by Gregg Herken
* * *
Following the alert sounded by Hoover, bureau agents had fanned out from FBI field offices that summer, looking for instances of Communists contacting scientists about a vital but unspecified secret project. Except for San Francisco, the dragnet yielded few suspects. FBI agents at the El Paso, Texas, office reported that efforts to “‘shake down’” scientists arriving at Los Alamos had been frustrated by the wartime housing shortage: Oppenheimer was quartering new arrivals in guest ranches dispersed throughout the area.13 A mail cover on letters going into and out of the lab was begun instead.
Agents in Santa Fe, shadowing a Russian-born man and wife who had recently moved to the city, described the couple as “a trifle Bohemian in their outlook” and reported that “their principle [sic] activity seemed to be drinking.”14 Other FBI agents tailed a Russian-born illustrator of children’s books traveling by train from New York all the way to his home in New Mexico. A search of his luggage turned up playing cards, an address book, and The Tall Book of Mother Goose.
In San Francisco, Pieper was becoming increasingly exasperated both with his assignment and with Pash. The FBI man wrote Hoover complaining that his agents would be able to do a better job if they knew what they were looking for. But the army still stubbornly refused to publicly acknowledge its involvement in the project at Berkeley, although it was hardly a secret on campus. Pieper was also distraught about security at the Rad Lab—where “rejected material” was simply thrown into garbage cans in a public area, he noted—and contemptuous of the tradecraft practiced by his allies in the battle, the G-2 agents that the bureau knew as “creeps.”15
In late July, Pieper informed Hoover of the latest idea hatched by his nemesis:
Pash has been negotiating for authority from Washington to obtain a boat for the purpose of Shanghaiing various Communists employed in the Laboratory and taking them all out to sea where they would be thoroughly questioned “after the Russian manner.” (Blank) stated that he realized any statements so obtained could not be used in prosecution but apparently Pash did not intend to have anyone available for prosecution after questioning.16
Pieper dissuaded Pash from carrying out this or his backup plan, which was to take Weinberg to a San Francisco hotel and interrogate him with the idea of “turning” the physicist into a double agent.17 Fearful that the army’s actions might have already tipped the spy suspects off to COMRAP’s wiretaps, Pieper advised his boss: “Pressure was brought to bear to discourage this particular activity.”18
* * *
Groves considered Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory a serious enough matter to bring it before the Top Policy Group at a meeting in Washington on August 17, 1943. Following a progress report on the bomb project, Groves summarized the status of the army’s investigation into what he called the “California trouble,” including the Nelson-Joe conversation and Nelson’s subsequent meetings with Ivanov and Zubilin.19
That same day, Groves had Lansdale hand-deliver a note to Secretary of War Stimson with an attached draft memorandum for the president. “It is essential that action be taken to remove the influence of FAECT from the Radiation Laboratory,” the memo informed Roosevelt.20 Groves urged FDR to order CIO president Philip Murray “in the strongest terms to issue directions to FAECT that all organizational activity regarding the Radiation Laboratory be stopped.” When Stimson passed Groves’s memo along to the president two weeks later, he appended his own handwritten warning: “Unless this can be at once stopped, I think the situation very alarming.”21
By late October, when no action had been taken against Berkeley’s FAECT, Stimson wrote a reminder to Roosevelt.22 The president had, in fact, already brought the matter up with Murray, who promised FDR that “this would end at once.”23 But it took the intervention of the regional director of the War Manpower Commission before the CIO leader finally issued the necessary orders.24 FBI agents were listening in when disbelieving officials of FAECT’s Local 25 were informed that their union was out of business for the duration.25
* * *
On August 23, 1943, less than a week after Groves’s briefing on Russian spying, Oppenheimer returned to Berkeley for what was ostensibly another recruiting drive. Following Lansdale’s visit to Los Alamos, Oppie had become curious about the activities of his former graduate students. Dropping by the New Classroom Building, Oppenheimer asked Lyall Johnson if the army had any objection to his talking to Lomanitz in Lawrence’s vacant office.
Following a testy exchange with Lomanitz—Oppenheimer urged Rossi to “get straight” with the security people, to which the latter retorted that he was being persecuted for his union organizing—the two continued their discussion on the street outside.26 When Oppie returned, Weinberg and Bohm were waiting. They, too, complained that Lomanitz was being “framed” for his politics and expressed fears that they might be tarred by the same brush.27 Oppenheimer reassured them they had nothing to fear so long as they stayed away from politics.28 When Lawrence briefly appeared, Oppie requested that he be a witness to this promise. Asked by Weinberg if this meant he would still go to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer denied that it had ever been his intention to send Joe to the desert lab.29
During dinner that night, Oppie told Robert Bacher—and army undercover agents eavesdropping nearby—that he “gave EOL hell” about the security mess at the Rad Lab.
Earlier, when stopping by Johnson’s office, Oppenheimer had casually mentioned that if the army was concerned about security, George Eltenton was someone who might also bear watching.30 Johnson had immediately telephoned Pash, who arranged a meeting with Oppenheimer for the following day. On the morning of August 26, Pash interrogated Oppenheimer while a technician in the adjoining teletype room recorded the conversation.31
When Oppie brought up the subject of Lomanitz, Pash interrupted to say that it was not Rossi but Eltenton and “other groups” that interested the army.32 Oppenheimer then surprised Pash with a lengthy and complicated story.
Several months earlier, Oppenheimer said, he had been contacted by “intermediaries” who were in touch with an unidentified official at the Soviet consulate. One of these individuals had talked about passing along information regarding the project at Berkeley. Oppenheimer told Pash his response had been that, while he had no objection to the president telling the Soviets about the bomb, he thought it inappropriate to do so by “having it moved out the back door.”
Oppie admitted to knowing of subsequent approaches—which “were always to other people, who were troubled by them, and sometimes came and discussed them with me.” Because he felt that those contacted had been picked by chance, he was reluctant to divulge names. However, two of the three men he knew to have been approached were now at Los Alamos, Oppie said, and the third was scheduled to be sent to Oak Ridge in the near future. All three had been approached independently, the first two within a week of one another, Oppenheimer claimed.
Under prodding by Pash, Oppenheimer identified Eltenton as one of the intermediaries. However, it was not Eltenton but another man who had approached his colleagues on behalf of Eltenton and the consular official, Oppie explained. Since this particular go-between was a friend of his as well as a member of the faculty at Berkeley—and, moreover, had acted in good faith, Oppie said—he saw no point in revealing his identity.
As diplomatically as he could, Pash pressed Oppenheimer for the names of the intermediary and his three contacts, but without success. Hinting that the unidentified professor had since left town, Oppenheimer told Pash that there was scant danger of any future such incidents.33
The interview lasted some forty-five minutes. That evening, while Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos by train, Pash had an army stenographer transcribe the recording. After hurriedly adding his own last-minute corrections by hand, Pash couriered the transcript to Groves and Pieper, asking that the FBI also put Eltenton under surveillance.34
This time the bureau had no trouble complying with the army’s request. Three wee
ks before, an anonymous letter, written in Russian, had been sent to Hoover by a disgruntled Soviet intelligence officer. The FBI determined that the missive had been mailed from a post office near the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The letter identified Zubilin, Kvasnikov, and Kheifets as three of Russia’s top spies in the United States.35 Shortly thereafter, King’s “one-man Commie squad” had ballooned to a force of 125 agents, or nearly half the complement working at the bureau’s San Francisco office.36
The extended dragnet was eager for evidence that the spy ring was still active in Berkeley. On the morning of September 3, an army agent followed Weinberg on foot to a French laundry on Telegraph Avenue and then to a candy shop. Weinberg’s next stop was the post office at Sather Gate, where he mailed a thick, business-sized envelope.37
Three days later, Pash received a photostat of the letter’s contents from CIC agent Jim Murray. In addition to a thirteen-page typewritten manuscript—“The Communist Party and the Professions”—the package contained a brief, unsigned note:
Dear A., Please do not communicate with me during this period, nor discuss with others my reasons for this request. I should like you to pass on this message to S. or B., however, without mentioning my name. Thanks a lot. We’ll take that walking trip when this is all over. Till then …
From previous surveillance, the army knew that the recipient, Al Flanigan, was a Berkeley graduate student and suspected party member who lived down the street from Chevalier and was a friend of Steve Nelson’s. Pash interpreted the “S.” and “B.” of the note to stand for Nelson and Bernadette Doyle. Suspecting that the note had originated with Oppenheimer, Pash asked de Silva to compare it with letters written on the typewriter in Oppie’s office at Los Alamos.38 Pash was also convinced that the note cast new light upon the purpose of Oppenheimer’s latest visit. As Murray wrote in his report to G-2: “The latent possibility that J. R. Oppenheimer tipped Weinberg off lies dormant.”39
Army wiretaps revealed that Oppie’s other grad students on the project continued to violate their promise to stay out of politics.40 Agents followed David Bohm to meetings of the Communist Party, which he had joined late the previous year.41 Until it was dissolved, Max Friedman had served as chairman of the Rad Lab’s FAECT Local, while Lomanitz was on its organizing committee and had been an active recruiter.42 (During one FAECT gathering, Lomanitz naively proposed organizing the campus police department. The idea was hooted down. The union had enough trouble “without inviting the FBI into the meetings,” grumbled one member, according to an agent’s report.)43
Having decided to keep Weinberg on campus in hopes that he might lead them to other spies, Groves and Lansdale resolved to rid the project of the other three.44 Friedman was summarily fired only a week after he had been hired by the university to teach physics to army recruits on campus.45 (“Promised jobs kept disappearing at the last moment,” Friedman wrote plaintively to Oppenheimer.)46 Bohm presented more of a problem, since Oppenheimer had recently asked him to come to Los Alamos. In a telephone call, Groves told Oppie that he could not approve the transfer since Bohm had relatives in Germany—an explanation that Oppenheimer found incredible but did not challenge.47 Weinberg and Bohm stayed on as teaching assistants in the physics department, where the two took over Oppenheimer’s course on quantum theory.48
Others at the Rad Lab who had been picked to go to Y-12—including Arthur Rosen, David Fox, and Bernard Peters—received similar notice that their assignments had been suddenly canceled, without explanation.49
Groves and Lansdale had already agreed that the simplest solution to the problem of what to do about Lomanitz was to draft him, since Rossi’s deferment was about to come up for renewal.50 On the same day that Lomanitz received a letter from his draft board, informing him that his deferment was canceled, he was ordered to report for a physical.51 Less than a week before, Lawrence had picked Rossi to supervise the operation of the Calutrons at Oak Ridge. At age twenty-one, he was the youngest group leader at the Rad Lab.52
More than six months of army and FBI surveillance had uncovered a wealth of intimate details about the four subjects under investigation, but no further incidents of espionage. (“There was a discussion of music, Russian Army songs, Paul Robeson, and bacteriology,” wrote the army agent monitoring Weinberg’s apartment of a typical evening that fall.)53
What the wiretaps and bugs did reveal was that Lomanitz and Friedman believed they had been fired from the Rad Lab for their left-wing views and union activity.54 It was their “firm conviction,” the two wrote Oppenheimer, “that union discrimination is the cause of all that has occurred.”55 Army agents overheard Lomanitz and Friedman drafting the letter to Oppie in Weinberg’s apartment, while Joe, in the background, offered advice.
That Weinberg’s friends remained ignorant of the real reason behind the army’s actions was evident even at the farewell party that Joe hosted for Rossi on the eve of his induction, where the conversation was in vino veritas:
Weinberg was heard to remark that people who live quietly never get their names in history books or in the newspapers.… Further discussion indicated that Weinberg was enjoying Lomanitz’ predicament. Lomanitz said “Both Joe and Dave have their necks out. Dave was my roommate and Joe has written three letters of recommendation for me.” Weinberg said he didn’t believe Max was in his present predicament because of his Union affiliations but because of something else.56
It was perhaps the closest that Weinberg would come to informing his friends that he was the source of all their troubles.57
The next morning, Joe drove Rossi to the induction center. The following week, Friedman, after borrowing a few road maps from Weinberg, left Berkeley at the wheel of his 1942 Pontiac on his way to Denver, Colorado, where he began the search for a new job.
* * *
Oppenheimer believed, mistakenly, that his confession to Pash had satisfied the G-2 man of his patriotism, or at least had drawn the bloodhounds off his trail. Pash, however, took Oppie’s smug evasions and refusal to name names as a provocation. He wired Groves that it was “essential that name of professor be made available in order that investigation can continue properly.”58 Pash asked Groves to find out exactly who had been contacted, and whether anyone else—“the professor, Eltenton, or some other party”—had approached Oppenheimer for information.59
Groves and Lansdale found an occasion to interrogate Oppenheimer further in early September, when the three shared a compartment on an eastbound streamliner. Between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Chicago, they discussed Oppenheimer’s interview with Pash as well as his meeting in Berkeley with Lomanitz, Weinberg, and Bohm. Oppie said he was confident that no further approaches had been made and no secrets lost. He offered to identify the professor who had been Eltenton’s intermediary if ordered to do so by Groves, but Groves demurred.60
Lansdale tried again to coax the story out of Oppenheimer when the physicist visited Washington later that month. Picking up Oppie at Union Station, Lansdale took him to Groves’s office, where another hidden microphone lay waiting. Oppenheimer was apologetic but adamant in refusing to name either the intermediary or those contacted.61 Stymied, Lansdale took up where he had been forced to leave off at Los Alamos—asking Oppenheimer to name those in the project he knew to be Communists.
Oppie said that he had only learned for certain that Weinberg and Lomanitz were party members during his last trip to Berkeley. When Lansdale mentioned the name Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer responded that he would not be surprised if Chevalier were a member of the party, since he was “quite a Red.”
After two hours, the only additional names that Oppenheimer had offered Lansdale were those of Charlotte Serber—whom Oppie had previously identified as probably a Communist during the train ride with Groves—and Hannah Peters, a friend of Jean Tatlock’s and the wife of Bernard Peters, a Rad Lab physicist who had served on FAECT’s executive committee. Both women were already on Lansdale’s list.
There the investigation la
nguished for almost two months. Lansdale told the FBI in late October that he believed Oppenheimer was telling the truth when he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party. He also thought Oppie sincere in his claim that he would not permit Communists to interfere with the bomb project.62 In private, however, Lansdale continued to pore over transcripts of Oppenheimer’s telephone calls between Berkeley and Los Alamos, hoping that the intermediary and his contacts might thereby be revealed.63
On his own, Pash began assembling a list of candidates for the unnamed professor.64 When one of the suspects on Pash’s list slipped his army shadow and boarded the Southern Pacific’s Daylight unescorted, Pash ordered the train stopped between San Francisco and Los Angeles, so that the agent—borrowing an army airplane—could catch up with his quarry. The outraged railroad lodged a formal protest with the Presidio.
On Thanksgiving Day 1943, Groves gave Pash a new assignment overseas, thereby removing the man who had been a persistent thorn in his side concerning Oppenheimer.65 Groves made Pash head of Project Alsos, a plan to gather scientific intelligence on the German bomb in countries occupied by the Nazis.66
* * *
On Saturday, November 13, 1943, current flowed to the Alpha racetrack for the first time. Although tests had hinted that some problems remained with the Calutrons, Lawrence and Groves were nonplussed when multiple failures forced the shutdown of the machine almost immediately.67 The magnetic field had been so unexpectedly strong that it pulled vacuum tanks from their fittings and pipes from the walls. No sooner were the vacuum tanks secured than magnet coils shorted out because of water in the oil used to cool them. Not a single source produced a beam; not a speck of U-235 arrived at the receivers.
Groves’s reaction was surprisingly stoic. Believing that part of the problem with the Calutrons lay in incessant design changes, he ordered Rad Lab engineers to abandon any improvements that could not be put into effect before the end of 1944.68 Lawrence was characteristically optimistic, predicting that the technical problems would be solved quickly and the Calutrons soon producing U-235 at maximum capacity.
