Alsos Mission - Origin

Origin

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program during World War II, led by the United States with the United Kingdom and Canada participating, that attempted to produce the first atomic bomb. Brigadier General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers became its director in September 1942. The Manhattan Project operated under a tight blanket of security lest its discovery induce Axis powers, particularly Germany, to accelerate their own nuclear projects or undertake covert operations against the project.

After the Allied Invasion of Italy in September 1943, Brigadier General Wilhelm D. Styer, the Chief of Staff of Army Service Forces, approached Groves on behalf of the Chief of Staff of the Army, General George Marshall, and asked if the Manhattan Project could take over responsibility for coordination of foreign intelligence activities related to nuclear energy. Styer felt that the existing efforts were not being properly coordinated, and that the importance of items of interest might be overlooked unless those responsible were properly briefed, but at the same time he wished to minimize the number of personnel with access to such secret information. The best option therefore seemed to be to have the effort undertaken by the Manhattan Project itself.

It was believed that the Japanese atomic program was not far advanced because Japan had little access to uranium ore, the industrial effort required far exceeded what Japan was capable of, and American physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, who knew the leading Japanese physicists personally, led to the conclusion that their qualified people were too few in number. The German nuclear energy project was another matter; German scientists were considered leaders in the field, and the fear of Germany developing nuclear weapons first was one of the reasons for the establishment of the Manhattan Project in the first place. Moreover, the Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, frequently claimed that Germany was developing secret weapons, and it was feared that these might include nuclear weapons. Reports of German nuclear activity were taken very seriously. At the instigation of the Manhattan Project, a bombing and sabotage campaign was carried out against heavy water plants in German-occupied Norway.

Groves created a small mission that was jointly staffed by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), the Manhattan Project, and Army Intelligence (G-2), to investigate enemy scientific developments, including nuclear weapons research. The mission was codenamed Alsos, the Greek word for "grove". Groves was not pleased with the codename, but in the end decided that changing it would only draw further unwanted attention.

The Chief of Army Intelligence, Major General George V. Strong, appointed Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash to command the unit. Pash had been the head of the Counter Intelligence Branch of the Western Defense Command, where he had investigated suspected Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Pash's command comprised his executive officer Captain Wayne B. Stanard, four Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents, four interpreters, and four scientists: Dr. James B. Fisk from the Bell Telephone Company, Dr. John R. Johnson from Cornell University, Commander Bruce Olds from ONI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Major William Allis, originally from MIT although then serving on the War Department scientific staff.