CHAPTER SIXTEEN

KIDNAP

WHILE NORWAY GRIEVED, Colonel Carl Eifler began putting together a team of operatives for a special mission: kidnapping Werner Heisenberg.

Proposals to “deny Germany [Heisenberg’s] brain” had been kicking around since October 1942, when the U.S. passed up an opportunity to seize Heisenberg during a visit to Switzerland. Sixteen months later, at the request of General Groves, the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, precursor to the CIA, resurrected the idea.

Eifler, the former head of a guerrilla unit battling the Japanese in Burma, was, according to one OSS operative, “the toughest, deadliest hombre in the whole OSS.” 140 The OSS gave Eifler a budget of $100,000 ($1.3 million adjusted for inflation) and unprecedented authority, notifying OSS officials: “the Director considers Eifler’s mission one of the highest priority and importance . . . The Eifler mission ‘must be made to work.’” 141 His first task would be to track down Heisenberg, whose lab had been relocated after it was bombed. Oppenheimer provided a photo of Heisenberg taken during his 1939 trip to the United States. 142

In a plot worthy of a James Bond novel, Eifler planned to sneak into Germany from neutral Switzerland with a team of twelve operatives, kidnap Heisenberg and drag him back across the Swiss border. From there, Eifler and Heisenberg would board a small plane, fly to the Mediterranean and parachute into the sea where they would be picked up by an American submarine. 143 (Eifler would have preferred to fly Heisenberg to a base in England, but the British SOE did not approve of the OSS running operations in northern Europe, thus the submarine.)

He spent months preparing. Oppenheimer assisted with information about Heisenberg’s known associates, their “traits, appearance and habits,” anything he could use to locate Heisenberg. Eifler traveled from Britain to Italy, then to North Africa and India building a cover story. The mission was so secret not even his fellow operatives could know what he was up to. Claiming to be head of a “Strategic Trial Unit,” he demonstrated exploding pencils and other OSS clandestine warfare gadgets to key Allied personnel. 144

He was so convincing that British agents shared information about their “toys and gadgets,” like suppositories for smuggling microfilm. When their superiors got word that clandestine tradecraft had been compromised, they were furious, and the kidnap plot was scrubbed. 145