Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (90 page)

Chief among those figures was J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, whose opinion that Oppenheimer was a dangerous and subversive communist had been entirely unaffected by the fame and celebrity that Oppenheimer had acquired as ‘Father of the Atom Bomb’. On 26 April 1946, Hoover wrote to the Attorney General, Tom C. Clark, recommending ‘technical surveillance’ (that is, wire tapping) of Oppenheimer ‘for the purpose of determining the extent of his contacts with Soviet agents, and for the additional purpose of identifying other espionage agents’. Permission was granted, and a bug was installed on Oppenheimer’s phone on 8 May. It did not take the Oppenheimers long to work out that
they were being listened to. Every phone call was transcribed and sent by the FBI San Francisco office to Hoover, including a conversation between Oppenheimer and Kitty on 10 May that included the following exchange:

JRO: . . . Are you there, dear?

KO: Yes

JRO: The FBI must just have hung up.

KO: (Giggles)

Two days later, the FBI summary of another conversation between Oppenheimer and Kitty included the following: ‘At this point there was a clicking sound and Oppenheimer asked, ‘Are you still there? I wonder who’s listening to us?’ Kitty replies lackadaisically, ‘The FBI, dear.’

The transcripts of Oppenheimer’s phone calls were forwarded to Byrnes, who would have taken special interest in the disparaging way in which Oppenheimer discussed Baruch – whom he invariably called ‘the old man’ – in these conversations.

Relations between Oppenheimer and Baruch during this time went from bad to worse. They first met early in April, at a time when Baruch was trying to recruit Oppenheimer as a scientific advisor. The meeting, reminiscent of Oppenheimer’s encounter with Truman the previous October, was a disaster. Baruch forced Oppenheimer to admit that his proposals, with their emphasis on openness and cooperation, were fundamentally incompatible with the character of Stalin’s Soviet regime. Baruch also horrified Oppenheimer by revealing some of the ways in which he wanted to amend the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan. The United Nations, Baruch thought, should authorise the US to keep a stockpile of atomic bombs to serve as a deterrent. He also wanted to restrict the power of the proposed Atomic Development Authority in two crucial ways: first, it should not own and control uranium mines; and second, it should not have power over the development of atomic energy. Oppenheimer left the meeting convinced that he could not possibly work with Baruch, and turned down the invitation to act as his scientific advisor.

In what was possibly a tactical error, Oppenheimer did not confine himself to private expressions of his views on international control of atomic energy; he also gave public lectures on the subject. Wherever he lectured there was sure to be an FBI agent in the audience, who would send Hoover a summary of what he had said. In one such lecture, given at Cornell on 15 May, Oppenheimer told his audience grimly: ‘Mark my words, if there is no international control of atomic energy, the next war will be fought to prevent an atomic war, but it will not be successful.’ In another, given in Pittsburgh the following day, he talked of his proposed
international Atomic Development Authority as a ‘world government’, remarking that what the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan amounted to was the ‘renunciation of national sovereignty’.

In the burgeoning FBI file on Oppenheimer, these views were duly recorded and cited when the Bureau was called upon to justify its continued surveillance of Oppenheimer. That surveillance, an FBI report states, ‘has from day to day kept this office aware of Dr Oppenheimer’s travels about the country and the subject matter of many of his speeches as well as information as to his opinions on highly controversial matters concerning the atom bomb’. The report concludes:

The FBI file also contains a letter to the Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, from a certain Gregory C. Bern, dated 3 June 1946, describing the atomic bomb as ‘the United States’ top military secret’ and castigating those atomic scientists who were ‘engaged in treasonable activity to transfer our military secret to our greatest enemy, the Soviet government’. ‘Of course,’ Bern goes on, ‘this plot is concealed in their so-called “bomb-control” idea via the media of the UNO, of which the Soviet government is a member.’ ‘It must be noted that Robert Oppenheimer is a member of two Communist Front organizations and therefore his agitation for the plan which would place us at the mercy of Soviet war criminals is easily explainable.’

The view, expressed by almost all competent atomic scientists, that there was no ‘secret’ about how to build an atomic bomb was thus not only rejected by influential people in the US political establishment, but was regarded as a treasonous plot. Whereas the scientists knew that their counterparts in Russia and elsewhere would be able to work out how the energy from fission could be used to make a bomb, many politicians and military leaders – to most of whom the physics of fission was an utter mystery – shared Truman’s view that the Russians were incapable of penetrating that mystery. Among them was General Groves, who, on 14 March 1946, just two days before the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan was sent to the State Department, gave a talk at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, in which he was reported by the writer Merle Miller as telling his audience ‘that the United States didn’t need to worry about the Russians ever making a bomb. “Why,” he said, smiling, “those people can’t even make
a jeep.” You should have heard the applause; thunderous is the only way to describe it; a great many people stood and cheered.’ This was the man on whom Baruch was relying for military advice. On that advice Baruch added to his panel of consultants Edgar Sengier, a Belgian mining magnate who had worked with Groves on supplying the Manhattan Project with uranium ore, and who had an even greater stake than Baruch himself in ensuring that ownership of uranium was not transferred to an international agency.

On 17 May, the day after his lecture in Pittsburgh, Oppenheimer was back in Washington to attend a meeting with Baruch that had been arranged by Acheson, who was hoping to bring all sides together. In response to Oppenheimer’s lectures and newspaper interviews, Baruch had complained to Acheson about being undercut. Oppenheimer himself remembered: ‘Mr Baruch told me that I had scooped his speech that he was going to make at the opening of the UN. That was not true.’

At the meeting Baruch made it clear to Oppenheimer just how far his own views diverged from those that had informed the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan. Unsurprisingly, given the vested interests of himself and at least one of his advisors, Baruch was not prepared to advocate the international ownership of uranium. He also insisted on building into the plan some procedures for punishing nations that violated its terms. The punishment he had in mind, it turned out, would be administered by the US, using its stockpile of atomic weapons. He also announced at this meeting that he would be proposing that the Soviet Union should give up its right to veto the actions of the new international atomic authority. In short, what Baruch was preparing to propose at the United Nations was exactly what Oppenheimer had wanted to avoid: the continuation of the US monopoly of atomic weapons, the preservation of national ownership of the means of making atomic weapons and the imposition by force of a policy of preventing other nations from acquiring such weapons. This was not a proposal motivated by internationalism, but one that sought to preserve the national interests of the United States.

To nobody’s surprise, when the ‘Baruch Plan’ (as it was now known) was presented to the United Nations Energy Commission at its meeting in New York on 14 June, it was emphatically rejected by the Soviet Union. On 19 June, the Soviets countered with their own proposal that all existing stockpiles of atomic weapons should first be destroyed and then a committee should be established to discuss the exchange of scientific information. This, in turn, was rejected by the United States. For several months afterwards negotiations continued, without any real hope of coming to an agreement.

Meanwhile the FBI continued its close surveillance of Oppenheimer, listening to his phone conversations, following him everywhere he went
and making a note of everything he did and everyone he spoke to. Almost daily, Hoover would receive reports from the San Francisco office, detailing Oppenheimer’s activities. As evidence that Oppenheimer ‘would place us at the mercy of Soviet war criminals’, however, these reports were, to say the least, unconvincing. Whenever called upon to justify their suspicion of Oppenheimer, the FBI invariably resorted to repeating what was already known: that Oppenheimer had belonged to several Communist Party front organisations in the 1930s, that he had several friends who were members of, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party and, most damningly of all, that Oppenheimer, by his own admission, had been approached by his friend Chevalier to leak information about the atomic-bomb project to the Soviet Union.

This last piece of ‘derogatory information’ is repeated over and over again in the FBI file, as if it held the key to a major conspiracy. And when, on 4 June, Chevalier himself came to Oppenheimer’s house, FBI agents were there, eager to report to Hoover that ‘the Oppenheimers were friendly with the man believed to be Chevalier’. Hoover was also sent a transcript of a phone conversation between Chevalier and Kitty that took place when Oppenheimer himself was away on 13 June, and of an unsuccessful attempt by Chevalier to contact Kitty on 18 June.

About a week later, on 26 June, Chevalier, who had only been back in Berkeley for about a month, received an unexpected and extremely unwelcome visit at his home from two FBI agents, who demanded that he accompany them to their San Francisco office. Once there, Chevalier was subjected to a tough, eight-hour-long interview, focusing on his relationships with George Eltenton and Oppenheimer. Every now and then, Chevalier later recalled, one of the agents would speak ‘in monosyllables and brief, enigmatic phrases’, to someone on the telephone. It turned out that he was speaking to another agent based in the FBI office in Oakland, where George Eltenton was being interviewed. Eventually one of the FBI agents said to Chevalier: ‘I have here three affidavits from three scientists on the atomic bomb project. Each of them testifies that you approached him on three separate occasions for the purpose of obtaining secret information on the atomic bomb on behalf of Russian agents.’

Puzzled by the mention of
three
scientists, but sure now that the FBI must somehow have received information about his conversation with Eltenton and his abortive attempt to approach Oppenheimer on Eltenton’s behalf, Chevalier told the agents the story, such as it was, of his extremely brief and unsuccessful experience of acting on behalf of Soviet intelligence. At the same time, in Oakland, Eltenton told roughly the same story: after being approached by Peter Ivanov from the Soviet consulate, he had asked Chevalier to ask Oppenheimer if he would be willing to pass information to the Soviets. A few days later, Eltenton said, Chevalier ‘dropped by my
house and told me that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr Oppenheimer did not approve’. No matter how many times they were asked, no matter how much pressure was put on them, neither Chevalier nor Eltenton said anything that provided any support to the idea that three scientists had been approached. Indeed, Chevalier put his claim in writing: ‘I approached no one except Oppenheimer to request information concerning the work of the radiation laboratory.’

Despite all their strenuous – indeed, obsessive – attempts to prove Oppenheimer’s complicity in a major espionage effort, all the FBI had to show for hours of interviewing and days of surveillance was evidence of a momentary, clumsy exchange between Oppenheimer and Chevalier, in which Oppenheimer refused to provide information. Why, despite the lack of any kind of evidence, was the FBI so convinced that Oppenheimer
must
be in league with the Soviet Union? The answer seems to be that they were unable, otherwise, to account for his post-war political views. On the other hand, Chevalier, on his return to Berkeley in the summer of 1946, was shocked to discover how far Oppenheimer’s political views had shifted to the right and how
anti
-Soviet he had become. ‘I cannot tell you why,’ Oppenheimer told Chevalier, ‘but I assure you I have real reason to change my mind about Russia. They are not what you believe them to be.’

This is not how it seemed to the FBI. They had no direct evidence that he was pro-Russian (despite looking very hard to find some), but there were two aspects to his post-war political attitudes that they found hard to explain without attributing to him a desire to help the Soviet Union. The first was his, to their minds, otherwise unfathomable advice to the US to give up its monopoly of atomic weapons, share information with the Soviets and cooperate with them on the development and control of atomic energy. The second was his apparently fervent conviction that no more atom bombs should be built and his opposition to any further atomic bomb tests.

When he was asked what should become of Los Alamos after the war, Oppenheimer replied: ‘Give it back to the Indians.’ Of course, such a plan was never even considered. Instead, though employing far fewer people, it continued to exist after the war as both a research establishment and as an atomic-bomb production facility, with Norris Bradbury replacing Oppenheimer as director. Its first post-war task was to produce further ‘Fat Man’-type bombs, some of which would be stockpiled and others set aside for a series of tests that was planned to take place in the summer of 1946.

These tests, code-named ‘Operation Crossroads’, were first devised at the end of 1945 as a means of investigating the effect of an atomic bomb on a naval fleet. The idea was to assemble a fleet of obsolete and captured ships, some German and some Japanese, and then attempt to destroy them in various ways using atomic bombs. Three such tests were planned. In
the first, named Able, a B-29 was to drop a bomb over the fleet; in the second, Baker, a bomb was to be exploded just below the surface of the sea, attacking the fleet from below; while in the third, Charlie, a bomb was to be exploded half a mile under the ships. The place chosen for the tests was Bikini Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike the Trinity test, these were not to be secret, but rather extremely public, with the media and observers from all over the world, including Russia, invited to witness what was expected (and no doubt hoped) to be a shocking spectacle.