137 - Arthur I. Miller [85]
Pauli, in any case, was not a specialist in nuclear physics, nor had he ever been a team player. His brilliance was in research at the highest theoretical level, whereas what was required at Los Alamos was very much applied research.
All the same, it is striking that Oppenheimer should have turned down such a distinguished scientist. Perhaps the Pauli effect was on Oppenheimer’s mind? After all, there was plenty of delicate machinery, not to mention powerful explosives, at the site.
Pauli inadvertently almost played a part in the war effort. In 1942, his old friend Gregor Wentzel wrote to tell him that Scherrer had invited Heisenberg to give a lecture at the ETH. It was the first time during the war years that Heisenberg had left occupied Europe. Pauli passed the information on to Weisskopf as a bit of friendly gossip. Weisskopf was working on the Manhattan Project and knew that Heisenberg was involved in the German atomic bomb program. He immediately hatched a plan, in which he too would have played a part, to have Heisenberg kidnapped. He passed the plot on to Oppenheimer who passed it to the military. But in the end nothing came of it.
Hertha, meanwhile, who was in New York, had discovered that her older brother was not just an important scientist but a famous one, and that he was near New York. Life was not going well for her and she needed financial and personal help. From time to time, she took to visiting the Paulis. Franca had misgivings about her. Possibly it was connected with Hertha’s drive to have a career, while Franca devoted her life to her husband. Or perhaps it was Franca’s innate jealousy of any female acquaintance of Wolfgang’s, even his sister—perhaps with good reason.
Agent 488
Pauli had the choice to opt out of the war, but Jung could not. As war loomed, Zürich became a nest of espionage and counter-espionage. In neutral Switzerland people moved freely about while keeping constant watch on each other. Parties, social gatherings, and universities were all potential places for exchanging information, finding out who was an agent and for what side, or trying to be a double-agent. Double-crossings were not uncommon, sometimes with dire consequences.
Ordinary citizens had to cope with food and fuel shortages. Like everyone else the Jungs dug up their landscaped lawns to grow vegetables. As a family of means they were able to come up with enough food, tobacco, and wine to maintain at least a vestige of their opulent prewar lifestyle.
Then Allen Dulles arrived, sent by Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, head of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, to establish a listening post in Switzerland. Dulles’s official title was Special Assistant to the American Ambassador in Bern. Before the war Dulles had been a successful Wall Street lawyer. He also had extensive experience in intelligence affairs from World War I. Just hours after he had slipped into Switzerland the Germans invaded Vichy France and closed the French border. Dulles would have to work with whomever he could recruit locally. Meanwhile there was two-way traffic of German spies across the German border with northern Switzerland, aided by a sympathetic population.
One of Dulles’s earliest recruits was Mary Bancroft, a thirty-six-year-old American and a well-known socialite. She was famous for her affairs and also for her loose tongue.
Dulles quickly added her to his list of lovers. He impressed upon her the seriousness of her task as a go-between, gathering information from Germans working for the OSS as well as advising him on who was who in Zürich. He cautioned that if she talked too much lives could be lost.
Bancroft knew Jung socially and mentioned him to Dulles in her reports. Aware of Jung’s reputation as a Nazi sympathizer, Dulles had him investigated and concluded that the allegations were