Robert Furman - He played a key role in the Manhattan project

[Swede]

Not sure if this is the right forum,but it is fascinating.

In September 1941, Robert Furman, a 26-year-old lieutenant in the US army construction division, was made executive officer in charge of day-to-day operations on the building of a new headquarters for the war department. Less than a year and a half later, the Pentagon was operational. Furman, who has died aged 93, had so impressed the man in charge, Colonel Leslie Groves, that when Groves, promoted to general, was given command of the Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb, he appointed Furman his intelligence officer, responsible for tracking Germany's progress on its own atomic weapon.

Furman would prove critical to the development of the bomb, but his role remained a close-kept secret, and the man who became known as "the mysterious major" did not speak about it for decades. "He was the guy who actually handled all this stuff. He was extremely young, and he had extraordinary power," said Thomas Powers, who interviewed Furman for his book Heisenberg's War (1993).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/23/obituary-robert-furman