Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  OPPENHEIMER KNEW ELTENTON only because the two of them had attended union organizing meetings on behalf of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT). Eltenton had attended one of these union meetings in Oppenheimer’s home. All told, he had seen Eltenton on four or five occasions.

  Eltenton, a thin, Nordic-featured man, and his wife, Dorothea (Dolly), were English. Although Dolly was a first cousin of the British aristocrat Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Eltentons were decidedly left-wing in their politics. In the mid-1930s, they had observed the Soviet experiment firsthand, in Leningrad, where George had been employed by a British firm.

  Chevalier had first met Dolly Eltenton in 1938, when she walked into the office of the League of American Writers in San Francisco and volunteered her secretarial services. Dolly, whose politics were, if anything, more radical than her husband’s, worked as a secretary for the pro-Soviet American Russian Institute in San Francisco. Moving to Berkeley, the couple naturally gravitated into its left-wing social circuit. Chevalier had seen them at many of the same fundraising parties attended by Oppenheimer.

  So when Eltenton phoned him one day to say that he wanted to have a chat, Chevalier drove over to his Berkeley home at 986 Cragmont Avenue a day or two later. Eltenton talked earnestly about the war and its still uncertain outcome. The Soviets, he pointed out, were bearing the brunt of the Nazi onslaught—four-fifths of the Wehrmacht was fighting on the Eastern Front—and much might depend on how effectively the Americans aided their Russian allies with arms and new technology. It was very important that there be close collaboration between Soviet and American scientists.

  Eltenton had been approached by Peter Ivanov, he said, whom he believed to be a secretary in the Soviet Consulate General in San Francisco. (Actually, Ivanov was a Soviet intelligence officer.) Ivanov had remarked that “in many ways the Soviet Government did not feel it was getting the scientific and technical cooperation which it felt it deserved.” He had then asked Eltenton whether he knew anything about what was going on “up on the Hill,” meaning the Berkeley laboratory.

  In 1946, the FBI interrogated Eltenton about the Chevalier incident, and he reconstructed his conversation with Ivanov as follows: “I told him [Ivanov] that I, personally, knew very little of what was going on, whereupon he asked me whether I knew Professor E. O. Lawrence, Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer or a third party whose name I do not recall.” (Eltenton later thought the third scientist named by Ivanov was Luis Alvarez.) Eltenton replied that he knew only Oppenheimer, but not well enough to discuss the issue. Ivanov had pressed him, asking if he knew anyone else who could approach Oppenheimer. “On thinking the matter over I said that the only mutual acquaintance whom I could think of was Haakon Chevalier. He asked me whether I would be willing to discuss the matter with [Chevalier]. After assuring myself that Mr. Ivanov was genuinely convinced that there were no authorized channels through which such information could be obtained and having convinced myself that the situation was of such a critical nature that I would be in my own mind free in conscience to approach Haakon Chevalier I agreed to contact the latter.”

  According to Eltenton, he and Chevalier agreed “with considerable reluctance” that Oppenheimer should be approached. Eltenton assured Chevalier that if Oppenheimer had any useful information, Ivanov could get it “safely transmitted.” From Eltenton’s account, the two men clearly understood what they were contemplating. “The question of remuneration was raised by Mr. Ivanov, but no sum was mentioned since I did not wish to accept payment for what I was doing.”

  A few days later—Eltenton told the FBI in 1946—Chevalier informed him that he had seen Oppenheimer, but that “there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.” Ivanov later came by Eltenton’s house and was likewise told that Oppenheimer would not cooperate. That was the end of it, although somewhat later Ivanov asked Eltenton if he had any information about a new drug called penicillin. Eltenton had no idea what this was—though he said he later called Ivanov’s attention to an article about it in Nature magazine.

  The accuracy of Eltenton’s account of the affair is confirmed by another FBI interview. At the same time that FBI agents were interrogating Eltenton, another team picked up Chevalier and asked him similar questions. As their interviews proceeded, the two teams of agents coordinated their questions through phone calls, checking each man’s recollections against the other’s and probing any inconsistencies. In the end, there were only minor differences in their statements. Chevalier said that to the best of his recollection he had not mentioned Eltenton’s name to Oppenheimer (although in his memoirs he recalled that he had). And he did not mention to his interrogators that Eltenton had made reference to Lawrence and Alvarez: “I wish to state that to my present knowledge and recollection I approached no one except Oppenheimer to request information concerning the work of the Radiation Laboratory. I may have mentioned the desirability of obtaining this information with any number of people in passing. I am certain that I never made another specific proposal in this connection.” Oppenheimer, he said, had “dismissed my approach without discussion.”

  In other words, the two men confessed that they had talked about funneling scientific information to the Soviets, but each confirmed that Oppenheimer had rejected the idea out of hand.

  OVER THE YEARS, historians have surmised that Eltenton was a Soviet agent who had worked as a recruiter throughout the war. In 1947, when the details of his interrogation began to leak from FBI sources, he fled to England, and for the rest of his life he refused to talk about the incident. Was Eltenton a Soviet spy? Certainly, no one can dispute that he proposed funneling scientific information about a war project to the Soviets. But an investigation of his behavior in 1942–43 suggests that he was more likely a misguided idealist than a serious Soviet agent.

  For nine years—1938 to 1947—Eltenton car-pooled to work at Shell every day with a neighbor, Herve Voge. Voge, a physical chemist who had once taken a class from Oppenheimer, was also employed at Shell’s facility in Emeryville, an eight-mile drive from Berkeley. Four other men car-pooled with them in 1943: Hugh Harvey, an Englishman whose politics were pretty middle-of-the-road; Lee Thurston Carlton, whose political views were leftist; and Harold Luck and Daniel Luten. They called their car pool the “red-herring ride club” because Luten was always bringing up red herrings in their lively discussions. Voge vividly recalled these “ride club” conversations: “I remember this very well, everybody knew that there were important things going on at the radiation laboratory in Berkeley; it was obvious. People were coming there and there was a lot of hush hush talk. . . .”

  One day as they drove to work, Eltenton got exercised about the war news and said, “I would like Russia to win this war, rather than the Nazis, and I would like to do anything I can to help them.” Voge claims that Eltenton then said, “I’m going to try to talk to Chevalier or Oppenheimer and tell them that I would be very happy to forward any information that they feel is useful to the Russians.”

  Voge thought Eltenton’s political views, which he wore on his sleeve, were at best simpleminded and immature; at worst, he was “a dupe of the Russian consulate.” Eltenton openly talked about his friends in the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, and boasted that he could get this information sent to Russia through his contacts at the consulate. (Indeed, FBI agents observed him meeting on several occasions in 1942 with Ivanov.) Eltenton brought up the subject more than once, Voge recalled: “He would continually say, ‘You know, we’re fighting on the same side as the Russians, why don’t we help them?’ ” When some of his car-pool buddies questioned whether this “isn’t the kind of thing that should go through official channels?,” Eltenton responded, “Well, I’ll do what I can.”

  A few weeks later, however, he told Voge and the others, “I talked to Chevalier and Chevalier talked to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer said he didn’t want to have anything to do with this.” Eltenton seemed disappointed, but Voge
was pretty sure that that was the end of his little scheme.

  This story, which Voge related to Martin Sherwin in 1983, is buttressed by what he told the FBI in the late 1940s. After the war, Voge almost lost his job because of his association with Eltenton; when the FBI said they could clear his name if he agreed to act as an informant, Voge refused. But the FBI did persuade him to sign a statement about Eltenton, which read in part: “George and Dolly Eltenton are admittedly suspicious characters. They had lived in the Soviet Union and were openly sympathetic to the regime. George made apparently open efforts to aid the Russians during World War II.” Describing his conversations with Eltenton in the “red-herring ride club,” Voge wrote, “We were never able to convince George of the evils of communism and he never converted any of us to his views.”

  Years later, when Eltenton’s name surfaced in the 1954 Oppenheimer hearings, Voge thought the government had it all wrong about Eltenton: “If he’d really been a genuine spy, he wouldn’t have talked that openly at all. He would have pretended to be a much different type of person.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “He’d Become Very Patriotic”

  When I was with him, I was a larger person. . . . I became very much of an Oppenheimer person and just idolized him.

  ROBERT WILSON

  ROBERT WAS BEGINNING A NEW LIFE. As the director of a weapons laboratory that would integrate the diverse efforts of the far-flung sites of the Manhattan Project and mold them quickly into a usable atomic weapon, he would have to conjure up skills he did not yet have, deal with problems he had never imagined, develop work habits entirely at odds with his previous lifestyle, and adjust to attitudes and modes of behavior (such as security considerations) that were emotionally awkward and alien to his experience. It is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that in order to succeed, at age thirty-nine, Robert Oppenheimer would have to remake a significant part of his personality if not his intellect, and he was going to have to do all this in short order. Every aspect of his new job was on a fast-track schedule. Very few things—including Oppenheimer’s transformation—could meet that impossible schedule; yet it is a measure of his commitment and willpower that he came very close.

  Robert had often mused about combining his passion for physics with his fierce attraction to the desert high country of New Mexico. Now he had his chance. On November 16, 1942, he and Edwin McMillan, another Berkeley physicist, accompanied an Army officer, Maj. John H. Dudley, to Jemez Springs, a deep canyon forty miles northwest of Santa Fe. After inspecting dozens of potential sites across the American Southwest, Dudley had finally settled on Jemez Springs as a suitable home for the proposed new weapons laboratory. Oppenheimer remembered it from his horseback trips as a “lovely spot and in every way satisfactory.”

  But when the three men arrived at Jemez Springs, he and McMillan began arguing with Dudley that the snake of land at the bottom of the canyon was too narrow and confined for the town they envisioned building. Oppenheimer complained that it had no view of the magnificent mountain scenery, and that the site’s steep canyons would make it nearly impossible to fence in. “We were arguing about this when General Groves showed up,” recalled McMillan. Groves took one look at the site and said, “This will never do.” When he turned to Oppenheimer and asked if there was something else around that had prospects, “Oppie proposed Los Alamos as though it was a brand new idea.”

  “If you go on up the canyon,” Oppenheimer told him, “you come out on top of the mesa and there’s a boys’ school there which might be a usable site.” Reluctantly, the men piled back into their cars and drove northwest about thirty miles across a lava mesa called the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau. It was already late afternoon when they pulled up to the Los Alamos Ranch School. Through the haze of drizzly snowfall, Oppenheimer, Groves and McMillan saw a group of schoolboys out on a playing field running around in shorts. The school’s 800-acre grounds included the “Big House,” its main building; Fuller Lodge, a beautiful manor house built in 1928 from 800 huge ponderosa logs; a rustic dormitory; and a few other, smaller buildings. Behind the lodge there was a pond that the boys used for ice skating in the winter and canoeing during the summer. The school stood at an elevation of 7,200 feet, just about at timberline. To the west, the snowcapped Jemez Mountains rose to 11,000 feet. From the spacious porch of Fuller Lodge, one could look forty miles east across the Rio Grande Valley to Oppenheimer’s beloved Sangre de Cristo mountain range, rising to a height of 13,000 feet. By one account, as Groves surveyed the scene he suddenly announced, “This is the place.”

  Within two days, the Army initiated the paperwork to buy the school, and four days later, after a quick trip to Washington, D.C., Oppenheimer returned with McMillan and Ernest Lawrence to inspect what had been designated “Site Y.” Wearing cowboy boots, Oppenheimer took Lawrence on a tour of the school buildings. For security purposes, they had introduced themselves under assumed names. But a Los Alamos student, Sterling Colgate, recognized the scientists. “Suddenly we knew the war had arrived here,” Colgate recalled. “These two characters showed up, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, one wearing a porkpie hat and the other a normal hat, and these two guys went around as if they owned the place.” Colgate, a high school senior, had studied physics and he had seen photographs of Oppenheimer and Lawrence in a textbook. Soon afterwards, an armada of bulldozers and construction crews invaded the school grounds. Oppenheimer, of course, knew Los Alamos well. Perro Caliente was a forty-mile horseback ride across the plateau. He and his brother had explored the Jemez Mountains on horseback over many summers.

  Oppenheimer got what he wanted—a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—and General Groves got a site so isolated there was only a winding gravel road and one phone line into the place. Over the next three months, construction crews built cheap barracks with shingled or tin roofs. Similar buildings were constructed to serve as crude chemistry and physics laboratories. Everything was painted Army green.

  Oppenheimer seemed unaware of the utter chaos that had descended on Los Alamos—although years later, he confessed, “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.” Focused on recruiting the scientists he needed for the project, he had no time for the administrative tasks associated with building a small town. John Manley, an experimental physicist whom Oppie had tapped as one of his assistants, had serious qualms about the site. Manley had just come from Chicago, where on December 2, 1942, the Italian émigré physicist Enrico Fermi had led a team that conducted the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Chicago was a big city, home to an eminent university, world-class libraries and a large pool of experienced machinists, glass-blowers, engineers and other technicians. Los Alamos had nothing. “What we were trying to do,” wrote Manley, “was build a new laboratory in the wilds of New Mexico with no initial equipment except the library of Horatio Alger books or whatever it was that those boys in the Ranch School read, and the pack equipment that they used to go horseback riding, none of which helped us very much in getting neutron-producing accelerators.” Manley thought that if Oppenheimer had been an experimental physicist, he would have understood that “experimental physics is really 90 percent plumbing,” and he never would have agreed to having a laboratory built in such a setting.

  The logistics were horrendously complicated. Oppenheimer and the initial group of scientists planned to arrive at Los Alamos by mid-March 1943. By then, Robert assured Hans Bethe, there would be a viable community run by a city engineer. There would be bachelor quarters and homes for families with one, two and three bedrooms. These furnished quarters would all come with electricity—but for security reasons there would be no phones. The kitchens would be equipped with wood-fired stoves and hot-water heaters. There would be fireplaces and a refrigerator. Servants would be available on occasion for any heavy housework. There would be a school for young children, a library, a laundry, a hospital and garbage collection. An Army post exchange would serve as the co
mmunity’s grocery store and mail-order house. A recreation officer would arrange for regular movies and hiking trips in the nearby mountains. And Oppie promised there would be a cantina for beer, Cokes and light lunches, a regular mess hall for unmarried people and a “fancy” café where married couples could eat out in the evening.

  FOR THE LABORATORIES, they ordered the shipment of two Van de Graaff generators from Michigan, a cyclotron from Harvard and a Cockcroft-Walton machine from the University of Illinois. All were essential. The Van de Graaff generators would be used to run basic physics measurements. The Cockcroft-Walton machine, the first particle accelerator, was necessary for experiments in which various elements could be artificially transmuted into other elements.

  The construction of Los Alamos, the recruitment of scientists and the assembling of all the equipment necessary for the world’s first nuclear weapons laboratory required a meticulous and patient administrator. In early 1943, Oppenheimer was neither. He had never supervised anything larger than his graduate seminars. In 1938, he had been responsible for fifteen graduate students; now he was directing the work of hundreds, soon to be thousands, of scientists and technicians. Nor did his peers believe he was temperamentally suited for the job. “He was something of an eccentric— almost a professional eccentric when I knew him before 1940,” recalled Robert Wilson, a young experimental physicist who was then studying under Ernest Lawrence. “He just wasn’t the kind of person that you would think would be an administrator.” As late as December 1942, James Conant wrote Groves that he and Vannevar Bush were “wondering whether we have found the right man to be the leader.”

  Even John Manley had serious misgivings about serving as Oppie’s deputy. “I was somewhat frightened of his evident erudition,” Manley recalled, “and his lack of interest in mundane affairs.” Manley was particularly worried about the laboratory’s organization. “I bugged Oppie for I don’t know how many months about an organization chart—who was going to be responsible for this and who was going to be responsible for that.” Oppenheimer ignored his pleas until finally, one day in March 1943, Manley climbed to the top floor of LeConte Hall and pushed open the door of Oppenheimer’s office. When Oppenheimer glanced up to see him standing there, he knew exactly what Manley wanted. Grabbing a piece of paper, he threw it down on his desk and said, “Here’s your damned organization chart.” Oppenheimer envisioned four broad divisions within the laboratory: experimental physics, theoretical physics, chemistry and metallurgy, and, finally, ordnance. Group leaders within each of these divisions would report to the division chiefs, and the division chiefs would report to Oppenheimer. It was a beginning.