Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (69 page)

On 12 August, the day that Lansdale wrote his memo about Oppenheimer to Groves, FBI agents watched as Bohm, Friedman and Lomanitz arrived at a meeting at Weinberg’s apartment that was also attended by Steve Nelson and his Communist Party assistant, Bernadette Doyle. The surveillance of Lomanitz and his friends was part of an extensive FBI operation entitled ‘CINRAD’ – ‘Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory’ – which was eventually to build up files on more than 300 Communist Party members in Berkeley. So seriously was the threat to security posed by the group of communists at the Rad Lab taken that it was discussed at the highest possible level. On 17 August, Groves, after presenting a progress report on the atomic-bomb project to the US government’s Top Policy Group, went on to summarise the army’s investigation of what he called the ‘California trouble’. On the same day he had delivered to Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, a draft memo for the President advising that FAECT should be ordered to stop all activity regarding the Radiation Laboratory. Within a few months the memo achieved its end when FAECT’s Rad Lab branch was forced to close.

Lansdale’s conversation with Oppenheimer of 10 August evidently persuaded Oppenheimer that it was not enough for him to distance himself from his old communist friends and comrades; he also had to be seen to be active in combating the threat to security that they represented. The
clumsy attempt by Chevalier to enlist his aid in George Eltenton’s espionage activities, about which he had previously been entirely quiet, now seemed to him to offer a relatively harmless way of giving the security forces what they wanted: information on communist espionage attempts. Not that Oppenheimer wanted to inform on Chevalier, but Eltenton seemed a promising target. After all, Eltenton was no friend of his and he had, much to Oppenheimer’s annoyance, actively sought to involve both him and Chevalier in espionage. A few days after his conversation with Lansdale, therefore, Oppenheimer went to see Groves and gave him Eltenton’s name as someone who needed to be watched.

About a week later, on 25 August 1943, Oppenheimer went to Berkeley with, it seems, the intention of addressing the problems that Lansdale had discussed regarding security at the Rad Lab. He first went to the secret office of Lieutenant Lyall Johnson and asked him whether it would be all right to speak to Lomanitz, who at that time was still on campus, continuing to hope that his draft into the army could be deferred. Johnson granted Oppenheimer permission to speak to Lomanitz, though he stressed that in his opinion Lomanitz was dangerous. As he was leaving Johnson’s office, Oppenheimer told him (as he had previously told Groves) that there was a man called George Eltenton of whom the security officers in Berkeley should be aware. Eltenton, Oppenheimer told Johnson, worked for Shell and was an active member of FAECT.

Oppenheimer then went to Lawrence’s office in the Rad Lab, where he had arranged to meet Lomanitz. It is not entirely clear exactly why Oppenheimer wanted to meet Lomanitz. Was he still trying to help Lomanitz keep his job at the Rad Lab? Was he trying to find out what truth there was in what Lansdale had said about Lomanitz – that he had, despite his promise to Oppenheimer, kept up his political activities, including taking an active part in FAECT business, and that he had been guilty of ‘indiscretion’? Or was his purpose to pass on to Lomanitz the fact that he had aroused the suspicions of counter-intelligence officers? The evidence is scanty and restricted to what Oppenheimer himself told Pash, Lansdale and the security hearing of 1954. At his hearing, Oppenheimer said: ‘With the approval or the suggestion, I don’t remember, of the security officer, I endeavoured to persuade Lomanitz to get the thing straight with the security people.’ To Lansdale, Oppenheimer revealed that Lomanitz had told him that he was being ‘framed’. ‘I said I think that’s nonsense, why would you be framed, and he said, “Well, part of the general scheme . . . maybe they’re after bigger game than the party.”’

In other words, Lomanitz thought, as he continued to think for the rest of his life, that the aim of the authorities in drafting him into the army was to destroy FAECT. Oppenheimer claims that by this time he had come to the view that it was a lost cause to keep Lomanitz at the Rad Lab.
‘I persuaded him, I think,’ Oppenheimer told Lansdale, ‘that he should not try to stay on the project there.’

Worried about being overheard by Lawrence’s secretarial staff, and also perhaps suspecting that Lawrence’s office was being bugged,
^fn50
Oppenheimer and Lomanitz went outside to continue their discussion on the street, after which Oppenheimer returned to Lawrence’s office to find Weinberg and Bohm waiting to see him. Oppenheimer told Lansdale:

In response, Oppenheimer claimed, he told them ‘if they were violating any of the three rules which meant active in union, maintaining any contacts with Reds, not maintaining discretion, they were useless to the project’. When Lawrence briefly appeared, Oppenheimer asked him to witness the promises of Weinberg and Bohm to stay away from politics. That night, Oppenheimer had dinner in Berkeley with Robert Bacher, and was overheard by ‘creeps’ telling Bacher that he had given Lawrence ‘hell’ over the lax security at the Rad Lab.

The indications are that Oppenheimer, when he went to bed on the night of 25 August 1943, probably considered that he had done much that day to improve both the security position at Berkeley and his own reputation among the security officers. He had volunteered information about possible communist spies, had told Lomanitz to forget his promised group leadership, had elicited promises from Weinberg and Bohm to stay away from politics, and had given Lawrence a dressing-down about the weak security in the Rad Lab. Not a bad day’s work, he might have felt. However, what he had done was to sow the seeds for his own downfall and that of many of his friends, students and colleagues.

For what he had succeeded in conveying to Lyall Johnson was very different from what he had meant to convey. What interested Johnson about the ‘information’ Oppenheimer had provided was not that George Eltenton was a communist, active in FAECT and keen to supply the
Soviets with information about US military projects. The security services already knew
that
. What interested Johnson was that
Oppenheimer
knew that. As soon as Oppenheimer left his office, therefore, Johnson phoned Boris Pash to tell him about his meeting with Oppenheimer. To Pash, this looked like the opportunity he had been waiting for to prove Oppenheimer’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Pash immediately arranged to see Oppenheimer the following morning and also arranged for their conversation to be recorded. The result was a recording that would be played, replayed, transcribed and minutely analysed for the rest of Oppenheimer’s life and beyond.

In responding to questions from Pash and Johnson about Eltenton, Oppenheimer seems in this recorded interview to be extraordinarily inept, which some commentators have attributed to his arrogance in not taking seriously the possibility that he might be intellectually outmanoeuvred by people of inferior intelligence. What seems most apparent, however, is that Oppenheimer was simply not prepared for the questions he received. He went to Johnson’s office on the morning of 26 August, expecting to discuss Lomanitz with Johnson alone. He did not expect Pash to be there, did not expect the conversation to be recorded and did not expect to be questioned about Eltenton. He thought, it appears, that the security officers would simply be grateful that he had provided them with a possible lead, not that they would grill him about it. After all, when he told Groves about Eltenton, he did not have to face lots of searching questions about
how
he knew Eltenton to be involved in espionage. For this reason it seems not to have occurred to him that, if he was to keep Chevalier’s name out of it, he had better have a convincing explanation of how he came to know about Eltenton. When called upon to provide such an explanation, therefore, he responded in the worst possible way by making up a story on the spot, one that could not possibly withstand the intense scrutiny it received – a ‘cock and bull story’, as he was later compelled to confess.

Pash began by telling Oppenheimer what a pleasure it was to be able to speak to him face-to-face, since, in maintaining the security of the atomic-bomb project, he felt as if General Groves had ‘placed a certain responsibility in me and it’s like having a child, that you can’t see, by remote control’. Then, getting straight to the point, he continued: ‘Mr Johnson told me about the little incident, or conversation, taking place yesterday in which I am very much interested and it had me worried all day yesterday since he called me.’

How far Oppenheimer was understanding the mentality of security officers is revealed in his reply to this, in which he assumed that what Pash was worried about was his conversation with Lomanitz. He also showed himself willing to be far more critical of Lomanitz than was strictly necessary in the circumstances:

‘That is not the particular interest I have,’ Pash told him. ‘It is something a little more, in my opinion, more serious. Mr Johnson said there was a possibility that there may be some other groups interested.’

Clearly wrong-footed by this, and entirely unprepared for it, Oppenheimer started to babble, ending up by appearing to endorse the idea of sharing information about the atomic bomb with the Russians:

Refusing to be deflected from his main purpose, Pash then pressed Oppenheimer: ‘Could you give me a little more specific information as to exactly what information you have?’ At this point, having not thought through an adequate story, Oppenheimer fell back on equivocation, vagueness and straightforward dishonesty. The approaches for information, he claimed, ‘were always to other people, who were troubled by them and discussed them with me’. Furthermore, he told Pash, ‘the approaches were always quite indirect, so I feel that to give more, perhaps, than one name, would be to implicate people whose attitude was one of bewilderment rather than one of cooperation’. The one name he was prepared to give was the one he had already given: Eltenton.

At this point Oppenheimer probably realised he was in trouble. He had said that Eltenton had approached, possibly through intermediaries, people working on the atomic-bomb project for information to pass on to the Soviet Union, and, as he by this point in the conversation no doubt realised, Pash was not going to rest until he had secured the names of the intermediaries, the people who had been approached and (though Pash and his colleagues probably already knew this part) Eltenton’s contact at the Soviet consulate. With regard to the last of these, Oppenheimer responded:

Again, this response gave away more information than was necessary. He did not need to inform Pash that he was possibly told the name of Eltenton’s contact at the Soviet consulate, nor did he need to reveal that he knew, at least roughly,
when
these incidents took place.

With regard to the names of the people who had been approached, Oppenheimer at first tried to evade the question, and then, perhaps realising he had to say
something
, began to concoct his ‘cock and bull story’: ‘I have known two or three cases, and I think two of the men were with me at Los Alamos. They are men who are very closely associated with me.’ Now he had committed himself to saying
far more
than he needed to. He knew, of course, of one person who had been approached, through an intermediary, by Eltenton: namely himself. Did he really know of one or two others who had been similarly approached? He later claimed that he did not, that these other cases simply did not exist. So why on earth did he tell Pash and Johnson that he knew two or three people ‘closely associated’ with himself who had been approached indirectly by Eltenton for information on the bomb project? The only explanation he gave for this at his security hearing was: ‘I was an idiot.’ Indeed, under the circumstances, it is hard to think of anything more idiotic, which shows, I think,
how little prepared Oppenheimer was for the questions Pash and Johnson put to him.