Your welcome, everybody to the International Spy museum. I am mark staudt, former historian of the International Spy museum. The Current Museum historian dr. Vince houghton is away at it down on a secret mission, which perhaps youll hear about in the future. But im always delighted to come back to my old haunts and step in whenever necessary. You have time tonight to what i think is a Wonderful Program that we are putting on in cooperation with the Norwegian Embassy because this is the story we are hearing tonight is a better world for us to come is very important and famous and dramatic world were to rate into norway convicted primarily by norwegians. And on this thing to partner up with the Norwegian Embassy. Id like to say a few words by way of introduction to our friends here from the norwegian in this these specifically. Jonage oyslebo is Cultural Affairs and education at the royal Norwegian Embassy. He has been here in washington for about 10 months on this particular tour. He served here previously a decade or so ago i believe. Hes immediately preceding to her was in oslo at the Foreign Ministry for hes been a number of times, but is also serving good diplomatic fashion in countries as varied as mozambique, poland, switzerland and morocco. The entire Norwegian Embassy are good friends of the International Spy museum. Weve done a number of fun and interesting event over the years. We are delighted to work again tonight and have them here. Perhaps a few words from our new ran. [applause] at evening, everyone. We are certainly divided to work with the spy museum. Thank you for hosting this interesting program. We are going to hear about an event that is certainly part of the history of my own country and i am quite happy that it does not take a bigger part in shaping the worlds history. Because that might have been devastating. To the embassy is pleased to be a partner. Just a few days ago, norways celebrated the 71st anniversary of the surrender of the Occupying Forces that the second world war. 71 years is a long time. It is long enough for people to forget. It is long enough for new generations never to learn what happened and not to speak of reflecting on the significance of what happened. Historians know that they should not her ask hypothetical questions. What wouldve happened if they were to focus on fact index blamed and explain what led to an outcome. In the case of the heavywater operation in norway, it is a little bit tempting to speculate what would our society is hamlet like if they had succeeded in their ambitions to produce an atomic bomb. In the interior in norway, the germans were produced in a key ingredient to such a bomb and some of the production is here in the room. Im sure youll hear about that later. Two initial attempts to stop the production failed and 41 young commanders lost their lives as a result. The third attempt, however, was successful. We all look forward to hearing neal bascomb talk about it. I know there is a young man sitting right here who is seven years old. He is here because his grandmothers brother was the last of the commanders to these the plant after they planted the bomb. He was one of the commanders and he is no longer alive they can come of it as part their family history. So thank you and i look forward to listening to the ambassadors presentation. [applause] so, a few words before we get started. Neil is a New York Times bestselling and awardwinning author of quite a number of books, all nonfiction, which tend to focus on Inspiring Stories of it in church or achievement. Neil studied economics in English Literature at Miami University in ohio and works of nature and the list in europe for a number of years and later as an editor at the Saint Martins press in new york. He now makes his living writing books, which makes him a rare individual. He has been very successful in this endeavor. His first book was higher, and historic race to the sky in the making of the city come a book about new york city selected for the barnes noble discover great new writers award and was featured on a History Channel documentary. He then read a book called the perfect mile about Roger Bannister and the ultimately successful effort to break the mile. His third book was red mutiny about the 1905 mutiny on the battleship in the late days of the czarist russia. This fourth book, which i believe you can buy back their alongside the winter fortress was hunting i can about the mission to find Adolf Eichmann and bring him to israel. But in modern terms a story about a rendition. That is what it was. This book was so successful that a young adult edition was also put out and won a number of words as well. You assert has been translated into 15 languages, several documentaries and optioned for film and television projects. Neil is among the fortunate few who not only is able to make his living as a writer, but also gets to live in ghetto, washington. As you might imagine, he is an avid hiker comes here and coffee drinker and as a seattle resident, he is therefore definitionally guy we are glad to have him. Neal bascomb. [applause] i have to lower this. You are taller than i am. One second. Just trying to find my notes. [laughter] i will be singing that beach again. I want to thank the International Spy museum and the Norwegian Embassy for cosponsoring this event. Thank you all for coming this evening. Now, last week was driving in seattle no soliciting to npr and i was listening to this interview of Chris Andersen who runs a tad talks. Over the course of the interview, i was the same avidly because i was about to go on up to her. Chris said that the longest you can possibly maintain an audiences attention is eight t. Minute 18 minutes. You guys will be here for roughly two and a half hours. [laughter] so hold tight. As mark introduced, ive written quite a few different kinds of books. Skyscrapers, informative miles, czarist russia, High School Kids building robots. People often ask me, what is going on here . What is that thing . Well the desperate kind of hoax. My wife says i think im generous late that i choose my books based on where i want to travel mac. Norway is a lovely place to travel, so that may be slightly accurate. But i choose my books. I focus on stories and this may be somewhat of a cliche, but it is the kind of stories that grab me. Stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In the story of the atomic sabotage by the regions definitely classifies in that. This is the story about atomic sabotage, physics, heavywater. It has some heavy stuff and it did either one of the site and i dont want you to lose sight about what is important in this story. I would like to read a letter that a scientist from a norwegian scientist, chemist who basically orchestrated all of these sabotages and devoted the rest of his life towards it. He was in london and escape the army, went to london, worked with the british and he wrote a series of letters to his family who was still back in norway. Many of them to his young daughter. His son was too young to read. But one of these written in 1943, he tried to explain why he was away because she was staring at that and i would like to read it here tonight. We have to do everything for her land to make it free again. When we say our fatherland, we dont just mean the land which is beautiful and we also loved, but also Everything Else was out at home. Mother, but the boy and you and all the other fathers and mothers and children. I also mean all the wonderful memories from the time we are those first mall and from later when we have children of her around. I home villages but the hills and mountains and forests. The lakes and ponds and rivers and streams and waterfalls. The smell of new head of murder, a purchase in spring at the cd in the big for us and even the biting and they are cold. Everything. The region songs and music and much, much more. That is our fatherland. That is what we have to struggle to get back. That is why in here. Now lets turn to atomic physics. You guys are all very excited i can be. I think its important to describe why it is important. I will do this in a very basic way because thats how my understanding of it is. You have regular h2o. You have water you can drink. But as hydrogen. Hydrogen has a single event on a single proton. Heavywater, e2 zero, deuterium. It is a variant or an isotope of hydrogen. It actually has neutrons within the new list, makes it heavier. You can see it here. Why that is important is in the course of the work, the germans and the americans were attempting to build heavywater react to us, of sustaining Nuclear Reactors and they needed a moderator, a heavywater or graphite, where you have these neutrons spinning around in this react to any need to slow them down to foster a decision. The thing that h2o does if you have these neutrons when you around, it might slow them down, but it absorbs those neutrons come stealing them away from a potential chain reaction. Heavywater doesnt absorb them. They bombard. They slow and the neutrons move on. It is a chain reaction. The heavy water reactors committee idea and the germans do this in the americans and hispanics and 42. If you have a heavy water reactor it will grade plutonium. If you have plutonium, you have the basics for an atomic arms. This is the atomic bomb explosion over nokias sake. The plutonium bomb. But many people talk about the german atomic bomb program, they talk about this gentleman on the far left. At the start of the war, the americans and germans were basically at the same place. They booed for new after the first but had first but at the ad and the potential for an atomic power or weapons was very viable. So they both move forward on programs. Heisenberg was part of the program. He was a genius. He won the nobel prize in his early 30s. But he wasnt the key man at the chairman atomic bomb program. The gentleman on your far right was. Dr. Kurt heebner who worked in the Army Ordnance department and for years to commit 30s he was telling his bosses we should focus on atomic physics. If the future. His bosses kept coming back and saying stop with this quote, unquote atomic malarkey. And so, he didnt move forward. And then the splitting of the atom and he was elevated into the role as the head of the german uranium club. He starts basic research, but the mayor is the one in charge. He is part of the not the party. He very much wants an atomic bomb. She was the head of the British Press that we and norway and they start hashing the land to go. This is by about april 1942. By april of 1942 company allies are advancing in their Atomic Research. They are realizing of course this is possible, this is happening and theyll soon realize that the german diane and that they will also be in the same place did they know now that heavy water is critical they also know it will be potentially for the tony on. This is one of my favorite letters of the story because it is so bland, but it really is the impetus for all that happens afterward. It was written april 23rd in the 1940 by the scientists of the committee, the british atomic program. And they write to churchill. Since it tournaments have confirmed the element 94, battalion, would be good for military purposes and since the element is best prepared in the use of heavywater, the Committee Recommends that attend showed if possible be made to stop productions. Summer 1942, churchill and roosevelt in a rather cheery here. Sit down in hyde park and discuss two things. One come in the invasion mainland, europe and what to do about the atomic bomb program. It is here where the first discussions move forward, that the americans will take over and the british will rise. But this is the beginning of the manhunt project. Now at this very meeting, they discussed the heavywater and they discuss what was happening. Churchill writes in his memoirs of this theory, sinister turn named heavywater. What is decided by the summer of 1942 by churchill is we need to hit it. We need to do whatever we can and division is on. This is a curious picture i could find, he looks very happy. And i love this picture because i identified one thing with minor scheduling, its toughness. Its looking very different from the face you see here but he was probably the toughest person ive read about in the course of researching this story. He wants to fight when the germans came to occupy the village. So one day, he goes to his mother and says im going to go on a skiing trip up in the mountains. Im having my rifle, im on my own, im going to hunt reindeer and ill see you in three weeks. Instead of going north, einar goessouthwest to the coast on his way , he crashes while skiing and how that happens, he didnt record it. He hurts his knee badly. But he reaches the coast, he joined together with a couple other guys and they have this ambition to hijack a steamer by gunboat and steamer across the north sea to reach scotland. A decent plan. The problem is, einars knee is worse and worse and hes injured terribly so he goes to the doctor, he goes to hospital and says i need surgery on his knee. Will you perform it today . And they say we will. You will need a week or two to recover and teach you the surgery andeinar says today, now, no anesthetic. So he writes of this experience of the pain, holding thesides of the hospital bed, worst pain he experienced but he had the surgery, not 24 hours later he was on that steamer in command of the ship. With a couple othergentlemen , they reachscotland. And einer is thinking this whole time and going to be trained to fight over the course of three months or six months and ill become a trained soldier and i will be able to fight. Transit heres theres this young man in the rubicon area which is where the remote is located whos in town. And so tron set sends the man to get einer to train directly to london, brings einer directly into his office and says you are leaving in a week. Youre going to be my spy on the ground. Youre going to provide information to me on the path and einer of course says yes, security man. He gets one week of training, one week of parachute training mixed with wireless radio training. And then einer is on a halifax bomber cruising across the north sea and then over norway. The hole in the bottom of the plane hes going to jump through and the trouble is that einar is afraid of heights. And tough as he is, i love history because theres some books written on this and every book written on it, their strife in einer in the plane and he hurls himself through that hole. The reports are that the british keep everything, the british keep dispatch reports of drop operations. And the dispatcher writes of basically having to shove einer through the hole. To get him down. But einerjumps down , lands on that home the, skis home , hello mother. After my skiing vacation and he begins to spy on vermont. He begins to live this double life. And i cant say this with 100 percent accuracy but einer was a spy on the ground for the sop for over three years, what probably one of the longest standing. And he provided an absolute wealth of information. He provided guard rotations, provided production quotas, he provided what lots were on the door, where the stairwells were, everything you would be need to know. They would joke that they had so much information on they could build it themselves in britain. Thats what einer and the people who helped himproduced. But what to do about it . What operation . How do we destroy their marked . How do we perform what churchill and roosevelt want us to do . The allies, particularly them and the americans made this american thing. They wanted to go the fast course, they wanted to bomb it. Just destroy it. From the air. When tron says heres this plan and he says no. He saysno for two reasons. One , there are a lot of civilians that live around that area. North heathrow town ruth con, theres over 105 People Living there, any bombing operation will kill civilians and two, this plant is tens of thousands of pounds of concrete stone steel and heavy water facilities are in the basin. He said you could bomb that they day and night and youre not going to touch that water. So the allies back off. And tron says well, what i think we should do is send in a small team and we will handle it. And no offense, but the british did not trust the norwegians to do it properly. They didnt have the experience at that point they thought for such an operation. So they decide something else. They decide to send to teams of British Royal engineers, staffers, parish users to go into this area by glider plane. Okay . Halifax would go to glider planes across the north sea, they would release them over the drop site, they would float down and land in this welcome countryside of copies of. Now, transit is informing them that we should talk about this and this is the hard placeland and a hard place to be. Ill give you an idea of how little the british knew of this area. This operation was scheduled to happen in likely november 1,942. And theres a series of correspondence, legitimate correspondence talking about how we are going to provide the royal engineers with bicycles. The idea was, there would be bicycles on the wider planes, they would take them out and they would bite down to the plant in late november. Which is probably a pretty bad idea given that was likely snowbound. Now, this operation was called operation freshman. It was called operation freshman because gliders had never been used by the alleys and combat operations. Operation freshman. Tronstad did manage to have a fourman team led by houston up here at the top, a fourman norwegian team. These were young norwegians much like general and who were itching to fight, to whatever fishing vessel, some went around the world to reach written to be trained. They were chosen to be part of the Norwegian Independent Company which was a s oe run group of norwegians