Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (70 page)

When asked to name the intermediary, Oppenheimer’s initial response was: ‘I think it would be a mistake . . . I think I have told you where the initiative came from and that the other things were almost purely accident and it would involve people who ought not be involved in this.’ When pressed, he gave a few hints, some of them entirely unhelpful (‘He is a man whose sympathies are certainly very far left, whatever his affiliations, and he may or may not have regular contacts with a political group’), and some that might indeed lead his inquisitors to Chevalier (‘It’s a member of the faculty, but not on the project’).

When Pash and Johnson returned to the question of who this nameless intermediary had approached, Oppenheimer again provided a curious detail. Asked if the people who had been approached had been contacted at the same time, he replied: ‘They were contacted within a week of each other . . . but not in each other’s presence.’ ‘And then,’ said Pash, ‘from what you first heard, there is someone else who probably still remains here who was contacted as well.’ ‘I think that is true,’ replied Oppenheimer. Driving home the importance of this point, Pash emphasised that, according to Oppenheimer’s story, there had been a plan to leak information to the Soviet consulate from contacts who worked on the atomic-bomb project, ‘and we may not have known all the contacts’. ‘That is certainly true,’ replied Oppenheimer. ‘That is why I mentioned it.’ After a bit more prevarication he let slip further details about the people who had been approached: first, that they ‘have a feeling toward this country and have signed the Espionage Act’; second, that one of the men ‘has gone, or is scheduled to go, to Site X [Oak Ridge]’. Putting all these hints together, it would have been natural to come to the conclusion that General Groves was to reach: that two of the people Oppenheimer had described as being approached by Eltenton were himself and his brother Frank, and that his evasions had to do with his desire – his duty – to protect Frank.

Several times towards the end of the discussion, Pash let Oppenheimer know in no uncertain terms that he had not heard the last of this. He repeatedly asked Oppenheimer if it would be all right to interview him again at Los Alamos, to which Oppenheimer gave his evidently unenthusiastic assent. Pash also referred repeatedly to the fact that he would not drop his attempts to discover the name of the intermediary. ‘We certainly would give a lot of thanks and appreciation for the name of that intermediary,’ he told Oppenheimer, since ‘we are going to have to spend a lot of time and effort which we ordinarily would not in trying to . . . trying to run him down before we even can get on to these others’. The clear implication was that, in withholding his name, Oppenheimer was not protecting the intermediary; rather, he was just wasting the time of
military-intelligence officers. ‘We will be hot under the collar until we find out what is going on,’ Pash promised.

Before he left, Oppenheimer tried two further tactics to rescue the situation. The first was to make grandiose declarations of his loyalty to his country and of his own concern for security (‘I think that I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong’). The second was, rather ignobly, to insist that security at his Los Alamos was a good deal better than it was at Lawrence’s Rad Lab (‘I feel responsible for every detail of this sort of thing down at our place and I will be willing to go quite far in saying that everything is 100 per cent in order. That doesn’t go for this place up here’). Neither tactic made any impression on Pash; he was, he told Oppenheimer, like a bloodhound on a trail and, whatever Oppenheimer might say or do, that trail was going to lead him to the identities of (a) Oppenheimer’s intermediary, and (b) the three members of the bomb project who had been approached to leak information to the Soviets.

The conversation left Pash more convinced than ever that Oppenheimer was involved in espionage, and, though he had been unable to convince either Groves or Lansdale of this, his view was shared by other important members of the security services, who shared also his fervent desire to protect the bomb project from Oppenheimer’s complicity. The FBI had always regarded Oppenheimer with suspicion and were only too pleased to ally themselves with Pash’s campaign against him. On 27 August, the day after Oppenheimer’s disastrous meeting with Pash and Johnson, an FBI agent recommended placing a wire tap on Jean Tatlock’s phone, on the grounds that Oppenheimer might use either her or her telephone in order to contact ‘the Comintern Apparatus’. Five days later, J. Edgar Hoover took up the suggestion in a memo to the Attorney General, saying that tapping her phone would help in ‘determining the identities of espionage agents within the Comintern Apparatus’, because she was ‘the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort’ and ‘a contact of members of the Comintern Apparatus’. Jean’s phone was duly tapped, but no information relevant to the protection of the US was ever gathered by such means.

On 2 September 1943, the day after Hoover’s memo to the Attorney General, the case against Oppenheimer was summarised in a memo to Pash written by Pash’s man at Los Alamos, Captain Peer de Silva. With regard to the recent developments in the espionage case relating to the Manhattan Project, de Silva began, ‘the part played by J.R. Oppenheimer is believed to take on a more vital significance than has heretofore been apparent’. After summarising Oppenheimer’s discussion with Pash and Johnson, de Silva states: ‘The writer wishes to go on record as saying that J.R. Oppenheimer is playing a key part in the attempts of the Soviet
Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the security of the United States.’ In support of this view, de Silva writes that Oppenheimer, despite having gone on record as believing that Communist Party membership is incompatible with access to military secrets, ‘has allowed a tight clique of known Communists or Communist sympathizers to grow up about him within the project, until they comprise a large proportion of the key personnel in whose hands the success and security of the project is entrusted’. ‘In the opinion of this officer,’ de Silva goes on, ‘Oppenheimer either must be incredibly naïve and almost childlike in his sense of reality, or he himself is extremely clever and disloyal. The former possibility is not borne out in the opinion of the officers who have spoken with him at length.’ What struck de Silva about Oppenheimer’s recent disclosure of information regarding Eltenton and his unnamed intermediary was its timing: immediately after Oppenheimer had been alerted to the fact that his ex-students were being investigated for leaking information. ‘Until alerted to the fact that an investigation was in progress,’ de Silva wrote, Oppenheimer ‘made absolutely no attempt to inform any responsible authority of the incidents which he definitely knew to have occurred and which, he claims, he did not approve.’

De Silva concluded that: ‘Oppenheimer is deeply concerned with gaining a worldwide reputation as a scientist, and a place in history’ through his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory. The army, he maintained, ‘is in the position of being able to allow him to do so or to destroy his name, reputation, and career, if it should choose to do so’. He ended up suggesting that, if ‘strongly presented to him’, the fact that the army could destroy his reputation, ‘would possibly give him a different view of his position with respect to the Army, which has been, heretofore, one in which he has been dominant because of his supposed essentiality’.

Four days later, this uncompromising assessment was sent to Lansdale by Pash, who added to it the statement: ‘This Office is still of the opinion that Oppenheimer is not to be fully trusted and that his loyalty to a Nation is divided. It is believed that the only undivided loyalty that he can give is to science and it is strongly felt that if in his position the Soviet Government could offer more for the advancement of his scientific cause he would select that Government as the one to which he would express his loyalty.’

Meanwhile, the close surveillance of Weinberg and his friends continued. On 3 September, the day after de Silva wrote his memo to Pash, agents following Weinberg saw him post a thick, large envelope addressed to Al Flanigan, a graduate student at Berkeley and a friend of Steve Nelson’s. When the agents opened the envelope they found that it contained a manuscript article entitled ‘The Communist Party and the Professions’, together with a brief, unsigned covering note, which said: ‘Please do not
communicate with me during this period, nor discuss with others my reasons for this request.’ The note also asked Flanigan to pass this message on to ‘S. or B.’ – presumably Steve Nelson and Bernadette Doyle – ‘without mentioning my name’. Copies of the manuscript and the note were sent to Pash, who regarded them as evidence that the purpose of Oppenheimer’s meeting with Weinberg and Bohm was to tip them off that they were being watched.

On 12 September, Lansdale conducted an interview with Oppenheimer, this time in Groves’s office in Washington. Like Pash’s interview a couple of weeks earlier, it was recorded and transcribed. The tone of the interview, however, was very different. As Lansdale made clear to Oppenheimer, he liked, admired and trusted him. He began the interview by telling Oppenheimer, ‘without intent of flattery or complimenting or anything else’, that ‘you’re probably the most intelligent man I ever met’, and ended it by emphasising: ‘I want you to know that I like you personally, and believe me it’s so. I have no suspicions whatsoever, and I don’t want you to feel that I have.’ Everything he later did and said suggests that Lansdale was being quite sincere in these remarks.

Lansdale’s purpose, too, was quite different from Pash’s. He did not want to trip Oppenheimer into revealing his complicity with espionage; he wanted, rather, to extract from him information that might be helpful in identifying those who were involved in espionage. And, in particular, he wanted the name of the intermediary whom Eltenton had used to try to obtain secret information regarding the Manhattan Project. The way Oppenheimer began the conversation shows that he still had not understood that the security forces regarded the Eltenton espionage attempt as a much bigger concern than the ‘indiscretions’ committed by Lomanitz and his friends. For, when Lansdale mentioned his interview with Pash, Oppenheimer immediately launched into an explanation of why he wanted to talk to Lomanitz, as if
that
is what Lansdale would be most concerned about:

Straight away, Lansdale let him know that his main concern was the intelligence and counter-intelligence surrounding the attempts by
the Soviet Union to penetrate the secrets of the Manhattan Project. Summing up the situation, he told Oppenheimer, ‘They know, we know they know, about Tennessee, about Los Alamos, and Chicago’, given which: ‘It is essential that we know the channels of communication.’ Appearing to recognise and sympathise with the feeling of many of the scientists that security concerns were actually an obstacle to getting the job done, Lansdale told Oppenheimer that he had a delicate line to tread. ‘We don’t want to protect the thing to death,’ he remarked, but, on the other hand, it was clear that
some
degree of protection was needed. And, therefore, Lansdale needed the name of that intermediary. Oppenheimer, however, refused to provide the name: ‘I’ve thought about it a good deal because Pash and Groves both asked me for the name, and I feel that I should not give it.’ ‘I don’t see how,’ Lansdale told him, ‘you can have any hesitancy in disclosing the name of the man who has actually been engaged in an attempt at espionage to a foreign power in time of war.’ But Oppenheimer was implacable in his refusal to land Chevalier in what he knew would be a lot of trouble.

Changing tack, Lansdale tried to use Oppenheimer’s communist past to glean information about Communist Party members. ‘Who do you know,’ he asked, ‘on the project in Berkeley who are . . . or have been members of the Communist Party?’ Unhelpfully, Oppenheimer replied: ‘I know for a fact, I know, I learned on my last visit to Berkeley, that both Lomanitz and Weinberg were members.’ Pressed to tell Lansdale something he did not already know, Oppenheimer – seemingly at random – chose to identify Charlotte Serber as having been in the past a member of the Communist Party. When asked whether Robert Serber had been a member, Oppenheimer replied: ‘I think it possible, but I don’t know.’

Lansdale: Now, have you yourself ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Oppenheimer: No.

Lansdale: You’ve probably belonged to every front organization on the coast.

Oppenheimer: Just about.

In Lansdale’s search for names of Communist Party members, an awkward moment for Oppenheimer came when his inquisitor asked: ‘How about Haakon Chevalier?’ On this occasion, however, Oppenheimer remained cool and unflustered. ‘Is he a member of the Party?’ he responded, adding: ‘He is a member of the faculty and I know him well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were a member, he is quite a Red.’

Frustrated by such suave evasions, Lansdale laid his cards on the table:

‘I’d better be. That’s all I’ve got to say,’ Oppenheimer replied.