OUTSIDE THE GATES OF SEESAW, DUDLEY BUCK DREW HIS YOUNGER sister close and whispered in her ear.
“Virginia, if anyone asks, I am going on an extended camping trip,” he said. “I don’t know how long I will be away. I’ll let you know when I get back.”
It was April 1950. There was a general feeling in the American intelligence community that the Russians were up to something. Tensions were still high regarding Berlin. America had gotten around Joseph Stalin’s blockade of the city by airlifting supplies into West Berlin, and it was embarrassing for Stalin.
The mistrust of the Russians prompted President Harry S. Truman to push for more formalized integration of the Western military powers, to help persuade Stalin not to spark a new land war in Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born, unifying the Western powers of World War II with strategically important countries that could be vital to any future war with the Soviets, such as Iceland and Norway.
The Soviet Union was, for its part, cementing its hold on Eastern Europe, sponsoring a coup in Czechoslovakia that saw a communist government come to power.
There was now a clean divide in Europe between Western democratic states that were getting back on their feet with the aid of American loans provided under the Marshall Plan and the Eastern countries who were being bullied and cajoled closer to Moscow.
A brain drain had begun, from east to west, with many talented engineers and scientists sneaking through the border in Berlin to seek a better life. Stalin, who focused on long-term economic planning as a means to gaining more power over the West, was deeply irritated by this trend, according to CIA intelligence gathered at the time that has since been declassified.
A third world war seemed like a credible possibility, even though everyone was trying desperately to avoid one.
Buck had received orders to go to Berlin, and then into Austria—with permission to stray outside the American zones. His mission, based on order papers found among his personal effects, was described simply as “temporary additional duty concerning such matters as you have been directed to attend to.”
Buck was to be honorably discharged from the navy, the papers said; he would travel into Germany on a diplomatic passport. A separate set of documents gave him permission to carry a concealed Colt .32 automatic pistol.
He would be paid a per diem to cover his expenses on the ground, the order papers said, but the US Navy would not pay this sum; it would come from some other mysterious, unnamed source. Buck had specific instructions to steer clear of military bases. It was apparent that if anyone caught him in the wrong place at the wrong time, the navy would claim no accountability for him. He was, for the time being, a spy.
As soon as Buck completed his duties, the papers said, he was to return to Washington, where he would be readmitted into the navy and sent back to his desk. In the meantime, he was to take orders from an organization called the 7821 Composite Group.
The 7821 Composite Group went by a number of different names. To the US Army it was known as Operation Rusty; to others in the intelligence community it was often simply referred to as The Organization.
It was, in short, a covert CIA operation run by a man who would later be dubbed the Spy of the Century—one of the most infamous and influential figures of the Cold War. And Dudley Buck was about to join his network.
Reinhard Gehlen grew up in the central German city of Erfurt, where his father owned a bookshop. He joined the Germany army at eighteen. He became a major in 1939, leading an infantry division into Poland as part of the Nazi invasion. From there he ascended steadily until, by 1942, he was a lieutenant colonel running Fremde Heere Ost (FHO)—a thirty-five-man crack intelligence team focused on monitoring the Russians. He was Adolf Hitler’s eyes and ears on the eastern front and beyond, with sources scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union.
Long before the Allies declared victory, Gehlen had started making preparations to switch sides. He had shot microfilm copies of FHO’s most secret files and had them stored in watertight drums in the Austrian Alps and parts of southern Germany.
In May 1945 Gehlen turned himself over to the US Army, explaining who he was and what he could offer. He cut a deal with an army intelligence officer, Captain John Boker. Gehlen offered his files and extensive network of contacts in exchange for his liberty and the release of his top agents, many of whom were in other American prisoner of war camps inside Germany.
While postwar America was keen to recruit top German brains, dealing with anyone who was known to have been, or appeared to have been, an ideologically committed Nazi was completely taboo. Gehlen spent a year in prison in Virginia before being released in July 1946 to resurrect his operation. To win his freedom, he identified a number of members of the US Communist Party working for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA.
He started to hire ex-Nazi spies, initially near Frankfurt, and then Munich. Gehlen quickly built a network of 350 handpicked agents across Germany, under the 7821 Composite Group moniker. Piece by piece, he resurrected his old network of contacts inside the Soviet Union. Eventually it expanded into a group of more than four thousand agents processing huge volumes of information. A succession of American liaison officers had no idea who Gehlen really was—he had been assigned a new name, Schneider. The information he provided was invaluable, however.
Buck reported to Gehlen on April 25, 1950, his twenty-third birthday—and just five days after he had received his orders in Washington.
Upon his arrival Buck would have found a well-funded codebreaking and signals-monitoring operation. Officially, Gehlen had a budget of $125,000 for the entire organization, but he had found a way to supplement it. Gehlen explained in his memoir how he struck a deal with one of the American colonels in Germany; he had arranged for vast amounts of surplus goods to be sent to the 7821 Composite Group from the US Army quartermaster’s outpost. He then sold them on the black market inside postwar Germany at vastly inflated prices.
He also played the warring factions of the US military against one another. The declassified CIA files on Gehlen show that the air force had supplied him with “a somewhat spectacular” amount of radio equipment, and codebreaking machines, which made the army furious. Gehlen had set up a whole research lab, creating a front company called Patent and Idea Applications and Negotiation that he claimed did some legitimate consulting business.
Buck’s order papers do not indicate what he had been sent there to do. Given the tensions surrounding Gehlen’s position, the navy possibly wanted some simple intelligence on the nature of his operation. That seems unlikely to have been enough to justify the trip, however.
Securing raw materials may have been another motive. For several months Buck had been working on a covert project to build a new sonar system for use on America’s submarines. At the time, the best radar and sonar equipment worked by passing waves through tubes of mercury. Buck had been tasked with building a system that could use fused quartz instead, which some navy researchers in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, had shown could operate at nine times the speed of the existing equipment.
The fused quartz technology worked in a similar way to fiber-optic cables, such as those used in high-speed Internet technology today. Buck was dabbling with using the cables to transmit information through a system called pulse-position modulation—now a common way to send Internet data, and a technique generally credited to two NASA scientists who came along much later.
Fused quartz looked like it could be an exciting tool in the technology battle with the Soviet Union. There was just one problem: the stockpiles of the quartz were mostly in Germany. Given Buck’s involvement in the project, it is logical to assume that he would have carried back a sizable amount of fused quartz.
His bigger mission was to go on a charm offensive, however.
A FEW MONTHS before Buck set foot in Berlin, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in a test site deep in Kazakhstan.
President Harry S. Truman, who had been reelected in 1948 on a pledge of cutting military spending, was already under pressure to reverse his stance. He was handed a sixty-page treatise by his team, National Security Council Paper 68, which became a defining tome of the era—laying out, among other things, the logic of mutually assured destruction.
The authors ran through a number of scenarios, including launching an all-out land war against the USSR while it was still weak. Eventually, however, it advocated a “rapid build-up of political, economic and military strength in the free world.”
Key to the whole plan was an attempt to undermine the Kremlin’s influence on the rest of the Soviet Union—to “wage overt psychological warfare” against communism. The aim was to prove America’s superiority in as many ways as possible and to increase defections of key scientists and engineers.
Securing the world’s best brains and getting them out of the reach of the Russians was a core strategic objective for the US government.
Buck’s trip to Germany and Austria came thirteen days after Truman saw the draft of NSC 68. It also coincided with the end of a “mathematical congress” in Darmstadt, Germany, where many of Europe’s top computing experts had been gathered in one place. It was a perfect opportunity to gain insight on the technology that other countries were developing.
“If they grabbed any cryptographic machine, or wanted to analyze something where they had limited time to go through it—or to analyze a device, and make an assessment of its importance—then Dudley would have been the perfect person to do that,” explains David Brock of the Computer History Museum.
There was one computer expert in particular that the Americans were desperate to get to: Konrad Zuse, a former Nazi gadget designer operating in the heart of Berlin. Nobody was 100 percent sure which side of the city Zuse would end up in: the American- or the Soviet-controlled zone.
Zuse was a civil engineer with a talent for design. He graduated from a technical university in Berlin in 1935, and worked briefly in advertising. He then got a job in the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin as a design engineer. The work involved lots of calculations, which Zuse found mind-numbingly boring. He set about designing a machine to do the work for him, working after hours in his parents’ apartment.
The time-saving machine he built became his Z1 computer—a mechanical calculator with thirty thousand metal parts. He finished it in 1938, and had barely started work on the second version when he was drafted into the German army. After seeing his work, the German military gave Zuse the resources to keep working on his machines. He designed a primitive missile guidance system, and a device that made aerodynamic computations to help steer the Germans’ radio-controlled Hs 293 bombs.
While the rest of the world’s computer pioneers were sharing ideas, Zuse was operating in almost complete intellectual isolation. He based his second machine, the Z2, on a switching system like the ones used in early telephone networks.
The machines being built in America and Britain were much quicker, but Zuse’s was more reliable. His Z3 design went a stage further: it was the first computer in the world to run from a program rather than numerical instructions punched straight into the machine.
Between 1942 and 1945 Zuse constructed his machines in a small factory in Berlin. He was selling the Z3 commercially—it is considered by many to be the second computer openly available for sale anywhere in the world. Zuse’s burgeoning business was laid low by an Allied bombing raid in 1945, which destroyed the Z1, Z2, and Z3 models and all the blueprints for them. The partially built Z4 had been whisked off to a safe location.
It would be 1949 before Zuse would resume work properly on the Z4. As soon as he resurrected his lab, Zuse became a prime target for American spies, determined to lure him to their side of the great divide.
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency had tried to bring Zuse to work in the United States under a program called Operation Paperclip in 1949. Zuse, apparently, was not interested. IBM had bought options on his patents in 1946, but Zuse was reluctant to get too involved with Americans.
In a further attempt to woo him, the US Air Force created an unclassified job for Zuse to continue working in Berlin but under the direction of the chief of the Computing Section in the Office of Air Research. The job description was for “original work in the design of mechanical and electrical computing aids for use in the solution of engineering and scientific problems, particularly in the field of nonlinear equations.”
Zuse remained a source of intrigue—and suspicion. In early 1950 he moved his computer operation to a new location near the Soviet boundary of the American Zone in Berlin. The US Office of Naval Research sent an officer to meet Zuse to find out more about his operations and make a fresh attempt to persuade him to relocate to the United States.
The report on Zuse came back saying that “the source of his funding is not known” and “not above suspicion.” That was in March 1950, just weeks before Buck was sent to Germany. The Z4 machine was mostly restored, Zuse had said, but would not be fully operational until May.
Buck, fresh from the success of building his own test computer in just four months, appears to have been sent to coax Zuse to the US. Rather than send a bullying military man promising cash and status, they sent the most enthusiastic engineer they knew to lure him with tales of the resources and laboratory staff that would be made available to him.
Buck was in a much better position than even his superiors to judge what progress Zuse had made with his machines. If he could not persuade the German to move to the United States, he could at least try to see some of his machines in action and gain some intelligence.
Clearly the reception was not altogether hostile. A few weeks later, at the end of May 1950, Buck was sent back to Germany and Austria.
His eight-day mission again saw him licensed to carry a concealed automatic pistol, and he traveled in civilian clothes. So far as his sister Virginia was concerned, it was another camping trip.
On that second trip, Buck appears to have had a modicum of success. Zuse agreed to travel to America that July for an interview with Remington Rand, one of the firms building early computers in the United States, at their complex in Norwalk, Connecticut. The visit was then pushed back until September.
Zuse never agreed to move to the United States, but his firm ended up working as a contracted supplier to Remington Rand for some years, mostly through its Swiss subsidiary. As Zuse suggested in various interviews during his lifetime, the deal was eventually ended after the US authorities leaned on Remington to cut off his supply of work.
Although Zuse never revealed the names of the navy agents who came to visit him, Buck’s diary entries show that Zuse came to see him at MIT later that same year, with a colleague, one H. Stacken.
Two years after Buck’s trip, when Virginia was posted to Germany as part of her work with the navy, Buck would give her the name of a young man who lived near Berlin who “likes to fish and talk with Americans.” She had no idea he had ever been to Germany.