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undercover work. A Gestapo officer cornered his mother, demanding information.
    She wouldn’t talk.
    A furious S. W. Fehmer, chief of Gestapo intelligence in Norway, stepped forward and ordered her to tell him where Haukelid had gone.
    â€œHe is in the mountains,” she responded.
    â€œNo!” shouted Fehmer. “He is in Britain. Our contact in Sweden tells us that he has been taken across the North Sea in a fighter plane. And what do you think he is doing there?”
    Haukelid’s mother had no idea. But she knew her son. She suspected it would be something big.
    Staring Fehmer straight in the eyes, she said. “You will find out when he comes back.”

ENORMOZ
    EARLY IN 1942, a young Soviet physicist named Georgi Flerov sat in the library of a military base in southwestern Russia, flipping through a tall stack of physics journals from the United States. When the Germans invaded, Flerov had put his studies aside to serve in the Soviet air force. But he couldn’t stop thinking about fission. So when he had a free moment, he snuck off to the library to read of the newest discoveries.
    â€œI hoped to look through the latest papers on the fission of uranium,” he said. Up until that point, American physics magazines had been filled with articles on new experiments and theories about fission.
    Suddenly there was nothing.
    â€œThis silence is not the result of an absence of research,” Flerov warned his government. “In a word, the seal of silence has been imposed, and this is the best proof of the vigorous work that is going on now abroad.”
    Flerov guessed right. The work being done by Oppenheimer and others on the Uranium Committee was top secret. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II. But that’s because they were fighting common enemies—not because they liked each other.
    Even more distressing to Flerov was the idea of a German atomic bomb. Germany had “first-class scientists,” he said, “and significant supplies of uranium ore.” If Hitler got his hands on atomic bombs, that would be the end of the Soviet Union.
    To Soviet physicists like Flerov, this made it vitally important that the Soviet Union develop its own atomic bomb. But the war was making this impossible. Russian forces stopped the German advance just short of Moscow, but the two massive armies were still slugging it out along a battlefront stretching 1,500 miles from north to south. Soviet scientists had to abandon fission experiments to work instead on weapons that could be used right away.
    The message to Soviet leaders was clear. If the Soviets were going to get an atomic bomb any time in the near future, they were going to have to steal it.
    *   *   *
    T HIS WAS A JOB FOR THE KGB.
    In March 1942, Semyon Semyonov and his fellow KGB agents in New York got a coded telegram from Moscow headquarters explaining the task. “Germany and the USA are frantically working to obtain uranium,” Moscow warned, “and use it as an explosive to make bombs of enormous destructive power, and to all appearances, this problem is quite close to practical solution. It is essential that we take up this problem in all seriousness.”
    Soviet spies in American cities began working on what they called “agent cultivation.” In tradecraft, “cultivation” means gathering information on a potential source, feeling him out to see if he might be convinced to cooperate. This was a tough task, since Soviet agents didn’t know which American scientists were working on the atomic bomb.
    Suddenly, in late March, the KGB got a break. One night, on the New York City subway, a KGB courier named Zalmond Franklin ran into an old friend, Clarence Hiskey. Hiskey was a chemist and professor at Columbia University. The two had gone to college together in the 1930s. Both had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and members of the Communist