Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (64 page)

Most people who knew them well thought that Kitty was very pleased that her husband had been appointed to direct such an important enterprise as the United States atomic bomb laboratory, and many considered her to be proud to the point of being haughty in her dealings with her husband’s employees, but it should not be assumed that she
liked
being at Los Alamos. On the contrary, her life there seemed to be one of almost unrelieved torment. She had no interest in doing what might have been expected of the director’s wife: holding parties and being at the centre of the laboratory’s social life. She took herself too seriously as a scientist and an intellectual for that. To begin with, she was given a part-time job as a laboratory technician, working with a team studying the medical effects of radiation, but she soon abandoned that, and sank into a listless, depressed and lonely existence, enlivened only by bouts of drinking, sometimes with others, but often alone. Peter, meanwhile, received little attention from
either
of his parents.

Soon after the Oppenheimers came the Serbers, who, to begin with, lived in what was known as the ‘Big House’. This had previously been the boys’ dormitory and, with just one big bathroom in the entire building, was intended for single men. As those single men began to arrive, the unsuitability of the Big House for married couples became increasingly manifest (‘two or three fellows were embarrassed by walking in on Charlotte while she was taking a shower,’ Serber remembers), and, after a little while, the Serbers moved into one of the specially built duplexes. These consisted of two apartments next to each other, each apartment having its own bathroom, which, by the standards of the housing at Los Alamos, was luxurious to an enviable extent.

The Serbers’ immediate neighbours in this duplex were Robert and Jane Wilson, who had recently arrived from Princeton. Wilson was there as head of the Cyclotron Group, part of the Experimental Physics
Division led by Robert Bacher. His participation was crucial, not only because he was one of the leading experimental physicists in the field of neutron research, but also because he brought with him Princeton’s cyclotron, one of the very few accelerators that the new laboratory had at its disposal. The others were two Van de Graaff generators from Wisconsin, which were put at the disposal of the Electrostatic Generator Group led by J.H. Williams from the University of Minnesota, and Manley’s own Cockcroft–Walton accelerator, which accompanied him from Illinois and provided the data that Manley’s ‘D-D Source Group’ used to work out what material would form the best ‘tamper’.

None of these machines was up and running until June 1943, which is when experimental physics at Los Alamos really started. Getting the machines to Los Alamos and then setting them up in an as-yet-uncompleted laboratory at the top of a mountain in a remote part of New Mexico was so difficult that it seemed to some of those charged with accomplishing it an almost insane plan. To get to Los Alamos from Santa Fe required crossing the Rio Grande at a place called Otowi, where there was what Serber has described as ‘a toy one-lane suspension bridge that looked as if it might be safe for two horses’. ‘It was hard to believe,’ writes Serber, ‘that all the construction trucks for Los Alamos had to cross that bridge and then climb 1,500 feet up a perilous switch-backed dirt road to the top of Los Alamos Mesa.’

Among those who had their doubts about the wisdom of building the laboratory in such a place was John Manley, whose job it was to work with the army engineers on the design and construction of the laboratories that would house the accelerators. Manley recalls that he was particularly concerned with the long, narrow building that would house the two Van de Graaff generators and the Cockroft–Walton machine. As he told the engineers, the Van de Graaffs were extremely heavy machines that would need a good, strong foundation underneath them, while the Cockcroft–Walton was a tall vertical machine that required a basement. Given these requirements, Manley writes: ‘Cost and construction time could obviously be saved if they selected the terrain properly’ – that is, the building should be built over a slope, wih the Cockcroft–Walton machine in the lower, deeper part of the building. When he went to inspect the buildings, however, Manley discovered that, instead of making use of the sloping terrain, the engineers had needlessly created their own slope by actually digging a basement for the Cockcroft–Walton machine and then using the resulting debris to make the foundation for the Van de Graaffs. ‘That was my introduction to army engineering,’ Manley remarked.

Part of the point of building the new laboratory in a remote part of New Mexico was to keep it from prying eyes, but, of course, in some
ways it was far more conspicuous there than it would have been in a large centre of population. In a small town like Santa Fe, the arrival of dozens of strangers could not possibly go unnoticed. In fact, as locals were quick to see and remark upon, there were two distinct kinds of strangers descending on their town: first, there were the young bohemian-looking characters with open-necked shirts, who seemed polite, if a little unworldly; and then there were the besuited, slightly threatening men in fedora hats who invariably went around in twos and had a watchful, furtive demeanour. That the first group were scientists was rather less obvious than that the second group were security agents.

Most of those agents would have been working for the army, rather than the FBI. In March 1943, the FBI was explicitly ordered by Major General Strong, the head of G-2 (the branch of the US army concerned with counter-intelligence), to close its file on Oppenheimer. Security issues relating to anyone – even civilians – working on a military project, Strong insisted, were the responsibility of the army. Astonishingly, the FBI was not officially informed about the Manhattan Project until April 1943, after it had learned of its existence through their surveillance of Communist Party leaders. Though under orders to confine themselves to civilians, FBI agents would inevitably often find themselves covering the same ground, even following some of the same people, as G-2 agents, and, despite the reluctance of military intelligence to confide in them, the FBI was generally quick to inform G-2 of anything that might concern them. Complementing these two security agencies, and sometimes causing further complications, was the Manhattan Project’s own security organisation, which, though officially part of G-2, was under the direct command of General Groves, and thus to some extent separate from it. To start with, this organisation consisted of just a few men, whose main job was to liaise with G-2 and the FBI, but by the autumn of 1943 it was large enough for Groves to insist that it took over all security responsibilities relating to the project. As Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford continued to expand, so did the Manhattan Project’s own security force, so that by the end of the war it had working for it nearly 500 ‘creeps’, as the agents came to be called.

The man whom Groves chose to head the Manhattan Project’s own security force was John Lansdale, who, after a series of rapid promotions, was by this time a Lieutenant Colonel. Lansdale worked closely with Groves, who evidently shared Conant’s high opinion of him. Like Groves, he was based in Washington, but most of the people working for him were based on the West Coast. At Berkeley, for example, Lansdale set up a secret, disguised office, run by Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, which became the centre of a covert surveillance operation, keeping a watchful eye on the research scientists working at the Rad Lab.

Before the Manhattan Project took complete responsibility for its own security, there was something of a turf war between John Lansdale and G-2’s head of counter-intelligence for the West Coast, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash. Pash was a formidable figure. Even by the standards of military security officers, he was passionately and belligerently anti-communist, his antagonism fuelled partly by his family history and his personal experience of fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia. He had been born in the US, but was from a Russian family (his father was a Russian Orthodox bishop, based in San Francisco) and had gone to Russia during the civil war that followed the revolution in order to fight alongside the White Army. Since America’s entry into the Second World War, Pash had been an enthusiastic and dedicated member of the US army’s counter-intelligence division, welcoming the opportunity to hunt down Soviet spies, among whom, he was convinced, was Oppenheimer himself – a conviction that remained with him throughout the war and beyond. When, after the war, newspapers reported the spying activities of the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, Pash was reported as remarking that he ‘would next be reading about Dr Oppenheimer’s involvement in such activities’. When he was asked at Oppenheimer’s security hearings in 1954 whether in 1943 he considered Oppenheimer a security risk, he replied straightforwardly: ‘Yes I did.’

From his office in San Francisco, Pash orchestrated an intense security effort to keep Oppenheimer under surveillance: his phone was tapped, microphones were installed in his home, agents were employed to act as his chauffeur, and wherever Oppenheimer went, G-2 men followed. At Los Alamos, the G-2 man in charge of security was Captain Peer de Silva, who was as convinced as Pash that Oppenheimer was a security risk, and who was under orders from Pash to keep Oppenheimer under the closest possible scrutiny.

It is unclear how aware Oppenheimer was of the intensity with which he was being scrutinised by security agents. It is said that the agents who served as his drivers were thwarted in their efforts to hear what he was saying to his fellow passengers because of his habit of winding the window down in order to create a wind noise that would drown out his conversation. This may have been a clever ploy to prevent his conversations from being heard by men he knew to be security agents, but it seems equally possible that, on the assumption that he thought his drivers were civilians, it was a perfectly sensible precaution.

When he arrived at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was in the extremely odd and vulnerable position of having been appointed director of the most secret laboratory in the country while still not having the security clearance that would normally be a prerequisite for taking up even the most junior appointment in that laboratory. He and Groves seemed to
take the view that he could start work before receiving his clearance, on the assumption that it would eventually be granted. Pash and de Silva were rather of the opinion that Oppenheimer’s request for clearance should be refused and that he should be removed from the bomb project as soon as possible.

Two weeks after Oppenheimer moved to New Mexico, at a time when he and his colleagues were still making hurried preparations for the opening of the new laboratory, Pash received news from the FBI that would, he thought, finally convince the authorities that his suspicions of Oppenheimer were well founded. It concerned a conversation picked up by the ‘technical surveillance’ of Steve Nelson’s home between Nelson and a man known to the FBI at this time only as ‘Joe’ (which is how Nelson addressed him in the conversation). As the FBI would discover two months later, ‘Joe’ was Oppenheimer’s friend and ex-student Joe Weinberg.

The conversation took place in the early hours of the morning on 30 March 1943. Weinberg had arrived at Nelson’s house the previous evening, telling Nelson’s wife, Margaret, that he had some important information to pass on – so important that he was prepared to wait several hours for Nelson to return home in order to discuss it with him. As Nelson discovered when he got home, the information Weinberg had was indeed of great importance and was bound to be of enormous interest to the Soviet Union: people engaged in the new weapon project (which, Weinberg thought at this time, would include himself) were about to be relocated to a remote spot where experiments on explosives could be conducted in secret. Clearly feeling nervous and (as he freely admitted to Nelson) ‘a little bit scared’, Weinberg spoke in a whisper when giving Nelson some technical details of the project. The classified information that he passed on to Nelson centred on developments at Oak Ridge, which Weinberg must have heard about from friends who worked at the Rad Lab. The FBI notes on the conversation at this point become a little sketchy – it was evidently difficult to hear what Weinberg was saying – but the gist is clear enough. A separation plant, Weinberg told Nelson, was already being built in Tennessee that was expected to employ thousands of people, the separation method being ‘preferably that of the magnetic spectrograph with electrical and magnetic focusing’. Towards the end of the conversation Weinberg discussed with Nelson how he might be able to provide information in the future via his sister, who lived in New York, and Nelson emphasised how important it was not to put anything in writing.

The conversation left no doubt at all that Weinberg was willing, indeed eager, to play an important role in Soviet espionage. And though the FBI
did not yet know who ‘Joe’ was, they did know that he was an ex-student of Oppenheimer’s. That much was clear from the conversation, in which Oppenheimer was mentioned several times, usually referred to as ‘the professor’. Pash clearly thought the mere fact that Oppenheimer was associated with two people plotting espionage would be enough to establish him as a security risk, but in fact the FBI notes of the conversation provide pretty good grounds for thinking that Oppenheimer was
not
a risk. Whenever ‘the professor’ came up in the conversation, either Nelson or Weinberg (or both) made some comment to the effect that he had cut his links to the Party and that he was emphatically not prepared to pass on secrets to the Soviet Union.

At one point, Nelson remarked that Oppenheimer was ‘very much worried now and we make him feel uncomfortable’, to which Weinberg responded by saying that Oppenheimer kept him off the project because he was worried that he would ‘attract more attention’ and also because ‘he fears that I will propagandize’. Oppenheimer, Weinberg told Nelson, had ‘changed a bit . . . You won’t believe the change that has taken place.’ Nelson agreed, saying: ‘To my sorrow, his wife is influencing him in the wrong direction.’ Evidently on the basis of his recent farewell lunch with Oppenheimer, Nelson told Weinberg that Oppenheimer, encouraged by his wife, was keen to dissociate himself from his former colleagues in the Communist Party, because he did not want to threaten his central role in the important project to which he had been recruited.