Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Oppenheimer then went to Lawrence’s office in the Rad Lab, where he had arranged to meet Lomanitz. It is not entirely clear exactly why Oppenheimer wanted to meet Lomanitz. Was he still trying to help Lomanitz keep his job at the Rad Lab? Was he trying to find out what truth there was in what Lansdale had said about Lomanitz – that he had, despite his promise to Oppenheimer, kept up his political activities, including taking an active part in FAECT business, and that he had been guilty of ‘indiscretion’? Or was his purpose to pass on to Lomanitz the fact that he had aroused the suspicions of counter-intelligence officers? The evidence is scanty and restricted to what Oppenheimer himself told Pash, Lansdale and the security hearing of 1954. At his hearing, Oppenheimer said: ‘With the approval or the suggestion, I don’t remember, of the security officer, I endeavoured to persuade Lomanitz to get the thing straight with the security people.’ To Lansdale, Oppenheimer revealed that Lomanitz had told him that he was being ‘framed’. ‘I said I think that’s nonsense, why would you be framed, and he said, “Well, part of the general scheme . . . maybe they’re after bigger game than the party.”’

  In other words, Lomanitz thought, as he continued to think for the rest of his life, that the aim of the authorities in drafting him into the army was to destroy FAECT. Oppenheimer claims that by this time he had come to the view that it was a lost cause to keep Lomanitz at the Rad Lab. ‘I persuaded him, I think,’ Oppenheimer told Lansdale, ‘that he should not try to stay on the project there.’

  Worried about being overheard by Lawrence’s secretarial staff, and also perhaps suspecting that Lawrence’s office was being bugged,fn50 Oppenheimer and Lomanitz went outside to continue their discussion on the street, after which Oppenheimer returned to Lawrence’s office to find Weinberg and Bohm waiting to see him. Oppenheimer told Lansdale:

  These two fellows were concerned with only one thing. They said they had worked closely with Rossi [Lomanitz], they thought he was a good guy and that they thought he was being framed for his activities in the union and his political sympathies, and they thought that because of this they were also in danger of such a nature that they should get out of the project into some other useful work or they were likely to be treated the same way.

  In response, Oppenheimer claimed, he told them ‘if they were violating any of the three rules which meant active in union, maintaining any contacts with Reds, not maintaining discretion, they were useless to the project’. When Lawrence briefly appeared, Oppenheimer asked him to witness the promises of Weinberg and Bohm to stay away from politics. That night, Oppenheimer had dinner in Berkeley with Robert Bacher, and was overheard by ‘creeps’ telling Bacher that he had given Lawrence ‘hell’ over the lax security at the Rad Lab.

  The indications are that Oppenheimer, when he went to bed on the night of 25 August 1943, probably considered that he had done much that day to improve both the security position at Berkeley and his own reputation among the security officers. He had volunteered information about possible communist spies, had told Lomanitz to forget his promised group leadership, had elicited promises from Weinberg and Bohm to stay away from politics, and had given Lawrence a dressing-down about the weak security in the Rad Lab. Not a bad day’s work, he might have felt. However, what he had done was to sow the seeds for his own downfall and that of many of his friends, students and colleagues.

  For what he had succeeded in conveying to Lyall Johnson was very different from what he had meant to convey. What interested Johnson about the ‘information’ Oppenheimer had provided was not that George Eltenton was a communist, active in FAECT and keen to supply the Soviets with information about US military projects. The security services already knew that. What interested Johnson was that Oppenheimer knew that. As soon as Oppenheimer left his office, therefore, Johnson phoned Boris Pash to tell him about his meeting with Oppenheimer. To Pash, this looked like the opportunity he had been waiting for to prove Oppenheimer’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Pash immediately arranged to see Oppenheimer the following morning and also arranged for their conversation to be recorded. The result was a recording that would be played, replayed, transcribed and minutely analysed for the rest of Oppenheimer’s life and beyond.

  In responding to questions from Pash and Johnson about Eltenton, Oppenheimer seems in this recorded interview to be extraordinarily inept, which some commentators have attributed to his arrogance in not taking seriously the possibility that he might be intellectually outmanoeuvred by people of inferior intelligence. What seems most apparent, however, is that Oppenheimer was simply not prepared for the questions he received. He went to Johnson’s office on the morning of 26 August, expecting to discuss Lomanitz with Johnson alone. He did not expect Pash to be there, did not expect the conversation to be recorded and did not expect to be questioned about Eltenton. He thought, it appears, that the security officers would simply be grateful that he had provided them with a possible lead, not that they would grill him about it. After all, when he told Groves about Eltenton, he did not have to face lots of searching questions about how he knew Eltenton to be involved in espionage. For this reason it seems not to have occurred to him that, if he was to keep Chevalier’s name out of it, he had better have a convincing explanation of how he came to know about Eltenton. When called upon to provide such an explanation, therefore, he responded in the worst possible way by making up a story on the spot, one that could not possibly withstand the intense scrutiny it received – a ‘cock and bull story’, as he was later compelled to confess.

  Pash began by telling Oppenheimer what a pleasure it was to be able to speak to him face-to-face, since, in maintaining the security of the atomic-bomb project, he felt as if General Groves had ‘placed a certain responsibility in me and it’s like having a child, that you can’t see, by remote control’. Then, getting straight to the point, he continued: ‘Mr Johnson told me about the little incident, or conversation, taking place yesterday in which I am very much interested and it had me worried all day yesterday since he called me.’

  How far Oppenheimer was understanding the mentality of security officers is revealed in his reply to this, in which he assumed that what Pash was worried about was his conversation with Lomanitz. He also showed himself willing to be far more critical of Lomanitz than was strictly necessary in the circumstances:

  I was rather uncertain as to whether I should or should not talk to him [Lomanitz] when I was here. I was unwilling to do it without authorization. What I wanted to tell this fellow was that he had been indiscreet. I know that that’s right that he had revealed information. I know that saying that much might in some cases embarrass him. It doesn’t seem to have been capable of embarrassing him to put it bluntly.

  ‘That is not the particular interest I have,’ Pash told him. ‘It is something a little more, in my opinion, more serious. Mr Johnson said there was a possibility that there may be some other groups interested.’

  Clearly wrong-footed by this, and entirely unprepared for it, Oppenheimer started to babble, ending up by appearing to endorse the idea of sharing information about the atomic bomb with the Russians:

  I think that is true, but I have no first-hand knowledge that would be, for that reason, useful, but 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 any danger of a leak, or scandal, or anything of that kind, information, which they might supply . . . I will take it to be assumed that a man attached to the Soviet consulate might be doing this. But since I know it to be a fact, I have been particularly concerned about any indiscretions which took place in circles close to the consul or which might come in contact with it. 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 ou
t the back door. I think that it might not hurt to be on the lookout for it.

  Refusing to be deflected from his main purpose, Pash then pressed Oppenheimer: ‘Could you give me a little more specific information as to exactly what information you have?’ At this point, having not thought through an adequate story, Oppenheimer fell back on equivocation, vagueness and straightforward dishonesty. The approaches for information, he claimed, ‘were always to other people, who were troubled by them and discussed them with me’. Furthermore, he told Pash, ‘the approaches were always quite indirect, so I feel that to give more, perhaps, than one name, would be to implicate people whose attitude was one of bewilderment rather than one of cooperation’. The one name he was prepared to give was the one he had already given: Eltenton.

  He has probably been asked to do what he can to provide information. Whether he is successful or not, I couldn’t know. But he talked to a friend of his who is also an acquaintance of one of the men on the project, and that was one of the channels by which this thing went. Now I think that to go beyond that would be to put a lot of names down, of people who are not only innocent but whose attitude was 100 per cent effective.

  At this point Oppenheimer probably realised he was in trouble. He had said that Eltenton had approached, possibly through intermediaries, people working on the atomic-bomb project for information to pass on to the Soviet Union, and, as he by this point in the conversation no doubt realised, Pash was not going to rest until he had secured the names of the intermediaries, the people who had been approached and (though Pash and his colleagues probably already knew this part) Eltenton’s contact at the Soviet consulate. With regard to the last of these, Oppenheimer responded:

  I mean I don’t know the name of the man attached to the consulate. I think I may have been told or I may not have been told and I have, at least not purposely, but actually forgotten. He is – and he may not be here now. These incidents occurred of the order of about five, six, seven, months ago.

  Again, this response gave away more information than was necessary. He did not need to inform Pash that he was possibly told the name of Eltenton’s contact at the Soviet consulate, nor did he need to reveal that he knew, at least roughly, when these incidents took place.

  With regard to the names of the people who had been approached, Oppenheimer at first tried to evade the question, and then, perhaps realising he had to say something, began to concoct his ‘cock and bull story’: ‘I have known 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.’ Now he had committed himself to saying far more than he needed to. He knew, of course, of one person who had been approached, through an intermediary, by Eltenton: namely himself. Did he really know of one or two others who had been similarly approached? He later claimed that he did not, that these other cases simply did not exist. So why on earth did he tell Pash and Johnson that he knew two or three people ‘closely associated’ with himself who had been approached indirectly by Eltenton for information on the bomb project? The only explanation he gave for this at his security hearing was: ‘I was an idiot.’ Indeed, under the circumstances, it is hard to think of anything more idiotic, which shows, I think, how little prepared Oppenheimer was for the questions Pash and Johnson put to him.

  When asked to name the intermediary, Oppenheimer’s initial response was: ‘I think it would be a mistake . . . I think I have told you where the initiative came from and that the other things were almost purely accident and it would involve people who ought not be involved in this.’ When pressed, he gave a few hints, some of them entirely unhelpful (‘He is a man whose sympathies are certainly very far left, whatever his affiliations, and he may or may not have regular contacts with a political group’), and some that might indeed lead his inquisitors to Chevalier (‘It’s a member of the faculty, but not on the project’).

  When Pash and Johnson returned to the question of who this nameless intermediary had approached, Oppenheimer again provided a curious detail. Asked if the people who had been approached had been contacted at the same time, he replied: ‘They were contacted within a week of each other . . . but not in each other’s presence.’ ‘And then,’ said Pash, ‘from what you first heard, there is someone else who probably still remains here who was contacted as well.’ ‘I think that is true,’ replied Oppenheimer. Driving home the importance of this point, Pash emphasised that, according to Oppenheimer’s story, there had been a plan to leak information to the Soviet consulate from contacts who worked on the atomic-bomb project, ‘and we may not have known all the contacts’. ‘That is certainly true,’ replied Oppenheimer. ‘That is why I mentioned it.’ After a bit more prevarication he let slip further details about the people who had been approached: first, that they ‘have a feeling toward this country and have signed the Espionage Act’; second, that one of the men ‘has gone, or is scheduled to go, to Site X [Oak Ridge]’. Putting all these hints together, it would have been natural to come to the conclusion that General Groves was to reach: that two of the people Oppenheimer had described as being approached by Eltenton were himself and his brother Frank, and that his evasions had to do with his desire – his duty – to protect Frank.

  Several times towards the end of the discussion, Pash let Oppenheimer know in no uncertain terms that he had not heard the last of this. He repeatedly asked Oppenheimer if it would be all right to interview him again at Los Alamos, to which Oppenheimer gave his evidently unenthusiastic assent. Pash also referred repeatedly to the fact that he would not drop his attempts to discover the name of the intermediary. ‘We certainly would give a lot of thanks and appreciation for the name of that intermediary,’ he told Oppenheimer, since ‘we are going to have to spend a lot of time and effort which we ordinarily would not in trying to . . . trying to run him down before we even can get on to these others’. The clear implication was that, in withholding his name, Oppenheimer was not protecting the intermediary; rather, he was just wasting the time of military-intelligence officers. ‘We will be hot under the collar until we find out what is going on,’ Pash promised.

  Before he left, Oppenheimer tried two further tactics to rescue the situation. The first was to make grandiose declarations of his loyalty to his country and of his own concern for security (‘I think that I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong’). The second was, rather ignobly, to insist that security at his Los Alamos was a good deal better than it was at Lawrence’s Rad Lab (‘I feel responsible for every detail of this sort of thing down at our place and I will be willing to go quite far in saying that everything is 100 per cent in order. That doesn’t go for this place up here’). Neither tactic made any impression on Pash; he was, he told Oppenheimer, like a bloodhound on a trail and, whatever Oppenheimer might say or do, that trail was going to lead him to the identities of (a) Oppenheimer’s intermediary, and (b) the three members of the bomb project who had been approached to leak information to the Soviets.

  The conversation left Pash more convinced than ever that Oppenheimer was involved in espionage, and, though he had been unable to convince either Groves or Lansdale of this, his view was shared by other important members of the security services, who shared also his fervent desire to protect the bomb project from Oppenheimer’s complicity. The FBI had always regarded Oppenheimer with suspicion and were only too pleased to ally themselves with Pash’s campaign against him. On 27 August, the day after Oppenheimer’s disastrous meeting with Pash and Johnson, an FBI agent recommended placing a wire tap on Jean Tatlock’s phone, on the grounds that Oppenheimer might use either her or her telephone in order to contact ‘the Comintern Apparatus’. Five days later, J. Edgar Hoover took up the suggestion in a memo to the Attorney General, saying that tapping her phone would help in ‘determining the identities of espionage agents within the Comintern Apparatus’, because she was ‘the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort’ and ‘a contact
of members of the Comintern Apparatus’. Jean’s phone was duly tapped, but no information relevant to the protection of the US was ever gathered by such means.

  On 2 September 1943, the day after Hoover’s memo to the Attorney General, the case against Oppenheimer was summarised in a memo to Pash written by Pash’s man at Los Alamos, Captain Peer de Silva. With regard to the recent developments in the espionage case relating to the Manhattan Project, de Silva began, ‘the part played by J.R. Oppenheimer is believed to take on a more vital significance than has heretofore been apparent’. After summarising Oppenheimer’s discussion with Pash and Johnson, de Silva states: ‘The writer wishes to go on record as saying that J.R. Oppenheimer is playing a key part in the attempts of the Soviet Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the security of the United States.’ In support of this view, de Silva writes that Oppenheimer, despite having gone on record as believing that Communist Party membership is incompatible with access to military secrets, ‘has allowed a tight clique of known Communists or Communist sympathizers to grow up about him within the project, until they comprise a large proportion of the key personnel in whose hands the success and security of the project is entrusted’. ‘In the opinion of this officer,’ de Silva goes on, ‘Oppenheimer either must be incredibly naïve and almost childlike in his sense of reality, or he himself is extremely clever and disloyal. The former possibility is not borne out in the opinion of the officers who have spoken with him at length.’ What struck de Silva about Oppenheimer’s recent disclosure of information regarding Eltenton and his unnamed intermediary was its timing: immediately after Oppenheimer had been alerted to the fact that his ex-students were being investigated for leaking information. ‘Until alerted to the fact that an investigation was in progress,’ de Silva wrote, Oppenheimer ‘made absolutely no attempt to inform any responsible authority of the incidents which he definitely knew to have occurred and which, he claims, he did not approve.’