Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  From San Francisco, Kheifets continued to send messages to Moscow via diplomatic pouch and encrypted cables.120 Most of Kharon’s coded telegrams reflected the mundane concerns of a regional consulate; he reported on fleet movements as well as efforts to locate Soviet sailors who had jumped ship and asked for political asylum.*121 But Kharon also passed along secrets received, via a sub-rezidentura at the consulate in Los Angeles (Caen), from agents planted in southern California’s wartime aviation industries.122

  Kheifets’s sources in the Bay Area included old-time party operatives likes “Pops” Folkoff (Uncle), as well as several new, younger converts.123 Among the latter was Louise Bransten—code-named Map—“the Bernstein woman” whom Steve Nelson had bragged to Zubilin about bringing into the fold, and journalist Anna Louise Strong, code-named Lyre.124 Kheifets was also seeking Fitin’s permission to recruit a “talkative” new agent: James Walter Miller (Vague), a naturalized citizen of Russian birth who worked as a clerk and translator in the Office of Postal Censorship in San Francisco. If Moscow did not approve his plan to “sign on Vague,” Kheifets cabled, he intended to make use of Miller in any case: “Uncle will arrange the details with the Fellow Countrymen [CPUSA members]. According to this plan Vague will pass his information to Map. Under a plan of this kind Vague will have no inkling that the information is coming to us.”125

  In most cases, ideology rather than monetary reward was the spur to cooperation. The NKVD depended on the romanticism of American Communists. (Lyre’s Soviet control identified himself to her with the recognition phrase, “Greetings from Charlotte Corday.”)126

  By early 1944, Bransten/Map was in New York, on what the FBI believed to be an espionage mission, in the company of another would-be spy: Haakon Chevalier.

  * * *

  Just five days after Oppenheimer had identified Chevalier as the mysterious go-between in the meeting with Groves, Hoover’s agents had begun shadowing the French literature professor through the streets of the city.127 Chevalier was staying at a nondescript hotel on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from the apartment where Bransten had taken up temporary residence. Bureau agents obtained access to Chevalier’s diary from a cooperative chambermaid. Additionally, an FBI mail cover tracked Chevalier’s frustrations in his search for a position with Washington’s intelligence services. The job at OWI or OSS was “still hanging fire, so to speak, for reasons that you know,” Chevalier wrote Oppenheimer in early December 1943.128

  Despite Oppie’s telling Groves that he had given Chevalier his “comeuppance” for trying to recruit Frank, Oppenheimer’s return letters seemed solicitous of his friend’s welfare—while simultaneously warning Chevalier not to reveal too much in his reply: “There are some things doubtless that you would not want to write to us here for no certain privacy is assured the mail, but why are you in New York and how long since, and to what end,” Oppie inquired.129

  A few days before Christmas 1943, the FBI followed Chevalier to a rendezvous with Bransten at her apartment. “I would like to see you—it is about the same thing—Earl,” a bureau agent overheard Chevalier tell Bransten from the call box in the lobby.130 Previously, agents had tailed Bransten to meetings with Earl Browder at the Communist leader’s house in the city.131

  On New Year’s day 1944 the FBI intercepted a telephone call between Bransten and another friend in New York. Agents heard Bransten say that she had just received encouraging news from someone who had been trying to find her a job. It “was the kind of job she would like,” Bransten said, adding that “every time she thought of it, she got excited, and it made her feel dangerous.”132

  7

  BREAK, BLOW, BURN

  BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO by the spring to host a benefit for Russian war relief, Louise Bransten introduced Gregori Kheifets to another prospective new recruit: Martin Kamen.1

  For the past year, Kamen had been commuting between Berkeley and Y-12. At both places, the voluble chemist had a reputation as a ready and reliable source of information on what was happening in the project. Kamen had already been reprimanded once by Cooksey for indiscreet comments made at Berkeley’s Faculty Club.2

  At the party, Kheifets asked for Kamen’s help in obtaining radiophosphorous treatments for a member of the Soviets’ Portland consulate who was suffering from leukemia. Kamen passed the request along to John Lawrence and did not hear from Kheifets again until late June, when the diplomat called to invite him to a farewell dinner.3 The meal was to thank Kamen for his help and to introduce him to Kheifets’s successor at the consulate, Gregori Kasparov.4 CIC agents monitoring the telephone call heard Kamen agree to meet the Russians two nights hence at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto in San Francisco.

  On July 1, the morning of the meeting, an army agent in the guise of an electrician repairing a light in Kamen’s office saw the chemist pick up a scientific equipment catalog and a handful of unclassified reports on the medical use of radioisotopes before heading out the door to the rendezvous.5 Other undercover agents shadowed Kamen on the Key System train across the Bay Bridge, where the chemist and the two Russians caught a cab to the restaurant, located near the cable car turntable on Powell Street. The army agents were surprised to find Hoover’s men already waiting outside, their surveillance equipment—disguised as hearing aids—at the ready. (“It looked like a convention of the deaf,” recalled one gumshoe.)6

  Following a hurried conference, the army agents took a table in the middle of the room while the bureau’s men—equipped with more sensitive technology—were seated in a booth adjoining that occupied by Kamen, Kheifets, and Kasparov.7 Amid the noise and bustle of the restaurant, the agents overheard only fragments of the conversation, including Kamen’s mention of “Lawrence,” “radiation,” and “military boys.”8

  Following the meal, while his hosts accompanied Kamen to the nearby train station, another army agent snapped a picture of the three men from the upstairs window of a recruiting office across the street. In the photograph, Kasparov is seen clutching the thick sheath of papers that Kamen brought with him. A few days later, FBI agents tailed Kheifets to the docks, where he boarded a ship bound for Russia.9

  Apprised of the incident, Groves ordered Kamen fired immediately. The unpleasant task fell to Cooksey, who wordlessly handed the stunned chemist his termination notice. The reason given was Kamen’s earlier loquaciousness at the Faculty Club. Kamen’s frantic telephone calls to Lawrence went unanswered; Fidler had already informed Ernest that since Groves himself had ordered the firing there could be no appeal.10 The chemist’s tearful farewells to Fidler and other well-wishers at the Rad Lab were recorded by army investigators.11

  With the help of a friend, Kamen got a job a few weeks later as an inspector at Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards. His neighbors—seeing young, dark-suited men in late-model cars parked at the curb with their engines running—reported the license numbers to the local police, the selective service, and the gasoline rationing board.

  * * *

  Having finally given up on trying to get a government job in New York or Washington, Haakon Chevalier, too, was back in the Bay Area by late spring 1944.12 Moving, with Barbara, into a guest cottage at Stinson Beach owned by his wife’s parents, Chevalier set about remodeling the house and attempting to repair his marriage. Commuting to Berkeley to teach part-time, he also began work on his long-deferred novel.

  For almost a year, the army’s wiretaps and mail cover on Frank Oppenheimer’s East Bay home had revealed only the usual parenting problems of a mother left alone with two small children. Jackie’s dislike of the deep South had made her reluctant to join Frank in Tennessee. Agents reading their letters learned of routine social engagements, the apricots in Jackie’s victory garden, and the final illness to afflict Pushkin, the couple’s German shepherd.13

  When Robert Oppenheimer returned to Berkeley that fall, army undercover agents followed him, driving a borrowed roadster, through the winding streets of Kensington to Eagle Hill.14 Oppie next picked up his brother and
the two drove down Telegraph Avenue, where they met David Bohm in front of the Carlton Hotel. Following five minutes of conversation—Frank stood apart and did not participate, the agents noted—Robert and his brother drove across the bridge to Scoma’s, a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. While the Oppenheimers were eating, the agents searched Robert’s overcoat and luggage found in the car. (The items found included a bottle of antidiarrhea medicine, a mostly empty fifth of Black Bear Gin, a full pint of twenty-seven-year-old brandy, and underwear.)15

  Leaving the restaurant an hour later, the brothers “walked around the block three times during which time they were engaged in earnest conversation, both gestulating [sic] frequently.” Frank then drove Robert to the railroad station in Oakland, where Oppie boarded the streamliner for Los Alamos.16

  * * *

  By mid-1944, even the army seemed willing to concede that its counterintelligence operation in the Bay Area might have reached the point of diminishing returns. Several months earlier, a devastating critique of the CIC’s operations and methods by the army inspector general had resulted in Lansdale’s nameless box-within-a-box becoming part of the Manhattan Project’s security apparatus. Lansdale and staff moved from the Pentagon to an office next to Groves’s at the New War Department building on Twenty-first Street and Virginia Avenue.

  Except for the information passed by “Joe” to Steve Nelson, the results obtained by Soviet espionage at Berkeley amounted to little, in retrospect. Yet the “California trouble” had become an early and main focus of the counterintelligence campaign by Groves and Lansdale for one simple reason: Oppenheimer.

  In April, Jim Murray, Pash’s top counterspy, was transferred to Chicago, where the FBI and Groves had recently uncovered an espionage ring passing Met Lab secrets to Moscow through the Soviets’ New York consulate.17

  That May, Lansdale made preparations to shut down the listening post on Forest Avenue and likewise close the army’s dummy storefront office in San Francisco.18 To save money, the remaining agents and their recording equipment were moved to a new headquarters in Oakland and given a different cover name: the “Universal Adjustment Company.” (One hapless visitor, seeking an insurance adjuster, was politely run off by Murray’s replacement.)19

  In the fall, Lyall Johnson would be put in charge of security at Hanford, which soon began regularly shipping plutonium to Los Alamos in converted army ambulances.

  Still unaware that the story Oppenheimer had told Pash was a fabrication, army agents continued their dogged search for the three Berkeley scientists whom Chevalier had supposedly asked to pass secrets to the Russians. Oppie himself had meanwhile done nothing to let the agents know that they were following a false trail. Instead, during a trip to Santa Fe with de Silva in early 1944, Oppenheimer had given the Los Alamos security officer the name of another possible suspect: Rad Lab physicist Bernard Peters.20

  Lansdale was confident that he had meanwhile neutralized the threat represented by the four grad students originally suspected of spying. After trailing Lomanitz and his girlfriend across the country to Oklahoma and back, the army had assigned an agent in uniform to accompany Rossi through basic training. Lomanitz’s shadow followed him to a billet at Fort Lewis, Washington, and ultimately to the Pacific without observing any effort on Rossi’s part at surreptitious contact.21 Bohm, like Weinberg, was still teaching physics in Berkeley.22 Following a succession of failed efforts to find work, Max Friedman had finally returned to being a student, enrolling in graduate physics classes at the University of Puerto Rico.

  Lansdale himself had recently shifted his attention to more pressing concerns—including the need to provide security for the growing tide of men and equipment being sent to the Pacific to drop the atomic bomb.23

  Notably, Groves had raised no objection when Robert Oppenheimer brought his brother to Los Alamos in spring 1945.24 (Army monitoring remained in place, however. When Teller griped once more about security strictures at the lab, Oppie snapped: “What are you complaining about? I can’t even talk to my own brother.”) Robert put Frank in charge of security at the desolate desert site where the bomb was to be tested.25

  A few months earlier, Frank had shared a Pullman compartment on the way to Y-12 with Lawrence. Ernest repeated for Frank’s benefit the advice he had given Oppie at the start of the war—that the best way to serve humanity was not by becoming involved in politics but by doing science.26

  At Los Alamos—where project officials were still innocent of the fact that the nation’s real atomic secrets were being driven out the front gate in Klaus Fuchs’s blue Buick—de Silva was handed another assignment by Lansdale: investigating Kitty Oppenheimer’s complaint that the army was opening the letters she received from her parents.*27

  * * *

  At Y-12 that summer, Lawrence was trying to rush the atomic bomb to completion by drastically increasing the number of Calutrons. “The primary fact now is that the element of gamble in the over-all picture no longer exists,” he had written to Conant in May.28 Ernest asked Groves to approve construction of two more Alpha II racetracks, even though the first of the new machines had barely begun operating.29

  Novel ways were also being found to improve efficiencies elsewhere. Unable to account for a discrepancy between the Calutrons’ calculated rate of production and the amount of enriched uranium actually being shipped to New Mexico, Lawrence had ordered the chemical processing plant at Oak Ridge taken down and the pipes in its labyrinth sawn in half. The missing uranium was found, and the facility was quickly rebuilt to a new design.30 In late June 1944, Los Alamos received the first shipment of highly enriched U-235 from the Beta machines.31

  As the production of uranium gradually picked up at Y-12, so, too, did Groves’s mood. In July, Groves gave Lawrence the go-ahead to begin work on a revolutionary new thirty-beam Calutron—even though Ernest admitted that the machine could not begin producing weapons-grade uranium until mid-1945 at the earliest.

  In August, Groves reported to the Top Policy Group that the scientists at Los Alamos were sufficiently confident of the uranium gun working that they advised it could be used in combat without a prior test. (Thin Man, the original high-velocity plutonium gun, had meanwhile been replaced by a shorter, low-velocity uranium gun, dubbed “Little Boy.”)32 The success of the Fat Man plutonium implosion weapon, on the other hand, remained problematic; a test was scheduled for the following year.

  Groves believed that the first atomic bomb might be ready to drop on the enemy as early as the end of March 1945. He estimated that between the spring and the summer Los Alamos would be able to produce from five to eleven implosion gadgets.33

  By November 1944, all nine Alpha racetracks were running at full capacity—daily feeding more than 100 grams of U-235 into two Beta tracks.34 Low-grade uranium from gaseous and thermal diffusion plants was also being sent through the Alpha and Beta Calutrons.35 Weekly shipments of enriched uranium to Los Alamos had begun. Army officers dressed in civilian clothes and carrying concealed sidearms accompanied the special suitcases containing the precious metal as it was transported by ambulance and train to New Mexico.36

  Just before Thanksgiving, Lawrence telephoned Groves from Oak Ridge to exult that “things are really booming down here.” The production of U-235 in November equaled all previous months combined.37 In December came another new record: nearly 200 grams of uranium, 80-percent pure U-235, were left in the receivers following a single day’s run. All nine Alpha tracks and three Beta tracks were in continuous operation for the first time. Spending Christmas on the job, Lawrence gave a holiday pep talk to the workers at Dogpatch. He promised even better news to celebrate “in the not far distant future.”38

  * * *

  Even as he chided Lawrence for overoptimism, Groves, too, had begun thinking beyond the war’s end. As early as spring 1944, he had asked Princeton physicist Henry Smyth to begin writing a technical history of the Manhattan Project that could be publicly distributed after the war. Smyth’s r
eport was intended, in part, to be a vindication of the project’s cost and effort; as such, it was really Groves’s valedictory. But the report was also a tidy and convenient way of dividing what scientists could talk about from what had to remain officially secret.

  In August, Bush picked Richard Tolman to head a panel that would make recommendations on postwar atomic research, including its applications to industry.39

  Two weeks later, Tolman’s Committee on Postwar Policy interviewed almost fifty Manhattan Project scientists in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.40 In a written response, sent from Los Alamos, Oppenheimer focused on the hydrogen superbomb and a hybrid fission-fusion device, the “Booster,” which Teller had proposed at the lab late in 1943. But Oppie thought it likely that both the Super and the Booster would remain essentially unexplored at war’s end: “I should like, therefore, to put in writing at an early date the recommendation that the subject of initiating violent thermo-nuclear reactions be pursued with vigor and diligence, and promptly.”41

  Lawrence planned a different path: he looked to the government as the engine that would drive and even accelerate postwar scientific research at Berkeley. But he also envisioned an improved, fully automated, peacetime Y-12 producing enriched uranium at five times the wartime rate.42

  Meeting with Tolman’s committee on Wednesday morning, November 8, 1944, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, Lawrence spoke of a ten-fold increase in output from the latest version of his Calutron, the Alpha III. Ernest envisioned each future racetrack churning out not only U-235 but also low-grade uranium fuel for the atomic reactors that would generate the electricity to run the plant, in what amounted to a kind of self-sustaining perpetual motion machine. “There must be a postwar policy and program on a very large scale,” he declared. “It can’t be piddling.”43

  When Oppenheimer appeared before Tolman’s committee that afternoon, a more reflective mood prevailed. Oppie declared that wartime secrecy was antithetical to maintaining the country’s “technical hegemony” in peacetime. “If we try to work in secret after the war, we will fall behind other countries better able to work in secret,” he warned.44