Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (71 page)

At the end of what had been, from his point of view, a frustrating and fruitless interview Lansdale warned Oppenheimer, with respect to the name of the intermediary: ‘Don’t think it’s the last time I’m going to ask you, ’cause it isn’t.’ Before he left, Oppenheimer – rather needlessly, but in an evident determination to appear to be cooperative – volunteered the suspicion that Bernard Peters was involved in the Communist Party: ‘I know that he was in Germany, and that he was actually in prison there, and I also know that he has always expressed a very great interest in the Communists, and I think whether he is a member or not would perhaps partly depend on whether he was a citizen or whether he was working on a war job.’

While Lansdale was expressing his liking for and admiration of Oppenheimer, Pash was doing his best to expose him as a spy. Ten days before Lansdale’s interview with Oppenheimer, Pash had sent Groves an insistent, slightly nagging memo, telling him: ‘It is essential that name of professor [that is, the intermediary between Eltenton and Oppenheimer] be made available in order that investigation can continue properly.’ He went on to ‘request names of individuals contacted by professor in order to eliminate unnecessary investigation and following of leads which may come to the attention of this office’. ‘Has anyone,’ he demanded to know, ‘approached JRO at any time while he was connected with the project? If so, was it the professor, Eltenton, or some other party?’

One imagines that Groves was not used to being addressed in this manner by someone of lower rank and that he did not much care for Pash’s tone or for Pash himself, who was, in his obsessive pursuit of Oppenheimer, in danger of becoming a nuisance. Nevertheless when he, Oppenheimer and Lansdale travelled together on a train to Chicago a day or two after Oppenheimer’s interview with Lansdale, Groves took the opportunity to put to Oppenheimer the questions Pash had raised with him. The topics discussed were summarised in a memo by Lansdale dated 14 September. According to this memo, Oppenheimer’s attitude to Lomanitz had hardened somewhat since his discussion with Lansdale a
day or two earlier. Whereas then he had described his discussion with Lomanitz as ‘pretty unsuccessful, or at least only partially successful’, now he described it as ‘very unsatisfactory’ and Lomanitz himself as ‘defiant’. The memo goes on: ‘Oppenheimer was sorry that he had ever had anything to do with him [Lomanitz], and he did not desire any further connection with him.’ With regard to the name of the Berkeley professor who had acted as Eltenton’s intermediary, Lansdale’s memo states:

Groves then put several names to Oppenheimer that Pash had suggested as possibilities for the people this intermediary had contacted. Among them was Al Flanigan, ‘who now appears’, wrote Lansdale, ‘from subsequent developments to be the contact’. Oppenheimer told Groves and Lansdale that he did not know Flanigan except casually, ‘but that he had the reputation of being a real “Red”’. This, presumably, ruled Flanigan out, since Oppenheimer had previously said he knew the three contacts rather well. As far as one can tell from the memo, the rest of the conversation was taken up with Oppenheimer telling Groves and Lansdale what they already knew: that Kitty, Frank and Charlotte Serber had been Communist Party members and that he himself, though not a member of the party, had been a member of several Communist Party front organisations.

Possibly the most significant thing to emerge from this train conversation was the weakness of Oppenheimer’s loyalty to Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, all of whom were henceforth to face whatever difficulties their loyalty to the Communist Party brought them without much in the way of support from Oppenheimer. Lomanitz had tried extremely hard to find jobs on the West Coast that would entitle him to defer his draft, but every time he was offered such a post, the offer would be withdrawn before he could be issued with such a deferment. On one occasion Friedman, who had just bought a new Pontiac, drove Lomanitz around the Bay area looking for work, and they found a new company that made radar tubes and were interested in hiring Lomanitz. As Lomanitz later remembered it, when the man in charge started haggling about wages,
he said to him: ‘Look. I’m making $300 a month right now. I’ll go to work for you for half that if you’ll just send in immediately a request for my deferment.’ He was offered the job, and the man duly applied for deferment. The next day, however, Lomanitz was told by his local draft board that the application had been withdrawn. Friedman, meanwhile, was advised by his former employers at Berkeley that he would do better if he moved out of the area.

So it was that Lomanitz and Friedman left Berkeley on the same day, 23 September, Friedman dropping Lomanitz off at the army induction centre before setting off for Denver, Colorado, looking for a new job. Before they left, the two of them drafted a letter to Oppenheimer, explaining the problems they had been experiencing (‘Promised jobs kept disappearing at the last moment’) and stating as their ‘firm conviction’ that ‘union discrimination is the cause of all that has happened’. The night before they left, Weinberg hosted a farewell party for them at his apartment, where he was heard by counter-intelligence agents, listening to the conversation via the microphones they had installed, telling them that, in the words of an agent’s report, ‘he didn’t believe Max [Friedman] was in his present predicament because of his Union affiliations but because of something else’. A few days later, Lomanitz tried calling Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, but Oppenheimer refused to take the call.

Throughout the following months, Groves and Lansdale continued to insist to suspicious colleagues in the security services that, as Groves put it to a G-2 officer, Oppenheimer ‘will continue to be loyal to the United States’. Groves, especially, did not want Oppenheimer to be distracted from his work at the laboratory by insistent and incessant questioning about his communist past and associates. He wanted Oppenheimer to get on with the job of building a bomb. Pash, meanwhile, devoted a great deal of time to trying to identify Eltenton’s intermediary and contacts, making lists of suspects – invariably drawn from the physics and chemistry departments at Berkeley – which he distributed to G-2 and the FBI offices. At Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Pash recalled how Oppenheimer’s mention of, but refusal to name, a contact of Eltenton’s who had gone, or was about to go, to Oak Ridge involved him in a ‘tedious project’: ‘We had to go through files, try to find out who was going to go to site X.’ By this means he identified just one suspect, ‘and I took measures to stop – at least I asked General Groves to stop the man’s movement to that area’. Another time, according to Philip Stern, the author of a book on the Oppenheimer security case, one of the people identified by Pash as a candidate for one of Eltenton’s contacts ‘suddenly, and without prior indication, boarded the
Daylight
, the crack San Francisco–Los Angeles train’:

In November 1943, Groves seized upon a perfect opportunity to get Pash off the case and to make more constructive use of his bloodhound instincts. The opportunity arose as a result of the turning fortunes of the Allies. The past year had seen a series of decisive Allied victories that left no doubt that the question was not
whether
but
when
the Nazis would be defeated. In November 1942, the British under General Montgomery had routed Rommel’s army at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, while the Americans landed a huge force in Morocco and Algeria, ready to link up with the British. In January 1943, the Russians won the hard-fought and extremely bloody Battle of Stalingrad, forcing the Germans to begin their long retreat from Russia and Eastern Europe. Six months later, in July 1943, the Russians beat the Germans in the massive tank battle at Kursk, and an Allied force of British, Canadian and American soldiers landed in Sicily, preparing to move through Italy. In September, the Italians surrendered and the following month declared war on Germany, whose forces still occupied much of Italy. Plans were afoot for two major Allied landings: the first in Anzio, in preparation for retaking Rome and driving the Germans out of Italy, and the second in Normandy, in preparation for retaking Paris and driving the Germans out of France. Meanwhile, the Russians were making steady progress pushing the Germans out of Poland.

In his Thanksgiving Day proclamation of 25 November 1943, President Roosevelt was able to find much for which to give thanks:

It is a proclamation that captures the tone of that time. Very few people doubted that the Allies would win the war. One very important question, however, remained unanswered and, for many who understood its importance, the optimism they felt about the seemingly inevitable defeat of
the Nazis was tempered by anxiety. That question was: how far had the Germans got in building an atomic bomb? After all, everyone knew that, in Heisenberg, the Germans had someone who was, from a scientific point of view, every bit as able as Oppenheimer to exploit the tremendous energy released by nuclear fission in the manufacture of a deadly weapon. And, in persuading scientists to come to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer would almost invariably make use of this anxiety, arguing that it was important for everyone who could be useful to the project to join it, because not only was it of the utmost importance that the Allies beat the Germans in this deadly race, but the Germans had got a head-start.

And so a mission was formed to accompany what was confidently assumed would be the successful Allied landings in Europe. Its aim was to determine what progress the Italians and the Nazis had made on the bomb. Heading the scientific side of the mission was Oppenheimer’s old friend from Holland, Sam Goudsmit; heading the military side, so he was informed on the day Roosevelt made his Thanksgiving proclamation, was Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash. The mission was called Alsos, the Greek for ‘Groves’. On 7 December 1943, it left for North Africa, and within a week was in Naples, where it was based for the next few months, during which Pash, Goudsmit and their subordinates tried to find out as much as they could glean from Italian scientists.

On 27 November, shortly before he left for North Africa, Pash forwarded to Lansdale a memo entitled ‘Possible identity of unnamed professor referred to by Dr J. R. Oppenheimer’, which had been written by Lieutenant James S. Murray, one of Pash’s agents. ‘Efforts of this office during the past month,’ Murray wrote, ‘have been directed in an attempt to ascertain the identity of the professor contact.’ He went on:

Murray then listed nine Berkeley scientists, one of whom was Joe Weinberg, whom he thought were candidates for being the unnamed professor. Of course, Chevalier was not one of those listed, since he was not a physicist or a chemist. With the implication that he had narrowed down the search to those nine people, Pash left Washington for North Africa.

A week or so after Pash left the US, those nine names were put aside after the true identity of Eltenton’s intermediary was at last revealed. On
12 December, during a visit to Los Alamos, Groves called Oppenheimer to his office and ordered him to reveal the intermediary. Oppenheimer duly named Chevalier, but did not admit that he himself was the person whom Chevalier had contacted for information on Eltenton’s behalf. The following day, Lansdale wrote to the FBI, telling them what they surely ought to have known already: that Oppenheimer had told army security that three members of the atomic-bomb project had, as Lansdale put it, ‘advised him that they were approached by an unnamed professor at the University of California to commit espionage’.

Lansdale went on to provide the fresh information that, having been ordered to name the professor, Oppenheimer had named Chevalier. The same day, Colonel Nichols, Groves’s second-in-command, sent telegrams to Lieutenant Johnson in Berkeley, de Silva in Santa Fe and the security officer at Oak Ridge, telling them that Oppenheimer had named Chevalier as Eltenton’s intermediary. The telegrams differed slightly (the one to de Silva, for example, mistakenly referred to Chevalier as a professor at the Rad Lab), but all three stated that Oppenheimer had expressed the belief that Chevalier had not approached anyone ‘other than [the] three original attempts’.

When Lansdale was asked at Oppenheimer’s security hearing to recall the first time he heard that Haakon Chevalier was the man he and (more strenuously) Pash had been trying to identify since the previous August, he was puzzled that his memory of the event did not match the written record. What he remembered, he said, was that Oppenheimer, at the time he named Chevalier, also revised his previous account about the three contacts, saying that there had actually been just one contact and that was his brother, Frank. Having read the contemporaneous documents, Lansdale testified, he could see that ‘the information was that the contact was with three persons . . . I have no explanation as to how I translate it from three into one.’ And he went on: ‘I called General Groves last night and discussed it with him in an attempt to fathom that and I can’t figure it out. But the record shows clearly that there were three.’