558 • VAUXHALL CROSS
VAUXHALL CROSS. Sir David Speddingwas theSecret Intelli-
gence Service’s chief in 1994 when the headquarters moved from
Century Houseto its flashy new headquarters at 85 Albert Embank-
ment, Vauxhall Cross—known to those who work there as ‘‘Lego-
land’’—designed by the avant-garde architect Terry Farrell and built
at a cost of £230 million. The transfer was required because of the
discovery of concrete cancer in the grim old building, which anyway
was due for major renovation and was thought to be affecting the
health of some staff. The new site proved a considerable embarrass-
ment, however, because of the huge cost overruns incurred while
converting the palatial structure into one suitable for the service’s
1,500 headquarters staff and its ostentatious design with terraces,
marble-lined atriums, open-plan offices, and a even a gym and sports
hall on the ground floor. The move attracted so much adverse public-
ity that, almost inevitably, one evening on 21 September 2000 it be-
came the target of a terrorist attack. The RealIrish Republican
Armylaunched a rocket-propelled grenade from a small park in
Spring Gardens, a hundred yards away, into the screen protecting the
eighth-floor personnel department. The Russian-made RPG-7 had
been fired by a motorcycle pillion passenger, who was driven away
from the scene at speed, abandoning the weapon. The building suf-
fered minimal damage and there were no injuries among the hundred
or so staff still at work.
VEMORK.Before and during World War II, the Norwegian hydroelec-
tric plant at Vemork, some 75 miles west of Oslo, was a significant
source of deuterium oxide, known as ‘‘heavy water,’’ which was be-
lieved by German scientists to be a useful moderator when attempt-
ing to create a nuclear chain reaction. Early in 1942 theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS) station in Stockholm recruited a scientist
at the university there to report on news seeping out of Germany, and
that June a Professor Waller wrote from Sweden to a friend in Lon-
don reporting that the leading German physicist, Professor Werner
Heisenberg, was supervising experiments into atomic fission. A
month later, Nobel laureate Leo Szilard, who was then working in
the United States, heard from a friend in Switzerland that the Ger-
mans were building ‘‘a power machine’’ and might use the radioac-
tive fission product as a weapon. This was confirmed in August by a