Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (68 page)

Fortunately for Oppenheimer, Groves trusted Pash’s judgement less than that of John Lansdale. At about the same time as he wrote to the
Pentagon recommending Oppenheimer’s dismissal, Pash wrote a memo to Lansdale suggesting that, if Oppenheimer was not fired, then he should be summoned to Washington to be told that the security services knew all about his communist connections and warned that the authorities would not tolerate any attempt by Oppenheimer to pass classified information to members of the Communist Party. Pash considered Oppenheimer to be potentially disloyal to his country, but, like Steve Nelson, he also saw how important it was to Oppenheimer to be heading an important government project and thought that the threat of losing his high-profile job, his reputation and his honour would be enough to keep him in check. ‘Consequently,’ Pash concluded, ‘it is felt that he would lend every effort to cooperating with the Government in any plan which would leave him in charge.’

Lansdale’s view of Oppenheimer differed sharply from Pash’s. He had by this time met Oppenheimer and Kitty at Los Alamos several times and had come to the conclusion that Oppenheimer was neither a communist nor a threat to security. When he was asked at Oppenheimer’s security case in 1954 why, in 1943, he had formed the judgement that Oppenheimer was not a communist, Lansdale gave the following interesting reply:

Lansdale, as he later emphasised in the same testimony, considered Oppenheimer to be a loyal American citizen who would put the interests of his own country first, and was therefore, according to the above definition,
not
a communist. Asked whether he had formed the same impression about Kitty, he replied:

However, Kitty’s strength of personality was, Lansdale came to think, a force acting in favour of Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness:

In other words, Lansdale had come to exactly the same conclusion as Steve Nelson: influenced by Kitty, Oppenheimer was quite prepared to separate himself from his old communist friends and comrades in order to maintain the trust of the US government and therefore hold on to his position as head of an important military project.

In a memo to Groves written in July 1943, Lansdale outlined this view of Oppenheimer and his wife. While listing all the ‘derogatory information’ that the FBI and G-2 had gathered about Oppenheimer – his connections with communist front organisations, his friendship with leading Communist Party members, his personal connections with Jean Tatlock and Haakon Chevalier (‘believed to be a Communist Party member’), and reliable reports from within the Communist Party that he was considered a member – and conceding that this information was troubling, Lansdale opposed Pash’s recommendation that Oppenheimer should be denied clearance and fired. As an alternative he recommended Pash’s fall-back position, but instead of placing the emphasis where Pash had placed it – on the use of the derogatory information to intimidate Oppenheimer into refusing to have anything to do with espionage – Lansdale emphasised the possibility that their information, and the possibly dire consequences it might have for Oppenheimer, could be used to persuade him to turn informant. Oppenheimer, Lansdale suggested, should be told that there were doubts about his loyalty ‘because of his known interest in the Communist Party and his association with and friendship for certain members of the Communist Party’ and invited to prove his loyalty by providing Groves and Lansdale with information about any threats to security that he might have heard about. In other
words, Oppenheimer should be made to feel that, in order to demonstrate his loyalty to his country, he would have to betray his old friends in the Communist Party.

In the light of Lansdale’s assessment, Groves took a characteristically decisive step. On 20 July 1943, he issued the following instructions to the US District Engineer:

Oppenheimer was thus granted his clearance, though this, of course, did not put an end to the matter. Pash and de Silva were still convinced that he was aiding and abetting Soviet espionage, while Groves and Lansdale, convinced that he was not, were determined to use him to reveal further information about people who were. At precisely the time when experimental work at Los Alamos could begin, therefore, Oppenheimer spent much of his time involved in various ways with issues of security. This no doubt contributed to his feeling, which he conveyed at this time to Robert Bacher, that he was not equal to the task with which he had been charged. In response, Bacher told him what Groves also clearly believed: he had no alternative but to continue, since there was no one else capable of doing the job.

Oppenheimer’s resolve to carry on was surely fortified by a letter he received at the beginning of July 1943 from President Roosevelt himself, asking him to assure the scientists working at Los Alamos that their efforts were appreciated: ‘I am sure we can rely on their continued wholehearted and unselfish labors. Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge.’ In his reply, Oppenheimer took the opportunity to emphasise to the President how importantly he took the security of the project:

That Oppenheimer was not entirely trusted by those for whom he worked was made clear in a letter that he received from General Groves written on 29 July 1943, telling him that henceforth he was requested: a) to ‘refrain from flying in airplanes of any description’; b) that he should be accompanied by ‘a competent, able bodied, armed guard’ acting as chauffeur during any road trip ‘above a few miles’; and c) that, in driving about Los Alamos, ‘a guard of some kind should be used, particularly during hours of darkness’.

This letter was evidently part of a tightening of security that was soon to have the drastic and lasting consequences mentioned earlier for those ex-students of Oppenheimer’s who were identified as actual or possible communist spies. The first affected was Lomanitz, who on 27 July was told by Ernest Lawrence that he had been promoted to group leader at the Rad Lab, having responsibility for overseeing the building of Calutrons at Oak Ridge. Three days later, before he could take up his new position, Lomanitz received a letter telling him that he had been drafted into the army. ‘It was really a sort of a strange thing,’ Lomanitz later explained, ‘because Dr Lawrence had just had a talk with me about some new work that he wanted me to undertake which was supposedly more important, which was to go out to Oakridge and be a liaison man between Berkeley and Oakridge while Oakridge was building a couple of hundred of these machines.’

Neither Lomanitz nor Lawrence, of course, knew that the FBI had been listening to Lehmann’s indiscreet conversation with Steve Nelson back in October 1942, or that Lomanitz’s comradely photograph with Weinberg, Friedman and Bohm had led to all four of them being identified as members of an espionage ring. Both were puzzled. According to Lomanitz, Lawrence’s initial reaction was: ‘Oh, there has to be a mistake. I’ll take care of it.’ But, Lomanitz discovered: ‘It turned out that it was not a mistake and he was not able to take care of it.’ Not that he didn’t try. Lansdale remembers: ‘Ernest Lawrence yelled and screamed louder than anybody else about us taking Lomanitz away from him.’ In his desperation, Lomanitz phoned Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, who immediately sent off a telegram to the Pentagon saying that a ‘very serious mistake is being made. Lomanitz now only man at Berkeley who can take this responsibility.’ On 31 July 1943, Oppenheimer cabled Lomanitz, saying: ‘Have requested in proper places reconsideration of support for your deferment. Cannot guarantee outcome but have made strong request.’

As Oppenheimer, Lomanitz and Lawrence all discovered, however, the army was implacable in its decision not to allow Lomanitz to work on the atomic-bomb project and to enlist him. Towards the end of his life, in 2001, Lomanitz gave an interview in which he revealed that, nearly sixty years after the event, he still believed that the purpose in getting him out
of Berkeley was not to prevent a security leak, but rather to weaken and then to close down the Rad Lab branch of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT), which he and Oppenheimer had helped to establish and to run.

In fact, it was the other way round: the authorities were indeed keen to close down the Rad Lab branch of FAECT, but this was because they saw it as a communist front organisation and a threat to the security of the bomb project. Removing Lomanitz was part of an attack not on trade unionism, but specifically on the Communist Party and, more specifically, on the use made of communist members of FAECT by Soviet intelligence to gain information on US military programmes. It was Lansdale’s hope that Oppenheimer’s vulnerability with regard to his past associations with the Communist Party would allow him to be exploited by the security services to aid them in that attack.

Some confirmation that Lansdale’s hopes might be well founded in this respect came from a meeting he had with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos on 10 August 1943, a full report of which is contained in a memo he sent Groves two days later. Lansdale told Groves he had made it clear to Oppenheimer that it was no use asking the authorities to defer Lomanitz’s draft, since ‘he had been guilty of indiscretions which could not be overlooked or condoned’. Oppenheimer – perhaps assuming, like Lomanitz, that what the authorities had against his ex-student was his involvement in political (rather than espionage) activities – told Lansdale that he had insisted very strongly to Lomanitz that, if he joined the atomic-bomb project, ‘he must forego all political activity’. He also told Lansdale ‘he knew that Lomanitz had been very much of a Red as a boy when he first came to the University of California’, but professed to have no knowledge of his political activities since then. When told by Lansdale that the investigation of Lomanitz had revealed that he had certainly not foregone any political activity, Oppenheimer, according to Lansdale, replied: ‘That makes me mad.’ Lansdale goes on:

At this point in the conversation, Oppenheimer endeavoured to give Lansdale the impression that he himself took a rather tougher line against Communist Party members than that taken by the army:

‘Oppenheimer gave every appearance of sincerity in this discussion,’ Lansdale concluded, telling Groves that his own view was that ‘what Dr Oppenheimer was trying to convey was, in the case of Lomanitz, that Lomanitz had been worried about his obligations to the party, and that Oppenheimer had told him that he must give up the party if he came on the project.’ He also ‘had the definite impression that Oppenheimer was trying to indicate that he had been a member of the party, and had definitely severed his connections upon engaging in this work.’ ‘On the whole,’ Lansdale’s memo ends, ‘it seemed that Oppenheimer, in a rather subtle way, was anxious to indicate to this officer his position in that regard.’