In September of 1965, Joe Barr, a Treasury Department official with a long history in government, agreed to meet with a group of members of Congress from Western states. He knew what to expect. Earlier that year, he had met with the same group, and endured its ire over the Treasury’s reluctance to help the American gold industry. After the Second World War, world leaders had met at Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire, and, as part of an agreement on an international monetary system, had fixed the price of gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce. This had, predictably, depressed the U.S. mining industry, even as the demand for private gold shot up. The more easily obtained sources of gold had been depleted over the years, while harder-to-reach sources became more difficult to mine profitably, given the static price. Foreign competition—chiefly from Canada and South Africa, where mines were less depleted and labor costs were lower—was far more intense by 1960 than it had been after the war, when the price of gold was set. The United States was a distant third in gold production. Rather than attempt to compete, many mines simply shut down.

Politicians from Western states, where most gold was mined in the U.S., considered this an economic crisis, and by 1965 they had lost their patience. Nineteen Senators—including influential Democrats like Frank Church, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Warren Magnuson, and George McGovern—signed a blunt letter to President Lyndon Johnson accusing him of letting America’s gold industry die. Gold, they said, “is the only commodity held down to a price established 31 years ago and compelled to sell only to the imposer of this strangling restriction—the Federal government.” (Since the nineteen-thirties, Treasury was the only domestic entity that could legally buy investment gold.) Badly needed reform, they added, was being blocked by Treasury’s “negative attitude.” These words were just short of a threat that the senators would take action on gold with or without the Administration’s support. It was in this atmosphere, which Barr described as “more heated than usual,” that he trekked to Capitol Hill that September day. Barr later said that at the meeting he had “a stroke of inspiration.” Instead of maintaining the government’s hard line, he suggested that “possibly the Government could assist in this area by some sort of an R&D approach in the discovery of deposits and in the extraction processes.” It wasn’t the price increase the Western senators hoped for, but it pleased them nonetheless.

Barr and a colleague then went to see Donald Hornig, who was Johnson’s science and technology adviser and one of the most accomplished American scientists ever to occupy a position of political power. Hornig had worked on the Manhattan Project. He also worked on the space program and was an expert in ocean-desalination technology. Responding to Treasury’s inquiry about gold research, Hornig asked the Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines for a study, and word came back that, yes, “there is indeed an opportunity to secure significant quantities of additional gold production in the United States within the $35 an ounce price limitation.” The solution seemed simple enough: deploy state-of-the-art technology to detect gold and then extract it.

Thus began a strange, untold episode in modern American history. In the mid-to-late nineteen-sixties, as gold’s role in the international monetary system was about to implode, a handful of top Johnson Administration officials, a few sympathetic members of Congress, and hundreds of government-paid scientists set off on a nuclear-age alchemical quest. Barr gave it the code name Operation Goldfinger. The government would end up looking for gold in the oddest places: seawater, meteorites, plants, even deer antlers. In an era during which people wanted badly to believe in the peaceful use of subatomic energy, plans were drawn up to use nuclear explosives to extract gold from deep inside the Earth, and even to use particle accelerators to try to change base metals into gold.

Operation Goldfinger represented the logical culmination of a government obsession with not having enough gold. The post-war global economy was expanding much faster than the gold supply that propped it up. Dollars freely convertible to gold were the underpinning of the world’s monetary system, and President John F. Kennedy—and many others—feared that if holders of dollars and other U.S. securities were to cash in their paper for gold, there wouldn’t be enough gold to exchange, and a global crisis could ensue. In a private 1962 conversation with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kennedy framed the shortage of monetary gold starkly: “My God, this is the time . . . if everyone wants gold, we’re all going to be ruined because there is not enough gold to go around.”

Against such fears, which continued through the Johnson Administration, Goldfinger’s promise was irresistible. If the predictions made by Hornig and Treasury officials in early 1966 were to come true, the initial investment of a few million dollars would, in just a few years, look like the bargain of the century. A sunny Hornig wrote to President Johnson in February, 1966, “It appears by spending from $10 million to $20 million per year we stand a good chance of adding several billion dollars to our gold reserves at the present price. With luck it might be much more.” Treasury’s general counsel asserted that “the President’s scientific advisers are confident of the success of the program [and] estimate that new gold reserves valued at up to $10 billion could be expected within five years.” That amount—ten billion dollars—was more than five times the volume of gold then produced annually worldwide. Goldfinger, to its enthusiastic backers, wasn’t like discovering some new gold mine—it was like discovering a new planet.

While the Johnson Administration sparred with Congress over seemingly basic issues like passing a tax bill, there was nonetheless consensus between the executive branch and a handful of congressmen to disguise Operation Goldfinger as a broad-based metal-mining program. There were several motivations for secrecy: no actual funds, for example, had been appropriated for government gold-hunting. A push for secrecy also came from the Federal Reserve chairman William McChesney Martin, who was concerned that “we simply do not know how foreign central banks would interpret this move.” As Barr wrote to his boss, the Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler, “There is general agreement among those I talked to that this program should be wrapped up in a search for all minerals. They advised us (the Treasury and the Administration) to deny or refuse to comment on any leaks . . . and to stick with the cover story of a search for minerals in short supply in the United States.”

Operation Goldfinger took the form of hundreds of research projects designed to find gold in places likely and very unlikely. The Roberts Mountains in north central Nevada had long seemed like a promising source of gold, and samples from dozens of areas were taken to search for surface minerals (such as limestone) known to be associated with gold deposits. Other studies were long shots. For decades, various scientists had found traces of gold in coal, and so the U.S. Geological Survey sifted through coal in dozens of locations in Appalachia and the Midwest. The government even took samples from coal ash and “coal-washing waste products received from various industrial plants.” These did not yield gold bonanzas. In the nineteen-forties in Czechoslovakia, scientists reported finding gold in the herb Equisetum palustre, or marsh horsetail. When government scientists collected twenty-two samples from across the United States, however, they found gold concentrations well below one part per million, and concluded, “Equisetum would not be useful in prospecting for gold.”