Today my chemistry teacher told us that one chemist (Heisenburg) was a German scientist during WW2. The US feared he could be crucial to the Nazis making an A-Bomb, so, at one of his lectures (in Germany) an American CIA (OSS at the time?) agent was in attendance. His orders were to, if it was beleived Heisenburg knew too much, kill him.
Can anyone confirm this? If this is true, can anyone tell me more or tell me about similar stories of planned and/or executed CIA assassinations?
That agent was former major league baseball player Moe Berg. You can read about this in “The Catcher Was a Spy”.
I believe it’s also Heisenberg.
The CIA tried to assassinate Castro.
J.F.K…Duh!
Ever see Hitchcock’s ‘Torn Curtain’. Your OP reminded me of it because there was a similar premise, to wit:
How would someone who was trained as an assassin decide if the man ‘knew too much’? Such a thug would probably not understand enough about the subject to make that determination.
Far more like they would just have bombers come in and take out his laboratory. Much simpler and (likely) far more effective.
The guy’s bullshiting you, man!
Tell ‘em Daemon sent ya’.
Daemon, meet BobT. He knows a lot about baseball. Moe Berg was a baseball player cum spy. If BobT says that Moe Berg is the spy in question, and cites “The Catcher Was a Spy” (which I haven’t read, but I have no reason to doubt its veracity).
ESPN also did a rather fascinating “Sportscentury” episode on Berg. I only caught parts of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this incident was mentioned in the program.
For the record, “The Catcher Was a Spy” was written by Nicholas Dawidoff.
You can also read about the Berg-Heisenberg incident in (I believe this is so I haven’t read this book) “Heisenberg’s War” by Thomas Powers.
The first book is much shorter. If you read the catcher was a spy, you will learn that Moe Berg was a very brilliant man and he was also one extraordinarily screwed up individual.
The CIA is offing and subverting all kinds of dictators we don’t like around the world on an almost continuous basis. Practically all the banana republics with the Dictator-For-A-Day style of government were aided in at least one occasion by the CIA. I’m sure that there are others in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and maybe North Korea working to Serve American Interests.
It’s amazing the track record these nations have with the US, following putchs that overthrew the CIA-installed puppets.
Maybe the CIA should secretly depose Jean Chirac up in the Great White North. Then we’d finally know, in a generation or two, who would win that mythic US/Canada war. 
Jean Chirac is the President of France. Jean Chrétien is the Prime Minister of Canada.
Whoops, it’s Jacques Chirac. Sorry about that.
France. French-Canada. What’s the difference?
(sorry, I hadn’t had caffeine yet when I posted this morning)
Werner Heisenberg was Nils Bohr’s protege. Heisenberg was head of bomb development for the Nazi’s and Bohr played a role in testing for the US Manhattan Project. It is widely believed that Heisenberg was sent to Bohr by the Nazi’s to gather intelligence on the state of the project by the allies. Suspicion ruined their long friendship. This isnt an answer but points to likelihood.
I know BobT already answered this but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of reinforcement. Moe Berg is definately the man you want. The book that BobT suggested also is a very interesting read if you get the chance.
Salvador Allende of Chile.
Do you have a site for this? Assassinating the leader of a country, even a bananna republic, is a pretty big deal.
I think CIA assassinations are more the stuff of spy movies and X-Files episodes than reality.
The CIA doesn’t do the assassinations themselves so much as they support and arm the resistance and hope for the best. And more often than not, this scheme backfires and we end up with an even bigger monster than we started with. Witness Salvador Allende in Chille. Or Saddamm Hussein in Iraq.
I think whether the CIA’s overthrow of Allende ‘backfired’ or not depends on your point of view. If you’re a U.S. business owner trying hard to keep your company afloat, and feel that what happens to Chileans is the problem of Chile, not yours, then the CIA succeeded: you didn’t have to worry about the Chilean government taking away (nationalizing) your assets in Chile, nor deal with extortionate labor unions. And even better, the rest of Latin America got the message that the U.S. wasn’t going to let some pissant country push around its businesses. And since I think that’s what the CIA set out to do, it really didn’t backfire.
Maybe the nasty publicity that the CIA got from all the killing done by the CIA-backed regime was a sort of downside that they would have rather done without. But I believe the feeling was probably that Pinochet “is a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” and better dead than Red, after all.
For Hussein, I think it’s less likely the outcome is what the CIA was aiming for, but on the other hand, if you think about it, it’s pretty handy for both the President and the CIA to have an evil (but not actually too powerful) opponent to rally against. Again, I don’t think it was planned, but pretty useful, nonetheless.
And MSmith, yes the U.S. does overthrow foreign governments pretty regularly (not just ‘dictators’ – Allende for instance was elected overwhelmingly in a fair election by the Chileans). It’s not always a CIA staffer who pulls the trigger, usually he’s just delivering the suitcases full of cash (or cocaine in 80’s) to the locals who do the actual shooting (though many of those locals are US-trained). But on the other hand, the Marines still go in on occaison when some little country stops showing the U.S. the proper respect (e.g. Panama 1989).
Read any history of Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries – it’s hardly a secret.
I was under the impression that congress passed a law forbidding the US from seeking, authorizing, participating or otherwise encouraging the assisination of foreign heads-of-state (not that laws mean anything to the CIA) but that law had recently been rescinded. Seems like it would be a whole lot cheaper to send a lone operative into Iraq than to mount a full scale war, even if it only lasts 100 hours.
“Such a thug would probably not understand enough about the subject to make that determination.”
Since when does “OSS agent trained as assassin” automatically equal “thug unable to understand physics”?! It’s my understanding that spies/agents/whatever usually aren’t dumb thugs but are required to have some college education, if not a degree, in order to get the job. We’re not talking about Mob hitmen here! A hitman doesn’t have to operate undetected or unsuspected in a hostile foreign country, which inherently requires a certain amount of intelligence even if the actual assassination doesn’t.
Besides, considering that a war was on and all that, finding some physics student or graduate to be an agent, and then having one of our own atomic physicists update him on what he’d need to know to see if Heisenberg knew “too much,” doesn’t seem so outlandish or difficult.