Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  And so a mission was formed to accompany what was confidently assumed would be the successful Allied landings in Europe. Its aim was to determine what progress the Italians and the Nazis had made on the bomb. Heading the scientific side of the mission was Oppenheimer’s old friend from Holland, Sam Goudsmit; heading the military side, so he was informed on the day Roosevelt made his Thanksgiving proclamation, was Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash. The mission was called Alsos, the Greek for ‘Groves’. On 7 December 1943, it left for North Africa, and within a week was in Naples, where it was based for the next few months, during which Pash, Goudsmit and their subordinates tried to find out as much as they could glean from Italian scientists.

  On 27 November, shortly before he left for North Africa, Pash forwarded to Lansdale a memo entitled ‘Possible identity of unnamed professor referred to by Dr J. R. Oppenheimer’, which had been written by Lieutenant James S. Murray, one of Pash’s agents. ‘Efforts of this office during the past month,’ Murray wrote, ‘have been directed in an attempt to ascertain the identity of the professor contact.’ He went on:

  A record check of all professors and associates in both the physics and chemistry departments at the University of California was made with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the results thereof contained in a progress report from this office dated October 20, 1943. A continued survey and check has been made and it is believed that it is entirely possible that the professor might be one of the following.

  Murray then listed nine Berkeley scientists, one of whom was Joe Weinberg, whom he thought were candidates for being the unnamed professor. Of course, Chevalier was not one of those listed, since he was not a physicist or a chemist. With the implication that he had narrowed down the search to those nine people, Pash left Washington for North Africa.

  A week or so after Pash left the US, those nine names were put aside after the true identity of Eltenton’s intermediary was at last revealed. On 12 December, during a visit to Los Alamos, Groves called Oppenheimer to his office and ordered him to reveal the intermediary. Oppenheimer duly named Chevalier, but did not admit that he himself was the person whom Chevalier had contacted for information on Eltenton’s behalf. The following day, Lansdale wrote to the FBI, telling them what they surely ought to have known already: that Oppenheimer had told army security that three members of the atomic-bomb project had, as Lansdale put it, ‘advised him that they were approached by an unnamed professor at the University of California to commit espionage’.

  Lansdale went on to provide the fresh information that, having been ordered to name the professor, Oppenheimer had named Chevalier. The same day, Colonel Nichols, Groves’s second-in-command, sent telegrams to Lieutenant Johnson in Berkeley, de Silva in Santa Fe and the security officer at Oak Ridge, telling them that Oppenheimer had named Chevalier as Eltenton’s intermediary. The telegrams differed slightly (the one to de Silva, for example, mistakenly referred to Chevalier as a professor at the Rad Lab), but all three stated that Oppenheimer had expressed the belief that Chevalier had not approached anyone ‘other than [the] three original attempts’.

  When Lansdale was asked at Oppenheimer’s security hearing to recall the first time he heard that Haakon Chevalier was the man he and (more strenuously) Pash had been trying to identify since the previous August, he was puzzled that his memory of the event did not match the written record. What he remembered, he said, was that Oppenheimer, at the time he named Chevalier, also revised his previous account about the three contacts, saying that there had actually been just one contact and that was his brother, Frank. Having read the contemporaneous documents, Lansdale testified, he could see that ‘the information was that the contact was with three persons . . . I have no explanation as to how I translate it from three into one.’ And he went on: ‘I called General Groves last night and discussed it with him in an attempt to fathom that and I can’t figure it out. But the record shows clearly that there were three.’

  Groves was also puzzled. Asked whether he recalled the conversation in which Oppenheimer revealed Chevalier’s name to him, he replied: ‘Yes, but I have seen so many versions of it. I don’t think I was confused before, but I am certainly starting to become confused today.’ ‘It was always my impression that he wanted to protect his brother,’ Groves added.

  So the contemporaneous telegrams tell one story, Lansdale’s memory tells another, and Groves’s somewhat confused recollection seems, rather shakily, to support Lansdale. To add to the confusion, Oppenheimer told a third version of his conversation with Groves. According to Oppenheimer: ‘When I did identify Chevalier, which was to General Groves, I told him of course that there were not three people, that this had occurred in our house, that this was me.’

  Oppenheimer’s claim that he told Groves the only person Chevalier had contacted was himself is not supported by any record or any recollection and can, I think, be discounted, since it is contradicted by every other account. The question that remains, then, is: did he, as the telegrams sent out on 13 December 1943 suggest, stick with his story that Chevalier had contacted three people, or did he, as Lansdale’s memory and Groves’s less clear impression indicate, tell Groves that the story of the three contacts had been a ‘cock and bull story’, and that there had been only one contact and that contact was Frank?

  The answer seems to be the latter. In FBI interviews with Groves, Lansdale and the US army lawyer Major William Consodine, the following story emerges: when ordered to name Eltenton’s intermediary, Oppenheimer named Chevalier. When asked to name Chevalier’s three contacts, however, Oppenheimer agreed to do so only on condition that Groves kept the names to himself, and, in particular, that he did not pass the names on to the FBI. Assuming that the three were Lomanitz, Weinberg and Bohm or Friedman – and therefore already under surveillance – Groves agreed. Oppenheimer then told him that there had been only one contact, namely Frank. When Groves returned to Washington, he discussed Oppenheimer’s response with Lansdale and Consodine, and asked them whether he should be bound by his promise to Oppenheimer not to reveal Frank’s name to the FBI. Consodine argued that he was not bound, because the demands of national security overrode those of a personal promise. Groves, however, was worried that, if he revealed Frank’s name to the FBI, Oppenheimer would leave the project and – as Groves had long believed that Oppenheimer was essential to the project – that was, to him, more or less unthinkable.

  So Groves honoured his promise not to reveal Frank’s name to the FBI, and the telegrams that were sent out to the various army-security offices duly maintained Oppenheimer’s original ‘cock and bull story’ about there being three contacts. Meanwhile, Lansdale, uncharacteristically and quite possibly uniquely, disobeyed Groves.fn51 ‘I remember distinctly,’ Lansdale was to tell the security hearing of 1954, ‘going over to the FBI and visiting Mr [E. A.] Tamm, who was then, I believe, assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, and Mr [Lish] Whitson, who was the FBI Communist expert, [and telling them] that it was Frank Oppenheimer and that we had got that information, or that General Groves had obtained that information, on the express term that it would not be passed on.’ He added:

  Nothing could be clearer in my memory than that incident of going over at night and talking to Tamm and Whitson. Nothing could be clearer in my memory than General Groves’s direction that I was not to pass it on to anybody, which I promptly violated in a very unmilitary manner . . . General Groves told me that, but I found it necessary to violate General Groves’s direction in that regard and to give to the Bureau the identity of Frank Oppenheimer.

  Just as Groves seems not to have let Nichols in on the secret, so Hoover and Tamm seem to have kept their own subordinates in the dark – at least for a while. By 5 March 1944, however, the story about Frank must have become known to FBI agents investigating the communist infiltration of the Rad Lab, since it is mentioned in a memo of that date entitled ‘Cinrad’. The memo was written by FBI agent William Harvey and says that, after conferring with Groves, Oppenheimer ‘fin
ally stated that only one person had been approached by Chevalier, that one person being his brother, Frank Oppenheimer’.

  What seems to have bothered Groves (and almost everybody who subsequently investigated the matter – including the FBI, army security, lawyers, journalists, historians and biographers) amazingly little about this story is that it stands no chance whatsoever of being true. If Chevalier approached Frank (and there is no evidence at all that he did, and prima facie evidence, in the form of denials by both Chevalier and Frank, that he did not), then it is not true that he approached only one person, since by Oppenheimer’s and Chevalier’s own admissions, Chevalier did approach Oppenheimer. So either Frank and Chevalier were lying, and Chevalier approached both Frank and Robert Oppenheimer – in which case, Oppenheimer was lying to Groves about there being only one contact – or Chevalier did not approach Frank, in which case the story Oppenheimer told Groves in December 1943 is every bit as much (and quite possibly more) of a’cock and bull story’ as the one he had told Pash in October. Either way, if his aim had been to protect Chevalier, that had gone horribly wrong. If his aim had been to protect Frank, then he had achieved partial and temporary success. If, on the other hand, his aim had been to protect himself, at least for as long as it took to build the bomb, then he had achieved complete success, but only because, given Groves’s determination to keep him as director of Los Alamos, almost nothing he could have done would have resulted in failure in that regard.

  Shortly before he named Chevalier to Groves, Oppenheimer had exchanged some very warm and sympathetic letters with him. In November 1943, Chevalier, not knowing where Oppenheimer was or what he was working on, wrote him what he later described as an ‘SOS call’. ‘Are you still in this world?’ he wrote to his old friend. ‘Yes, I know you are, but I am less sure about myself. I am in deep trouble. All my foundations seem to have been knocked out from under me, and I am alone dangling in space, with no ties, no hope, no future, only a past – such as it is.’ ‘I am close to despair,’ he went on, ‘and in such a moment, I think of you and I wish you were about to talk to.’

  I don’t know if this will reach you, which is the reason why I do not write you more. I should like to hear from you if you can spare time for the personally human, in these days when the human seems to become depersonalised.

  On 3 December – having in the meantime, to his astonishment and delight, received a reply – Chevalier wrote again: ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to receive your warm and unmistakably Oppjesque letter. I was startled, too, for when I wrote my SOS call I had no hope of receiving an answer.’ His despair, he explained, was partly to do with the break-up of his marriage, but also to do with his unwillingness, after a year’s sabbatical, to return to teaching at Berkeley when he felt that, in the middle of the war, there were so many more important jobs to be done:

  I am, I suppose, in a sense a symbol of our time – perhaps an unimportant and negative one. I have certain talents, strong feelings and convictions and a definite capacity for work – and I have no place in this world. I feel very close to people and to the important problems of our time, and yet I seem to be unable to get into a position where I can fulfil an important function.

  Chevalier was writing from New York. He told Oppenheimer:

  The specific reason I came here was to get a war-job. I came here with very good sponsorship – in fact I was asked to come here to work in the OWI [Office of War Information] and eventually be sent overseas in the Outpost Division. I have been here since the first of September and the job is still hanging fire, so to speak, for reasons that you know. I am investigating all possibilities, but it is likely that I will find the same obstacles elsewhere. Meanwhile my money ran out . . . I nearly got a job on Time at $150 a week a few weeks ago, but again was blocked in the last round on the same grounds.

  In January 1944, Chevalier learned that his application for clearance for his proposed job at the Office of War Information had been rejected. In his memoir of his friendship with Oppenheimer, Chevalier recalls how, after four months of waiting to hear about his application for security clearance, he was called into the office of Joe Barnes from the Office of War Information:

  His face was somber. He had just come back from Washington and there, exceptionally, he had been shown my FBI file. He said it contained allegations that were so fantastic as to be utterly unbelievable. ‘Someone obviously has it in for you,’ he said.

  Chevalier did not learn until many years later exactly what these allegations were that had cost him his job at the OWI. ‘The last thing I could have imagined was that they had anything to do with Opje.’

  For the rest of the war, and for some time after that, Chevalier was put under close surveillance by the FBI, whose agents monitored his every move. He himself seems to have remained entirely unaware that he was being trailed, watched and listened to. For the first six months of 1944 he stayed in New York, earning a living as a journalist, translator and interpreter, before returning to California and eventually to teaching at Berkeley. Not until after the war was he interviewed by the FBI. Until then they were evidently hoping that their surveillance of him would lead to more information about Soviet espionage, which it did not.

  The surveillance of Jean Tatlock, meanwhile, had been in operation since the end of August 1943 and had continued even after Pash’s departure in November, the FBI evidently sharing Pash’s view that she might be a go-between for Oppenheimer and the Soviet Union. By the time the Los Alamos laboratory was up and running, however, Jean Tatlock had little interest in politics, consumed as she was by more personal anxieties. On 5 January 1944, Charlotte Serber received a telegram from a friend of Jean’s in Berkeley, Mary Ellen Washburn, telling her that Jean had committed suicide the previous day and asking her to break the news to Oppenheimer. She took the telegram to her husband, who in turn went to see Oppenheimer. ‘When I got to his office,’ Robert Serber writes in his autobiography, ‘I saw by his face that he had already heard. He was deeply grieved.’

  Jean’s body had been discovered by her father the morning after she died. Worried that she had not been answering her phone, he had gone to her apartment, where, after getting no reply by ringing the doorbell, he climbed in through a window. He found her in the bath, her head submerged in water. On her dining-room table he found a suicide note, saying that she had become ‘disgusted with everything’, that she thought she ‘would have been a liability all my life’, and that, in killing herself, she felt that ‘at least I could take away the burden of a paralysed soul from a fighting world’.

  How had Oppenheimer heard the news of Jean’s suicide before Serber could tell him? The answer seems to be through the security services’ surveillance of her apartment. According to Bird and Sherwin’s biography of Oppenheimer, Captain Peer de Silva – a man committed to Pash’s view that Oppenheimer and Tatlock were engaged in espionage – claims in an unpublished manuscript to have been the person who first informed Oppenheimer that Jean had killed herself. When told, de Silva writes, Oppenheimer ‘went on at considerable length about the depth of his emotion for Jean, saying that there was really no one else to whom he could speak’. Bird and Sherwin, citing several instances of de Silva getting his facts wrong (for instance, de Silva asserts wrongly that Jean had cut her throat), insist: ‘De Silva is not a reliable observer, and it is not credible that Oppenheimer would confide in him.’ That de Silva is not a reliable witness is demonstrably true, and that Oppenheimer would not treat him as a confidant is almost certainly also correct. However, I find it entirely plausible to suppose that, apart from Jean’s distraught father, the first people to learn of her suicide were the FBI and G-2, and, though Oppenheimer had no reason to regard de Silva as someone in whom to confide, I also find it perfectly believable that he responded to the news in the way that de Silva reports. After all, Oppenheimer obviously at this stage did not realise quite how deeply de Silva held him in contempt or how suspicious he was of him.

  On
6 January, the day after Oppenheimer learned of Jean’s suicide, de Silva wrote a memo to the army security agent Captain Calvert at Oak Ridge, headed ‘Conversation with J.R. Oppenheimer’, in which he reported the substance of a talk that he had had with Oppenheimer en route to Santa Fe. ‘During the course of the conversation,’ de Silva wrote, ‘Oppenheimer touched on the subject of what persons at Berkeley were in his opinion truly dangerous.’

  He named David Joseph Bohm and Bernard Peters as being so. Oppenheimer stated, however, that somehow he did not believe that Bohm’s temperament and personality were those of a dangerous person and implied that his dangerousness lay in the possibility of his being influenced by others. Peters, on the other hand, he described as a ‘crazy person’ and one whose actions would be unpredictable. He described Peters as being ‘quite a Red’ and stated that his background was filled with incidents which indicated his tendency toward direct action.

  When presented later with de Silva’s description of this conversation, Oppenheimer doubted its accuracy. The tone was wrong, he thought, and he also doubted that he had ever said Bohm was dangerous, since he was certain that he had never believed he was. He also rejected the implication in de Silva’s memo that he himself had initiated the conversation and volunteered the opinion that Bohm and Peters were dangerous. ‘I think,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘what I was asked by de Silva [was] “Here are four names, Bohm, Weinberg, and somebody else and Peters; which of these would you regard as the most likely to be dangerous”, and I think I answered Peters?’

  Even if we accept Oppenheimer’s version of the conversation, it is impossible to avoid the impression that he betrayed someone who had been his student and his political comrade, if not his friend, and whose wife had been for a time his doctor. And, as he was repeatedly asked at his security case, if he considered Peters to be unpredictable, crazy and potentially dangerous, why, in the autumn of 1942, had he asked Peters and his wife to come to Los Alamos? His unconvincing answer was that he believed that, though Peters had been a member of the Communist Party in Germany, he had ceased to be so during the time of his friendship with Oppenheimer, and that Peters was not dangerous in October 1942, but became so after he had turned down Oppenheimer’s invitation to come to work at Los Alamos.