I am the former historian of the International Spy museum. Museum. The Current Museum historian is a way out of town on a secret mission you will hear about in the future but im always delighted to come back and step in whenever necessary. You have come to a Wonderful Program in cooperation with the Norwegian Embassy. The story we are going to be hearing tonight is a world war ii famous and dramatic as you will hear raid. Id like to say a few words by way of introduction. He is minister counsel for the affairs and education at the Royal Norwegian Embassy and hes been here serving in washington for about ten months on this particular tour he served previously decade or so. Immediately preceding post at the Foreign Ministry where he spends a number of times but also in good diplomatic fashion as mozambique, poland, switzerland and morocco. They are good friends of the museum and weve done a number of fun and interesting events with them. We are delighted to work with them again tonight and have them here so a few words for our friends. [applause] good evening everyone. We are certainly delighted to work with the spy museum. Thank you for hosting this interesting program. I am quite happy that it doesnt take a bigger part in shaping the worlds history because that might have been devastating. So the embassy is pleased to be a partner. Just a few days ago they celebrated the 71st anniversary of the surrender of the occupied forces in the second world war. 71 years is a long time for the generations never to learn what happened and reflecting on the significance of what happened historians know that they should never ask hypothetical questions what would have happened. But in the case of the heavywater operation, it is a little bit tempting to speculate what would the societies have looked like if they had succeeded to produce a bomb. And the interior they were producing a key ingredient. Im sure that you will hear about that later. Two initial attempts to stop the production failed command 41 young commanders lost their lives as a result. The third attempt was successful and we look forward to hearing them talk about it. In particular there was a young man sitting right here. Hes 7yearsold and hes here because his grandfathers brother was the last to leave after they planted the bomb. I look forward to listening to the presentation. [applause] a few words before we get started. A New York Times bestselling and awardwinning author of quite a number of books all nonfiction that tend to focus on adventure and achievement. He studied economics and worked as a journalist in europe for a number of years and later as an editor at the Saint Martins press in new york. He was very successful and in the race to the making of the city a book about new york city selected for the barnes and noble. Then the unsuccessful effort to break the fourminute mile. The third book was mutiny about the 1905 battleship in the late days of russia and the fourth books you can buy back their alongside the fortress. The story was successful in that a book called nazi hunters was put out and one as well. There were 15 languages and several documentaries. They are among the fortunate few that gets to live in Seattle Washington and as you might imagine from somebody in seattle he is a skier and coffee drinker and as a resident as i once was he is therefore definitionally a good guy and we are glad to have him. [applause] i have to blow fo go over this. You are taller than i am. One second. Trying to find the notes. I will be saying that speech again. I want to thank the International Spy museum and the Norwegian Embassy for cosponsoring this event and thank you all for coming this evening. Now, last week i was driving in seattle listening to npr to this interview with Chris Anderson that runs ted talks. Over the course of the interview i was listening avidly add up to go on book tour and they said the longest you can maintain the audience attention is 18 minutes. You will be here for roughly two and a half hours. [laughter] so hold on tight. Ive written quite a few different kinds of books. Skyscrapers and fourminute miles into czarist russia, High School Kids building robots. People often ask me whats going on here. My wife says i think im generously i choose my books based on where i want to travel next. Norway is a lovely place to travel so that might be slightly accurate, that i choose my books on stories and this may be something of a cliche but its about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And this story of the sabotage definitely classifies within that. I would like to read a letter from the scientist chemist who basically orchestrated all these subconscious and devoted the rest of his life towards it. They worked with the british and he wrote a series of letters to his family who was still back in norway. He tried to explain why he was away because she was upset and i would like to read that tonight. We have to do everything for the land to make it free again. We dont just mean that which is beautiful and we also love but also Everything Else we love at home and all the other fathers and mothers and children. I also mean all the wonderful memories from that time that we ourselves were small and when we have children of our own. Our home villages in the mountains and forests, the lakes and ponds and rivers and streams and waterfalls. And even the norwegian songs and music and everything more thats what we have to struggle to get back thats why im here. You have water you can drink. It has hydrogen into a variant of an isotope that has a new trauma within the nucleus that makes it have here. Why thats important, the germans and americans were attempting to build heavy reactors and they needed a moderator where you have these neutrons and you need to slow them down to foster the decisi decision. It might slow them down but it absorbs stealing them away from the chain reaction. The heavywater doesnt absorb them. They slow down and move on and this fosters the chain reaction. The heavy water reactors, the idea and they do this by 1942 if you have a heavywater reactor it will breed plutonium and if you have plutonium, you have the basics for the atomic bomb. This is the atomic bomb explosion over nagasaki. When people talk about the german atomic bomb program, they talk about this gentle man on the far left. At the start of the war the americans in the germans were at the same place. They both knew the potential was viable so they moved forward on programs. Heisenberg was part of the program. He had won the nobel prize in his early 30s that he wasnt the key man of the german atomic bomb program. The gentle man on the far right was. He worked in the Army Ordnance departmenor defensedepartment ag his bosses they should focus on atomic physics. Its the future and they kept coming back to him and say stop with this atomic malarkey and then the splitting of the atom happened and they were elevated into the role as the head of the german uranium club. They start basic research but hes the one in charge. He very much wants an atomic bomb. One of the things he needs is heavywater and there was a single plant and all the world that produced it. There is a precipice on the edge of a place of about 3500 square miles which is this plateau and post often snow. They were doing that with electrolysis, so you have three or cheap hydroelectric power and it is the plant produced hydrogen fertilizer. The concern was the one who financed and built it and in 1940 the germans came calling. We want as much as you can give us. Then they said what do you need that for and they said we cant argue. Until the spring of 1940 when the germans occupied norway rather quickly they went and saisent his engineers and scientists first five older than tenfold as much as could be produced. Now the problem for his plans building out the heavy water plant and getting as much as possible, he needed what he said was 5ton for his reactor. He was very smart, they didnt have much money. He pulled himself up in the american wa way of the bootstras and in germany and england was though to make a very wellregarded with his childhood sweetheart. He asked at this point in time in his early 30s i can do one of two things and you need to help me decide to case i wanted to be a teacher. You will get to know over the course of the talk he was a vigorous man who couldnt sit still and was constantly working and sitting and so he turns out to make a lot of money and he did that by consulting with these industrial concerns and he decided that the water had recently been discovered. Wouldnt it be great if we produced something in great quantity and he doesnt and its a financial and utter disaster. Nobodys interested until the splitting of the atom and people realized what the work is. He said and was a pure science to see if it could be done, first experiment and Practical Application later. Im not sure how he felt about that. They used to joke that the most useful property would be to make skating rinks at a slightly higher temperature. The gestapo discovers what hes doing, he hears but they are coming for him and escapes by train, put his family at the childhood home, goes to london and quite quickly they said thansaidthank you to develop scc technology for us and what he said was i want to fight for my country. The reason i know this is i was able thanks to my son to assemble the binaries from the time he got on the train to the moment of his death what he was thinking and feeling and doing. He wanted to fight and he quickly found himself at the high command. Here he is in his uniform. He said hes at the nexus of the high command in the special Operations Executive as many were some of you may know its i think most famously the ministry of the ungentlemanly warfare. They are the ones who go behind enemy lines and perform operations. So that is the role and high on his list key partners up with colonel wilson, the head of the british in norway and they start making plans. So this is by april of 1942 and by april of 1942, the allies are advancing in their research and realizing of course this is possible, this can happen and also realized with the german science they will also be in the same place. They know now that heavywater is critical and it will be used potentially for plutonium. This is one of my favorite letters in the story because it is so bland that it really is the impetus for all that happens afterwards. It was written april 23, 1942 by the scientists of the committee, the british atomic program. And they write to churchill since experiments confirmed the elements 94 would be good for military purposes and since it is best prepared and systems involving the use of heavywater, the Committee Recommends that if possible an attempt should be made to stop the production. Summer of 1942 churchill and roosevelt sit down in hyde park and discuss two things. One of them o, the invasion of e mainland europe and number two, what to do about the atomic bomb program. It is here where the first discussions move forward that the americans will move over this is the beginning of the manhattan project. At this very meeting they discussed the heavywater and what was happening. Churchill writes in his memoirs in this sinister term and what is decided by the summer of 1942 is we need to do whatever we want and can to get it and the mission is on. If the british had a secret weapon and he had a secret weapon, he was born beside the dam that provided the water to the hydroelectric plant. This is a place where its a necessity if something is broken, you fix it. He boasted he was born with skis on his feet. Hes an expert skier and hunter and winter survivalist and engineer that worked for north as he drove. Now here he is god the best picture i could find. He looks very happy and i love this picture because if i identify one thing within its toughness. He was probably the toughest person that i wrote about in the story. He wanted to fight the germans came and occupied his village. So one day he goes to his mother in this im going to go on a ski trip. I will see you in three we. Instead of going north he goes southwest coast on his way and crashes, i dont know how that happened and he hurts his knee but he reaches the coast and joins a couple others and they have this ambition to hijack by gunboat and steam across the north sea to reach out and. Decent plan. The problem is his knee is worse and worse, hes injured terribly so he goes to a doctor and says i need surgery. Will you perform it today and they say we will. You will need he will need a weo recover. He says today, now, and no anesthetic. So he writes of this experience of pain holding the side of the hospital bed as the worst that he experienced but he had surgery and not 24 hours later he was on the steamer command of the ship with another couple of other gentlemen. They steamed across and reach scotland and hes thinking this whole time im going to be returning over the course of three or six months as a trained soldier and then i will be able to fight. He hears that there is a young man from the rochon area who is in town. So he sends him directly to london, brings him into his office and says you are leaving in a week. You will be my spy on the ground and provide information to me on the plant and of course he says yes. He gets one week of training mixed with wireless radio training and then hes cruising across the nort north sea and or norway there is a hole in the bottom of the plane but the thing is he is afraid of heights. [laughter] and as tough as he is, i love history because there is some books written on this and there he is in the plan and he makes it through. The reports are the british keep dispatch reports of the dropped operations and of basically having to shove him through the whole to get him down but he jumps down and lands on his bum knee, skis home. Hello mother, back from my ski vacation and he begins to spy and lift this double life. I cant say this with 100 accuracy but he was a spy on the ground for over three years, probably one of the longest standing and he provided an absolute wealth of information. He provided a guard rotations and production quotas and what walks were on the door and where the stairwells were, everything you would need to know. In fact they would joke they had so much information they could build it themselves in britain. Thats when the people that helped him produced. Thats what to do about it, how do we perform with churchill and roosevelt wants us to do. It now the allies want to go that fast course and just destroy it. He says here is this plan and he says no for two reasons. One, theres a lot of civilians that live around that area. Theres over 5,000 People Living there and an any operation will kill a number of civilians. And number two, this plant is tens of thousands of pounds of concrete, steel and the heavywater facilities in the basement. He said you could bomb that thing day and night but youre not going to touch the heavywater of episodes they back off the plan and he says but i think we should do is send in some who know the country and we will handle it. But the british didnt trust the norwegians to do it properly. They just didnt have the experience at that point to perform such an operation. So they decide something else. They decide to send two teams of engineers to go into this area landed by glider plane. They crossed the north sea and would release them over the drop site, float down and planned in this welcome countryside. Hes conforming to them we should talk about this. Its a hard place to land and hard place to be. I will give you an idea how little the british knew of this area. This operation was scheduled to have beehappen in likely novembf 1942. There is a series of legitimate correspondence talking about how youre going to provide we are going to provide engineers with bicycles. [laughter] the idea was there for the bicycles on the airplane that would take them out and they would like down to the plant in late november, which is probably a pretty bad idea given its likely snowbound. Now this operation was called operation freshman because gliders had never been used in the combat operations before, operation freshman. He did manage to have a team led by the top of the fourman Norwegian Team who pitched the fight and took whatever vessel around the world to reach britain to be trained and could be part of the Norwegian Independent Company which was a group of norwegians they trained and basically then spy training. The idea was this operation would land october 19, 1942 they landed in the area. They have so much equipment to go the number of miles they needed to go they would ski a distance of six or 7 miles, dropped her bags, go back and pick up the second half and ski back again. Over the course of roughly ten days to reach the landing site, they were on the ground preparing it, setting up what was the rebecca beacon which was this long story short a device for the planes to be able to spot the landing site. Now, i dont want to forget the royal engineers because these were very brave young men who were told very little of what they were getting into. They were told to simply that this was an important operation. They were not told they were going to norway but that it was important enough to decide the fates of the war. They were asked who wants to participate in every ma and evee company stepped forward. In november, 1942, operation freshman begins and this is the glider that you see there. The glider pilots nicknamed them the wooden coffin. Being inside of it was as they described like being on top of a docking bronco. They had a corrugated steel for. They have harnesses but they did very little and they were on a mission in the furthest that any had been towed into the idea again was to land and then commence the operation. It didnt go as planned. The Radio Operator sends a transmission early that morning saying all the weather is clear. By that evening whe the evenings finally arrived in the dark cloud cover lowered and picked up into the cold had deepened and is a different place. What we do know is that the first glider snapped and crash crashed. The second glider we are not sure what happened. But we do know that they separated for the other into the hillside. They wanted to see where the glider had landed and it crash crashed. Those that were not kille put on impacts were captured by the germans. Some of them were tortured, interrogated and then sadly killed. Besides the loss of life of the 41