and many with little or no military background—slipped down a shady alleyway to gain access. They referred to themselves as hailing from ‘the Org’, ‘the Firm’, or perhaps most fittingly, ‘the Racket’.
Scores of Special Training Schools (STSs) were established in the country mansions that pepper rural Britain to prepare Churchill’s secret army for the dirty war that was coming. Crucially, the SOE’s existence was to be kept utterly off the books: its missions were ‘secret and independent’, and deniable in the extreme.
At first, the military high command was resentful of this new upstart. The SOE’s senior positions were invariably filled by those with military backgrounds, but experience in irregular warfare was prized above all. After that, the SOE welcomed bankers, academics, poets, professors, sportsmen, journalists, novelists, film producers and playwrights—civilian amateurs, many of whom had never fired a shot in anger. Even more controversially, it sought out magicians, conjurers, gangsters, safe-breakers, street-fighters and thieves to teach its recruits the new means of waging warfare.
The SOE founded its own gadget department, charged with developing weaponry and other equipment suited to its revolutionary form of fighting. Code-named MD1, it was nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’, due to the Prime Minister’s boyish enthusiasm for everything it produced. The SOE also had its own propaganda department, the ultra-shady Political Warfare Executive.
At the Thatched Barn, near Borehamwood, there was a Special Training School devoted entirely to camouflage and subterfuge in all its forms. Part of its role was to equip agents with authentic-looking ‘local’ clothing and personal effects, before they were sent into occupied Europe. Various other stations dealt with the forgery of passports, identity papers and ration books, plus the concealment of innovative weapons in seemingly everyday items.
The SOE operatives would come to revel in their nicknames—Churchill’s Secret Army, or the Baker Street Irregulars. But amongst its detractors the SOE earned a very different reputation: it was the ‘school for bloody mayhem and murder’. To the top brass, many of whom were veterans of the Great War, the SOE’s black arts and guerrilla tactics were ‘ungentlemanly’ and ‘un-soldierly’, and out of keeping with the British military’s chivalrous tradition.
Churchill, quite simply, did not give a damn. His aim was to ‘release the fury of rebellion’ in the occupied nations, using all necessary measures. To do so, the SOE would need to surpass the Germans in cunning, surprise, boldness and black endeavour. From the labyrinth of tunnels running beneath Whitehall—resembling dungeons, and known as ‘The Hole in the Ground’, which now housed Churchill’s War Room—he held forth, and directed his secret army.
Lit by flickering candles and lanterns, and with the walls running with damp, an odd-looking system of tubing snaked around the ceilings of the War Room and beyond; within it, canisters containing messages pinged from one ministry to another, propelled by compressed air. And behind Churchill’s battered wooden chair sat one of many stacks of shoeboxes: the War Room’s filing system.
One was labelled ‘B/SOE/1: Formation of Special Operations Executive’. Inside lay a red file outlining the SOE’s mandate in the bluntest possible terms. It called for ‘a reign of terror conducted by specially trained agents and fortified by espionage and intelligence, so that the lives of German troops in Occupied Europe be made an intense torment.’
With America yet to join the war, Churchill appointed William Stephenson as his secret go-between with Roosevelt. Stephenson’s task was to carry crucial Enigma intercepts to the US president, and to build a covert intelligence partnership with the Americans. To that end, he was charged with setting up the SOE’s US headquarters, in New York, with himself at its head, thus formalising somewhat his shadow espionage operations.
He was empowered by Churchill to move against Britain’s enemies whenever and wherever he saw fit, using covert diplomacy or clandestine warfare, including targeted assassinations. Churchill also sent Stephenson to America with a plain message for President Roosevelt. ‘He [Hitler] has a good chance of conquering the world,’ Churchill warned. ‘All he needs is that a small island capitulate. Tell the President that!’
Stephenson made exhaustive preparations. He assembled intercepts and captured documents that proved beyond doubt the Third Reich’s policies of mass murder and enslavement. Orders issued as long ago as 1933 laid down the basis upon which human beings were to be segregated according to Hitler’s warped ideals of ‘racial purity’. Carefully selected Germans were to sire pure-bred infants—the Übermensch, the Aryan ‘master race’.
Children deemed worthy of ‘Germanization’ were to be selected to join this programme. The rest were to be enslaved or left to die. This was no idle conjecture. Stephenson had painstakingly gathered the undeniable proof: the written orders, the propaganda films, the textbooks and the bureaucratic forms via which the human race was to be ‘sanitized’ with Teutonic thoroughness.
Stephenson was utterly single-minded: he was driven by a relentless fear of this blind, twisted fanaticism. But most of all he was haunted by the fear that those who espoused such aims might engineer the world’s first atomic bomb.
‘If Germany conquers Britain,’ Stephenson declared, ‘the way is clear for the development of this weapon with which Hitler can blackmail the rest of the world … Give him respite, and he will make this new weapon of horror.’
It was clear that Britain would have to join the race to build the bomb, but many doubted whether the besieged nation had the time, the resources or the manpower to do so. In the meantime, it would fall to the schoolboy adventurers of the SOE to try to halt Hitler’s nuclear programme at source—where the raw materials were being mined, and the heavy water distilled into vats for shipping to the Reich.
Into the heart of this atomic storm had sailed Agent Cheese.