Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War IIIn the 1940s, the brightest minds of the United States and Nazi Germany raced to West Africa with a single mission: to secure the essential ingredient of the atomic bomb and to make sure nobody saw them doing it Albert Einstein told President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that the world's only supply of uniquely high quality uranium ore the key ingredient for bomb could be found in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo at the Shinkolobwe Mine.