U.S. Reporter Gets A-Bomb Scoop -- 60 Years Late

SAN FELICE CIRCEO, Italy, Aug. 7, 2005 — -- Sixty years ago, war correspondent George Weller had the scoop of a lifetime.

The dateline was Nagasaki, Japan, just after the atomic bomb fell there on Aug. 9, 1945. But it was a story Weller never got to report in his lifetime.

"Nothing was ever published," said his son, Anthony Weller, who must have heard the story from his father a thousand times, and has finally made it public.

Impersonating an Officer

The year was 1945, Japan had just surrendered on the USS Missouri, and George Weller was there. But Gen. Douglas MacArthur had some disappointing news. He told the reporters that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targets of two atomic bombs dropped by the United States at the end of the war, were off limits.

"MacArthur's logic," Anthony Weller said, "was that, 'Oh, it's not safe for anybody to see southern Japan.' And my father was absolutely furious at this."

So Weller signed up for a trip organized by the military to an abandoned kamikaze base, one of the few places MacArthur would allow reporters to go. Weller knew Nagasaki was just a few miles away, so he snuck off.

When he got there, Nagasaki was a city in ruins. Weller immediately took off the insignia that identified him as a war correspondent.

"He presented himself to the Japanese general, and said that he was Col. Weller, and he'd been ordered to come here and collect all the information possible about the results of the atom bomb," Anthony Weller said. "At that moment, the general thought for a second and then bowed to him."

Censored

George Weller was in. But his dispatches, written as telegrams, never made it past MacArthur's censors.

Anthony Weller read from one of the telegrams: "Chicago News, New York, from Weller, Nagasaki, publish any time, new cases atomic bomb poisoning, with approximate 50 percent death rate."

Weller had a front-row seat to history, the first independent account of an atom bomb's effects. He was in Nagasaki for three weeks. But the "The Chicago News" never received a word.

"I think it was probably the greatest professional disappointment of his career," his son said.

Lost and Found

What's worse, Weller lost his carbon copies and film. He'd hidden them in case the military tried to confiscate them, always intending to write a book. But the only record of his trip was gone.

When Weller died two years ago, his son Anthony sorted through mountains of old papers at his father's house in Italy. The carbons were at the bottom of a box, along with two rolls of film.

They are crumpled with age and neglect, "but the whole horrible story is still here, quite evident," Anthony Weller said.

All of George Weller's Nagasaki stories finally were published this year by a newspaper in Japan. It was still a scoop -- but 60 years late.

ABC News' David Wright originally reported this story for "World News Tonight" on July 31, 2005.