American Prometheus (34 page)

When Groves proposed Oppenheimer’s name to the Military Policy Committee, there was, again, considerable opposition. “After much discussion I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became clear that we were not going to find a better man.” By the end of October, the job was Oppenheimer’s. Rabi, who didn’t like Groves, grudgingly observed, after the war, that the appointment “was a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius. . . . I was astonished.”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER his appointment, Oppenheimer began to explain his new mission to a few key figures in the scientific community. On October 19, 1942, he wrote Bethe: “It is about time that I wrote to you and explained some of my wires and actions. I came east this time to get our future straight. It is turning out to be a very big order and I am not at liberty to tell all that is going on. We are going to have a laboratory for the military applications, probably in a remote spot and ready for use, I hope, within the next few months. The essential problems have to do with taking reasonable precautions about secrecy and nevertheless making the situation effective, flexible, and attractive enough so that we can get the job done.”

By the autumn of 1942, it was more or less an open secret around Berkeley that Oppenheimer and his students were exploring the feasibility of a powerful new weapon associated with the atom. He had sometimes talked about his work, even to casual acquaintances. John McTernan, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, and a friend of Jean Tatlock’s, ran into Oppenheimer one evening at a party and vividly recalled the encounter: “He talked very fast, trying to explain his work on this explosive device. I didn’t understand a word he was saying. . . . And then, the next time I saw him he made it clear that he was no longer free to talk about it.” Almost anyone who had friends in the physics department might have heard speculation about such work. David Bohm thought that “many people all around knew what was going on at Berkeley. . . . It didn’t take much to piece it together.”

A young graduate student in the psychology department, Betty Goldstein, arrived on campus fresh from Smith in the autumn of 1942 and befriended several of Oppenheimer’s graduate students. The future Betty Friedan began dating David Bohm, who was writing his doctoral dissertation in physics under Oppie’s supervision. Bohm—who decades later became a world-famous physicist and philosopher of science—fell in love with Betty, and introduced her to his friends, Rossi Lomanitz, Joe Weinberg and Max Friedman. They all socialized on weekends and sometimes saw each other in what Friedan characterized as “various radical study groups.”

“They were all working on some mysterious project they couldn’t talk about,” Friedan recalled, “because it had something to do with the war.” By the end of 1942, when Oppenheimer began recruiting some of his students, it was pretty clear to everyone that a very big weapon was going to be built. “Many of us thought,” said Lomanitz, “ ‘My God, what kind of a situation it’s going to be to bring a weapon like that [into the world]; it might end up by blowing up the world.’ Some of us brought this up to Oppenheimer; and basically his answer was, ‘Look, what if the Nazis get it first?’ ”

STEVE NELSON—whose job it was to serve as the Communist Party’s liaison to the Berkeley university community—had also heard the rumors about a new weapon. Some of these rumors were actually published when local newspapers quoted a congressman boasting about the weapons research being conducted at Berkeley. Rossi Lomanitz heard Nelson say in a public speech: “I’ve heard some of these congressmen talk about how there’s some big weapon being developed here. I’ll tell you, people’s wars aren’t being won by big weapons.” And then Nelson went on to argue that this war would be won when a second front was opened up in Europe. The Soviets were fighting four-fifths of the Nazi armies and desperately needed relief. “It’s going to take the American people making that sacrifice—that’s how this war is going to be won.”

Lomanitz had met Nelson at various public meetings of the Communist Party and, he said, “respected him a great deal.” He regarded Nelson as a hero of the Spanish Republic, a veteran labor organizer and a courageous critic of racial segregation. By his own account, Lomanitz, while strongly sympathetic to the Party in many ways, never formally became a member. “I attended some Communist Party meetings,” he said, “because at that time meetings were much more open. There wasn’t any great distinction. . . . Who was officially a member or what it took to be officially a member, I can’t tell you to this day. It just wasn’t all that conspiratorial.”

In his memoirs, Nelson described his relationship to Oppenheimer’s students like Lomanitz, Weinberg and others: “I was responsible for working with people from the university, getting them to conduct classes and discussions. A number of Oppenheimer’s graduate students in the field of physics were quite active. Our contacts were more on their terms than ours. They lived in a more rarefied intellectual and cultural atmosphere, although they were friendly and not at all pretentious.”

BY THE EARLY SPRING of 1943, the FBI had installed a microphone in Nelson’s home. In the early morning hours of March 30, 1943, Bureau agents overheard a man they could identify only as “Joe” talking about his work at the Radiation Lab. “Joe” had arrived at Nelson’s home at 1:30 a.m. and was obviously anxious to speak with him. The two men talked in whispers. Nelson began by saying that he was looking for a “comrade who was absolutely trustworthy.” “Joe” insisted that he was that man. “Joe” then explained that “certain portions of the project were to be moved to some remote section of the country, hundreds of miles away,” where highly secret experimental explosions could be carried out.

The conversation then turned to discussing “the professor.” Nelson commented that “he’s very much worried now and we make him feel uncomfortable.”

“Joe” agreed, saying that the professor (the transcript makes clear that the reference is to Oppenheimer) had “kept me off the project because he’s afraid of two things. First of all, that my being there will attract more attention. . . . That’s one excuse. The other is, he fears that I will propagandize . . . a strange thing for him to fear. But he’s changed a bit.”

Nelson: “I know that.”

Joe: “You won’t hardly believe the change that has taken place.”

Nelson then explained that he “used to be very intimate with the guy, not only from a Party relationship, but also for a personal relationship.” Oppenheimer’s wife, he said, used to be the wife of his (Nelson’s) best friend, who was killed in Spain. Nelson said he had always tried to keep Oppenheimer “politically up to date, but that he is not so sound as he would have people believe. . . . Well, you know, he probably impresses you fellows as brilliant in his field and I don’t doubt that. But in other way[s] he had to admit a couple of times that he was off—when he tried to teach Marx, you know, and when he tried to teach Lenin to somebody else. You know what I mean. He’s just not a Marxist.”

Joe: “Yes, it’s interesting. He rather resents the fact that I don’t have deviations.”

At this, Nelson and “Joe” laughed.

Nelson then observed that Oppenheimer “would like to be on the right track but I think now he’s gone a little further away from whatever associations he had with us. . . . Now, he’s got the one thing in the world, and that’s this project and that project is going to wean him from his friends.”

Clearly, Nelson was annoyed with his old friend’s attitude. He knew Oppenheimer wasn’t interested in money—“No,” interjected Joe, “he’s quite wealthy”—but he sensed that it was ambition that was now driving Oppenheimer’s actions. “[He] wants to make a name for himself, unquestionably.”

Joe disagreed: “No that’s not necessarily it, Steve. He’s internationally very well known.”

Nelson: “Well, I’ll tell you, to my sorrow, his wife is influencing him in the wrong direction.”

Joe: “It’s something we all suspected. . . .”

Having established that Oppenheimer was not going to be forthcoming with information about the project, Nelson now focused on “Joe” and tried to coax him into revealing information about the project that might be useful to the Soviets.

The FBI’s twenty-seven-page transcript—based on an illegal bug—then has Joe cautiously, even anxiously, discussing details of the project that might be helpful to America’s wartime ally. Speaking in a whisper, Nelson asked how soon such a weapon would become available. Joe’s guess was that it would take at least one year to produce enough of this separated material for an experimental trial. “Oppie, for instance,” Joe volunteered, “thinks that it might take as long as a year and a half.” “So,” Nelson said, “as far as the question of turning the material over. I don’t know whether he’d come through but I think it’s done every day.” At this point in the transcript, an FBI or Army Counter-Intelligence official analyzing the transcript, writes, “Said in such a fashion as to indicate that Oppenheimer was overly cautious in withholding such information from Steve.”

If the transcript implicates Joe in passing information to Nelson, it also demonstrates that Oppenheimer had become security-conscious, and Nelson concluded that he had become uncooperative and overly cautious.
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AN FBI TRANSCRIPT of Nelson’s conversation with the then still unidentified “Joe” was soon delivered to Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash at G-2 Army intelligence in San Francisco. Pash, Chief of Counter-Intelligence for the Ninth Army Corps on the West Coast, was stunned. He had spent much of his career hunting communists. A native-born San Franciscan, he had as a young man accompanied his father, a Russian Orthodox bishop, to Moscow during World War I. When the Bolsheviks seized power, Pash joined the counterrevolutionary White Army and fought in the 1918–20 civil war. He returned to America after marrying a Russian aristocrat. During the 1920s and ’30s, while employed as a high school football coach, Pash spent his summers as a reserve U.S. Army intelligence officer. After America entered World War II, he assisted in the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and then was assigned as the Manhattan Project’s chief counterintelligence officer. Pash had little patience for bureaucracy; he considered himself a man of action. While his admirers described him as “cunning and shrewd,” others regarded him as a “crazy Russian.” Pash considered the Soviet Union America’s mortal enemy—and not just a temporary wartime ally.

Pash quickly leaped to the conclusion that the Nelson-“Joe” transcript was not only evidence of espionage but also confirmation that his suspicions about Oppenheimer were well founded. The next day he flew to Washington, where he briefed General Groves on the transcript. Because the wiretap on Nelson was illegal, the authorities couldn’t press charges against him or the mysterious “Joe.” But they could use the information to trace the full extent of Nelson’s activities and contacts inside the Radiation Lab. Lieutenant Colonel Pash was soon authorized to investigate whether the Berkeley lab was the target of espionage.

Pash later testified that he and his colleagues “knew” that “Joe” had furnished technical information and “timetables” pertaining to the bomb project to Steve Nelson. Initially, Pash’s investigation focused on Lomanitz, merely because Pash had information that Lomanitz was a Communist Party member. A tail was put on Lomanitz, and one day in June 1943 he was observed standing just outside U.C. Berkeley’s Sather Gate with several friends. They were posing, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, for a photographer who routinely sold his services to students on campus. After the photo was taken and Lomanitz and his friends walked away, a government agent walked up to the photographer and bought the negative. Lomanitz’ friends were quickly identified as Joe Weinberg, David Bohm and Max Friedman—all of them Oppie’s students. From that moment on, these young men were marked as subversives.

Lieutenant Colonel Pash testified that his investigators “determined in the first place that these four men I mentioned were very frequently together.” Without divulging “investigative techniques or operational procedures,” Pash explained that “we had an unidentified man and we had this photograph. As a result of our study we determined and were sure that Joe was Joseph Weinberg.” He also claimed that he had “sufficient information” to name both Weinberg and Bohm as Communist Party members.

Pash was convinced that he had stumbled upon a sophisticated ring of wily Soviet agents, and he felt that any means necessary should be used to break the suspects. In July 1943, the FBI field office in San Francisco reported that Pash wanted to kidnap Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, take them out to sea in a boat and interrogate them “after the Russian manner.” The FBI noted that any information gathered in such a fashion could not be used in court, “but apparently Pash did not intend to have anyone available for prosecution after questioning.” This was too much for the FBI: “Pressure was brought to bear to discourage this particular activity.”

Pash nevertheless stepped up his surveillance of Steve Nelson. The FBI had placed a microphone in Nelson’s office even before they bugged his home, and the conversations they overheard suggested that he had methodically gathered information on the Berkeley Radiation Lab from a number of young physicists whom he knew to be sympathetic to the Soviet war effort. As early as October 1942, the FBI bug picked up a conversation between Nelson and Lloyd Lehmann, an organizer for the Young Communist League who also worked at the Rad Lab: “Lehmann advised Nelson that a very important weapon was being developed and that he was in on the research end of this development. Nelson then asked Lehmann if Opp. [Oppenheimer] knew he was a ‘YCLer’ and added that Opp. was ‘too jittery.’ Nelson went on to state that Opp. at one time was active in the Party but was then inactive and further stated that the reason the Government left Opp. alone was because of his ability in the scientific field.” After noting that Oppenheimer had worked on the “Teachers’ Committee”—a reference to the Teachers’ Union—and the Spanish Aid Committee, Nelson wryly commented that “he can’t cover his past.”