American Prometheus (35 page)

IN THE SPRING OF 1943, just as David Bohm was trying to write up his thesis research on the collisions of protons and deuterons, he was suddenly told that such work was classified. Since he lacked the necessary security clearance, his own notes on scattering calculations were seized and he was informed that he was barred from writing up his own research. He appealed to Oppenheimer, who then wrote a letter certifying that his student had nevertheless met the requirements for a thesis. On this basis, Bohm was awarded his Ph.D. by Berkeley in June 1943. Although Oppenheimer personally requested the transfer of Bohm to Los Alamos, Army security officers flatly refused to give him clearance. Instead, a disbelieving Oppenheimer was told that because Bohm still had relatives in Germany, he couldn’t be cleared for special work. This was a lie; in fact Bohm was banned from Los Alamos because of his association with Weinberg. He spent the war years working in the Radiation Lab, where he studied the behavior of plasmas.

Although barred from working on the Manhattan Project, Bohm was able to continue his work as a physicist. Lomanitz and several others were not so fortunate. Shortly after Ernest Lawrence appointed him to serve as the liaison between the Rad Lab and the Manhattan Project’s plant at Oak Ridge, Lomanitz received a draft notice from the Army. Both Lawrence and Oppenheimer interceded for him, but to no avail. Lomanitz spent the remainder of the war years in various stateside Army camps.

Max Friedman was called in and fired from his job in the Radiation Lab. He taught physics for a while at the University of Wyoming, and late in the war, Phil Morrison got him a job at the Met Lab in Chicago. But security officers caught up to him after six months there, and he was fired. After the war, when his name surfaced in the HUAC investigations into atomic spying, the only job he could get was at the University of Puerto Rico. Like Lomanitz, Friedman had been associated with union organizing within the Rad Lab for Local 25 of FAECT. Army intelligence officers equated such activities with subversive tendencies and they easily jumped to the conclusion that they should get rid of Lomanitz and Friedman.

As for Weinberg, he was put under close surveillance, and when no other evidence emerged to connect him to espionage, he too was drafted and sent to an Army post in Alaska.

Shortly before leaving for Los Alamos, Oppenheimer phoned Steve Nelson and asked his friend to meet him at a local restaurant. They met for lunch in an eatery on Berkeley’s main strip. “He appeared excited to the point of nervousness,” Nelson later wrote. Over a big mug of coffee, Robert told him, “I just want to say good-bye to you . . . and I hope to see you when the war is over.” He explained that he couldn’t say where he was going, but that it had something to do with the war effort. Nelson merely asked if Kitty was going with him, and then the two friends chatted about the war news. As they parted, Robert commented that it was too bad the Spanish Loyalists hadn’t managed to hold out a little longer “so that we could have buried Franco and Hitler in the same grave.” Writing later, in his memoirs, Nelson noted that this was the last time he ever saw Oppenheimer, “for Robert’s connection with the Party had been tenuous at best, anyway.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“The Chevalier A fair”

I talked to Chevalier and Chevalier talked to Oppenheimer,
and Oppenheimer said he didn’t want to have anything to do
with this.

GEORGE ELTENTON

A MAN’S LIFE CAN TURN on a small event, and for Robert Oppenheimer such an incident occurred in the winter of 1942–43 in the kitchen of his Eagle Hill home. It was merely a brief conversation with a friend. But what was said, and how Oppie chose to deal with it, so shaped the remainder of his life that one is drawn to comparisons with the tragedies of classical Greece and Shakespeare. It became known as “the Chevalier affair,” and over time it took on some of the qualities of
Rashomon,
the 1951 film by Akira Kurosawa in which descriptions of an event vary according to the perspective of each participant.

Knowing that they would soon be leaving Berkeley, the Oppenheimers invited the Chevaliers to their home for a quiet dinner. They counted Haakon and Barbara among their closest friends and wanted to share with them a special farewell. When the Chevaliers arrived, Oppie went into the kitchen to prepare a tray of martinis. Hoke followed, and relayed a recent conversation he had had with their mutual acquaintance George C. Eltenton, a British-born physicist educated at Cambridge employed by the Shell Oil Company.

Exactly what each man said is lost to history; neither made contemporaneous notes of the conversation. At the time, neither appears to have considered it a momentous exchange, even though the topic was an outrageous proposal. Eltenton, Chevalier reported, had solicited him to ask his friend Oppenheimer to pass information about his scientific work to a diplomat Eltenton knew in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco.

By all accounts—Chevalier’s, Oppenheimer’s and Eltenton’s—Oppie angrily told Hoke that he was talking about “treason” and that he should have nothing to do with Eltenton’s scheme. He was unmoved by Eltenton’s argument, prevalent in Berkeley’s left-wing circles, that America’s Soviet allies were fighting for survival while reactionaries in Washington were sabotaging the assistance that the Soviets were entitled to receive.

Chevalier always insisted that he was merely alerting Oppie to Eltenton’s proposal rather than acting as his conduit. In either case, that is the interpretation that Oppenheimer put on what his friend told him. Viewing it thus—as a dead end that he had buried—allowed him to brush it aside for the time being as yet another manifestation of Hoke’s overwrought concern for Soviet survival. Should he have informed the authorities immediately? His life would have been very different if he had. But, at the time, he could not have done so without implicating his best friend, whom he believed to be, at worst, an overenthusiastic idealist.

The martinis mixed, the conversation over, the two friends rejoined their wives.

IN HIS MEMOIR, The Story of a Friendship, Chevalier recounts that he and Oppenheimer talked only briefly about Eltenton’s proposition. He insisted that he was not soliciting information from Oppie, but was merely passing on to his friend the fact that Eltenton had proposed a means of sharing information with Soviet scientists. He thought it important that Oppie know of it. “He was visibly disturbed,” wrote Chevalier, “we exchanged a remark or two, and that was all.” Then they returned to the living room with their martinis to join their wives. Chevalier remembered that Kitty had just bought an early-nineteenth-century French edition of a book on mycology with hand-drawn, painted illustrations of orchids—her favorite flower. Sipping their drinks, the two couples perused the beautiful book before sitting down to dinner. Thereafter, Chevalier “dismissed the whole thing from my mind.”

In 1954, at his security hearing, Oppenheimer testified that Chevalier had followed him into the kitchen and said something like, “I saw George Eltenton recently.” Chevalier then added that Eltenton had a “means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists.” Oppenheimer continued: “I thought I said [to Chevalier], ‘But that is treason,’ but I am not sure. I said anyway something. ‘This is a terrible thing to do.’ Chevalier said or expressed complete agreement. That was the end of it. It was a brief conversation.”

After Robert’s death, Kitty reported yet another version of the story. While in London visiting Verna Hobson (Oppie’s former secretary and Kitty’s friend), she said that “the minute Chevalier came into the house she could see that something was up.” She made a point of not leaving the men alone together, and finally, when Chevalier realized that he could not get Robert off by himself, he related his conversation with Eltenton in her presence. Kitty said it was she who then blurted out, “But that would be treason!” According to this version, Oppenheimer was so determined to keep Kitty out of it that he took her words in his mouth and always claimed that he and Chevalier were alone in the kitchen when they discussed Eltenton. On the other hand, Chevalier always insisted that Kitty never entered the kitchen while he and Robert discussed Eltenton’s proposition, and Barbara Chevalier’s recollection of the incident does not include Kitty.

Decades later, Barbara, by then an embittered ex-wife, wrote a “diary” that adds a somewhat different perspective. “I was not, of course, in the kitchen when Haakon spoke to Oppie, but I knew what he was going to tell him. I also know that Haakon was one hundred percent in favor of finding out what Oppie was doing and reporting it back to Eltenton. I believe Haakon also believed that Oppie would be in favor of cooperating with the Russians. I know because we had a big fight over it beforehand.”

At the time Barbara wrote this—some forty years later—she had a low opinion of her ex-husband. She thought him foolish, “a man of limited horizons, fixed ideas and immutable habits.” Soon after Eltenton’s approach, Haakon had told her, “The Russians want to know.” As she remembered things, she had tried to persuade her husband not to pursue the matter with Oppenheimer. “The absurd ridiculousness of the situation never occurred to him,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir in 1983. “This innocent teacher of modern French literature to be the conduit to Russians of what Oppie was doing.”

OPPENHEIMER KNEW ELTENTON only because the two of them had attended union organizing meetings on behalf of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT). Eltenton had attended one of these union meetings in Oppenheimer’s home. All told, he had seen Eltenton on four or five occasions.

Eltenton, a thin, Nordic-featured man, and his wife, Dorothea (Dolly), were English. Although Dolly was a first cousin of the British aristocrat Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Eltentons were decidedly left-wing in their politics. In the mid-1930s, they had observed the Soviet experiment firsthand, in Leningrad, where George had been employed by a British firm.

Chevalier had first met Dolly Eltenton in 1938, when she walked into the office of the League of American Writers in San Francisco and volunteered her secretarial services. Dolly, whose politics were, if anything, more radical than her husband’s, worked as a secretary for the pro-Soviet American Russian Institute in San Francisco. Moving to Berkeley, the couple naturally gravitated into its left-wing social circuit. Chevalier had seen them at many of the same fundraising parties attended by Oppenheimer.

So when Eltenton phoned him one day to say that he wanted to have a chat, Chevalier drove over to his Berkeley home at 986 Cragmont Avenue a day or two later. Eltenton talked earnestly about the war and its still uncertain outcome. The Soviets, he pointed out, were bearing the brunt of the Nazi onslaught—four-fifths of the Wehrmacht was fighting on the Eastern Front—and much might depend on how effectively the Americans aided their Russian allies with arms and new technology. It was very important that there be close collaboration between Soviet and American scientists.

Eltenton had been approached by Peter Ivanov, he said, whom he believed to be a secretary in the Soviet Consulate General in San Francisco. (Actually, Ivanov was a Soviet intelligence officer.) Ivanov had remarked that “in many ways the Soviet Government did not feel it was getting the scientific and technical cooperation which it felt it deserved.” He had then asked Eltenton whether he knew anything about what was going on “up on the Hill,” meaning the Berkeley laboratory.

In 1946, the FBI interrogated Eltenton about the Chevalier incident, and he reconstructed his conversation with Ivanov as follows: “I told him [Ivanov] that I, personally, knew very little of what was going on, whereupon he asked me whether I knew Professor E. O. Lawrence, Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer or a third party whose name I do not recall.” (Eltenton later thought the third scientist named by Ivanov was Luis Alvarez.) Eltenton replied that he knew only Oppenheimer, but not well enough to discuss the issue. Ivanov had pressed him, asking if he knew anyone else who could approach Oppenheimer. “On thinking the matter over I said that the only mutual acquaintance whom I could think of was Haakon Chevalier. He asked me whether I would be willing to discuss the matter with [Chevalier]. After assuring myself that Mr. Ivanov was genuinely convinced that there were no authorized channels through which such information could be obtained and having convinced myself that the situation was of such a critical nature that I would be in my own mind free in conscience to approach Haakon Chevalier I agreed to contact the latter.”

According to Eltenton, he and Chevalier agreed “with considerable reluctance” that Oppenheimer should be approached. Eltenton assured Chevalier that if Oppenheimer had any useful information, Ivanov could get it “safely transmitted.” From Eltenton’s account, the two men clearly understood what they were contemplating. “The question of remuneration was raised by Mr. Ivanov, but no sum was mentioned since I did not wish to accept payment for what I was doing.”

A few days later—Eltenton told the FBI in 1946—Chevalier informed him that he had seen Oppenheimer, but that “there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.” Ivanov later came by Eltenton’s house and was likewise told that Oppenheimer would not cooperate. That was the end of it, although somewhat later Ivanov asked Eltenton if he had any information about a new drug called penicillin. Eltenton had no idea what this was—though he said he later called Ivanov’s attention to an article about it in
Nature
magazine.

The accuracy of Eltenton’s account of the affair is confirmed by another FBI interview. At the same time that FBI agents were interrogating Eltenton, another team picked up Chevalier and asked him similar questions. As their interviews proceeded, the two teams of agents coordinated their questions through phone calls, checking each man’s recollections against the other’s and probing any inconsistencies. In the end, there were only minor differences in their statements. Chevalier said that to the best of his recollection he had not mentioned Eltenton’s name to Oppenheimer (although in his memoirs he recalled that he had). And he did not mention to his interrogators that Eltenton had made reference to Lawrence and Alvarez: “I wish to state that to my present knowledge and recollection I approached no one except Oppenheimer to request information concerning the work of the Radiation Laboratory. I may have mentioned the desirability of obtaining this information with any number of people in passing. I am certain that I never made another specific proposal in this connection.” Oppenheimer, he said, had “dismissed my approach without discussion.”