atom. The Germans were apparently trying to cause a chain—or explosive—effect by releasing the extra hydrogen atom so appended.
The Science Disciple then argued that it would be useful to “persuade” scientists engaged in German atomic research to come to this country—or, “persuasion” failing, to kidnap them. Though he was not convinced that these people would be able to make a contribution to the American nuclear effort, it was inarguable that if they were here, they could not contribute to the German effort.
The problem, Donovan said, was that if German nuclear people started disappearing, it would alert the Germans to American interest in the subject. Roosevelt himself had decided that the one American war plan that most had to be concealed from the Axis was the attempt to develop an atomic bomb.
“Even in the case of that obscure mining engineer we just brought out of North Africa,” Donovan went on, “we thought about that long and hard before we went for him. In the end, because we need the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo, we decided we had to have him. In other words, we’ll have to go very carefully with this. As a general rule of thumb, anybody we got out would have to be very important. So come up with a list, and rate them twice: how important they are to the Germans and how important they are to our program.”
The second item on the agenda was political: the question of Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey, French Navy, retired. Not just for organizational but for personal reasons. This affair was the business of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., the Disciple who dealt with France and French colonies.
Like Donovan, Martin had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. After the war, he had been appointed to the Armistice Commission. A civil engineer, he had met and married a French officer’s widow, and had subsequently taken over the running of her late husband’s construction firm. This he had turned from a middle-size, reasonably successful business into a large, extremely profitable corporation. His wife’s social position (she was a member of the deposed nobility) and his wealth had then combined to permit them to move in the highest social circles.
C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., brought his wife and children to New York after the fall of France in 1940, purchased an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, and promptly enraged the Franco-American community and large numbers of sympathetic Americans by proclaiming whenever the opportunity arose that French stupidity, cowardice, and corruption, and not German military prowess, had caused France to go down to such a quick and humiliating defeat.
Even more outrageously, he made no secret of his belief that millions of middle- and upper-class Frenchmen indeed preferred Hitler to Blum,3 and had every intention of cooperating with Hitler’s New Order for Europe.
One of the few people who agreed with any of this was Colonel William Donovan. And so far as Donovan was concerned, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was the ideal man to be Disciple for France. He had spent more than twenty years there, knew the country and its leaders better than most Frenchmen, and, with very few exceptions, cordially detested most of them.
Over luncheon and golf, Donovan had learned from him that Martin detested most of the French as much for their chauvinism as for their inept army. His success with his wife’s firm, because it was an “American” and not a “French” success, earned him more jealousy than respect among his French peers. His wife’s late husband’s family, for instance, referred to him as “le gigolo Américain.”
On January 11, 1942, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., entered the service of the United States government, at the usual remuneration of one dollar per annum, as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Three days later, C. Holdsworth Martin III, a 1940 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, by enlisting in the U.S. Army as a private soldier, entered the service of the United States government at a remuneration of twenty-one dollars per month.
Although he acted, and sounded, like a French boulevardier, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was almost belligerently an American.
Now C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was engaged in a description of what he referred to as “l’affaire du vieux amiral vicieux” (“the old, vicious admiral”), by which he meant Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey.
When the war broke out, Admiral de Verbey was recalled from retirement. He was assigned to the French naval staff in