American Prometheus (43 page)

As he had told Lansdale just a few weeks earlier, Party discipline subjected members to the pressures of dual loyalties. As an example he cited Lomanitz, to whom he still felt “a sense of responsibility.” Lomanitz, he said, “may have been indiscreet in circles [meaning the Communist Party] which would lead to trouble.” He had no doubt that people often approached Lomanitz and they “might feel it their duty if they got word of something to let it go further. . . .” For this reason, it would simplify things for everyone if it were agreed that communists should stay away from secret war projects.

Incredibly—in retrospect—Oppenheimer repeatedly tried to convince Pash that pretty much all the people involved in these contacts were well-meaning innocents. “I’m pretty sure that none of the guys here, with the possible exception of the Russian, who is doing probably his duty by his country—but the other guys really were just feeling they didn’t do anything but they were considering the step, which they would have regarded as thoroughly in line with the policy of this Government, just making up for the fact that there were a couple of guys in the State Department who might block such communications.” He pointed out that State was sharing some information with the British, and so many people thought there wasn’t a great deal of difference between that and sharing similar information with the Soviets. “A thing like this going on, let us say, with the Nazis would have a somewhat different color,” he told Pash.

From Pash’s perspective, all of this was outrageous and, moreover, quite beside the point. Eltenton and at least one other individual—the unnamed faculty member—were trying to get information about the Manhattan Project, and that was espionage. Pash nevertheless patiently listened to Oppenheimer lecture him on his view of the security problem, and then he returned the focus of the conversation back to Eltenton and the unnamed intermediary. Pash explained that it might be necessary for him to come back to Oppenheimer and press him again for more names. Oppenheimer again explained that he was only trying to “act reasonably” and “draw the line” between those, like Eltenton, who took the initiative and those who reacted negatively to such approaches.

They continued to spar a little longer. Pash tried to use a bit of irony, saying, “I am not persistent (ha ha) but—”

“You are persistent,” interrupted Oppenheimer, “and it is your duty.”

Toward the end of the interrogation, Oppenheimer returned to his earlier concerns about the FAECT union: The main thing Pash needed to know was that “there are some things there which would bear watching.” He even suggested that “it wouldn’t hurt to have a man in the local of this union FAECT—to see what may happen and what he can pick up.” Pash immediately picked up on this suggestion and asked if Oppenheimer knew anyone in the union who might be willing to serve as an informant. He replied, no, that he had only heard that “a boy called [David] Fox is president of it.”

Oppenheimer then made it clear to Pash that as director at Los Alamos, he was certain that “everything is 100 percent in order. . . . I think that’s the truth,” he said, and added for emphasis, “I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong.”

When Pash indicated that he might be visiting Los Alamos, Oppenheimer quipped, “My motto is God bless you.” As Oppenheimer rose to leave, the recorder captured Pash saying, “the best of luck.” Oppenheimer replied, “Thank you very much.”

It was a bizarre—and ultimately disastrous—performance. Oppenheimer had raised the red flag of espionage, identified Eltenton as the culprit, described an unnamed “innocent” intermediary and reported that this innocent person had contacted several other scientists who likewise were innocent. He was certain of his judgments, he had assured Pash, so there was no need to name names.

Recall that, unbeknownst to Oppenheimer, this conversation was recorded and transcribed. It became a part of Oppenheimer’s security file, and because he would later claim that his report of approach
es
(whether it was two or three is not clear) was inaccurate—a “cock and bull” story whose origins he himself could not explain—he could never prove whether he had lied to Pash, or had told Pash the truth and lied later. It was as if he unknowingly had swallowed a time bomb; a decade would pass before it exploded.

IN THE AFTERMATH of Oppenheimer’s encounter with Pash, Lansdale and Groves realized they had a serious problem on their hands. On September 12, 1943, Lansdale sat down with Robert for yet another long and frank conversation. Having read the transcript of Oppenheimer’s interrogation, he was determined to get to the bottom of the alleged espionage approach. Surreptitiously, he, too, recorded the conversation.

Lansdale began with an obvious attempt to flatter Oppenheimer. “I want to say this without any intent of flattery . . . you’re probably the most intelligent man I ever met.” He then confessed that he had not been entirely straight with him during their previous conversations, but now he wanted to be “perfectly frank.” Lansdale then explained that “we have known since February that several people were transmitting information about this project to the Soviet Government.” He claimed that the Soviets knew the scale of the project, knew about the facilities at Los Alamos, Chicago and Oak Ridge—and had a general sense of the project’s timetable.

Oppenheimer seemed genuinely shocked by this news. “I might say that I have not known that,” he told Lansdale. “I knew of this
one attempt
to obtain information which was earlier, or I don’t, I can’t remember the date, though I’ve tried.”

The conversation soon turned to the role of the Communist Party, and both men agreed on having heard that it was Party policy that anyone doing confidential war work should resign their Party membership. Robert volunteered that his own brother, Frank, had severed his ties to the Party. Moreover, eighteen months before, when they had started work on the project, Robert said he had told Frank’s wife, Jackie, that she should stop socializing with CP members. “Whether they have, in fact, done that, I don’t know.” He confessed that it still worried him that his brother’s friends were “very left wing, and I think it is not always necessary to call a unit meeting for it to be a pretty good contact.”

Lansdale in turn explained his approach to the whole problem of security. “You know as well as I do,” Lansdale told Oppenheimer, “how difficult it is to prove communism.” Besides, their goal was to build the “gadget,” and Lansdale suggested that a man’s politics really didn’t matter so long as he was contributing to the project. After all, everyone was risking their lives to get the job done, and “we don’t want to protect the thing [the project] to death.” But if they thought a man was engaged in espionage, they had to make a decision on whether to prosecute him or just weed him out of the project.

At this point, Lansdale brought up what Oppenheimer had told Pash about Eltenton—and Oppenheimer once again said he didn’t think it would be right to name the individual who had approached him. Lansdale pointed out that Oppenheimer had spoken of “three persons on the project” who had been contacted and all three told this intermediary “to go to hell in substance.” Oppenheimer agreed. So Lansdale asked him how he could be sure that Eltenton hadn’t approached other scientists. “I don’t,” Oppenheimer replied. “I can’t know that.” He understood why Lansdale thought it important to discover the channel through which this initial approach had been made, but he still felt it would be wrong to involve these other people.

“I hesitate to mention any more names because of the fact that the other names I have do not seem to be people who were guilty of anything. . . . They are not people who are going to get tied up in it in any other way. That is, I have a feeling that this is an extremely erratic and unsystematic thing.” He therefore felt “justified” in withholding the name of the intermediary “because of a sense of duty.”

Changing direction, Lansdale asked Oppenheimer for the names of those individuals working on the project in Berkeley who he thought were Party members or had once been Party members. Oppenheimer named some names. He said he had learned on his last visit to Berkeley that both Rossi Lomanitz and Joe Weinberg were Party members. He thought a secretary named Jane Muir was a member. At Los Alamos, he said, he knew that Charlotte Serber had at one time been a Party member. As to his good friend, Bob Serber, “I think it is possible, but I don’t know.”

“How about Dave Hawkins?” Lansdale asked.

“I don’t think he was, I would not say so.”

“Now,” said Lansdale, “have you yourself ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

“No,” replied Oppenheimer.

“You’ve probably belonged to every front organization on the Coast,” Lansdale suggested.
¹²

“Just about,” Oppenheimer replied casually.

“Would you in fact have considered yourself at one time a fellow traveler?”

“I think so,” replied Oppenheimer. “My association with these things was very brief and very intense.”

At a later point, Lansdale got Oppenheimer to explain why he might have gone through a relatively brief period of intense association with the Party—yet never joined. Oppenheimer remarked that a lot of these people they had been discussing had joined the Party out of “a very deep sense of right and wrong.” Some of these people, Oppenheimer said, “have a very deep fervor,” something akin to a religious commitment.

“But I can’t understand;” interrupted Lansdale, “here’s the particular thing about it. They are not adhering to any constant ideals. . . . They may be adhering to Marxism, but they follow the twistings and turnings of a line designed to assist the foreign policy of another country.”

Oppenheimer agreed, saying, “This conviction makes it not only hysterical. . . . I think absolutely unthinkable[.] My membership in the Communist Party. [Quite clearly, what he means here is that actually joining the Communist Party was for him “unthinkable.”] At the period in which I was involved there were so many positions in which I did fervently believe, in correctments [
sic
] and aims of the party. . . .”

Lansdale: “Can I ask what period that was?”

Oppenheimer: “That was the time of the Spanish War, up to the [Nazi-Soviet] pact.”

Lansdale: “Up to the pact. That is the time you broke, you might say?”

Oppenheimer: “
I never broke. I never had anything to break.
I gradually disappeared from one after another of the organizations.” (Emphasis added.)

When Lansdale once again pressed him for names, Oppenheimer replied, “I would regard it as a low trick to involve someone where I would be[t] dollars to doughnuts he wasn’t involved.”

Lansdale ended the interview with a sigh and said, “O.K., sir.”

TWO DAYS LATER, on September 14, 1943, Groves and Lansdale had another conversation with Oppenheimer about Eltenton. They were on a train ride between Cheyenne and Chicago, and Lansdale wrote up a memorandum of the conversation. Groves brought up the Eltenton affair, but Oppenheimer said he would only name the intermediary if ordered to do so. A month later, Oppenheimer again refused to name the intermediary. But curiously, Groves accepted Robert’s position. He attributed it to Oppenheimer’s “typical American schoolboy attitude that there is something wicked about telling on a friend.” Pressed by the FBI for more information about the whole affair, Lansdale informed the Bureau that both he and Groves “believed that Oppenheimer is telling the truth. . . .”

MOST OF GROVES’ subordinates did not share his trust in Oppenheimer. Early in September 1943, Groves had a conversation with another of the Manhattan Project’s security officers, James Murray. Frustrated that Oppenheimer had finally been awarded a security clearance, Murray posed a hypothetical question for Groves: Suppose twenty individuals in Los Alamos were found to be definite communists and this evidence was laid before Oppenheimer. How would Oppenheimer react? Groves replied that Dr. Oppenheimer would say that all scientists are liberals and that this was nothing to be alarmed about. Groves then told Murray a story. Some months earlier, he said, Oppenheimer was asked to sign a secrecy pledge that among other things stated that he would “always be loyal to the United States.” Oppenheimer signed the pledge, but he first struck out those words and wrote, “I stake my reputation as a scientist.” If a “loyalty” oath was personally distasteful, Oppenheimer was nevertheless pledging his absolute trustworthiness as a scientist. It was an arrogant act—but one calculated to make it clear to Groves that science was the altar at which Oppenheimer worshipped and that he had pledged his unreserved commitment to the success of the project.

Groves went on to explain to Murray that he believed Oppenheimer would regard any subversive activity at Los Alamos as a personal betrayal. “In other words,” Groves said, “it is not a question of the country’s safety, but rather whether a person might be working against OPP [Oppenheimer] in stopping him from obtaining the reputation which will be his, with the complete development of the project.” In Groves’ eyes, Oppenheimer’s personal ambitions guaranteed his loyalty. According to Murray’s notes of the conversation, Groves explained that Oppenheimer’s “wife is pressing him for fame and that his wife’s attitude is that [Ernest] Lawrence has received all the limelight and honors in this matter so far, and she would rather that Dr. OPP have these honors because she thinks her own husband is more deserving. . . . this is the Doctor’s one big chance to gain a name for himself in the history of the world.” For this reason, Groves concluded, “it is believed that he will continue to be loyal to the United States. . . .”

Fierce ambition was a character trait Groves respected and trusted. It was a trait he shared with Oppie, and together they had a single transcendent goal—to build this primordial weapon that would defeat fascism and win the war.

GROVES CONSIDERED himself a good judge of character, and in Oppenheimer he believed he had found a man of unswerving integrity. Still, he also knew that the Army-FBI investigation of the Eltenton affair would go nowhere without further names. So finally, in early December 1943, Groves ordered Oppenheimer to name the intermediary who had approached him with Eltenton’s request. Oppenheimer, having committed himself to respond frankly if ordered, reluctantly named Chevalier, insisting that his friend was harmless and innocent of espionage. Putting together what Robert had told Pash on August 26 with this new information, Colonel Lansdale wrote the FBI on December 13, “Professor J. R. Oppenheimer stated that three members of the DSM project [an early designation for the bomb program] had advised him that they were approached by an unnamed professor at the University of California to commit espionage.” When ordered to name the professor, Lansdale said, Oppenheimer had identified Chevalier as the intermediary. Lansdale’s letter mentioned no other names, either because Oppenheimer was still refusing to identify the three men approached by Chevalier, or more likely, because Groves had asked him only for the name of the intermediary. This so rankled the FBI that two months later, on February 25, 1944, the Bureau pressed Groves to get Oppenheimer to reveal the names of the “other scientists.” Groves apparently did not even bother to reply to this request, for the Bureau was never able to find a reply in its records.