by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The conversation then turned to discussing “the professor.” Nelson commented that “he’s very much worried now and we make him feel uncomfortable.”
“Joe” agreed, saying that the professor (the transcript makes clear that the reference is to Oppenheimer) had “kept me off the project because he’s afraid of two things. First of all, that my being there will attract more attention. . . . That’s one excuse. The other is, he fears that I will propagandize . . . a strange thing for him to fear. But he’s changed a bit.”
Nelson: “I know that.”
Joe: “You won’t hardly believe the change that has taken place.”
Nelson then explained that he “used to be very intimate with the guy, not only from a Party relationship, but also for a personal relationship.” Oppenheimer’s wife, he said, used to be the wife of his (Nelson’s) best friend, who was killed in Spain. Nelson said he had always tried to keep Oppenheimer “politically up to date, but that he is not so sound as he would have people believe. . . . Well, you know, he probably impresses you fellows as brilliant in his field and I don’t doubt that. But in other way[s] he had to admit a couple of times that he was off—when he tried to teach Marx, you know, and when he tried to teach Lenin to somebody else. You know what I mean. He’s just not a Marxist.”
Joe: “Yes, it’s interesting. He rather resents the fact that I don’t have deviations.”
At this, Nelson and “Joe” laughed.
Nelson then observed that Oppenheimer “would like to be on the right track but I think now he’s gone a little further away from whatever associations he had with us. . . . Now, he’s got the one thing in the world, and that’s this project and that project is going to wean him from his friends.”
Clearly, Nelson was annoyed with his old friend’s attitude. He knew Oppenheimer wasn’t interested in money—“No,” interjected Joe, “he’s quite wealthy”—but he sensed that it was ambition that was now driving Oppenheimer’s actions. “[He] wants to make a name for himself, unquestionably.”
Joe disagreed: “No that’s not necessarily it, Steve. He’s internationally very well known.”
Nelson: “Well, I’ll tell you, to my sorrow, his wife is influencing him in the wrong direction.”
Joe: “It’s something we all suspected. . . .”
Having established that Oppenheimer was not going to be forthcoming with information about the project, Nelson now focused on “Joe” and tried to coax him into revealing information about the project that might be useful to the Soviets.
The FBI’s twenty-seven-page transcript—based on an illegal bug—then has Joe cautiously, even anxiously, discussing details of the project that might be helpful to America’s wartime ally. Speaking in a whisper, Nelson asked how soon such a weapon would become available. Joe’s guess was that it would take at least one year to produce enough of this separated material for an experimental trial. “Oppie, for instance,” Joe volunteered, “thinks that it might take as long as a year and a half.” “So,” Nelson said, “as far as the question of turning the material over. I don’t know whether he’d come through but I think it’s done every day.” At this point in the transcript, an FBI or Army Counter-Intelligence official analyzing the transcript, writes, “Said in such a fashion as to indicate that Oppenheimer was overly cautious in withholding such information from Steve.”
If the transcript implicates Joe in passing information to Nelson, it also demonstrates that Oppenheimer had become security-conscious, and Nelson concluded that he had become uncooperative and overly cautious.10
AN FBI TRANSCRIPT of Nelson’s conversation with the then still unidentified “Joe” was soon delivered to Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash at G-2 Army intelligence in San Francisco. Pash, Chief of Counter-Intelligence for the Ninth Army Corps on the West Coast, was stunned. He had spent much of his career hunting communists. A native-born San Franciscan, he had as a young man accompanied his father, a Russian Orthodox bishop, to Moscow during World War I. When the Bolsheviks seized power, Pash joined the counterrevolutionary White Army and fought in the 1918–20 civil war. He returned to America after marrying a Russian aristocrat. During the 1920s and ’30s, while employed as a high school football coach, Pash spent his summers as a reserve U.S. Army intelligence officer. After America entered World War II, he assisted in the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and then was assigned as the Manhattan Project’s chief counterintelligence officer. Pash had little patience for bureaucracy; he considered himself a man of action. While his admirers described him as “cunning and shrewd,” others regarded him as a “crazy Russian.” Pash considered the Soviet Union America’s mortal enemy—and not just a temporary wartime ally.
Pash quickly leaped to the conclusion that the Nelson-“Joe” transcript was not only evidence of espionage but also confirmation that his suspicions about Oppenheimer were well founded. The next day he flew to Washington, where he briefed General Groves on the transcript. Because the wiretap on Nelson was illegal, the authorities couldn’t press charges against him or the mysterious “Joe.” But they could use the information to trace the full extent of Nelson’s activities and contacts inside the Radiation Lab. Lieutenant Colonel Pash was soon authorized to investigate whether the Berkeley lab was the target of espionage.
Pash later testified that he and his colleagues “knew” that “Joe” had furnished technical information and “timetables” pertaining to the bomb project to Steve Nelson. Initially, Pash’s investigation focused on Lomanitz, merely because Pash had information that Lomanitz was a Communist Party member. A tail was put on Lomanitz, and one day in June 1943 he was observed standing just outside U.C. Berkeley’s Sather Gate with several friends. They were posing, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, for a photographer who routinely sold his services to students on campus. After the photo was taken and Lomanitz and his friends walked away, a government agent walked up to the photographer and bought the negative. Lomanitz’ friends were quickly identified as Joe Weinberg, David Bohm and Max Friedman—all of them Oppie’s students. From that moment on, these young men were marked as subversives.
Lieutenant Colonel Pash testified that his investigators “determined in the first place that these four men I mentioned were very frequently together.” Without divulging “investigative techniques or operational procedures,” Pash explained that “we had an unidentified man and we had this photograph. As a result of our study we determined and were sure that Joe was Joseph Weinberg.” He also claimed that he had “sufficient information” to name both Weinberg and Bohm as Communist Party members.
Pash was convinced that he had stumbled upon a sophisticated ring of wily Soviet agents, and he felt that any means necessary should be used to break the suspects. In July 1943, the FBI field office in San Francisco reported that Pash wanted to kidnap Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, take them out to sea in a boat and interrogate them “after the Russian manner.” The FBI noted that any information gathered in such a fashion could not be used in court, “but apparently Pash did not intend to have anyone available for prosecution after questioning.” This was too much for the FBI: “Pressure was brought to bear to discourage this particular activity.”
Pash nevertheless stepped up his surveillance of Steve Nelson. The FBI had placed a microphone in Nelson’s office even before they bugged his home, and the conversations they overheard suggested that he had methodically gathered information on the Berkeley Radiation Lab from a number of young physicists whom he knew to be sympathetic to the Soviet war effort. As early as October 1942, the FBI bug picked up a conversation between Nelson and Lloyd Lehmann, an organizer for the Young Communist League who also worked at the Rad Lab: “Lehmann advised Nelson that a very important weapon was being developed and that he was in on the research end of this development. Nelson then asked Lehmann if Opp. [Oppenheimer] knew he was a ‘YCLer’ and added that Opp. was ‘too jittery.’ Nelson went on to state that Opp. at one time was active in the Party b
ut was then inactive and further stated that the reason the Government left Opp. alone was because of his ability in the scientific field.” After noting that Oppenheimer had worked on the “Teachers’ Committee”—a reference to the Teachers’ Union—and the Spanish Aid Committee, Nelson wryly commented that “he can’t cover his past.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1943, just as David Bohm was trying to write up his thesis research on the collisions of protons and deuterons, he was suddenly told that such work was classified. Since he lacked the necessary security clearance, his own notes on scattering calculations were seized and he was informed that he was barred from writing up his own research. He appealed to Oppenheimer, who then wrote a letter certifying that his student had nevertheless met the requirements for a thesis. On this basis, Bohm was awarded his Ph.D. by Berkeley in June 1943. Although Oppenheimer personally requested the transfer of Bohm to Los Alamos, Army security officers flatly refused to give him clearance. Instead, a disbelieving Oppenheimer was told that because Bohm still had relatives in Germany, he couldn’t be cleared for special work. This was a lie; in fact Bohm was banned from Los Alamos because of his association with Weinberg. He spent the war years working in the Radiation Lab, where he studied the behavior of plasmas.
Although barred from working on the Manhattan Project, Bohm was able to continue his work as a physicist. Lomanitz and several others were not so fortunate. Shortly after Ernest Lawrence appointed him to serve as the liaison between the Rad Lab and the Manhattan Project’s plant at Oak Ridge, Lomanitz received a draft notice from the Army. Both Lawrence and Oppenheimer interceded for him, but to no avail. Lomanitz spent the remainder of the war years in various stateside Army camps.
Max Friedman was called in and fired from his job in the Radiation Lab. He taught physics for a while at the University of Wyoming, and late in the war, Phil Morrison got him a job at the Met Lab in Chicago. But security officers caught up to him after six months there, and he was fired. After the war, when his name surfaced in the HUAC investigations into atomic spying, the only job he could get was at the University of Puerto Rico. Like Lomanitz, Friedman had been associated with union organizing within the Rad Lab for Local 25 of FAECT. Army intelligence officers equated such activities with subversive tendencies and they easily jumped to the conclusion that they should get rid of Lomanitz and Friedman.
As for Weinberg, he was put under close surveillance, and when no other evidence emerged to connect him to espionage, he too was drafted and sent to an Army post in Alaska.
Shortly before leaving for Los Alamos, Oppenheimer phoned Steve Nelson and asked his friend to meet him at a local restaurant. They met for lunch in an eatery on Berkeley’s main strip. “He appeared excited to the point of nervousness,” Nelson later wrote. Over a big mug of coffee, Robert told him, “I just want to say good-bye to you . . . and I hope to see you when the war is over.” He explained that he couldn’t say where he was going, but that it had something to do with the war effort. Nelson merely asked if Kitty was going with him, and then the two friends chatted about the war news. As they parted, Robert commented that it was too bad the Spanish Loyalists hadn’t managed to hold out a little longer “so that we could have buried Franco and Hitler in the same grave.” Writing later, in his memoirs, Nelson noted that this was the last time he ever saw Oppenheimer, “for Robert’s connection with the Party had been tenuous at best, anyway.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“The Chevalier A fair”
I talked to Chevalier and Chevalier talked to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer said he didn’t want to have anything to do with this.
GEORGE ELTENTON
A MAN’S LIFE CAN TURN on a small event, and for Robert Oppenheimer such an incident occurred in the winter of 1942–43 in the kitchen of his Eagle Hill home. It was merely a brief conversation with a friend. But what was said, and how Oppie chose to deal with it, so shaped the remainder of his life that one is drawn to comparisons with the tragedies of classical Greece and Shakespeare. It became known as “the Chevalier affair,” and over time it took on some of the qualities of Rashomon, the 1951 film by Akira Kurosawa in which descriptions of an event vary according to the perspective of each participant.
Knowing that they would soon be leaving Berkeley, the Oppenheimers invited the Chevaliers to their home for a quiet dinner. They counted Haakon and Barbara among their closest friends and wanted to share with them a special farewell. When the Chevaliers arrived, Oppie went into the kitchen to prepare a tray of martinis. Hoke followed, and relayed a recent conversation he had had with their mutual acquaintance George C. Eltenton, a British-born physicist educated at Cambridge employed by the Shell Oil Company.
Exactly what each man said is lost to history; neither made contemporaneous notes of the conversation. At the time, neither appears to have considered it a momentous exchange, even though the topic was an outrageous proposal. Eltenton, Chevalier reported, had solicited him to ask his friend Oppenheimer to pass information about his scientific work to a diplomat Eltenton knew in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco.
By all accounts—Chevalier’s, Oppenheimer’s and Eltenton’s—Oppie angrily told Hoke that he was talking about “treason” and that he should have nothing to do with Eltenton’s scheme. He was unmoved by Eltenton’s argument, prevalent in Berkeley’s left-wing circles, that America’s Soviet allies were fighting for survival while reactionaries in Washington were sabotaging the assistance that the Soviets were entitled to receive.
Chevalier always insisted that he was merely alerting Oppie to Eltenton’s proposal rather than acting as his conduit. In either case, that is the interpretation that Oppenheimer put on what his friend told him. Viewing it thus—as a dead end that he had buried—allowed him to brush it aside for the time being as yet another manifestation of Hoke’s overwrought concern for Soviet survival. Should he have informed the authorities immediately? His life would have been very different if he had. But, at the time, he could not have done so without implicating his best friend, whom he believed to be, at worst, an overenthusiastic idealist.
The martinis mixed, the conversation over, the two friends rejoined their wives.
IN HIS MEMOIR, The Story of a Friendship, Chevalier recounts that he and Oppenheimer talked only briefly about Eltenton’s proposition. He insisted that he was not soliciting information from Oppie, but was merely passing on to his friend the fact that Eltenton had proposed a means of sharing information with Soviet scientists. He thought it important that Oppie know of it. “He was visibly disturbed,” wrote Chevalier, “we exchanged a remark or two, and that was all.” Then they returned to the living room with their martinis to join their wives. Chevalier remembered that Kitty had just bought an early-nineteenth-century French edition of a book on mycology with hand-drawn, painted illustrations of orchids—her favorite flower. Sipping their drinks, the two couples perused the beautiful book before sitting down to dinner. Thereafter, Chevalier “dismissed the whole thing from my mind.”
In 1954, at his security hearing, Oppenheimer testified that Chevalier had followed him into the kitchen and said something like, “I saw George Eltenton recently.” Chevalier then added that Eltenton had a “means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists.” Oppenheimer continued: “I thought I said [to Chevalier], ‘But that is treason,’ but I am not sure. I said anyway something. ‘This is a terrible thing to do.’ Chevalier said or expressed complete agreement. That was the end of it. It was a brief conversation.”
After Robert’s death, Kitty reported yet another version of the story. While in London visiting Verna Hobson (Oppie’s former secretary and Kitty’s friend), she said that “the minute Chevalier came into the house she could see that something was up.” She made a point of not leaving the men alone together, and finally, when Chevalier realized that he could not get Robert off by himself, he related his conversation with Eltenton in her presence. Kitty said it was she who then blurted out, “But that would be treason!” According to
this version, Oppenheimer was so determined to keep Kitty out of it that he took her words in his mouth and always claimed that he and Chevalier were alone in the kitchen when they discussed Eltenton. On the other hand, Chevalier always insisted that Kitty never entered the kitchen while he and Robert discussed Eltenton’s proposition, and Barbara Chevalier’s recollection of the incident does not include Kitty.
Decades later, Barbara, by then an embittered ex-wife, wrote a “diary” that adds a somewhat different perspective. “I was not, of course, in the kitchen when Haakon spoke to Oppie, but I knew what he was going to tell him. I also know that Haakon was one hundred percent in favor of finding out what Oppie was doing and reporting it back to Eltenton. I believe Haakon also believed that Oppie would be in favor of cooperating with the Russians. I know because we had a big fight over it beforehand.”
At the time Barbara wrote this—some forty years later—she had a low opinion of her ex-husband. She thought him foolish, “a man of limited horizons, fixed ideas and immutable habits.” Soon after Eltenton’s approach, Haakon had told her, “The Russians want to know.” As she remembered things, she had tried to persuade her husband not to pursue the matter with Oppenheimer. “The absurd ridiculousness of the situation never occurred to him,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir in 1983. “This innocent teacher of modern French literature to be the conduit to Russians of what Oppie was doing.”
