Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (65 page)

Even if it did not implicate Oppenheimer, this conversation between Weinberg and Nelson provided irrefutable evidence of a threat to the security of a top-secret military project, and, as such, it was taken very seriously indeed by the FBI, to whom ‘Joe’s’ information was as much a revelation as it was to Nelson. The FBI immediately delivered a transcript of the conversation to Colonel Pash, whose response was to fly to Washington to tell Groves and Lansdale that he had evidence of Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage.

Of course, what Pash had was fairly conclusive evidence that Oppenheimer – much to the disappointment of his former friends in the Communist Party – was
not
involved in espionage. Indeed, from the point of view of incriminating Oppenheimer, the conversation between Nelson and ‘Joe’ did not tell Groves and Lansdale anything new; it simply confirmed what they already knew about him, and what they had discussed with each other many times, namely that he had a history of close associations with communists. Lansdale later recalled that when he and Groves first looked through Oppenheimer’s FBI file (he could not remember exactly when this was, but thought it was while Los Alamos was still being built, so probably sometime in the first two months of 1943), Oppenheimer’s political history caused them ‘a great deal of concern’
and they discussed it at length. ‘General Groves’s view, as I recall,’ Lansdale said, ‘was (a) that Dr Oppenheimer was essential; (b) that in his judgment – and he had gotten to know Dr Oppenheimer very well by that time – he was loyal; and (c) we would clear him for this work whatever the reports said.’ So, on the question of Oppenheimer’s loyalty, General Groves had already firmly made up his mind, and he was a man who trusted his own judgement. Nothing short of incontrovertible evidence that Oppenheimer was a security risk would make him drop his conviction that Oppenheimer was the man to get the job done.

However, it was now clear that the Soviets already knew much about the American atomic-bomb project (more, for example, than the FBI knew at the time) and that, unless the flow of information was stopped immediately, there was a strong possibility they would very soon know a good deal more. It thus became a matter of urgent importance to discover the identity of ‘Joe’ and prevent him having any further access to sensitive information. So seriously did G-2 take this that they immediately established a closer working relationship with the FBI. Thus, on 5 April 1943, General Strong met J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, E.A. Tamm, to inform him officially of the existence of the Manhattan Project. The following day, Groves and Lansdale met with two representatives of the FBI to discuss ways in which the two security organisations might cooperate in order to establish ‘Joe’s’ identity and protect the project from Soviet espionage.

A few days before those meetings the FBI had already gathered some counter-intelligence that was, they now realised, of immediate interest to G-2’s attempt to maintain the security of the Manhattan Project. In response to the conversation between Nelson and ‘Joe’, they had decided to keep Nelson under constant, twenty-four-hour surveillance, and on 1 April their agents had seen him walk to a corner shop, from where he phoned the Soviet consulate in San Francisco to arrange a meeting with Ivanov. When the meeting subsequently took place, on 6 April, FBI agents were there to observe it. Then, on 10 April, FBI agents watching Nelson’s house noted the arrival there of none other than Vasily Zubilin, the head of the NKVD espionage operation, who was based at the Soviet embassy in Washington. The microphones inside the house picked up a long conversation between the two about the structure of the Soviet espionage operation and the respective roles played within it by the American Communist Party and the NKVD (Nelson was worried that the former was being bypassed by the latter). Agents also heard Zubilin counting out large amounts of money to give to Nelson, who exclaimed: ‘Jesus, you count money like a banker.’ Presumably Nelson and Zubilin soon realised that US counter-intelligence was on to them, because this was the last time that either was recorded as having anything to do with espionage.

While the security forces were trying to discover his identity, Weinberg managed to insinuate himself into a position in which he would have access to secret information. Sometime in April 1943, Oppenheimer, despite his earlier reservations about hiring Weinberg, employed him at the Rad Lab to work on some calculations that were part of the effort to improve the focusing of the beam of the Calutron. Of course, Oppenheimer knew nothing of the recorded conversation between Weinberg and Nelson. However, Pash and de Silva later cited Oppenheimer’s willingness to employ Weinberg as evidence of his complicity with Soviet espionage. Lansdale, on the other hand, when asked years later about this period, not only did not see anything suspicious in Oppenheimer’s behaviour, but went out of his way to praise Oppenheimer for being ‘very helpful’ in the attempt to impress upon his fellow scientists at Los Alamos the importance of maintaining strict security.

‘The scientists en masse presented an extremely difficult problem,’ Lansdale said, adding: ‘I hope my scientist friends will forgive me, but the very nature of them made things difficult.’ Scientists, by their very nature, like to
share
information, which put them somewhat at odds with the people whose job it was to ensure that information was not shared. From both sides there was, from the very beginning, mutual incomprehension. In the many reminiscences of Los Alamos written by scientists, the security arrangements are almost invariably regarded with a mixture of contempt and amusement. Robert Serber, for example, describes the initial attempts to secure the Los Alamos site as comically lax and amateurish. ‘Oppie,’ he writes, ‘wrote passes for us on University of California stationery which didn’t well survive being carried in hip pockets.’

As Serber remembers it, the first guards at the site were Spanish American construction workers who were ‘dragooned to man the gate’. After that, the army took over ‘and brought in MPs who were mostly ex-New York cops and put the New York cops on the horses – probably none of them had ever seen a horse before – and set them to patrolling the fences’. Unsurprisingly, ‘they called that off after a couple of weeks’.

Serber also remembers taking part in a plan, devised by Oppenheimer and army security, to spread false rumours about what was happening at the Mesa. The rationale behind this is given in a letter from Oppenheimer to Groves, dated 30 April 1943. ‘We propose,’ Oppenheimer wrote:

What struck Oppenheimer as a credible plan, however, turned out, in practice, to be a laughable failure. Together with others from the laboratory, Serber was instructed to go to a bar in Santa Fe and start talking in a loud voice about the electric rocket they were working on. The problem they encountered was that, no matter how loudly they discussed it, no one seemed very interested. Eventually Serber approached a drunk at the bar and said to him: ‘Do you know what we’re doing at Los Alamos? We’re building an electric rocket!’ It was, Serber admits, mission unaccomplished: ‘the FBI and Army Intelligence never reported picking up any rumors about electric rockets’.

Equally unsuccessful was another idea Oppenheimer came up with to mislead potential snoops, this time involving Wolfgang Pauli, who since 1940 had been a physics professor at Princeton. Oppenheimer’s idea, he told Pauli in a letter written in May 1943, was one ‘that I think deserves to be taken seriously, although I know that you will laugh at it’. It was that Pauli could use his ‘great talents for physics and burlesque’ by writing phoney articles on aspects of theoretical physics and publishing them under the names of, for example, Bethe, Teller, Serber and Oppenheimer, thus forestalling questions the enemy might have about why these top physicists had apparently stopped publishing any work and preventing them from drawing the obvious conclusion that, as Oppenheimer put it, ‘we are finding good uses for our physicists’.

In his reply, Pauli reported that he was having problems getting funding for his research from the Rockefeller Foundation and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and so, though he ‘would be glad to be helpful in the suggested way’, he felt compelled to publish what he was writing under his own name in order ‘to prove to the quoted money-givers that after all I am working on something for their money’, fearing, he added, ‘their sense for burlesque to be rather undeveloped’. In any case, Pauli wrote, he doubted the scheme would work, since why would the enemy not believe that ‘the persons whose names figure as authors are not occupied beside some scientific work also with war problems?’ And then ‘the whole Don-Quichotery would be in vain’.

Despite the suspicions of him entertained by Pash, de Silva and other security officers, then, Oppenheimer seemed, on the face of it, wholeheartedly – if sometimes quixotically – in support of the security efforts of army intelligence. In this, as Lansdale pointed out, he stood out among his fellow scientists, some of whom, like Serber, adopted an attitude of amused disdain towards the security restrictions, while others were openly
contemptuous and provocative. As he has recounted in his famous public lecture, ‘Los Alamos from Below’, chief among the latter was Richard Feynman.

Feynman was among the first to arrive at Los Alamos, being part of what Oppenheimer described as a ‘job lot’ of scientists from Princeton who came with Robert Wilson. He would later win the Nobel Prize and become one of the best-known physicists in the world, but in 1943 Feynman was a young man of twenty-four who had only just completed his PhD thesis. Though young, he had already impressed many of the most eminent scientists in America with the sharpness of his intellect and the originality of his mind – Wilson at Princeton and Teller at Chicago among them – and was very shortly to make a deep impression on Hans Bethe at Los Alamos. To the security staff at Los Alamos, however, Feynman was a mischievous and vexatious nuisance.

From the very beginning, Feynman was determined to cock a snook at the precautions he was asked to adopt. All the physicists at Princeton had been told not to buy their train tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico from Princeton, since it was a small station and, if everyone bought tickets to Albuquerque from there, suspicions would be aroused. ‘And so,’ Feynman later said, ‘everybody bought their tickets somewhere else.’ Everyone, that is, except Feynman, ‘because I figured if everybody bought their tickets somewhere else . . .’

Once at Los Alamos, Feynman discovered to his horror that his letters to his wife, and hers to him, were being examined and, at times, censored. His wife, on learning this, repeatedly mentioned in her letters to him that she felt uncomfortable knowing that the censor was looking over her shoulder as she wrote. This led to Feynman receiving a note: ‘Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.’ But, of course, as Feynman gleefully pointed out, he himself was under instructions not to mention censorship, so he wrote back: ‘I have been instructed to inform my wife not to mention censorship. How in the heck am I going to do it?’ Feynman was presented with another opportunity to be a thorn in the side of the security effort when he discovered that the workmen on the site had cut themselves a hole in the fence, so as to enable them to leave for home without having to go through the official gate. So Feynman went out through the gate, walked around to the hole, came back in and then went out again through the gate, ‘until the sergeant at the gate began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in?’

In the memoirs of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos, the pervasive presence of the army and the security measures they imposed are almost universally prominent. Apart from the extraordinary location, the fact that the laboratory was a military establishment was, in
the eyes of the civilian scientists – most of whom would have had little or no prior experience of being with soldiers and working under army regulations – its most novel and noteworthy aspect. For many of these scientists, Groves was the very embodiment of everything they found strange, irksome and idiotic about the army. As such, he often appears in scientists’ recollections of Los Alamos as a figure of fun, a man whose limited understanding of physics and brutish manner made him a legitimate target of derision. Edward Teller, for example, though claiming to have ‘neutral’ feelings about Groves (and therefore, he emphasises, better feelings about him than most of the scientists at Los Alamos), remarks that Groves’s opening speech to the scientists ‘seemed about what would be expected from a person who knew nothing about the project he was supervising’. Teller says that he was puzzled to hear that Groves had complained about Hungarian being spoken on the site, since he and his wife were at the time the only Hungarians there and had spoken Hungarian only in their own apartment. Then he discovered that Groves had heard Felix Bloch’s sons speaking in their Swiss German dialect and ‘had confused that strange language with one even more peculiar’.

The task of maintaining good relations between the scientists and the military officers fell to the associate director of the laboratory, Edward Condon. In his autobiography, Groves goes so far as to say that maintaining good relations was Condon’s ‘major responsibility’. Whether or not it was his principal task, it was certainly a difficult and thankless one, made much worse by the fact that Condon and Groves very quickly developed extremely poor opinions of each other (‘Condon was not a happy choice,’ Groves remarks dismissively). The biggest issue on which they failed to see eye-to-eye was ‘compartmentalisation’, the policy – which Groves regarded as ‘the very heart of security’ – according to which workers on the Manhattan Project knew only what they needed to know in order to do their jobs and no more. The workers at Oak Ridge and Hanford, for example, did not know that they were helping to produce uranium and plutonium, nor did the workers at one site even know of the existence of the other. It was this policy that had resulted in the strange situation mentioned earlier, of the FBI investigating breaches to the security of a project the existence of which they were officially unaware. Groves felt strongly that this policy should apply also to scientists, so that those working at the Met Lab at Chicago, for example, should know nothing about what was going on at Los Alamos.