109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  The SEDs were a breed apart from the post’s army soldiers, and their brief five weeks of basic training did little to whip them into tip-top military shape. Whenever Groves was visiting with some high brass from Washington, there would be a formal military review on the baseball field in front of the Big House, and the whole post was treated to the laughable spectacle of watching the youngsters try to parade. “It was pathetic,” said Hudgins, who worked as a technician in the Chemistry Division. “Here would be these people straggling in after pulling three straight shifts in the laboratory, just desperate for some sleep, and they would have to get up at dawn and line up for inspection. There were always a half dozen that couldn’t keep time to anything to save their lives and were tripping over their feet. You have to understand, they had come from all over. Some were straight off the farm or from small family businesses. This was all new to them.” After one visit, a general reportedly declared the detachment “a disgrace to the army.”

  Hudgins complained to Dorothy about the exhausting hours and tough drills, and although she commiserated, it was out of her hands. Dorothy, like most of the laboratory staff, was patriotic without being particularly pro-army, and failed to see the need for all the spit-and-polish drill on their remote base. Like Oppenheimer, she also had a strong sense that they were all in this together, and the disparities between the civilian and military privileges troubled her. Peer de Silva, the post military intelligence officer, was also the SEDs commander, and he arbitrarily refused to allow the young married men to get their wives jobs at Los Alamos, so they too could be quartered on the site. Dorothy felt bad that they were unfairly separated from their families, and underpaid and unappreciated to boot. “She stuck up for us,” said Hudgins. “She was very informal and unpretentious, not a flag waver. She thought the army was giving us an awfully hard time.”

  Some of the senior scientists, who had barely escaped being put in uniform themselves, took pity on the SEDs and intervened on their behalf. Kistiakowsky, who had hundreds of SEDs working in his division, became their leading champion. He complained that the young enlisted personnel only rated what army regulations stipulated as “the minimum comforts: minimum housing, minimum recreation, minimum food facilities. And this means,” Kistiakowsky continued, “40 square feet per man in the barracks, including part of the recreation area. Try to recreate yourself in that area.” Their commanding officer was old school and, in Kistiakowsky’s opinion, treated the junior technical personnel like pariahs. “Since he was not told, as many other military weren’t (nor the machinists, of course) what the purpose of Los Alamos was, he loudly described all of us as draft dodgers who were just escaping Army service and having fun here. He insisted the SEDs be awakened by reveille and be mustered daily to do calisthenics and keep the barracks in order and even wear caps and salute officers on the streets.” While this was traditional in the army, the SEDs were not regular army and were barred from going on to Officer Candidate School, which made the rigorous discipline all the more humiliating and unnecessary.

  Kistiakowsky took up their cause with Oppenheimer, who as always worried about morale and argued with Groves to no avail. When Groves was next in Los Alamos, Kistiakowsky asked for permission to speak to him. Groves told him he could ride in his car with him as far as Albuquerque, and for the whole two-and-a-half-hour trip they argued about the SED problem. Kistiakowsky, getting nowhere with Groves, resorted to his “ultimate weapon,” going so far as to threaten to quit if the hard-working youngsters did not receive better treatment. “You know, General,” the imposing White Russian said, squarely facing Groves, “I didn’t ask to come here and what’s more you can’t keep me here. I am too old to be drafted,” he added, “and I’ll leave.” According to Kistiakowsky, Groves responded with “grunts and violent attacks on me for transgressing my authority as a civilian, and meddling in army affairs.” But shortly thereafter, the SEDs got a new CO, Major T. O. Palmer, and the reveille and calisthenics were quietly dropped. Kistiakowsky, who apart from that dispute got along well with Groves, suspected the general tolerated his interference because he saw him “as more manly than the effete physicists” because of his explosives work: “I was to him a kind of kindred spirit.”

  For those who came to Los Alamos that second summer, the chaos of the first few months—when everything was half-finished and everyone was put to work setting up camp—had been replaced by an overgrown, relatively organized, and highly hierarchical society. As a consequence, those who had been with the project from the early days could not help taking a certain guilty pleasure in the misadventures that still beset newcomers. When Laura Fermi arrived at Lamy, Dorothy had arranged for her and her children to be met by an official car. In August 1944 Lamy was still the same small, unimpressive whistle-stop it was when the project began, a desolate depot with little more than a bar and a few squat adobe huts. Laura Fermi and her two children descended in the rain and looked around for their transport to the laboratory’s front office on East Palace Avenue.

  As the platform emptied, a uniformed WAC approached her and using the project code, inquired anxiously, “Are you Mrs. Farmer?” Unaware of her husbands alias, Laura Fermi shook her head no. The WAC then queried the remaining female passengers and, unable to locate the VIP’s wife, was about to depart when Laura Fermi stopped her and identified herself. She explained that she was going to “Site Y” and could the WAC by any chance take them there. The driver apologized, but maintained her orders were to pick up a “Mrs. Farmer.” As Dorothy later related the sorry tale, “Out of her brilliant persuasiveness, coupled with extreme fatigue and some desperation, Mrs. Fermi, quietly insisting she was not as important as the Mrs. Farmer, nevertheless prevailed on the driver to let her and her children ride in the empty car.”

  Among the other late arrivals that August was Klaus Fuchs, a German member of the British mission. Fuchs had been doing research on gaseous diffusion for the Manhattan Project at the Keflex Corporation in New York and was being transferred to Los Alamos at Peierls’ request to work on implosion. He was a very quiet young man, and like many of the émigré scientists, had been through a difficult time. After he sought asylum in England as a destitute refugee from Hitler, he was briefly detained as an enemy alien, then interned for six months at a prison camp on the Isle of Man, and finally banished to Canada. When leading German physicists such as Peierls and Frisch joined the British effort, Fuchs, who had by then been granted political asylum, was recruited to help with the war work. Physicists were in desperately short supply in wartime England, and British intelligence made allowances for his past Communist activity and cleared him to work on Tube Alloys. Given the urgency of the bomb project, when it was agreed the British Technical Mission would be joining the American effort, clearances for all their scientists were put through by the State Department and were never vetted by the FBI.

  At Los Alamos, Fuchs quickly earned a reputation as extremely bright and hard-working. He was assigned to an important position in the Theoretical Division, and he attended the weekly colloquiums and important planning discussions. Bethe, who had known him since the 1930s, called him “one of the most valuable men in my division.” But, even for a lab rat, Fuchs was so pale and withdrawn that Segre’s wife, Elfriede, nicknamed him “II Poverino,” Italian for “poor soul,” and it suited him so well that a number of people used the nickname when referring to him. Fuchs was extremely shy and serious, and while painfully polite, he had almost nothing to say for himself and usually replied in monosyllables. He had grown close to the Peierlses early in the war while a lodger in their house in Birmingham, England, and as they treated him as a member of the family, he was quickly included on Sunday outings, group picnics, and hikes. He was assigned the room adjacent to Dick Feynman in the Big House, which was a dormitory for single scientists. Although the two men could not have been more different, they soon became friends. Fuchs had his own car, a dilapidated blue Buick, and often drove Feynman to Albuquerque to see his wife, Ar
line, who did not have long to live. Realizing that her condition was precarious, Fuchs told Feynman he could borrow the car anytime he needed it, so that in case of an emergency he could get to the hospital quickly It was the sort of generous gesture that endeared him to many in the tight-knit community.

  “We all liked him,” recalled Dorothy, who thought he was “very gentle and sweet,” and looked rather like an owl with his large sad eyes framed by round tortoiseshell glasses. He was so solicitous of their children that he became a popular babysitter and often took care of the Tellers’ son, Paul. “He had quite a reputation for being so good and kind,” said Dorothy, who on more than one occasion asked him to keep an eye on Kevin, who was becoming a rambunctious adolescent. As far as she was concerned, Fuchs was a likable young man, and she invited the lonely-looking bachelor to dinners and Saturday night gatherings. It turned out he was quite a good dancer, and he became a pet of many of the Hill wives. “In Los Alamos, we all trusted him and saw him frequently,” recalled Laura Fermi. “We had frequent parties, and Fuchs came often. He seemed to enjoy himself, played ‘murder’ or charades with the others, and said only a few words. We all thought him pleasant and knew nothing about him.”

  Five years later, when the news broke of Fuchs’ arrest, Groves’ former assistant Anne Wilson happened to be meeting Oppenheimer for an early breakfast at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central in New York City. She would never forget that morning of February 4, 1950, as Oppie’s face crumpled as he took in the headlines splashed across the front page of The New York Times. “The papers had just come out, and there it was. Klaus Fuchs was a Soviet spy,” she said. “Robert was in shock. He just stared at the story shaking his head. He could not believe the man had done this.”

  Fuchs was the last person anyone at Los Alamos would have pegged as a security risk. Feynman even went so far as to joke with him once about which of the two of them would be the “most likely candidate as a suspect for possible espionage.” There was no question; they both agreed that it was Feynman, the Tech Area’s speediest code breaker and nimble-fingered safecracker. Dorothy never had the slightest doubt about Fuchs’ integrity until his treachery was made public. By the time agents from the British Secret Service Bureau, MI5, confronted him and Fuchs confessed, he had returned to England and was working at Harwell, the center of Britain’s nuclear weapons research.

  “When this was discovered, British intelligence came over here,” recalled Dorothy, who was beside herself when she heard of his arrest. “The only thing that they could trace on the Continent that got to Russia could have come from only one place in the world, and that was Los Alamos…. They narrowed it down to the information and the way it was dispatched.” It turned out that the private Fuchs was a resolute Communist and had been passing classified technical information to the Soviets through an American courier named Harry Gold for almost three years before being transferred to the Manhattan Project’s New Mexico site. Gold, a biochemistry technician at Philadelphia’s General Hospital, had been doing industrial espionage for the Soviets since the early 1930s and was told to contact Fuchs in March 1944, while Fuchs was still in New York. The whole time he was at Los Alamos, Fuchs had been stealing atomic secrets, driving off with them in his battered car to Santa Fe, and handing them off to Gold at the Castillo Street Bridge. G-2, which was obsessively investigating Oppenheimer, never noticed a thing.

  Suspicion did not fall on Fuchs until four years after the war, when British code breakers, in the process of cracking the Soviet cipher system, intercepted a startling document—a report on the Manhattan Project authored by Fuchs while he was at Los Alamos and sent from New York to Moscow. This set off alarms, and Fuchs came under investigation. As soon as he realized the British were on to him, Fuchs blurted out a full confession. “[They] just tapped him on the back and he made no resistance whatever, and went with them,” said Dorothy. She found the idea that he had given the Russians documents about the implosion bomb deeply disturbing. She had formed an impression of him as a harmless creature and had failed utterly to recognize his deception. He was the saboteur that all the security precautions, clearances, and passes had been designed to catch, and instead he had been operating right under their very noses all during the war, and even afterward.

  In retrospect, Dorothy had to admit Fuchs was the ideal double agent. As Bethe put it, “If he was a spy, he played his part beautifully.” Fuchs was so quiet and unassuming, he faded into the background. When Dorothy and several of her friends on the Hill later compared notes about him, they were amazed at how little Fuchs had ever revealed about his background or politics. No one was more traumatized by his arrest than Rudolf Peierls, who had been his mentor. When Fuchs confessed, he told investigators that he had had no trouble keeping his friendships and ideals separate: “It had been possible for me in one half of my mind to be friends with people, to be close friends, and at the same time to deceive and to endanger them.” Peierls went to see him in Brixton Prison, and during a long conversation, Fuchs admitted everything and “expressed regret.” He told Peierls, “You must remember what I went through under the Nazis.”

  Fuchs’ revolutionary rage had been sparked by the death of his mother, who had been driven to suicide by Nazi persecution, and stoked by the arrest of his father, who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. He became a fervent Communist long before he escaped to England, only to find himself distrusted and mistreated by the British government until they realized his skills as a physicist might make him useful to the empire. His passion to serve the Soviet cause became the one pure thing left in his life, and his idealism led him to betray all of his friends and colleagues. In his mind, aiding the Russians was not morally wrong. As Laura Fermi observed, “Fuchs’ intelligence was far above the average; his judgment below, probably distorted by the circumstances of his life.”

  Fuchs pleaded guilty and stated in court that he hoped his admission would help atone for his wrongdoing. He was sentenced to fourteen years, the maximum under British law. But his bizarre, abbreviated trial, which took all of ninety minutes and included scant evidence beyond his confessions and the testimony of the MI5 agent, left Dorothy feeling frustrated. The British understandably wanted to limit the damage and prevent the exposure of more official secrets, but a satisfying account of Fuchs’ motives never emerged. He had let them all down, done irreparable harm, and now they would never really know why.

  Later, most of the Los Alamos scientists concluded that the documents Fuchs leaked probably shortened the Soviet atom bomb development by one to two years. “He was an extremely clever guy,” said Joseph Hirschfelder. “He set out to discover what was going on in the Manhattan Project. He very systematically went to each of the laboratories in the Manhattan Project, got himself placed in a key position, and transmitted his information. For example, at Los Alamos, he ended up as the editor of the twenty-five-volume secret Los Alamos Encyclopedia, which summarizes all of the research which was carried out.”

  Unbeknownst to him, Fuchs was not the only security leak at Los Alamos. Gold was running another operative inside the classified laboratory, a relative grunt by comparison, but his information may have helped confirm what the Soviets were learning about the bomb project from Fuchs. David Greenglass was a young SED who worked as a technician in the machine shop, and while he had only a fraction of Fuchs’ knowledge and access, he supplied whatever information he could, including a list of the scientists, the layout of the project and technical buildings, and a very crude sketch of the explosive lens molds used in the plutonium bomb. Greenglass was married to Ruth Rosenberg and had been recruited by his brother-in-law, Julius. Ruth, Julius, and Julius’ wife, Ethel, were members of a Soviet espionage ring in New York. Greenglass was arrested in June 1950, six months after Fuchs, and received a thirty-year sentence. His case might only have been a footnote had it not blown the lid off the far greater treachery of the Rosenbergs and triggered the events that would lead to the most infamous espionage trial o
f the century. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.

  On August 24, 1944, the news that Paris had been liberated swept the mesa late in the evening and sparked an impromptu party. The French 2nd Armored Division had fought their way into the heart of the city, overcome a last stand by the Germans, and cleared the way for General Charles de Gaulle’s return. The European scientists, many of whom had spent the previous night glued to the radio, were jubilant. It was an intensely emotional moment for those with family members who were still in France when the country was divided in two and Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain headed the Vichy government in the south.

  Françoise Ulam was nursing her baby daughter, who had been born in their secret city a month earlier, when a sharp rapping brought her to the window and a none-too-sober Rabi delivered the happy news. As word spread through the apartment complexes, people gathered outside to shake hands, hug, and cheer. Rabi and Victor Weisskopf apparently decided the event wasn’t being properly celebrated and began marching around the residential area bellowing “La Marseillaise” and inviting everyone to join their parade. They proceeded to serenade Françoise, the only French citizen on the Hill, with the strains of her proud anthem, which Rabi played on his pocket comb. Even in the midst of all the excitement, Françoise felt a pang of guilt that she and her husband and baby were safely ensconced on their small mesa while war was raging across the world. She had no idea about the fate of her family, left behind in the embattled cities of her homeland, and no way to find out if they had survived the occupation. Communication with relatives trapped in Hitler’s Europe had long since ceased to be possible. There was nothing to do but wait, and trust that friends or relatives would find some way to get word to her. It was not until a year later that she would finally receive the news that her mother had been sent to a concentration camp and had not survived.