A dark secret behind the Hiroshima bomb is where the uranium came from, a spy-vs.-spy race to secure naturally enriched uranium from Congo to fuel the Manhattan Project and keep the rare mineral out of Nazi hands, reports Joe Lauria.
Destruction wrought in Hiroshima, with ruins of Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/Wikimedia Commons/Maarten Heerlien)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Since the first use of a nuclear weapon in Hiroshima 80 years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1945, the story of where the uranium for the bomb came from and the covert operation the U.S. employed to secure it was little known.
That was until the 2016 publication of the book, Spies in the Congo, by British researcher Susan Williams (Public Affairs Books, New York), which unveiled for the first time the detailed story of the deep cover race between the Americans and the Nazis to get their hands on the deadliest metal on earth.
At the outset of World War II, when the U.S. launched the extraordinarily secret Manhattan Project, mines in North America and most of the rest of the world yielded ore with less than one percent uranium, considered inadequate to build the first atom bombs. But there was one mine in the world where, through a freak of nature, the ore yielded up to 65 percent uranium: Shinkolobwe mine in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo.
The link between Shinkolobwe and Hiroshima, where more than 200,000 people were killed, was still largely unknown in the West, in the Congo and even in Japan among the few survivors still alive.
Shinkolobwe mine in 1925. (Public Domain/Wikipedia)
Another ignored link is the disastrous health effect on Congolese miners who handled the uranium as virtual slaves of the Belgium mining giant Union Minière, owners of Shinkolobwe in the then Belgian Congo.
Though it turned out the Nazis had not got very far in their quest for the bomb (because of a lack of highly-enriched uranium), the Americans were unaware of that in 1939, and were fearful Hitler would get a nuclear weapon before they did. That would have almost certainly affected the outcome of the war. As early as that year, Albert Einstein wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt to indirectly advise him to keep the Nazis away from Shinkolowbe and secure the uranium there for the United States.
Williams’s meticulously-researched and masterfully written book tells the intricate tale of a special unit of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, that was set up to purchase and secretly remove all the uranium from Shinkolowbe that the U.S. could get its hands on.
William Joseph (‘Wild Bill’) Donovan, Head of the OSS in 1945. (National Archives)
The unit was headed in Washington by OSS Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Rud Boulton, head of the OSS’s Africa section. Donovan was obsessed with stopping the Nazis from getting the bomb and mistrustful of Britain’s role in the uranium operation. Britain on the other hand feared the U.S. was trying to take over its West African colonies. Williams tells us that Donovan trained his agents to not only target Nazism but colonialism as well.
The OSS agents used a number of covers, such as ornithologists, naturalists collecting live gorillas, silk importers, and posing as an executive for the Texaco oil company, such as agent Lanier Violett did. This became an issue after Texaco’s president, Torkild Rieber, was forced to resign in 1940 after being exposed as an oil smuggler to the Nazis and hiring Germans who turned out to be spies “using Texaco’s internal communications to transmit intelligence information to Berlin.”
Williams also tells us that the American spies had difficulties operating in French Congo and other colonies under General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French control because the U.S. recognized the Vichy government until the Normandy invasion.
A Real-Life Thriller
AND HOW IT ENDED: The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. (U.S. Army)
Williams’s real-life spy thriller focuses on a number of OSS agents involved in securing the uranium and stopping the Nazis from accessing the unique mine in Katanga province, a mission so secretive most of the agents involved thought they were preventing diamond smuggling. The few OSS agents who knew it was uranium that the U.S. was after, didn’t know what the ore was for.
Once such agent, Wilbur “Dock” Hogue, the protagonist of the story, only found out after Aug. 6, 1945, why he had helped uncover Nazi smuggling routes from the Congo and helped spirit uranium out of the country. It was brought by train to Port-Francqui, then on barges down the Kasai to the Congo River to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), where it was reloaded on a train to the port of Matadi.
There the uranium was put on Pan American airplanes or on ships, both bound for New York, where it was unloaded and 1,200 tons stored in a warehouse on the New York City borough of Staten Island. There the uranium remained until it was transported by train to Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where scientists were developing the bomb.
(The New York site under the Bayonne Bridge still registered radiation levels high enough for the U.S. government to order a clean-up in 2010.)
Williams also reveals that the U.S. mission was complicated by some Belgian officials in the Congo, as well as Union Minière, who cooperated at times with the Nazis to smuggle out some of the lethal ore. As Williams explains, after the Germans surrendered, the U.S. learned how far from a bomb the Nazis actually were, and after Japan was defeated, learned for the first time that Tokyo also had had a rudimentary nuclear weapons program.
After VE Day, Einstein tried to convince Truman to shut down the Manhattan Project. But it was too late. Though Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and three other senior American military commanders were opposed to using the bomb, Truman dropped it anyway, not to end the war and save lives, as many historians now agree, but to test the weapon and send a message to the world, and especially the Soviets, about America’s coming dominance.
Author Susan Williams
“The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” Eisenhower said.
Though OSS agent Hogue did not know what the uranium was for, he knew he was on a highly dangerous mission. Nazi agents three times tried to kill him, with a bomb, a knife and a gun. He survived the war only to succumb to stomach cancer at the age of 42.
As Williams points out: “Risk factors for this disease include exposure to radiation, which explains why atomic bomb survivors in the Second World War were more likely than most people to get stomach cancer.”
Two other of Hogue’s OSS colleagues from the Congo mission also died at very young ages. But Williams’s concern also extends to the Congolese mine workers who handled the stuff for days on end and about which neither Belgium, Union Minière nor the Americans seemed to have the slightest concern.
“Astonishingly, hardly any attention has been paid to the Congolese, not one of whom was consulted about plans to make atomic bombs with Shinkolobwe’s uranium,” Williams writes. “What would have been their reaction, on a moral basis, to the building of such a destructive and terrible weapon with a mineral from their own land?”
“What would be their reaction today, if the disinformation, shadows and mirrors were swept aside and the full history was set out?” she asks. “Nor were the Congolese informed about the terrible health and safety hazards to which they were exposed; they were simply used as workers, as if they had no rights as equal human beings. This was a process for which the US, the UK and Belgium bear a heavy responsibility.”
This article first appeared in Consortium News on Aug. 6, 2016.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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Albert de Vleeschauwer, Belgian Minister of the Colonies during the Belgian Government in Exile.
You’ll never get rich digging a ditch ?
Digging a hole to make another hole ?
And a mountain of it , you son of a bitch.
Your in the Army now .
Not behind the plow .
Hup two three , come dig with me .
Sing it with me now .
The deadliest metal on earth is polonium, not uranium.
In a real sense plutonium isn’t ‘of the earth’ since it is not a naturally occurring element. Uranium is the heaviest element naturally occurring here. But still, uranium is only the ‘most dangerous’ because the infinitely more dangerous human animal has made it so.
Sorry d4l3d, misread your comment first time through. But the gist of mine remains. These elements are only dangerous in human manipulated forms. It is our numbers and our capacities to manipulate matter and energy that will most need our attention if we can survive what we have done thoughtlessly up to now.
“[Albert] Speer, the head of armaments production in Germany […] was revealing to Hitler [in June 1942] that yes, an atomic bomb was possible. But probably not in the short timetable that Hitler wanted to end the war, within three years. And it would take longer than that and more uranium than turned out to be necessary. And he also explained what [Werner] Heisenberg, the […] great German physicist, had explained to him about the possibility of what was called atmospheric ignition. And Speer reports Hitler was not at all thrilled by the idea that he would preside over the ending of life on earth.
[…]
[T]he British were scouring Germany for nuclear physicists and any evidence there had ever been a [nuclear weapons] program. By the end of, by actually the late summer of 1944 and early fall, [James] Chadwick, head of the British program, visited Los Alamos and told his former worker, colleague, Joseph Rotblat, a Polish immigrant, that the British had decided there was no German program. And that was true. There had not been since 1942. That’s the fall of ‘44.
[…]
in ’46 and ’47, firms like Boeing and Lockheed and others, which depended entirely, had depended on sales to the government, found they could not survive, really, in the post-war period simply on commercial projects. Ford and GM, who built most of the planes, went back to building cars. But Lockheed and Boeing found that the commercial aircraft airline industry didn’t provide them enough sales and purchases really to stay solvent. […] I would now say that the Cold War was to a very large extent, from beginning to end, a marketing campaign for subsidization of the aerospace industry.”
Source:
“Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (2/13),” The Real News Network (TRNN), Oct. 31, 2018
Re: “I would now say that the Cold War was to a very large extent, from beginning to end, a marketing campaign for subsidization of the aerospace industry.”
This was Ellsberg’s belief, informed by his reading of the 1995 book by Frank Kofsky, “Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation.” The U.S. Army manufactured the scare that prompted Congress to beef up the military, part of which was a large order of planes for the Air Force that salvaged the financially hemorrhaging post-war aerospace industry.
However, it can be argued that the WWII Soviet alliance with the West was but a temporary accommodation to defeat Hitler, and that the dueling economic systems — capitalism vs. communism — portended a post-war clash.
I am personally inclined to suspect that US-Soviet tensions would have nigh-inevitably emerged on some level even if both superpowers had ended up forging a more cooperative relationship in the latter stages and immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as in an alternative history scenario where the likes of Henry A. Wallace (Michael Kurilla, “The President’s Inbox Recap: Henry Wallace and the Origins of the Cold War,” Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Feb. 2, 2024) and Lavrentiy Beria (“History’s Forgotten People: Lavrentiy Beria,” from Sky History (UK) website) ended up successfully assuming long-term leadership roles in their respective societies.
I have reason to believe that this was always a very likely outcome largely because of the sorts of transnational but often US-based “oligarchical collectivist” forces documented by Kofsky in his book, alongside other observers such as George Orwell (“Emmanuel Goldstein” himself), Antony C. Sutton, Gabriel Kolko, Jonathan Kwitny, etc.
In a personal exchange with me at one point, Boeing whistleblower Timothy Kerr (who joined the late George D. Wynalda Jr. in a lawsuit exposing their production of faulty commercial and military aircraft even prior to their 1997 acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, and well before the controversies surrounding the 737 MAX and 787 Dreamliner planes – see Faye Bowers, “$10 Billion Suit Claims Boeing Produced ‘Defective’ Aircraft,” Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 29, 1997, and Ed Vulliamy, “Crash Highlights Boeing Assembly Line Problems,” The Observer (UK), Nov. 6, 1999) alleged that the company engaged in all manner of cloak-and-dagger, mafia-style intrigues in coordination with US intelligence actors, connecting them to, among other activities, the 2001 assassination of former federal prosecutor Tom Wales in the Seattle area – while it was unclear, Kerr may have been alluding to a federal investigation into Boeing’s “Sea Launch” project involving Wales (Bruce Keppel, “Russia: Boeing Denies U.S. Probing Venture,” RFE/RL, March 9, 1999), though the FBI has pursued different leads related to Wales’s murder (Steve Miletich and Mike Carter, “20 Years After Unsolved Killing of Federal Prosecutor Thomas Wales in Seattle, Details Emerge About the FBI’s Theory,” The Seattle Times, Oct. 10, 2021).
Regardless of the validity of Kerr’s contentions, Boeing demonstrably has been the beneficiary of other US economic espionage efforts, even when these occurred at the expense of other US private citizens:
“Insight Magazine reported in a series of articles in 1997 that President Clinton ordered the NSA and FBI to mount a massive surveillance operation at the 1993 Asian/Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) hosted in Seattle. One intelligence source for the story related that over 300 hotel rooms had been bugged for the event, which was designed to obtain information regarding oil and hydro-electric deals pending in Vietnam that were passed on to high level Democratic Party contributors competing for the contracts. But foreign companies were not the only losers: when Vietnam expressed interest in purchasing two used 737 freighter aircraft from an American businessman, the deal was scuttled after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arranged favorable financing for two new 737s from Boeing.”
Source:
Patrick S. Poole, “ECHELON: America’s Secret Global Surveillance Network,” 1999 / 2000
Wow, excellent, hard-hitting piece that connects dots, gives historical context, and relates to what is happening today. The West is still interfering in DR Congo’s internal affairs. Congo is reportedly one of the richest nations in the world in terms of natural resources, rare earths etc.
And, as noted in this article: the use of nuclear bombs on Japan was not necessary as Japan was already going to surrender.
(The US has sent Ohio class nuclear-armed submarines “close to Russia’s shores” and thus threatening Russia with nuclear first strike and this should be alarming. Scott Ritter and others have pointed this out recently)
The Heart of Darkness Belgian atrocities in Congo, then the race for uranium and western interference.
That reminds me: I recall around 20 years ago sitting at a research presentation on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba bv a Belgian scholar where not one mention or reference was given regarding US or western intelligence. I found that a glaring omission to any serous research into the subject. The US and western powers were at least indirectly involved, and it appears that they at least indirectly are responsible for his murder. Belgium even apologized for its role, in the early 2000s. More recent research has apparently uncovered deeper involvement of the CIA et al.