by Close, Frank
AMALDI IS SEVENTY
By 1978 Bruno had given up all hope of visiting Italy. One day, however, a message arrived at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, encouraging the group to send a delegate to Rome to take part in a celebration of Edoardo Amaldi’s seventieth birthday. Amaldi, with whom Bruno had first shared the discovery that led to the slow-neutron method; Amaldi, the father of CERN, who had indirectly inspired the Warsaw Pact’s own high-energy physics program at Dubna; Amaldi, one of Europe’s most influential living physicists. Bruno Pontecorvo was the natural candidate to attend this event.
However, no one in the Academy nominated him, and Bruno himself said nothing. Another delegate was chosen instead.
That, at any rate, is how Bruno described things to Miriam Mafai.30 However, it is hard to believe that this is the whole story. The episode is reminiscent of Pontecorvo’s behavior when Fuchs visited Dubna, his silence a response to orders from above. Then fortune smiled. At the last minute the chosen delegate fell ill and could not go. Someone (Bruno says he never knew who) suggested that the Academy send “Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo” as a replacement. It is not known why the powers that be had a change of heart. There seems to have been a division of opinion at the highest level. Bruno recalled that after he received permission to go, the local KGB tried to dissuade him. They said that it would be safer for him to go to Switzerland or France because in Italy he might be surrounded by police and harassed by the media. He responded unequivocally: “I don’t want to go to France; I don’t want to go to Switzerland. I want to go to Italy.”31
Which he did. On September 6, 1978, almost twenty-eight years to the day since he had left Rome for the USSR, Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo returned.
WHEN ITALY HEARD THAT THE PRODIGAL SON WAS ABOUT TO RETURN, Bruno got a foretaste of the excitement. On the eve of his departure a journalist telephoned him from Rome. Bruno was polite but firm, explaining that the purpose of his visit was to celebrate Edoardo Amaldi’s seventieth birthday, and that he would not give any interviews. The caller pointed out that the return of Bruno Pontecorvo would be such a big story that journalists would besiege him when he arrived. Bruno repeated his statement, and hung up. Perhaps there was some truth to the KGB’s warning. The KGB duly provided Bruno with two minders to accompany him to Italy, masquerading as physics colleagues.
On the morning of September 6, Bruno arrived at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Press photographers vied for the best shots as he entered the terminal, and the flash bulbs of their cameras nearly blinded him. Journalists fired questions as they thrust microphones under his nose. A newsreel camera whirred into action.
Bruno had prepared a statement, which he repeated in response to the reporters’ questions. It confirmed the essential message of his 1955 press conference, the only other occasion since 1950 that he’d spoken to the general public: “I have never worked on the atomic bomb, or the H-bomb, not in the West nor in the USSR.”32 He praised Edoardo Amaldi, Italian physics in general, and Enrico Fermi, who had helped him so much in his career. He said that he had gone to the USSR of his own accord, and had complete freedom of research there. He refused to be drawn into making further comments.
Gillo Pontecorvo, who had come to the airport to see his brother, fought his way through the throng to reach Bruno. There were tears as the two embraced on Italian soil for the first time in nearly thirty years. Bruno finally escaped the crowds and spent the afternoon at his sister Giuliana’s home in Cetona, a village near Siena. His KGB limpets came too.
In 1978 Giuliana’s son Eugenio Tabet was a young professor of physics, and he suspected that Bruno’s bodyguards were not physics colleagues. So he decided to “set them a test.” He explained: “At the side of my mother’s house was a wood-burning stove. It was a good approximation to what physicists call a blackbody radiator. So I asked the guard what wavelength he thought the radiation would be. I wasn’t looking for a precise answer. I just wanted [to get] a feel of whether the question made any sense to him. I can’t recall exactly how he responded. But it was total nonsense!”33
For many of the physicists at the conference, it was their first meeting with the legendary Bruno Pontecorvo. Many old friends were seeing him for the first time in decades. There is a famous photo from this time, showing Bruno with Edoardo Amaldi and Emilio Segrè. Edoardo’s son Ugo, a leading physicist himself, described the reality behind the image: “The photo shows them all smiling. That was just for the camera. I was there the first time Emilio and Bruno met. It was very cool. The handshake was formality, no more. Emilio was [still] very unhappy about the patent.”34 Little seemed to have changed since their meeting in Kiev in 1959.
REUNIFICATION
When Bruno returned to Dubna, he shared his experiences with Tania Blokhintseva, daughter of Dmitri Blokhintsev, the first director of JINR at Dubna: “Bruno was absolutely astonished. [It was so long since] he had seen Italy. He said to me, ‘You know—the carabinieri—they were very polite.’ The amount of traffic made it difficult to cross the road. He was very happy there.”35
Reading the media accounts of Bruno’s return to Italy in 1978, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was the first time a Pontecorvo had emerged from the Iron Curtain to visit the West. However, Bruno’s eldest son, Gil, had actually broken the ice three years earlier, with a trip to Italy in 1975.
When Gil mentioned this to me, almost en passant, I was astonished.
He explained that he had traveled to Turin to work with a team of physicists, who have since served as his collaborators in CERN experiments for several decades. Gil confirmed that he had been allowed to leave Soviet territory even though his brother Tito had not: “He was the head of [an oceanographic] team but was not allowed to leave the boat. . . . There is no logic to [Soviet] bureaucracy!”
I imagined Bruno in 1975, still trapped behind the Iron Curtain while his eldest son was in Italy. “When you returned to Dubna, what did Bruno say?” I asked.
“I don’t remember it in detail, but you can guess,” Gil replied, giving a gentle laugh. He did remember the trip itself, however: “I had a big meeting with the Italian family.”
I interjected: “You had seen some in Moscow of course.”
“Yes, but this meeting was with the whole clan. There were people there who hadn’t seen me since the old times in England.” He laughed again, as he recalled what sounded like an inquisition: “It was like a sort of interview. It went on for four hours! Questions like: how can you explain this, how do you explain that? I was sweating at the end. It was all in Italian.”36
Perhaps Gil’s successful exit, and safe return to the USSR, helped loosen the straitjacket that entrapped his father. Three years later, the Soviet authorities must have been satisfied with Bruno’s performance too, as his 1978 trip to Italy became the start of a regular pilgrimage. The following year he was back in Rome as a guest of the Italian-Soviet Society. He had been invited to give a physics lecture, and those who knew him noticed that a change was taking place: with his trembling movements, Bruno was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s disease.
During this visit his itinerary gave him a chance to travel around some of Italy. After two-thirds of a lifetime, he returned to his hometown of Pisa. The villa where he had grown up was still there, but had been converted into a hotel. He also visited Tuscany, whose countryside he loved but had not seen for decades; he had feared that he would never set eyes on it again.
Now that the Soviets were more relaxed about him, Bruno returned to Italy each year. In 1982, he sought to visit France as well, to attend a symposium on the history of fundamental particle physics. Unfortunately, this was not to be. France refused him.37
The scientific community, meanwhile, held him in high esteem. Although he sent a paper to the symposium that was read in his absence, many participants were upset that he could not be there in person. They sent him a card, signed “vos amis vous saluent” (greetings from your friends). The signers included old friends su
ch as Edoardo Amaldi and Pierre Auger, Nobel laureates C. N. Yang and Julian Schwinger, as well as future laureates (and fellow neutrino chasers) Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger.
Most physicists regarded Bruno as an international leader in the field of neutrinos, caring little about his past or insisting that he could never have been a spy. Nonetheless, the governments of France and several other Western nations remained suspicious. These attitudes persisted even though no evidence was ever presented against him.
Peter Minkowski, a particle theorist, recalled one example of the West’s hostility toward Pontecorvo. In the early 1980s Minkowski was working at Caltech in Pasadena. He had written a paper that anticipated work by Bruno and Samoil Bilenky, and was eager to meet Bruno to discuss physics. During this time, a senior official in charge of nuclear physics at the US Energy Department visited Caltech. Minkowski suggested to him that Pontecorvo be invited to the United States. In Minkowski’s memory, “He went pale. Then he said we cannot do that; there’s a warrant for his arrest.”
It is hard to know how reliable this story is. Many years have passed and, if such a warrant ever existed, the proof is either lost or overlaid with black ink in the US security files. In any case, no invitation was issued, so the crisis was avoided. At the end of our conversation, Minkowski was in a reflective mood. He repeated to me, quietly: “He went pale.”38
In 1984, celebrations were held in Paris to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of induced radioactivity. Once more Bruno was unable to attend. He sent an article instead, which reviewed his early work in Paris on nuclear isomers. There was no restriction that prevented French citizens from visiting Dubna, however, and in June 1984 Bruno met with Hélène Langevin, the daughter of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, whom Bruno had taught to ski in 1939. Colleagues recalled that both had tears in their eyes.39
The French authorities eventually relented and lifted their ban. In 1989 Bruno returned to Paris for a week. He visited his old haunts at the Curie Institute (formerly the Radium Institute), and on September 11 he led a seminar at the Collège de France. During his talk, he recalled his encounters with Fermi, Joliot-Curie, and other great scientists of the prewar period. Unfortunately, Parkinson’s disease limited his range of movement, and whereas in the past he used to walk up and down the stage during lectures, energizing his audience, he now stood at the podium, speaking elegantly and vivaciously but occasionally having to take a rest as the trembling took over.
Ugo Amaldi recalled Bruno’s visit to CERN on September 14, 1989. At the time, Ugo was the leader of an experiment at CERN’s Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), one of whose achievements was to demonstrate that there are indeed three, and only three, varieties of standard neutrinos. Bruno was thrilled as he and Amaldi visited the collider, located 100 meters underground, at the CERN complex near Geneva. The splendor of the apparatus, which consisted of several layers of sophisticated electronics, wrapped in cylinders the size of a cathedral, was breathtaking. One of the features of Parkinson’s disease is that its symptoms become more manifest when the sufferer becomes excited, and Bruno began to shake.
Later that day he was scheduled to give a talk in the CERN auditorium, in front of several hundred scientists, who were very eager to hear him. Ugo recalled that, immediately before the talk, “Bruno was really shaking.” Nonetheless, Bruno composed himself, and after an introduction by Jack Steinberger he began to speak. His once-vibrant tones were now faint, yet still commanded authority. Suddenly the shaking began, and he paused. “Don’t pay any attention to my tremors,” he told the audience. “This Parkinson’s disease looks much worse than it is.” Then, to settle them, he deployed his everlasting sense of humor: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to die.”40
THE LONG CHILL
After the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union itself began to crumble, Bruno reevaluated his life and the circumstances that had brought him to Russia. In 1990, at the age of seventy-seven, Bruno gave an extensive series of interviews to Miriam Mafai, a communist Italian journalist. These formed the basis for her study of his time in the Soviet Union. Titled Il lungo freddo (The long chill), the book paints a picture of Bruno Pontecorvo as he would have wished to be seen. It has also provided invaluable source material for the present work.41
Bruno, his eyes perhaps having been opened by his visits to the West, realized what he had lost during his years in the USSR. It was at this stage of his life, when barriers were relaxed thanks to the Soviet policy of détente, that he made his startling admission to a journalist from the London Independent: “I was a cretin.”42 He seemed to regret his former unwavering support of the Soviet agenda, and the experience had left him sad, as his extended interviews with Mafai also showed.
He had fled to the USSR in 1950, enthused by the hopes symbolized by the red star atop the Kremlin. He was forbidden from contacting the West for five years, and then allowed only to send letters for twenty. Except for the siblings who came to see him in the USSR, he had no contact with his family during this time. Only in 1978 was Bruno freed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain and make contact with relatives, friends, and colleagues in the West. The most poignant meeting was his reunion with his sister Anna. They had not seen each other since August 28, 1950, the day she had returned to England from their fateful vacation. At long last, in the 1980s, brother and sister were reunited.
If anyone deserved an explanation of Bruno’s precipitous disappearance, Anna would be near the top of the list. In 2011, I met her at Cambridge’s Churchill College, whose archives contain letters and documents from Bruno’s Abingdon home. After I had been waiting for some time, a stooping, white-haired lady came slowly across the quad. Although we had never met, I immediately recognized her: she had the strong nose and long face of her brother.
Anna was now Bruno’s only surviving sibling. She smiled wistfully as she recalled seeing Bruno in Rome, where he defied Parkinson’s disease by playing the fool and dodging the cars in the road. So what explanation had Bruno offered her for his flight? After so many years apart—nearly three decades—surely she wanted to understand his behavior? But Anna had not asked. She felt that he had been let down by the USSR and considered himself a fool. “He was so broken by the whole experience,” she recalled, “that I did not want to turn another screw.”43
During Bruno’s final years, his friends and relatives seem to have universally treated such questions as a no-go area. They cite Bruno’s manifest anguish at his Soviet misadventures as their reason for steering clear. Even Gil, who was twelve at the time of the family’s flight to the USSR and old enough to realize that “something was up,” seems to never have discussed the subject during the ensuing four decades. Within the circle of Bruno’s loved ones, there was almost an omertà, a vow of silence. Colleagues outside the family have certainly expressed the opinion, to me and others, that there is a tacit agreement that the subject of Bruno’s departure is taboo. They do not ask why Bruno left so suddenly. In their hearts they suspect the answer, but, by not saying it out loud, it is possible to live within a dream.
LAST MEMORIES
In his seventies, Bruno made several trips to Italy to receive treatment for his Parkinson’s. His eightieth birthday came on August 22, 1993. Knowing he would be visiting France and Italy during this time, his colleagues at the Dubna laboratory planned an autumn celebration of the occasion. In July, he visited France for the last time, and attended an international particle physics conference in Marseille.
By now he often needed assistance, and in Marseilles his nephew Ludo helped him to move around and eat. Lev Okun, a Russian colleague, joined Bruno for lunch at a restaurant, alfresco. The tables were spread across a large patio, at a busy intersection. Bruno chose a table situated so that all the passersby walked between them and the restaurant. Suddenly he turned to Okun as if struck by a sudden insight: “Lev Borisovitch! Have you noticed how the women in Marseilles are not as beautiful as those in Paris?” Okun admitted that he had not,
and hinted that it was an opinion for which there was no true evidence. Bruno advised him, “Just count the number of plain women that pass before an attractive one appears.”44
That was Okun’s final memory of his old friend. Nearly eighty, debilitated by Parkinson’s, with just weeks to live, Bruno was still the charmer with an eye for a pretty girl, and a scientific approach to all aspects of life.
From Marseilles, Bruno went to Italy. He was expected to remain there for several weeks before returning to Dubna. Irina Pokrovskaya, his personal assistant, recalled the surprise among the workers at Dubna when suddenly, without warning, he returned from Italy ahead of schedule. His arrival was so unexpected that there was hardly time for the laboratory director to arrange for a car to meet him at the airport and bring him home. Tania Blokhintseva, the daughter of a former director of Dubna, described his return “as a deliberate act,” as if Bruno was aware that he did not have long to live.45 An informal gathering took place on his birthday, August 22, even though many of his colleagues were still away for the summer.
Bruno continued to come to the laboratory, but in the first days of September Irina Pokrovskaya noticed “an irreversible shadow” on his face. According to her, Bruno was the first to notice the change. During his visits to the laboratory, he was “serene and calm, not wanting to disturb anybody.”46
A month after his birthday, he came to the laboratory for the last time. It was evening and he remarked on the beauty of the “yellow birch trees” that were visible through the window of Irina’s office. Afterward, she escorted him to the laboratory gate, where his son Tito was waiting. Her last memory of him was the fact that he was still joking as they parted.
Two days later, he died. His famed charisma, modesty, and politeness were with him to the end. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, Bruno’s last words to the doctors scurrying around his bed were: “Thank you.”47
