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It was a great secret to the American citizens but to the military world it was leaking like a sieve.Espionage and the Manhattan Project, 1940-1945With an atomic bomb program of its own, Germany attempted to build a large spy network within the United States. Most German spies were quickly caught, however, and none penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project. German physicists heard rumors and suspected an atomic bomb project was underway in Britain, the United States, or both, but that was all. Japan also had a modest atomic research program. Rumors of the Manhattan Project reached Japan as well, but, as with Germany, no Japanese spies penetrated the Manhattan Project.The Soviet Union proved more adept at espionage, primarily because it was able to play on the ideological sympathies of a significant number of Americans and British as well as foreign émigrés. Soviet intelligence services devoted a tremendous amount of resources into spying on the United States and Britain. In the United States alone, hundreds of Americans provided secret information to the Soviet Union, and the quality of Soviet sources in Britain was even better. (In contrast, during the war neither the American nor the British secret services had a single agent in Moscow.) The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had thousands of members, a disproportionate number of whom were highly educated and likely to work in sensitive wartime industries. Many physicists were members of the CPUSA before the war. This does not mean that every member of the CPUSA was willing to supply secret information to the Soviet Union, but some were and some did.Soviet intelligence first learned of Anglo-American talk of an atomic bomb program in September 1941, almost a year before the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) was created. The information likely came from John Cairncross, a member of the infamous "Cambridge Five" spies in Britain. (Cairncross served as a private secretary for a British government official, Lord Hankey, who was privy to some British discussions of the MAUD Report.) Another of the "Cambridge Five," Donald Maclean (left), also sent word of the potential for an atomic bomb to his Soviet handlers around the same time. (Maclean was a key Soviet agent. In 1947 and 1948, he served as a British liaison with the MED's successor, the Atomic Energy Commission.) At the same time, the sudden drop in fission-related publications emerging from Britain and the United States caught the attention of Georgii Flerov, a young Soviet physicist, who in April 1942 wrote directly to Josef Stalin to warn him of the danger.Soviet intelligence soon recognized the importance of the subject and gave it the appropriate codename: ENORMOZ ("enormous"). Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow pressured their various American residencies to develop sources within the Manhattan Project. Many of these early attempts at recruiting spies were detected and foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Manhattan Project counterintelligence officials. In February 1943, they learned of Soviet attempts to contact physicists conducting related work at the "Rad Lab" at the University of California, Berkeley.The scientists in question were placed under surveillance and, when possible, drafted into the military so that they could be assigned away from sensitive subjects. Another scientist at the Rad Lab caught passing information to the Soviet Union in 1944 was immediately discharged. In early 1944, the FBI also learned of several "Met Lab" employees suspected of divulging secret information to their Soviet handlers. The employees were immediately dismissed. While these Soviet attempts at espionage were discovered and thwarted, other Soviet spies went undetected.Of the Soviet spies not caught during the war, one of the most valuable was the British physicist Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs first offered his services to Soviet intelligence in late 1941. Soon thereafter, he began passing information regarding British atomic research. Soviet intelligence lost contact with him in early 1944 but eventually found out that Fuchs had been reassigned to the bomb research and development laboratory at Los Alamos as part of the newly-arrived contingent of British scientists. Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, and from there he passed to his Soviet handlers detailed information regarding atomic weapons design. Returning home to begin work on the British atomic program in 1946, he continued to pass secret information to the Soviet Union intermittently until he was finally caught (largely due to VENONA), and in January 1950 he confessed everything.For over four decades, Klaus Fuchs was thought to be the only spy who was a physicist at Los Alamos. In the mid-1990s, release of the VENONA intercepts revealed an alleged second scientist-spy: Theodore Hall. Like Fuchs, a long-time communist who volunteered his services, Hall made contact with Soviet intelligence in November 1944 while at Los Alamos. Although not as detailed or voluminous as that provided by Fuchs, the data supplied by Hall on implosion and other aspects of atomic weapons design served as an important supplement and confirmation of Fuchs's material. The FBI learned of Hall's espionage in the early 1950s. Unlike Fuchs, however, under questioning Hall refused to admit anything. The American government was unwilling to expose the VENONA secret in open court. Hall's espionage activities had apparently ended by then, so the matter was quietly dropped.The most famous "atomic spies," Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (right), never worked for the Manhattan Project. Julius Rosenberg was an American engineer who by the end of the war had been heavily involved in industrial espionage for years, both as a source himself and as the "ringleader" of a network of like-minded engineers dispersed throughout the country. Julius's wife, the former Ethel Greenglass, was also a devoted communist, as was her brother David. David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of 1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it over to Soviet intelligence. As Greenglass later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist."In March 1946, Greenglass left the Army. Soviet intelligence maintained contact with him, urging him to enroll at the University of Chicago in order to re-enter atomic research. The NKGB (the People's Commissary for State Security and the predecessor to the KGB) offered to pay his tuition, but Greenglass's application to Chicago was rejected. In 1950, the confession of Klaus Fuchs led the FBI to his handler, Harry Gold, who in turn led the FBI to David Greenglass. When confronted, Greenglass confessed, implicating his wife Ruth and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. This was soon confirmed through VENONA intercepts (Rosenberg was codenamed ANTENNA and LIBERAL, Ethel was WASP, Greenglass was BUMBLEBEE and CALIBER, and his wife Ruth was OSA). The "rolling up" of the espionage ring stopped, however, with the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel (who knew of her husband's activities and at times assisted him) both maintained their innocence and refused to cooperate with authorities in order to lessen their sentences. Because of his cooperation, Greenglass received only 15 years, and his wife, Ruth, was never formally charged. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. Authorities apparently hoped to use the death sentences as leverage to get them to name names, but the Rosenbergs maintained their silence. Despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953.At least two other scientists associated with the Manhattan Project also served as spies for Soviet Union: Allan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo. Another British physicist who came over with James Chadwick in 1943, May, unlike his colleague Klaus Fuchs, was not assigned to Los Alamos. Instead, he was chosen to assist in the Canadian effort to construct a heavy water-moderated reactor at Chalk River, Ontario. During 1944, May visited the Met Lab several times. Once during these visits, he even met Leslie Groves. In February 1945, May passed what he had learned to Soviet intelligence. His colleague at Chalk River, Bruno Pontecorvo, also served as a spy. Pontecorvo was a former protégé of Enrico Fermi. In 1936, Pontecorvo, who was Jewish, fled fascist Italy for France. When France fell to the invading Nazi armies in 1940, Pontecorvo was again forced to flee fascism. He was invited to join British atomic research, and by 1943 he found himself assigned to the Chalk River facility. Pontecorvo established contact with Soviet intelligence and began passing them information about the atomic activities there. He continued his dual life as a physicist and a spy in Canada until 1949 when he was promoted and moved back to Britain to join the atomic research being conducted there. Following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo's Soviet handlers became worried that he would be exposed, and in 1950 Pontecorvo defected with his family to the Soviet Union. Pontecorvo continued his work as a physicist in the Soviet Union, eventually receiving two Orders of Lenin for his efforts, all the while continuing to deny that he had been a spy during his years in Canada and Britain.A number of spies within the Manhattan Project have never been positively identified. Most are only known by their codenames, as revealed in the VENONA decrypts. One source, an engineer or scientist who was given the codename FOGEL (later changed to PERSEUS), apparently worked on the fringes of the Manhattan Project for several years, passing along what information he could. Soviet documents state that he was offered employment at Los Alamos, but, to the regret of his handlers, he turned it down for family reasons. Another source, a physicist codenamed MAR, first began supplying information to the Soviet Union in 1943. In October of that year, he was transferred to the Hanford Engineer Works. In another case, a stranger one day in the summer of 1944 showed up unannounced at the Soviet Consulate in New York, dropped off a package, and quickly left. The package was later found to contain numerous secret documents relating to the Manhattan Project. Soviet intelligence attempted to find out who the deliverer of the package was so that they could recruit him. They never could, however, determine his identity. An Englishman codenamed ERIC also provided details of atomic research in 1943, as did an American source codenamed QUANTUM, who provided secret information relating to gaseous diffusion in the summer of 1943. Who QUANTUM was or what became of him after the summer of 1943 remains a mystery.Few aspects of the Manhattan Project remained secret from the Soviet Union for long. Given the size of the pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented. In most cases, the individuals who chose to provide information to the Soviet Union did so for ideological reasons, not for money. They were usually volunteers who approached Soviet intelligence themselves. Further, in most cases, they were not aware that anyone else had chosen to do the same thing. (Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall were all at Los Alamos at the same time, yet none of them knew of the espionage activities of the other two.)Soviet espionage directed at the Manhattan Project probably hastened by at least 12-18 months the Soviet acquisition of an atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949 (left), the device they used was virtually identical in design to the one that had been tested at Trinity four years previously.https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/08/manhattan-project-leaks/The Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II was among the most highly classified and tightly secured programs ever undertaken by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, it generated more than 1,500 leak investigations involving unauthorized disclosures of classified Project information.That remarkable fact is noted in the latest declassified volume of the official Manhattan District History (Volume 14, Intelligence & Security) that was approved for release and posted online by the Department of Energy last month.In several respects, the Manhattan Project established the template for secret government programs during the Cold War (and after). It pioneered or refined the practices of compartmentalization of information, “black” budgets, cover and deception to conceal secret facilities, minimal notification to Congress, and more.But wherever there are national security secrets, it seems that leaks and spies are not far behind.During the course of the Manhattan Project, counterintelligence agents “handled more than 1,000 general subversive investigations, over 1,500 cases in which classified project information was transmitted to unauthorized persons, approximately 100 suspected espionage cases, and approximately 200 suspected sabotage cases,” according to the newly declassified history (at pp. S2-3).Most of the 1,500 leak cases seem to have been inadvertent disclosures rather than deliberate releases to the news media of the contemporary sort. But they were diligently investigated nonetheless. “Complete security of information could be achieved only by following all leaks to their source.”In 1943, there were several seemingly unrelated cases of Protestant clergymen in the South preaching sermons that alarmingly cited “the devastating energy contained in minute quantities of Uranium 235” (while contrasting it with “the power of God [that] was infinitely greater”). The sermons were eventually traced back to a pamphlet distributed by a Bible college in Chicago, which was determined to be harmless. Other disclosures cited in the history involved more serious indiscretions that drew punitive action.“Since September 1943, investigations were conducted of more than 1500 ‘loose talk’ or leakage of information cases and corrective action was taken in more than 1200 violations of procedures for handling classified material,” the history said (p. 6.5).“Upon discovery of the source of a violation of regulations for safeguarding military information, the violator, if a project employee, was usually reprimanded, informed of the possible application of the Espionage Act, and warned not to repeat the violation.”Fundamentally, however, information security was not to be achieved by the force of law or the threat of punishment. Rather, it was rooted in shared values and common commitments, the Project history said.“Grounds for protecting information were largely patriotism, loyalty to the fighting men, and the reasoning that the less publicity given the Project, the more difficult it would be for the enemy to acquire information about it and also, the greater would be the element of surprise” (p. 6.13).The only other remaining portion of the official history, Foreign Intelligence Supplement No. 1 to Manhattan District History Volume 14, was also published online last month. It provided an account of U.S. wartime intelligence collection aimed at enemy scientific research and development. Some information in that volume was deleted by the Central Intelligence Agency.The entire thirty-six volume Manhattan District history has now been declassified and posted online.Even the Germans tried to infiltrate the program…The Germans knew of the Manhattan Project and they made attempts to infiltrate it but they were not effective at it, unlike the Russians. Below is a very interesting story of a Nazi infiltration that was caught in New york.Taken From Nazi Spies Come AshoreErich GimpelErich Gimpel—the most accomplished German spy to make it into the United States, was a very unlikely agent. Born on March 25, 1910, Gimpel began his espionage career in the mid-1930s in Peru, where he was working as a radio engineer for mining companies. Like a character in a Graham Greene spy novel, he was told by the German government to track ship movements in the area and send his information to a contact in Chile. "In Lima I never missed a party," he later wrote, describing the whole thing as somewhat of a lark. "We were fighting our war in dinner jackets and with cocktail glasses in our hands."When America entered World War II, Gimpel was deported from Peru with other Germans and sent to Texas where he spent seven weeks in an internment camp. On his arrival back in Germany, Gimpel was welcomed by a stranger who gave him money and identity and ration cards, and told him to report to an address in Berlin. "I knew this was the headquarters of the German Secret Service," he wrote. "The amateur was about to become an expert."William ColepaughWilliam Colepaugh was an even more unlikely Nazi spy. For starters, he was an American, born in Connecticut (exactly eight years after Gimpel) and educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After the war began, his pro-German attitudes got him into trouble with his Selective Service Board and the FBI. Colepaugh eventually took a kitchen job on a Swedish ship in early 1944 just to get across the Atlantic. He abandoned ship in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, and presented himself to the German consul. Unable to speak German, he announced in English that he wanted to help Germany win the war. The fact that his mother was German did not keep the Nazi diplomat from wondering whether this American was really an Allied agent trying to get inside the Third Reich.SS Major Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite commando. In June 1944, Skorzeny sent Colepaugh to an SS training school in the German-occupied Netherlands.From Lisbon, Colepaugh traveled through France to Berlin, where German authorities watched him closely for three months. Finally, he was interviewed by SS Major Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite commando. In June 1944, Skorzeny sent him to an SS training school where he himself taught, in the German-occupied Netherlands. There, Colepaugh met Erich Gimpel, who considered the "young, well-fed, and contented" American not a problem, but a potential solution.Gimpel had been asked to infiltrate America to uncover details about the United States’ program to develop an atom bomb—the Manhattan Project. He had ~reed on one condition. To survive as a spy in the United States, Gimpel had concluded, he would need to take along "a proper American. He must know the latest dance steps and the latest popular songs. He must know everything about baseball and have all the Hollywood gossip at his fingertips." That said, Gimpel had to wonder where he would find "an American who was prepared to work against his own country and who at the same time was courageous, sensible, and trustworthy."Colepaugh appeared to be just what Gimpel needed. Late in September 1944, the two men boarded the 252-foot, IXC/40-class U-1230 in Kiel, Germany, bound for Maine. Ordinarily, the vessel carried a full crew of 56, but two of the regulars were left behind to make room for the spies. Their agents’ mission and identities were kept secret even from the young crewmen and their commander, with Gimpel posing as a chief engineer and Colepaugh as a war correspondent. The crew soon figured out that something was amiss, though: how could a man who didn’t speak German be a German reporter?The sub entered the open ocean on October 6. It was a dangerous time for a U-boat to cross the Atlantic; in fact, the U-1230’s sister ship U-1229 was headed for Maine about six weeks earlier when she was sunk in the North Atlantic by Navy planes from the aircraft carrier USS Bogue.To help make their way in the United States, Gimpel and Colepaugh carried $60,000 in small bills (the equivalent of $656,000 today). Colepaugh had convinced his superiors that a person could hardly get by in America on less than $15,000 a year—at a time when the average family income was about $2,250. The money was supposed to keep the two spies in the United States through 1946. Along with the cash, the men had also been given 99 small diamonds to sell if the US currency had changed by the time they arrived or if they eventually needed additional funds. Checking on the holdings one day as the submarine neared Maine, Gimpel was shocked to find the American money bundled in wrappers printed "Deutsche Reichsbank." He quickly disposed of that evidence.U-1230 had been equipped for a six-month patrol, and ‘carried 14 torpedoes. Nevertheless, she was under orders not to attract attention until her primary mission of delivering Gimpel and Colepaugh to the United States had been accomplished. After five weeks of a largely uneventful voyage, the submarine reached the coast of Newfoundland and continued south from there down the Maine coast. Along the way, the sub’s transformer and depth-finding equipment was damaged by condensation caused by weeks of traveling underwater. The equipment had to be repaired on the surface, so the vessel was taken up under the cover of night. The repairs succeeded, and the surface activity went unnoticed.Finally, on November 29, after almost two months at sea, the sub made its way a dozen miles up Frenchman Bay between the islands just off Bar Harbor. (About 31 feet high, the sub had a draft of just over 15 feet.) Shortly before 11 p.m., near Sunset Ledge on the western side of Hancock Point, it came to a stop a few hundred yards off shore, with only its conning tower showing above the water.A rubber raft was brought up and inflated by a line connected to a silent air compressor. The original plan called for the two spies to row themselves ashore, at which point the raft would be pulled back to the sub on a light tether. The line broke, however, making it necessary for the two uniformed sailors to come along—and earn a moment of glory on the US mainland.Even today, 60 years later, you’ll find this remote area of the Maine coast deserted at midnight. In 1944, "there probably were less than a dozen families" near where the spies landed, says Lois Johnson of the Hancock Historical Society. The Hancock Town Report for 1944 lists 13 births, 12 deaths, and two marriages. Census figures show that the population grew from 755 to only 770 between 1920 to 1950.Hancock was a place with few people around to notice anything that might happen, but also a place where strangers stood out. Two people did happen to drive by as Gimpel and Colepaugh were walking along the road at that late hour. Both of them spotted the men, but neither stopped: Hancock was also a place where people minded their own business.After the men reached US Route 1, a third car passed them, and it did stop. Miraculously, it was a taxicab from Ellsworth, the small town eight miles to the west. Colepaugh did all the talking, explaining that their car had slid into a ditch in the storm and they needed a ride to the train station in Bangor, 35 miles away. So followed a $6 cab ride and a 2 A.M. train to Portland. Stopping there for a bite to eat, Gimpel stammered when a short-order cook asked him what kind of bread he preferred with his ham and eggs. To him, bread was bread, and "the fact that in America people ate five different kinds" was surprising, he wrote.The spies boarded a train to Boston at 7 a.m. That afternoon, Gimpel went into a store in town to buy a tie, and the salesman recognized the cloth and cut of his trench coat as not being American. "As a matter of fact," Gimpel managed to reply, "I bought it in Spain." He decided never to wear that coat again. Gimpel and Colepaugh spent the night in a hotel, sleeping in their American clothes to try and make them look less new. They left the next day, completing their journey with a train ride to Grand Central Station in New York City. In less than 40 hours the intruders had gone from the middle of nowhere in Maine to downtown Manhattan. It was a remarkably efficient journey.The pair checked into a hotel on 33rd Street. They spent most of the next week looking for a place not constructed of steel, because steel hindered radio transmissions. They found an apartment on Beekman Place for $150 a month and paid two months’ rent in advance.Things had gone well so far for the two Nazi spies on American soil, but over the next few weeks, their luck began to wear out. Two days after their arrival in New York, U-l230, still lingering about the coast, sank the 5,458-ton Canadian freighter Cornwallis, which was carrying sugar and molasses from Barbados to St. John, New Brunswick. Alarmed by the possibility that this U-boat could have dropped off enemy agents, the Boston FBI office sent men north to Maine. The agents soon located 29-year-old Mary Forni and her next-door neighbor, 17-year-old Harvard Hodgkins, the two Hancock residents who had driven past the spies walking in the snow. Forni, the wife of the Hancock tax collector, had been out late playing cards with friends; Hodgkins, son of the town’s deputy sheriff and a Boy Scout and assistant scout leader, had been at a dance. They both described to the agents what they had seen.Much has been made of the Nazis getting away with walking through the Maine woods in a late November snowstorm dressed in light topcoats, advertising themselves as outsiders. But such hindsight misses the point, says Richard Gay. "The truth is," he told an interviewer, "their cover was perfect, and it worked without a hitch." As far as any witnesses knew, the spies "were visitors from the city whose car had broken down."What really broke down on the spy mission was William Colepaugh. Deciding that espionage was not for him, he took off on December 21 with both suitcases, including all the cash. Gimpel returned to the apartment to find everything gone and figured out that his partner must have headed back to Grand Central Station. There, Gimpel found the suitcases in the baggage room and, after some anxious moments, managed to recover them, even though he did not have the claim checks.Gimpel had proven resourceful in responding to every mishap so far, but he had no answer for what happened two days later: Colepaugh, meeting with an old school friend, confessed that he was a spy. The friend at first thought Colepaugh was joking, but after he realized the story was true, he called the FBI. A manhunt immediately centered on Manhattan, and Gimpel was captured on December 30.In early February 1945, Gimpel and Colepaugh were tried by a military court at Fort Jay on Governors Island, New York. They were convicted and, on Valentine’s Day, sentenced to death by hanging. Before their sentence was carried out, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and all federal executions were suspended for four weeks. By the time that month was up, the war had ended in Europe, and on June 23, new president Harry S. Truman announced that he was commuting the two sentences to life in prison—Gimpel’s because the United States and Germany were no longer at war, and Colepaugh’s because he had given himself up and provided the FBI with the information needed to arrest Gimpel. A statement from the War Department, reported in The New York Times, ended with the confident conclusion "The mission of the spies in this country was a complete failure."Colepaugh served 17 years in prison, then moved to the Philadelphia area. He reportedly lives in a rest home in Florida today. Gimpel served 10 years at Leavenworth, Alcatraz, and Atlanta before he was released and deported to Germany in 1955. He later moved to Brazil, where he celebrated his 94th birthday in 2004. In 1991 and again in 1993 he visited Chicago as the honored guest of the Sharkhunters, a group of some 7,000 U-boat enthusiasts from 70 countries.Gimpel was not the only Nazi from this spy mission to return to America. Horst Haslau, the radioman aboard the U-1230 and one of the vessel’s youngest crewmen, got a job in the United States. In 1984, he was working for RCA in Indianapolis, Indiana, and visited the Hancock area. The local newspaper published photos of America’s one-time enemy wearing a John Deere cap and sitting in the Ellsworth Holiday Inn, holding a bottle of beer. The brand was Beck’s, the same German beer that was stocked on U-1230, Haslau said. Three weeks after the sub dropped off Gimpel and Colepaugh in Maine, he recalled, each crewmember received one bottle for Christmas.Forni continued to live in the Hancock area and was one of the guests of honor at a June 2005 party to celebrate the 90th birthday of some local residents. Sixty years earlier, she had been honored at another local party; shortly after the spy incident, her friends organized an event to honor her for her role in providing information that helped capture Gimpel and Colepaugh and presented her with a $100 war bond.Americans ate up the story of Hodgkins, the Hancock Boy Scout. The New York Journal-American sponsored the high school senior’s first ride in an airplane, bringing him and his family to New York for a week in January 1945, where he was given a key to the city. He saw the Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, and some Broadway shows, and met Governor Thomas Dewey, boxing champion Joe Louis, and Babe Ruth. After he graduated from Ellsworth High School, Hodgkins received a full scholarship to the Maine Maritime Academy for his anti-spy efforts. He died in May 1984.Given what we know about Operation Magpie, Gimpel and Colepaugh were probably no great threat to America’s security. They had little skill and experience to aid them in circumventing the huge obstacles that remained in their path. In the end, the chief result of their mission was to turn a couple of ordinary Americans in Hancock, Maine, into heroes. Gimpel and Colepaugh were left with the claim to the fairly weightless title Last Nazi Spies in America.Richard Sassaman, a resident of Bar Harbor, Maine, two miles from where the U-1230 passed, recommends the book Agent 146 by Erich Gimpel (St. Martin’s Press, 2003) for further reading.