Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  A few days later, Lansdale dropped by Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos office for a long chat. Lansdale warned Oppenheimer against any further efforts to help Lomanitz, saying that the young physicist had been guilty of “indiscretions which could not be overlooked or condoned.” Lansdale avowed that even after joining the Radiation Lab, Lomanitz had continued his political activities. “That makes me mad,” Oppenheimer said. Lomanitz had promised him, he explained, that if he came aboard the bomb project he would abstain from political work.

  Lansdale and Oppenheimer then had a general discussion about the Communist Party. Lansdale declared that, as a military intelligence officer, he was not concerned with a man’s political beliefs. His only concern was with preventing the transmission of classified information to unauthorized persons. To Lansdale’s surprise, Oppenheimer vigorously disagreed, saying that he did not want anyone working for him on the project who was a current member of the Communist Party. According to Lansdale’s memorandum of the conversation, Oppenheimer explained that “one always had a question of divided loyalty.” Discipline inside the Communist Party “was very severe and was not compatible with complete loyalty to the project.” He made it clear to Lansdale that he was speaking only of those who were current members of the Party. Former members were another matter—he knew several former Party members who were now working in Los Alamos.

  Before Lansdale could ask him for the names of these former members, their conversation was interrupted by someone walking into the room. Afterwards, Lansdale had the distinct impression that Oppenheimer was “trying to indicate that he had been a member of the party, and had definitely severed his connections upon engaging in this work.” Lansdale’s overall impression was that Oppenheimer “gave every appearance of sincerity.” The scientist was “extremely subtle in his allusions” but also “anxious” to explain his position. In the months to come, the two men would occasionally spar over security issues, but Lansdale would always believe that Oppenheimer was loyal and devoted to America.

  Oppenheimer himself, however, came away worried from this conversation with Lansdale. The fact that Lomanitz had been dismissed from the Rad Lab despite his intercession was troublesome. Unaware of the exact “indiscretions” that had provoked this action, Oppenheimer surmised that the cause was union organizing on behalf of FAECT. In this context, he recalled that George Eltenton, the Shell engineer who had asked Chevalier to approach him about passing project information to the Soviets, had also been active in FAECT. The conversation in his kitchen some six months earlier with Chevalier about Eltenton’s scheme—which he had dismissed as ridiculous—now appeared serious. Oppie’s meeting with Lansdale thus triggered a fateful decision: He decided he had to tell the authorities about Eltenton’s activities.

  General Groves later told the FBI that Oppenheimer first came to him with Eltenton’s name sometime in early or mid-August. But Oppenheimer didn’t stop there. On August 25, 1943, during a visit to Berkeley on project business, Robert walked into the office of Lt. Lyall Johnson, the army security officer for the Rad Lab. After a brief discussion about Lomanitz, he told Johnson that there was a man in town who worked at the Shell Development Corporation and was active in FAECT. His name, he said, was Eltenton, and he ought to be watched. He intimated that Eltenton may have been trying to obtain information about the Rad Lab’s work. Oppenheimer left without saying much more. Lieutenant Johnson immediately called his superior, Colonel Pash, who instructed him to have Oppenheimer return the next day for an interview. Overnight, they placed a small microphone in the base of the phone on Johnson’s desk and ran a connection to a recording device in the adjoining room.

  The next day, Oppenheimer appeared for what would be a fateful interrogation. When he walked into Johnson’s office, he was startled to be introduced to Pash, still a stranger, but nevertheless a man whose reputation had preceded him. As the three men sat down, it was clear that Pash himself would conduct the interview.

  Pash began with transparent obsequiousness: “This is a pleasure. . . . General Groves has, more or less, I feel, placed a certain responsibility in me and it’s like having a child, that you can’t see, by remote control. I don’t mean to take much of your time.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Oppenheimer replied. “Whatever time you choose.”

  When Pash then began to ask him about his conversation of the day before with Lieutenant Johnson, Oppenheimer interrupted and began talking about the subject he had expected to discuss, Rossi Lomanitz. He explained that he didn’t know whether he should talk to Rossi, but he wanted to tell him that he had been indiscreet.

  Pash interrupted and said he had more serious concerns. Were there “other groups” interested in the Rad Lab?

  “Oh, I think that is true,” Oppenheimer replied, “but I have no firsthand knowledge.” But then he went on to say, “I think it is true that a man, whose name I never heard, who was attached to the Soviet consul, has indicated indirectly through intermediary people concerned in this project that he was in a position to transmit, without danger of leak, or scandal, or anything of that kind, information which they might supply.” He then indicated that he was concerned about possible “indiscretions” on the part of people who might move in the same circles. Having revealed as “fact” an effort by someone in the Soviet consulate to collect information on the Rad Lab’s activities, Oppenheimer plunged ahead and, without interruption from Pash, explained his personal position: “To put it quite frankly—I would feel friendly to the idea of the Commander in Chief informing the Russians that we were working on this problem. At least, I can see that there might be some arguments for doing that, but I do not feel friendly to the idea of having it moved out the back door. I think that it might not hurt to be on the lookout for it.”

  Pash—a man reared to loathe the Bolsheviks—responded evenly, “Could you give me a little more specific information as to exactly what information you have? You can readily realize that phase [the transmittal of secret information] would be, to me, as interesting, pretty near, as the whole project is to you.”

  “Well, I might say,” replied Oppenheimer, “that the approaches were always to other people, who were troubled by them, and sometimes came and discussed them with me.”

  Oppenheimer had used the plural, and he began to elaborate about more than one such approach. He had not come to this interview prepared. Indeed, he had expected to be asked to expand on his conversation with Lieutenant Johnson about Lomanitz. Suddenly he was facing Pash, and a line of questioning that was making him anxious—and all too loquacious.

  The memory of his brief conversation with Chevalier six months ago in his Berkeley kitchen was now hazy. Perhaps Chevalier had mentioned to him (as Eltenton later told the FBI) that Eltenton had suggested approaching three scientists: Lawrence and Alvarez in addition to himself. But perhaps he had in mind several other conversations about the notion that the Soviets ought to have access to new weapons technology. And why not? Many of his friends, students and colleagues worried daily about a fascist victory in Europe. They understood, quite correctly, that only the Soviet army could prevent such a calamity. Many of the physicists then working in the Rad Lab were not joining the Army only because they had been convinced—in quite a few cases by Oppenheimer himself—that their special project would materially contribute to the war effort. These men often discussed whether their government was doing everything it could to help those bearing the brunt of the fascist onslaught. Surely, Oppenheimer had heard many of his colleagues and students giving voice to the desire to help the beleaguered Russians—at a time when, after all, the Soviets were being promoted in the American press as heroic allies.

  So Oppenheimer now tried to explain to Pash that the people who approached him about assisting the Soviets all came to him with an attitude of “bewilderment rather than one of cooperation.” They were sympathetic to the notion of helping our ally, but troubled by the idea of providing information, as Oppenheimer put it, “out the
back door.” Oppenheimer now reported what he had already told Groves and Lieutenant Johnson: that George Eltenton, who worked at the Shell Development Corporation, should be watched. “He has probably been asked,” Oppenheimer said, “to do what he can to provide information.” Eltenton, he said, had talked to a friend who was also an acquaintance of one of the men on the project.

  When Pash pressed him to name who had been approached, Oppenheimer politely refused, on the grounds that the individuals were entirely innocent. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Oppenheimer said, “I have known of two or three cases, and I think two of the men were with me at Los Alamos— they are men who are very closely associated with me.” These two Los Alamos men were approached separately but within a week of each other. A third man, an employee of the Rad Lab, had already left or was scheduled to be transferred to “Site X”—the Oak Ridge facility of the Manhattan Project in Tennessee. These approaches came not from Eltenton but from a third party, a man Oppenheimer refused to name because, he said, “I think it would be a mistake.” He explained that it was his “honest opinion” that the man was himself innocent. He conjectured that this individual had bumped into Eltenton at a party and Eltenton had said, “Do you suppose you could help me? This is a very serious thing because we know that important work is going on here, and we think this ought to be made available to our allies, and would you see if any of those guys are willing to help us with it.”

  Other than identifying this “third party” as a member of the Berkeley faculty, Oppenheimer stubbornly refused to say more, insisting, “I think I have told you where the initiative came from [Eltenton] and that the other things were almost purely accident. . . .” Oppenheimer had identified Eltenton because he considered him as “dangerous to this country.” He would not, in the same breath, name his friend Hoke, whom he believed to be an innocent. “The intermediary between Eltenton and the project,” Oppenheimer told Pash, “thought it was the wrong idea, but said that this was the situation. I don’t think he supported it. In fact, I know it.”

  While refusing to name Chevalier or any names other than Eltenton’s, Oppie talked freely and in considerable detail about the nature of the approach to his friends. In an effort to place all of this in a benign context, he told Pash, “Let me give you the background. The background was— well, you know how difficult it is with the relations between these two allies, and there are a lot of people who don’t feel very friendly to Russia, so that the information—a lot of our secret information, our radar and so on, doesn’t get to them, and they are battling for their lives and they would like to have an idea of what is going on and this is just to make up, in other words, for the defects of our official communication. That is the form in which it was presented.”

  “Oh, I see,” Pash responded.

  “Of course,” Oppenheimer rushed to acknowledge, “the actual fact is that since it is not a communication which ought to be taking place, it is treasonable.” But the spirit of the approach was not treason at all, Oppie continued. Aiding our Soviet allies was “more or less a policy of the Government. . . .” The men involved were merely being asked to compensate for the bureaucracy’s “defects” in official communications with the Russians. Oppenheimer even spelled out how the information would be transmitted to the Russians. As he understood it from his friends who had been approached by Eltenton’s contact, an interview would be arranged with Eltenton. They were told that “this man Eltenton . . . had very good contacts with a man from the [Soviet] embassy attached to the consulate who was a very reliable guy (that’s his story) and who had a lot of experience in microfilm work, or whatever the hell.”

  “SECRET INFORMATION.” “Treasonable.” “Microfilm.” Oppenheimer had used all of these words, surely alarming Pash who already was convinced that Oppenheimer was a dangerous security risk, if not a hardened communist agent. Pash would never understand the man who sat before him. Although he and Oppenheimer lived in adjacent cities, they came from different worlds. The former high school football coach and intelligence officer must have been astonished that Oppie could sound so self-assured as he spoke of treasonable activities and in the same breath confidently explained why he could not, as a matter of principle, name the names of men he knew to be innocent.

  In some respects, Oppenheimer had become a changed man in the six months since his conversation with Chevalier. Los Alamos had transformed him; he was now the bomb laboratory’s director, the science administrator upon whose shoulders the ultimate success of the project rested. But in other respects, he was the same self-assured, brilliant professor of physics who demonstrated every day that he had an informed opinion about an astonishingly broad array of topics. He understood Pash had a job to do, but Oppie was confident that he could decide on his own who was a security risk (Eltenton) and who was not (Chevalier). He even explained to Pash his belief that “association with the Communist movement is not compatible with the job on a secret war project, it is just that the two loyalties cannot go [together].” Furthermore, he told Pash, “I think that a lot of brilliant and thoughtful people have seen something in the Communist movement, and that they maybe belong there, maybe it is a good thing for the country. I hope it doesn’t belong on the war project. . . .”

  As he had told Lansdale just a few weeks earlier, Party discipline subjected members to the pressures of dual loyalties. As an example he cited Lomanitz, to whom he still felt “a sense of responsibility.” Lomanitz, he said, “may have been indiscreet in circles [meaning the Communist Party] which would lead to trouble.” He had no doubt that people often approached Lomanitz and they “might feel it their duty if they got word of something to let it go further. . . .” For this reason, it would simplify things for everyone if it were agreed that communists should stay away from secret war projects.

  Incredibly—in retrospect—Oppenheimer repeatedly tried to convince Pash that pretty much all the people involved in these contacts were well-meaning innocents. “I’m pretty sure that none of the guys here, with the possible exception of the Russian, who is doing probably his duty by his country—but the other guys really were just feeling they didn’t do anything but they were considering the step, which they would have regarded as thoroughly in line with the policy of this Government, just making up for the fact that there were a couple of guys in the State Department who might block such communications.” He pointed out that State was sharing some information with the British, and so many people thought there wasn’t a great deal of difference between that and sharing similar information with the Soviets. “A thing like this going on, let us say, with the Nazis would have a somewhat different color,” he told Pash.

  From Pash’s perspective, all of this was outrageous and, moreover, quite beside the point. Eltenton and at least one other individual—the unnamed faculty member—were trying to get information about the Manhattan Project, and that was espionage. Pash nevertheless patiently listened to Oppenheimer lecture him on his view of the security problem, and then he returned the focus of the conversation back to Eltenton and the unnamed intermediary. Pash explained that it might be necessary for him to come back to Oppenheimer and press him again for more names. Oppenheimer again explained that he was only trying to “act reasonably” and “draw the line” between those, like Eltenton, who took the initiative and those who reacted negatively to such approaches.

  They continued to spar a little longer. Pash tried to use a bit of irony, saying, “I am not persistent (ha ha) but—”

  “You are persistent,” interrupted Oppenheimer, “and it is your duty.”

  Toward the end of the interrogation, Oppenheimer returned to his earlier concerns about the FAECT union: The main thing Pash needed to know was that “there are some things there which would bear watching.” He even suggested that “it wouldn’t hurt to have a man in the local of this union FAECT—to see what may happen and what he can pick up.” Pash immediately picked up on this suggestion and asked if Oppenheimer knew anyone in the union who mig
ht be willing to serve as an informant. He replied, no, that he had only heard that “a boy called [David] Fox is president of it.”

  Oppenheimer then made it clear to Pash that as director at Los Alamos, he was certain that “everything is 100 percent in order. . . . I think that’s the truth,” he said, and added for emphasis, “I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong.”

  When Pash indicated that he might be visiting Los Alamos, Oppenheimer quipped, “My motto is God bless you.” As Oppenheimer rose to leave, the recorder captured Pash saying, “the best of luck.” Oppenheimer replied, “Thank you very much.”

  It was a bizarre—and ultimately disastrous—performance. Oppenheimer had raised the red flag of espionage, identified Eltenton as the culprit, described an unnamed “innocent” intermediary and reported that this innocent person had contacted several other scientists who likewise were innocent. He was certain of his judgments, he had assured Pash, so there was no need to name names.

  Recall that, unbeknownst to Oppenheimer, this conversation was recorded and transcribed. It became a part of Oppenheimer’s security file, and because he would later claim that his report of approaches (whether it was two or three is not clear) was inaccurate—a “cock and bull” story whose origins he himself could not explain—he could never prove whether he had lied to Pash, or had told Pash the truth and lied later. It was as if he unknowingly had swallowed a time bomb; a decade would pass before it exploded.

  IN THE AFTERMATH of Oppenheimer’s encounter with Pash, Lansdale and Groves realized they had a serious problem on their hands. On September 12, 1943, Lansdale sat down with Robert for yet another long and frank conversation. Having read the transcript of Oppenheimer’s interrogation, he was determined to get to the bottom of the alleged espionage approach. Surreptitiously, he, too, recorded the conversation.