Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  De Silva concluded that: ‘Oppenheimer is deeply concerned with gaining a worldwide reputation as a scientist, and a place in history’ through his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory. The army, he maintained, ‘is in the position of being able to allow him to do so or to destroy his name, reputation, and career, if it should choose to do so’. He ended up suggesting that, if ‘strongly presented to him’, the fact that the army could destroy his reputation, ‘would possibly give him a different view of his position with respect to the Army, which has been, heretofore, one in which he has been dominant because of his supposed essentiality’.

  Four days later, this uncompromising assessment was sent to Lansdale by Pash, who added to it the statement: ‘This Office is still of the opinion that Oppenheimer is not to be fully trusted and that his loyalty to a Nation is divided. It is believed that the only undivided loyalty that he can give is to science and it is strongly felt that if in his position the Soviet Government could offer more for the advancement of his scientific cause he would select that Government as the one to which he would express his loyalty.’

  Meanwhile, the close surveillance of Weinberg and his friends continued. On 3 September, the day after de Silva wrote his memo to Pash, agents following Weinberg saw him post a thick, large envelope addressed to Al Flanigan, a graduate student at Berkeley and a friend of Steve Nelson’s. When the agents opened the envelope they found that it contained a manuscript article entitled ‘The Communist Party and the Professions’, together with a brief, unsigned covering note, which said: ‘Please do not communicate with me during this period, nor discuss with others my reasons for this request.’ The note also asked Flanigan to pass this message on to ‘S. or B.’ – presumably Steve Nelson and Bernadette Doyle – ‘without mentioning my name’. Copies of the manuscript and the note were sent to Pash, who regarded them as evidence that the purpose of Oppenheimer’s meeting with Weinberg and Bohm was to tip them off that they were being watched.

  On 12 September, Lansdale conducted an interview with Oppenheimer, this time in Groves’s office in Washington. Like Pash’s interview a couple of weeks earlier, it was recorded and transcribed. The tone of the interview, however, was very different. As Lansdale made clear to Oppenheimer, he liked, admired and trusted him. He began the interview by telling Oppenheimer, ‘without intent of flattery or complimenting or anything else’, that ‘you’re probably the most intelligent man I ever met’, and ended it by emphasising: ‘I want you to know that I like you personally, and believe me it’s so. I have no suspicions whatsoever, and I don’t want you to feel that I have.’ Everything he later did and said suggests that Lansdale was being quite sincere in these remarks.

  Lansdale’s purpose, too, was quite different from Pash’s. He did not want to trip Oppenheimer into revealing his complicity with espionage; he wanted, rather, to extract from him information that might be helpful in identifying those who were involved in espionage. And, in particular, he wanted the name of the intermediary whom Eltenton had used to try to obtain secret information regarding the Manhattan Project. The way Oppenheimer began the conversation shows that he still had not understood that the security forces regarded the Eltenton espionage attempt as a much bigger concern than the ‘indiscretions’ committed by Lomanitz and his friends. For, when Lansdale mentioned his interview with Pash, Oppenheimer immediately launched into an explanation of why he wanted to talk to Lomanitz, as if that is what Lansdale would be most concerned about:

  I thought I might be able to talk him out of some of this foolishness so I asked Johnson for permission to do that. I had a rather long discussion with Lomanitz which I should describe as pretty unsuccessful, or at least only partially successful. And, of course, Johnson had expressed the opinion that he was dangerous and why, and that Pash ought to be brought in on it. So I told Pash some of the reasons why I thought it was dangerous and I suppose that is probably what you mean.

  Straight away, Lansdale let him know that his main concern was the intelligence and counter-intelligence surrounding the attempts by the Soviet Union to penetrate the secrets of the Manhattan Project. Summing up the situation, he told Oppenheimer, ‘They know, we know they know, about Tennessee, about Los Alamos, and Chicago’, given which: ‘It is essential that we know the channels of communication.’ Appearing to recognise and sympathise with the feeling of many of the scientists that security concerns were actually an obstacle to getting the job done, Lansdale told Oppenheimer that he had a delicate line to tread. ‘We don’t want to protect the thing to death,’ he remarked, but, on the other hand, it was clear that some degree of protection was needed. And, therefore, Lansdale needed the name of that intermediary. Oppenheimer, however, refused to provide the name: ‘I’ve thought about it a good deal because Pash and Groves both asked me for the name, and I feel that I should not give it.’ ‘I don’t see how,’ Lansdale told him, ‘you can have any hesitancy in disclosing the name of the man who has actually been engaged in an attempt at espionage to a foreign power in time of war.’ But Oppenheimer was implacable in his refusal to land Chevalier in what he knew would be a lot of trouble.

  Changing tack, Lansdale tried to use Oppenheimer’s communist past to glean information about Communist Party members. ‘Who do you know,’ he asked, ‘on the project in Berkeley who are . . . or have been members of the Communist Party?’ Unhelpfully, Oppenheimer replied: ‘I know for a fact, I know, I learned on my last visit to Berkeley, that both Lomanitz and Weinberg were members.’ Pressed to tell Lansdale something he did not already know, Oppenheimer – seemingly at random – chose to identify Charlotte Serber as having been in the past a member of the Communist Party. When asked whether Robert Serber had been a member, Oppenheimer replied: ‘I think it possible, but I don’t know.’

  Lansdale: Now, have you yourself ever been a member of the Communist Party?

  Oppenheimer: No.

  Lansdale: You’ve probably belonged to every front organization on the coast.

  Oppenheimer: Just about.

  In Lansdale’s search for names of Communist Party members, an awkward moment for Oppenheimer came when his inquisitor asked: ‘How about Haakon Chevalier?’ On this occasion, however, Oppenheimer remained cool and unflustered. ‘Is he a member of the Party?’ he responded, adding: ‘He is a member of the faculty and I know him well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were a member, he is quite a Red.’

  Frustrated by such suave evasions, Lansdale laid his cards on the table:

  we’ve got the case of Dr J. R. Oppenheimer, whose wife was at one time a member of the party anyway, who himself knows many prominent Communists, associates with them, who belongs to a large number of so-called front organizations and may perhaps have contributed financially to the party himself, who becomes aware of an espionage attempt by the party six months ago and doesn’t mention it, and who still won’t make a complete disclosure. I may say that I’ve made up my mind that you yourself are OK or otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you like this, see?

  ‘I’d better be. That’s all I’ve got to say,’ Oppenheimer replied.

  At the end of what had been, from his point of view, a frustrating and fruitless interview Lansdale warned Oppenheimer, with respect to the name of the intermediary: ‘Don’t think it’s the last time I’m going to ask you, ’cause it isn’t.’ Before he left, Oppenheimer – rather needlessly, but in an evident determination to appear to be cooperative – volunteered the suspicion that Bernard Peters was involved in the Communist Party: ‘I know that he was in Germany, and that he was actually in prison there, and I also know that he has always expressed a very great interest in the Communists, and I think whether he is a member or not would perhaps partly depend on whether he was a citizen or whether he was working on a war job.’

  While Lansdale was expressing his liking for and admiration of Oppenheimer, Pash was doing his best to expose him as a spy. Ten days before Lansdale’s interview with Oppenheimer, Pash had sent Groves an insistent, slightly nagging
memo, telling him: ‘It is essential that name of professor [that is, the intermediary between Eltenton and Oppenheimer] be made available in order that investigation can continue properly.’ He went on to ‘request names of individuals contacted by professor in order to eliminate unnecessary investigation and following of leads which may come to the attention of this office’. ‘Has anyone,’ he demanded to know, ‘approached JRO at any time while he was connected with the project? If so, was it the professor, Eltenton, or some other party?’

  One imagines that Groves was not used to being addressed in this manner by someone of lower rank and that he did not much care for Pash’s tone or for Pash himself, who was, in his obsessive pursuit of Oppenheimer, in danger of becoming a nuisance. Nevertheless when he, Oppenheimer and Lansdale travelled together on a train to Chicago a day or two after Oppenheimer’s interview with Lansdale, Groves took the opportunity to put to Oppenheimer the questions Pash had raised with him. The topics discussed were summarised in a memo by Lansdale dated 14 September. According to this memo, Oppenheimer’s attitude to Lomanitz had hardened somewhat since his discussion with Lansdale a day or two earlier. Whereas then he had described his discussion with Lomanitz as ‘pretty unsuccessful, or at least only partially successful’, now he described it as ‘very unsatisfactory’ and Lomanitz himself as ‘defiant’. The memo goes on: ‘Oppenheimer was sorry that he had ever had anything to do with him [Lomanitz], and he did not desire any further connection with him.’ With regard to the name of the Berkeley professor who had acted as Eltenton’s intermediary, Lansdale’s memo states:

  Oppenheimer’s attitude was that he would give the name of the intermediate contact at the University of California if pressed to do so, and told by General Groves that we had to have it, but that he did not want to do so because he did not believe that any further contacts had been made and was confident that the contacts that had been with the project had not produced any information. He intimated further that it was a question of getting friends of his into difficulties and causing unnecessary troubles when no useful purpose could be served.

  Groves then put several names to Oppenheimer that Pash had suggested as possibilities for the people this intermediary had contacted. Among them was Al Flanigan, ‘who now appears’, wrote Lansdale, ‘from subsequent developments to be the contact’. Oppenheimer told Groves and Lansdale that he did not know Flanigan except casually, ‘but that he had the reputation of being a real “Red”’. This, presumably, ruled Flanigan out, since Oppenheimer had previously said he knew the three contacts rather well. As far as one can tell from the memo, the rest of the conversation was taken up with Oppenheimer telling Groves and Lansdale what they already knew: that Kitty, Frank and Charlotte Serber had been Communist Party members and that he himself, though not a member of the party, had been a member of several Communist Party front organisations.

  Possibly the most significant thing to emerge from this train conversation was the weakness of Oppenheimer’s loyalty to Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, all of whom were henceforth to face whatever difficulties their loyalty to the Communist Party brought them without much in the way of support from Oppenheimer. Lomanitz had tried extremely hard to find jobs on the West Coast that would entitle him to defer his draft, but every time he was offered such a post, the offer would be withdrawn before he could be issued with such a deferment. On one occasion Friedman, who had just bought a new Pontiac, drove Lomanitz around the Bay area looking for work, and they found a new company that made radar tubes and were interested in hiring Lomanitz. As Lomanitz later remembered it, when the man in charge started haggling about wages, he said to him: ‘Look. I’m making $300 a month right now. I’ll go to work for you for half that if you’ll just send in immediately a request for my deferment.’ He was offered the job, and the man duly applied for deferment. The next day, however, Lomanitz was told by his local draft board that the application had been withdrawn. Friedman, meanwhile, was advised by his former employers at Berkeley that he would do better if he moved out of the area.

  So it was that Lomanitz and Friedman left Berkeley on the same day, 23 September, Friedman dropping Lomanitz off at the army induction centre before setting off for Denver, Colorado, looking for a new job. Before they left, the two of them drafted a letter to Oppenheimer, explaining the problems they had been experiencing (‘Promised jobs kept disappearing at the last moment’) and stating as their ‘firm conviction’ that ‘union discrimination is the cause of all that has happened’. The night before they left, Weinberg hosted a farewell party for them at his apartment, where he was heard by counter-intelligence agents, listening to the conversation via the microphones they had installed, telling them that, in the words of an agent’s report, ‘he didn’t believe Max [Friedman] was in his present predicament because of his Union affiliations but because of something else’. A few days later, Lomanitz tried calling Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, but Oppenheimer refused to take the call.

  Throughout the following months, Groves and Lansdale continued to insist to suspicious colleagues in the security services that, as Groves put it to a G-2 officer, Oppenheimer ‘will continue to be loyal to the United States’. Groves, especially, did not want Oppenheimer to be distracted from his work at the laboratory by insistent and incessant questioning about his communist past and associates. He wanted Oppenheimer to get on with the job of building a bomb. Pash, meanwhile, devoted a great deal of time to trying to identify Eltenton’s intermediary and contacts, making lists of suspects – invariably drawn from the physics and chemistry departments at Berkeley – which he distributed to G-2 and the FBI offices. At Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Pash recalled how Oppenheimer’s mention of, but refusal to name, a contact of Eltenton’s who had gone, or was about to go, to Oak Ridge involved him in a ‘tedious project’: ‘We had to go through files, try to find out who was going to go to site X.’ By this means he identified just one suspect, ‘and I took measures to stop – at least I asked General Groves to stop the man’s movement to that area’. Another time, according to Philip Stern, the author of a book on the Oppenheimer security case, one of the people identified by Pash as a candidate for one of Eltenton’s contacts ‘suddenly, and without prior indication, boarded the Daylight, the crack San Francisco–Los Angeles train’:

  In order to gain time to get his agent to Los Angeles, Pash ordered the train stopped en route. Unhappily, his order was carried out in a most peremptory and undiplomatic way. Railroad officials were outraged. They complained to the commanding general, but since Pash’s project was ultrasecret, Pash had not informed his superiors of his actions; nor could they pry any information out of the Colonel even after the rude train-stopping was traced to him. The ironic footnote is that the object of Pash’s pursuit turned out to have nothing whatever to do with the case.

  In November 1943, Groves seized upon a perfect opportunity to get Pash off the case and to make more constructive use of his bloodhound instincts. The opportunity arose as a result of the turning fortunes of the Allies. The past year had seen a series of decisive Allied victories that left no doubt that the question was not whether but when the Nazis would be defeated. In November 1942, the British under General Montgomery had routed Rommel’s army at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, while the Americans landed a huge force in Morocco and Algeria, ready to link up with the British. In January 1943, the Russians won the hard-fought and extremely bloody Battle of Stalingrad, forcing the Germans to begin their long retreat from Russia and Eastern Europe. Six months later, in July 1943, the Russians beat the Germans in the massive tank battle at Kursk, and an Allied force of British, Canadian and American soldiers landed in Sicily, preparing to move through Italy. In September, the Italians surrendered and the following month declared war on Germany, whose forces still occupied much of Italy. Plans were afoot for two major Allied landings: the first in Anzio, in preparation for retaking Rome and driving the Germans out of Italy, and the second in Normandy, in preparation for retaking Par
is and driving the Germans out of France. Meanwhile, the Russians were making steady progress pushing the Germans out of Poland.

  In his Thanksgiving Day proclamation of 25 November 1943, President Roosevelt was able to find much for which to give thanks:

  God’s help to us has been great in this year of the march towards world-wide liberty. In brotherhood with warriors of other United Nations our gallant men have won victories, have freed our homes from fear, have made tyranny tremble, and have laid the foundation for freedom of life in a world which will be free.

  It is a proclamation that captures the tone of that time. Very few people doubted that the Allies would win the war. One very important question, however, remained unanswered and, for many who understood its importance, the optimism they felt about the seemingly inevitable defeat of the Nazis was tempered by anxiety. That question was: how far had the Germans got in building an atomic bomb? After all, everyone knew that, in Heisenberg, the Germans had someone who was, from a scientific point of view, every bit as able as Oppenheimer to exploit the tremendous energy released by nuclear fission in the manufacture of a deadly weapon. And, in persuading scientists to come to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer would almost invariably make use of this anxiety, arguing that it was important for everyone who could be useful to the project to join it, because not only was it of the utmost importance that the Allies beat the Germans in this deadly race, but the Germans had got a head-start.