Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  To help in identifying the next targets for Russia’s spies, Kurchatov listed for Pervukhin a number of laboratories in the United States where work on plutonium might be taking place. Berkeley’s Rad Lab was at the top of his list.

  * * *

  Fortunately for the Soviets, Kurchatov’s seed fell upon fertile soil. The FBI considered the San Francisco Bay area, and particularly Berkeley, a recruiting ground for subversives going back to the West Coast waterfront strike of 1934.50

  In November 1941, Fitin had established a secret residentura at the Soviets’ consulate in San Francisco, a beaux-arts mansion overlooking the Bay on Divisidero Street. The NKVD rezident was the forty-two-year-old vice consul, Gregori Kheifets. Before his posting in California, Kheifets had reportedly served as secretary to Lenin’s wife, later becoming a high-ranking official in the Moscow offices of the Comintern. The small, dark, and rather sinister-looking Russian had also served as an “illegal”—a spy without diplomatic cover—while a student in Italy and Germany. Returning to Moscow, Kheifets beat the odds and survived Stalin’s notorious “blood” purges.51 To Americans, Kheifets introduced himself as “Mr. Brown.”52 But to Fitin at Moscow Center, he was known as Kharon (Charon), after the boatman who ferried damned souls across the River Styx into Hell.53

  Joined by the consulate’s third secretary, Pyotr Ivanov, Kheifets set out almost immediately to recruit so-called talent spotters: sympathetic Americans, usually Communists, who agreed to identify prospective candidates for the Soviets’ espionage effort.54 One of Kharon’s early recruits was FAECT organizer George Eltenton, the Shell employee who had spoken for the union at Oppie’s house.55

  Eltenton was a British-born chemical engineer who had first visited Russia in summer 1931, with a group of fellow scientists, on a three-week tour. When he returned to England at the start of the depression, the only job the Cambridge-educated Eltenton could find was at the British Cotton Industry Research Association in grimy Manchester. Not surprisingly, George and his wife, Dorothea, eagerly accepted, in 1937, an invitation to Leningrad’s prestigious Institute of Chemical Physics from Soviet physicist Yuri Khariton, whom Eltenton had met on his Russian tour. In Leningrad, George worked with another famed physicist, Nicholai Semenov, while “Dolly” served as personal secretary to a visiting American geneticist at the nearby Vavilov Institute.56

  Despite the Stalinist purges already under way, the Eltentons became fervent believers in the Communist cause, as Dolly documented in a private journal. (Iconographic of her faith is Dolly’s description of the December 1937 “election” of people’s deputies: “The enthusiasm of the people was very genuine. To those of us there at the time the results were no surprise. There was not a candidate who received less than ninety per cent of the votes. In some cases almost one hundred per cent was recorded.”)57

  When foreigners’ work permits were revoked in spring 1938—more fallout from Stalin’s terror—the Eltentons showed little enthusiasm for returning to Manchester. Instead, they elected to move to California.

  In 1946, George Eltenton would tell the FBI that he and his wife first met Kheifets and Ivanov on Berkeley’s College Avenue one evening in November 1941, following a Cal football game, when they overheard the two diplomats speaking Russian. George said that he and Dolly ran into the two men again a few weeks later, at a cocktail party held in the home of a Berkeley professor, and shortly thereafter, during a benefit for Russian war relief held at the Chevaliers’ house.58

  The Eltentons invited Kheifets and Ivanov to their holiday party in 1941, as well as to subsequent social gatherings during the following year.59 It was on one such occasion, in late spring 1942, that Kheifets asked Eltenton for the names of prominent American scientists who might be favorably disposed toward the USSR, and thus candidates for honorary membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The NKVD had traditionally used such awards and prizes as a first step in the recruitment of prospective agents. (A week or two earlier, on May 8, 1942, Ernest Lawrence and Berkeley chemist Gilbert Lewis had been elected to honorary membership in the Soviet Academy. The following year, the two men and Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, would be guests of honor at the Soviet embassy in Washington; Russian chargé d’affaires Andrei Gromyko personally presented the men with the little red-bound book that certified membership in the academy.)60

  Eltenton told the FBI that he had raised Kheifets’s question with Robert Oppenheimer. Oppie’s suggested candidates included Vannevar Bush and the Compton brothers. Eltenton—who said he subsequently passed this information along to Kheifets—told the FBI that his contact with Mr. Brown had ended there.

  Late in 1942, however, when the tide of battle had begun to turn at Stalingrad, it was Ivanov rather than Kheifets who came to the Eltentons’ home. After dinner, Ivanov confided that he knew the work going on at the Radiation Laboratory was of military value and that it was connected with atomic energy. “Do you know any of the guys or any others connected with it?” Ivanov asked Eltenton.61

  Ivanov’s particular interest was with how well Eltenton knew Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and a third scientist at Berkeley. (Eltenton subsequently said that he thought the individual was Alvarez, but he could not be sure.) Eltenton informed Ivanov that Lawrence was a most unlikely candidate for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Regarding Oppenheimer, Eltenton proposed that a mutual friend—Chevalier—act as an intermediary and approach the physicist. But Eltenton said that Chevalier had come back almost immediately afterward with the news “that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.”62

  How, Eltenton had asked Ivanov, would the information be given to the Russians? The Soviet diplomat had assured him, Eltenton subsequently told bureau agents, that the transfer would be “by very safe methods” and that the information could even be back in the informant’s hands the same evening. Eltenton distinctly remembered Ivanov’s description of the process by which secrets would be passed: it “went ‘click, click, click.’”63

  * * *

  A friend of both Eltenton’s and Kheifets’s at this time was a thirty-three-year-old San Francisco socialite, Louise Bransten. Born Louise Rosenberg, the granddaughter of Gold Rush pioneers, she had inherited a fortune from her parents’ dried fruit importing business.64 Dubbed the “apricot heiress” by the local press, Bransten was also well-known in the city as an advocate of progressive causes. In 1929, Louise had married Richard Bransten, the scion of another prominent San Francisco family who went on to embrace communism.65 During 1933, the two had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union.

  Although Louise later divorced Bransten, she kept her former husband’s name, and the couple remained on good terms. When San Francisco dockworkers were blocked from organizing a protest meeting during the waterfront strike, the two used their own money to hire the city’s Scottish Rite Hall. Earlier, Louise and Richard had taken a course—“The Economics of Capitalism”—from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, then a young professor at St. Mary’s College in San Francisco.66

  By 1941, Louise was assistant to the director of San Francisco’s American-Russian Institute.67 Dolly Eltenton and Thomas Addis served on the institute’s board.68 Like Haakon Chevalier, Bransten volunteered her home for parties benefiting political and humanitarian causes like the Spanish Loyalists and Russian war relief.69

  Bransten’s association with Kheifets had also made her an early target of the FBI’s COMRAP investigation.70 Bureau agents planted two bugs in her elegant home at 2626 Green Street, just around the corner from the Soviet consulate. The microphones—installed in an archway outside the library and in a light fixture in her bedroom—recorded dinnertime conversations and Bransten’s romantic assignations with several individuals, including Kheifets, but yielded little of intelligence value.71

  It was probably at Bransten’s house that Kheifets first met Robert Oppenheimer, possibly at the benefit for veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that Oppie att
ended the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor.*72 Like Eltenton and Bransten, Chevalier was another social contact whom the Russian diplomat had been careful to cultivate.73 Frustrated about his stalemated career and stuck in an unhappy marriage, Chevalier had persuaded his department chairman to grant him a sabbatical for the coming academic year. Haakon decided to go to New York, where he hoped to get a literary job; he already had a contract with Dial Press to translate a novel by Salvador Dali.74 But Chevalier also entertained notions of a more glamorous and exciting role. “I have filed application for some kind of work in one of the War services,” he wrote to Jacques at Yale. “I am trying to wangle something through people who might remember me, but this is all very uncertain.”75 Bransten, also New York bound, was one of those helping Chevalier make connections on the East Coast.

  In early April 1943, a few weeks after he had bid farewell to Oppie, Haakon sent a job application, including a completed personnel security questionnaire, to the Washington headquarters of the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services.76 Chevalier’s application contained a letter of introduction written by Owen Lattimore, head of OWI’s Pacific operations, addressed to White House aide Lauchlin Currie.77

  * * *

  At the FBI’s San Francisco field office late in 1942, Robert King, the bureau’s “one-man commie squad,” was puzzled by Oppenheimer’s suddenly frenetic travel schedule. Since the conversation intercepted in Steve Nelson’s office that October, Oppie had become a subject of renewed interest to the bureau. Forbidden by Roosevelt’s attorney general from tapping Oppenheimer’s telephone, King and Special Agent-in-Charge Pieper were reduced to vicariously following the physicist around the country through the telephone company’s log of his collect calls home to Kitty.78 The only information gleaned thus far was that Oppenheimer seemed conscientious about keeping in touch.

  Early in 1943, Pieper sent two of his agents across the Bay to talk with Harold Fidler, the army’s area engineer in Berkeley. Fidler confirmed that there was indeed a secret military project going on at the Radiation Laboratory, and that Oppenheimer was involved, but he was unwilling or unable to say more.79 (Conspicuous in their raincoats and fedoras, the two agents sat on the porch of the Faculty Club until Fidler pointed out Oppenheimer walking by.)

  Frustrated at the army’s lack of cooperation, King next called Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, the head of counterintelligence at the Presidio. Pash, as it turns out, was also Lansdale’s handpicked man on the West Coast.

  An intense and pugnacious bantamweight, Pash for the past two years had headed G-2, military intelligence, for the Western Defense Command and was the Fourth Army’s foremost Soviet expert. Although born in San Francisco, he had fought the Bolsheviks in Russia’s civil war; his father was the senior bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in America. When the White armies were defeated, Boris returned to the United States with little job experience beyond coaching volleyball for a church youth camp in Sebastopol. For sixteen years, Pash headed the athletic department at Hollywood High School.80

  Called to active duty following Pearl Harbor, Pash was assigned to running a network of army undercover agents sent into Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to intercept saboteurs landed by Japanese submarines.81 Although he encountered neither submarines nor saboteurs, Pash realized he had found his calling. Embracing the role of spycatcher, he assembled a personal collection of wigs, voice-altering devices, and disguises that he always carried with him on his travels.82

  Pash abruptly told King that he had “no cognizance” of any military project across the Bay.83 Disgusted, King asked the agent he had assigned to shadow Oppenheimer to draft a report on the physicist. Pieper sent the eighteen-page report to Hoover on February 10, 1943, and also had a copy hand-delivered to Pash at the Presidio.

  The FBI director promptly forwarded Oppenheimer’s file and an accompanying report on FAECT to G-2 headquarters in Washington.84 Hoover warned the army that a major effort was under way by the radical union to recruit “‘progressive’ applicants” to spy upon an unknown secret project at the Rad Lab.85

  Hoover’s report arrived just as the army was setting up its own security and counterintelligence apparatus for the Manhattan Project. Early in February, Major General George Strong, the head of G-2, had appointed Captain Horace Calvert to run the project’s Intelligence Section.86 Calvert in turn picked an ex-FBI agent, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, to be G-2’s man in the Bay Area.

  Johnson moved into an office on the first floor of Berkeley’s New Classroom Building. To disguise its connection with the army’s war effort, a campus policeman was stationed at the door. The room used by Oppie’s grad students who were working on the project was just down the hall. Calvert had instructed Johnson to work closely with Pash and his shadow organization across the Bay. Johnson bought a supply of 3-by-5-inch cards from a stationery store on Telegraph Avenue and began keeping a file on Rad Lab employees who the army believed to be of questionable loyalty.

  Ironically, the sudden interest in Oppenheimer had set off a turf war between the army and the bureau. General Strong’s response to Hoover’s warning had been to ask the FBI to cease its surveillance of the physicist—who, as Strong pointed out, was now the army’s, not the bureau’s, responsibility.87 Believing that the bug in Steve Nelson’s office had shown Oppenheimer complicit in espionage, however, the FBI director was reluctant to abandon his quarry. Thus, while Hoover dutifully instructed Pieper to close the file on Oppenheimer, he simultaneously approved the agent’s plan for a new offensive aimed at uncovering Soviet spies in Berkeley. Titled “Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory,” the FBI’s latest file would become known at the bureau by its shorthand moniker, “CINRAD.”88

  * * *

  A scant two weeks later, on March 29, 1943, the bureau’s bug in Steve Nelson’s home yielded the first hard evidence of espionage against the Manhattan Project. William Branigan was the FBI agent whom King had assigned to the wiretap.

  Late that evening, Branigan monitored a conversation between Nelson’s wife, Margaret, and a man who identified himself only as “Joe.”89 Told that Steve would not return from a union meeting until early morning, Joe agreed to come to the house to wait, since he said he had urgent and important information to convey.

  When Nelson finally arrived, it was clear from his conversation with Joe that this was not their first encounter. The two had met a few days earlier with Bernadette Doyle, Nelson’s assistant at Communist Party headquarters.90 Steve apologized for not being able to speak more freely with Joe on that occasion, but “he would not discuss such matters even with the most trusted of Comrades.”

  Alone at the FBI listening post, Branigan alerted King, who dispatched Branigan’s partner, Mike Cassidy, to Nelson’s home in hopes of taking a photograph of Joe. Branigan frantically scribbled notes while he listened to the dialogue that took place in Nelson’s living room: “Steve said that he was looking for a Comrade who was absolutely trustworthy. Joe insisted that he was and that he was willing to cooperate with the Party because he believed in it and the fact that it was right.”

  In Branigan’s notes, Joe explained that the reason he needed to see Nelson on such short notice was because those working on the project would soon be relocated to a remote site, and he had been recently selected as one of those to go. The two discussed “the professor,” who Nelson complained was “very much worried now and we make him feel uncomfortable.”

  “You won’t hardly believe the change that has taken place,” Joe agreed.

  “To my sorrow, his wife is influencing him in the wrong direction,” Steve said.

  The discussion then shifted back to “the project.” “Do you happen to know about what kind of materials they are working on?” Steve asked his guest. Joe hesitated before replying that most of the things he knew were already a matter of common knowledge among physicists around the world. Much of that early work had already been published, he said.

  Branigan’s
notes recorded Nelson’s delicate effort to coax more information from Joe:

  STEVE: “Joe, I’d like to ask you, would it be possible for you to give this elementary thing that’s already been published, you know?”

  JOE: “Uh, huh.” Long pause.

  STEVE: “Could I get a copy of that?”

  JOE: “The one that’s published you mean?”

  STEVE: “Yeah. Is that possible?

  JOE: Long pause. “Now, wait just a second. Pauses. “It’s natural I’m a little bit scared, because…” (trails off)

  Joe worried that his Communist background—he had been a member of the party since 1938, he told Steve—would cause him to come under scrutiny by the project’s investigators. Steve said that he had already been told something about the project by the professor: “What the nature of it is—as much as that.” But his informant had been reluctant to discuss the subject, and Nelson had decided not to pressure him.

  Finally, Joe gave in. Lowering his voice, he dictated in whispers while Nelson—and Branigan—took notes. The FBI agent strained to hear but was only able to catch and write down snippets: “Separation method is preferably that of the magnetic spectrograph with electrical and magnetic focusing, or less preferably, that of the velocity selector.… sphere 5 centimeters in diameter with material … deuterium.… this design is tentative and is being experimented upon.”91

  Joe also told Steve that there was already a separation plant under construction in Tennessee that was expected to employ from 2,000 to 3,000 workers.

  Before he left, Joe and Steve discussed the logistics of future meetings. He had a sister in New York, Joe said, and her travels could be used as a cover for subsequent contacts, where he could pass additional information to Steve. Nelson advised Joe that comrades sent to Tennessee and other remote locations should work in teams of two and burn their party books as a precaution. As with Communists serving overseas in the army or navy, the names of those involved in the project would be kept in a secret list, which Steve said he would memorize and then destroy. In parting, Nelson again cautioned Joe not to put anything in writing.92 Cassidy arrived outside Nelson’s house in time only to catch a glimpse of Joe walking out the door.