Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (19 page)

Oppenheimer was also the subject of a lengthy October 1945 report
written by Charles Kramer, a KGB source on the staff of U.S. Senator
Harley Kilgore. Kramer had attended a Washington breakfast in late September at which Oppenheimer discussed with Senator Kilgore pending
legislation dealing with control of atomic energy in the postwar environment. This was an intense political controversy at the time, with the U.S.
military supporting continued Pentagon control over nuclear weapons
production and tight federal government control over nuclear power and
other atomic research. A vocal section of leftists and liberals, however,
was attempting to minimize the military's role and pushing for the United
States to relinquish control to an international body that would include
the USSR in its governing structure and would share American nuclear
secrets with the world. A number of junior and some senior Manhattan
Project scientists vigorously supported the proposal to internationalize
control of nuclear energy and hoped that Oppenheimer, then at the peak
of his prestige, would support their views. Kramer's report of Oppenheimer's views was not one to please the Soviets:

"Oppenheimer is playing a curious role in the entire atomic energy discussions
now going on inside and outside of government. As noted last week, his central position seems to be that nations must arrive at profound political collaboration in the atomic age or face disaster. This is the theme which he seems to
propound publicly to most groups and individuals. At the same time he has
consistently supported the War Department and its scientific henchmen, Van-
nevar Bush and James B. Conant in their attempts to rush through the warlike
May-Johnson Bill to set up an Atomic Energy Commission for so-called
`purely domestic aspects' of atomic energy, even though most of his fellow
workers on the atomic bomb disagree violently with the bill and all of them
desire that greater consideration be given to the bill before rushing it through
to passage.

At present a wide breach is developing between Oppenheimer and the
younger scientists who have to date practically worshipped him not only for his
scientific acumen but for his political sagacity as well. Last week, before the
hearings reopened on the May-Johnson Bill in the House Military Affairs Committee, O-r was striving desperately to maintain a united front of the scientific
workers, particularly the top level of physicists, to prevent any open break with
the War Department and the Administration on its desire to get the bill put through quickly. He was unsuccessful, as you have seen from the newspaperstwo associates, Dr. Leo Szilard and Dr. H. L. Anderson, came out openly
against the bill, while O-r and Arthur Compton came out supporting the bill,
although with some amendments in O-r's case. O-r's position (as explained by
some of his opponents and as have been gathered from his own remarks) is that
the present research work would go to pieces unless something immediately is
done to continue the work on atomic energy. He thus separates the so-called
`domestic' problems from the foreign or international problems, and says that
the United States must continue its work in atomic energy, even with the May
Johnson Bill's imperfections, even though the international political problems
are not taken care of. At the same time he argues publicly that the international
aspects, that is, the political relations with other countries, is of more decisive
importance than the domestic ones, and repeat the warning that we must learn
to live with other nations or be destroyed. Under questioning by Senators Fulbright, Magnuson and Kilgore, in public hearings last Wednesday, he even said,
This may not only be the last war, but the last victory, meaning that no nation
would survive an atomic war. But when a group of younger scientists testified at
the same hearings that we must perform a miracle in political science and international relations if we are to consider any developments in, or attempt to keep
atomic energy research secret, O-r termed their view in effect as political
naivete. While the bulk of the younger physicists and other scientists are opposed to the May-Johnson Bill, and are opposed to secrecy, O-r seems to take
his stand with those scientific bureaucrats who want to keep it secret under the
terms of the May-Johnson Bill."

Kramer evaluated Oppenheimer as a liberal "`in need of conversation
and guidance from the `right kind of people." "33

Vassiliev's notebooks also contain notes on a plan of action prepared
for KGB chief Merkulov to expand the number of agents working on
Enormous. This plan is undated, but the context in the notebook suggests the fall of 1945, likely in October. It was authored by Lev Vasilevsky,
formerly the KGB station chief in Mexico City but in 1945 an officer back
in Moscow, and approved by General Fitin, head of KGB foreign intelligence. Vasilevsky noted: "`We have done no work in the western USA on
`Enormous,' or on the XY line as a whole, since the start of 1944, owing
to the absence of operatives there who could be entrusted with this matter."' Echoing Semenov's suggestions of July for dedicated XY line sections, Vasilevsky urged setting up a new operations center on the West
Coast that would focus on work at the University of California, and he
listed three targets for the new technical intelligence section: Ernest
Lawrence and the still elusive Oppenheimer brothers.34

Nothing came from any of the plans, however. The defection of
Gouzenko, Bentley, and Budenz in the fall of 1945 devastated KGB operations. The KGB withdrew most of its senior field officers, ambitious
plans for new recruitment were put aside, and the depleted KGB stations focused on damage control. Oppenheimer remained on a KGB list,
but not as a prospective recruit. In February 1950, following Fuchs's arrest, Andrey Raina, a senior officer in Moscow Center, drew up a plan of
operational measures to deal with the developing furor in the United
States over atomic espionage. One of his goals was to find

ways to discredit certain leading reactionary scientists working on the atomic
problem in the USA and England.... "To look into the possibility and advisability of discrediting the Amer. scientists: a) Urey Grosse, and Smith, who are
currently working on the atomic problem. b) The designer of the first atomic
bomb, Opp-mer [Oppenheimer].... c) Reactionary scientist and defector
Gamow, who left the USSR in 1933. d) The prominent, Hungarian-born scientist from U. of Chicago, Szilard.... e) The head of the general physics division
at the Eng. atomic center, the German fascist Skinner. -35

More than a score of KGB archival documents, spanning the period
from 1942 to 1950 and quoted or summarized in Vassiliev's notebooks, directly or indirectly indicate that Robert Oppenheimer was not a KGB
source and was never in communication with a KGB officer. This point
requires some emphasis because of the continuing controversy over
whether he was or was not a Soviet spy. Both Army security and the FBI
were suspicious of Oppenheimer due to his Communist ties and subjected him to intense scrutiny, but neither agency found evidence to conclude that he was cooperating with Soviet intelligence. No charges were
brought or even proposed. A minority of security officers, however, disagreed. In 1953, for example, William Borden, earlier staff director for
the congressional joint Committee on Atomic Energy, sent a letter to J.
Edgar Hoover that reviewed the evidence and concluded: "The purpose
of this letter is to state my own exhaustively considered opinion, based
upon years of study, of the available classified evidence that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."
While most historians have concluded that Oppenheimer was innocent of
espionage, a minority have felt he either was a spy or might well have
been one. In recent years those suspicious of Oppenheimer have received
support from two sources.36

One was the already mentioned memoir of KGB general Pavel Sudoplatov. Sudoplatov had a long career in the KGB, overseeing assassi nations of Soviet defectors among other tasks, and in 1945 and 1946 heading a KGB department that depersonalized the KGB's atomic intelligence
to remove information that might identify the sources before it was forwarded to Igor Kurchatov, scientific chief of the Soviet bomb program.
Sudoplatov was closely associated with Lavrenty Beria, and when Beria
fell from power in 1953, Sudoplatov was imprisoned for fifteen years for
his role in KGB tests of lethal poisons on live prisoners. With the assistance of his son and American journalists Jerrold and Leona Schecter he
published his memoir, Special Tasks, in 1994. Covering his long career in
Soviet internal security and foreign intelligence (he joined the original
Cheka in 1921), the book was welcomed by many historians for the light
it shed on obscure matters, such as the 1938 assassination of exiled
Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevhen Konovalets (personally carried out
by Sudoplatov).

But, as noted above, Sudoplatov's chapter on atomic espionage created a sensation and was hotly contested. He flatly stated that "Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard ... were often quoted in the NKVD files form
1942 to 1945 as sources for information on the development of the first
American atomic bomb" and that "they agreed to share information on
nuclear weapons with Soviet scientists." Sudoplatov claimed that Kheifets
met Oppenheimer twice, once on 6 December 1941, when Oppenheimer
first informed him of American interest in the uranium problem, and
later in order to report to Moscow that scientists were planning to move
to a new site to conduct research. Sudoplatov wrote that early in 1943
Italian physicist Bruno Pontecoivo informed the KGB that Enrico Fermi
was prepared to hand over information. Sudoplatov credited Elizabeth
Zarubin (KGB officer and wife of KGB station chief Vasily Zarubin) with
traveling frequently to California, where she cultivated Oppenheimer's
wife; persuaded Oppenheimer himself to recruit Klaus Fuchs to work at
Los Alamos; and solicited Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard to help "us
place moles in Tennessee, Los Alamos and Chicago." The information
from Los Alamos was transmitted via a covert KGB station operating out
of a drugstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico, near Los Alamos. In total, according to Sudoplatov, Oppenheimer passed along five classified re-
ports.37

The first point that needs to be taken into account is that Special Tasks
was a memoir, written by a man in his late eighties about events that took
place forty years earlier and during which he played no direct role but was
a staff officer at Moscow Center. While memoirs are a valuable source of
information, historians know that in relying on them, one must keep in mind such problems as poor memory, errors about details, embellishment, self-service, sensationalism, and outright deception. Critics also
quickly noted obvious mistakes and flaws in the story. Among other errors, Sudoplatov gave Oppenheimer and Fermi a shared cover name,
"Star," but when the Venona decryptions were released in 1995, it was
clear that cover name actually belonged to Saville Sax, Theodore Hall's
courier. Historians of the Manhattan Project also found that Oppenheimer had nothing to do with Fuchs's assignment to Los Alamos. Nor
was there independent evidence that Elizabeth Zarubin had ever met
Katherine Oppenheimer. While there is some evidence to suggest that
the KGB might have had a covert safe house in Santa Fe in the late 1930s
as a way station for its operations against the exiled Leon Trotsky in Mexico (assassinated by a KGB agent in 1940), there is no indication that this
facility, if it existed, remained in use during the Los Alamos atomic period. There is a great deal of detail available about the travels of such
couriers as Saville Sax, Harry Gold, and Lona Cohen, all of whom made
careful and risky journeys to New Mexico to collect information from
KGB sources at Los Alamos. Harry Gold, for example, made a full confession of his activities. But nothing indicates that these couriers stopped
at a Santa Fe drugstore.38

The Schecters, who had assisted in writing Sudoplatov's memoir,
added new specifications to the indictment of Oppenheimer in a new
book, Sacred Secrets, in zooz. They dropped Sudoplatov's claim that Oppenheimer's cover name was "Star" and agreed that it was "Chester," a
cover name that first appeared in Weinstein and Vassiliev's 1999 Haunted
Wood. They wrote that Kitty Harris, a Canadian Communist and veteran
KGB agent, had located two old KGB covert agents in California, one of
whom was close to the Oppenheimer family. Through one of them, they
asserted, Elizabeth Zarubin had recruited Robert Oppenheimer. And,
they added, Elizabeth Zarubin arranged for atomic secrets to be funneled
through the drugstore in Santa Fe to Kitty Harris, assigned to the KGB's
Mexico City station, thus bypassing the New York station. This convoluted system allowed the Schecters to account for the absence of Venona
traffic to support their story. Except it didn't. Elizabeth Zarubin was an
officer of the KGB New York station and wife of its station chief. Her activities would have been known to the KGB New York station and routinely reported to Moscow. Additionally, the Venona project deciphered
a number of KGB cables between Moscow Center and its Mexico City
station. No corroboration of the Schecters' narrative can be found in the
Venona traffic or in Vassiliev's notebooks.39

The Schecters reproduced a single KGB document to support the
charge that Oppenheimer had supplied information to the KGB, a memo
to Beria from Merkulov dated 2 October 1944. Reporting on the efforts
to garner atomic information, Merkulov claimed that important information had been gleaned via Grigoiy Kheifets: "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer,
while being an unlisted member of the apparatus of Comrade Browder,
informed us about the beginning of work." The memo went on to credit
Oppenheimer, at Kheifets and Browder's request, with providing "cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources, including
a relative of Comrade Browder." The Schecters provided no explanation
of where they got the document and cite no archival source.40