Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (17 page)

As famous as Russell McNutt was obscure, J. Robert Oppenheimer was
the chief technical architect of the Manhattan Project. Hailed as an
American scientific hero after the detonation of atomic bombs over Japan
and an influential voice in public and bureaucratic debates about nuclear
weapons early in the Cold War, he was humiliated after losing his security clearance amid charges that he was either a spy or a concealed Communist. For more than a half a century Oppenheimer has been denounced as the most damaging Soviet spy inside the Manhattan Project
or defended as an honorable man undone by false and politically motivated charges. KGB documents demonstrate that he was not a spy, although not for lack of KGB effort.

A leading theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berke ley, Oppenheimer had joined the atomic bomb project in early 1942, and
his impressive performance persuaded project leaders that he might be
the man to direct the principal secret facility that would actually build
the device. In the fall of 1942 General Leslie Groves, military commander
of the Manhattan Project, overruled skeptics who pointed to Oppenheimer's lack of a Nobel Prize and administrative experience and made
him the scientific leader of the project and director of its Los Alamos,
New Mexico, site. Oppenheimer turned out to be an inspired choice, able
to manage the individualistic, egotistical, and prickly scientists unaccustomed to military ways. He was able to coordinate the scientific effort,
manage the egos, and work out a modus vivendi between the soldiers and
scientists that brought the atomic bomb project to a successful conclusion. Almost all historical assessments of the Manhattan Project have
judged his role to be one of the key factors in its success.

When General Groves chose Oppenheimer as the project's scientific
director, most senior scientists welcomed or at least acceded to the
choice. Army security officers, however, were appalled. Robert Oppenheimer had been an ardent Popular Front liberal and ally of the Communist Party from the late 1930s until early 1942, and his sympathy for
the Communist cause had been strong enough to withstand the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Army security and FBI agents also were aware
that he and his wife socialized with Steve Nelson, San Francisco Bay Area
CPUSA leader and, to the certain knowledge of security officers, a conduit between the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence. Oppenheimer's wife, Katherine, had been a Communist and married to Joseph
Dallet, a full-time Communist functionary who had died while serving
as a political commissar with the International Brigades in the Spanish
Civil War. Security officials also thought it likely that his younger brother,
Frank Oppenheimer (also a physicist), and Frank's wife were concealed
Communists, and a number suspected that Robert was one as well.
(Frank vehemently denied Communist Party membership until 1949. He
then admitted he had joined the party in 1937 and remained a member
until 1941.) General Groves understood the basis for the concern, but he
judged Oppenheimer the man for the job of scientific director and
trusted him. He overrode military security and ordered that Oppenheimer be given the appropriate clearances for access to all atomic bomb
project information.

After the end of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer briefly returned to the University of California before he became director of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. He also contin ued to be one of the chief advisers to the U.S. government on nuclear
weapons development. Doubts about his loyalty persisted and were exacerbated by harsh personal conflicts between Oppenheimer and other
nuclear scientists, military officials, and civilian policymakers over development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) held a hearing on whether his security clearance should be revoked. During the AEC proceeding Oppenheimer admitted to a series of
friendships with Communists, membership in Communist front groups,
the signing of letters and petitions supporting Communist causes, and
regular donations of large sums of money (he had considerable private
means) to party causes through Isaac Folkoff, a veteran California Communist. (Folkoff, American security officials knew, also had ties to Soviet
intelligence.) He insisted there was nothing sinister in these activities
and, further, that he had long since changed his views. He adamantly denied ever being a secret member of the Communist Party.

Evidence that has accumulated over the years indicates that Oppenheimer had lied and had been a secret member of the Communist Party
and active in a secret Communist faculty club at the University of California as late as 1941. FBI telephone taps and listening devices in the
early 1940s overheard senior officials of the San Francisco Bay Communist Party refer to the Oppenheimer brothers as members of the party
but no longer active. Also confirming his membership are three other
items: first, an unpublished memoir by Gordon Griffiths (a historian and
fellow member of the U.C. Berkeley faculty Communist club) in which
Griffiths discussed his and Oppenheimer's participation in the Communist unit; second, the private journal of Barbara Chevalier about her late
husband Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature, in which she
wrote of her husband joining the U.C. Berkeley Communist club at the
same time as his close friend Robert Oppenheimer; third, a 1964 Haakon
Chevalier letter to Oppenheimer indicating that in his forthcoming memoir Chevalier would confirm that they had both been members of the
Berkeley faculty Communist club. (Oppenheimer replied that he would
publicly repudiate Chevalier, and when his book appeared, Chevalier instead said they had been members of a Marxist discussion group rather
than a party unit.) The evidence also indicates that after 1941 Oppenheimer's political attitudes shifted. He counseled junior scientists to abandon Communist activities, and by late 1943 Oppenheimer was assisting
Manhattan Project security officers in identifying and removing security
risks from the project.' 5

An episode that contributed most directly to Oppenheimer's loss of his security clearance began in August 1943, when he informed Manhattan Project security officers that he had indirect information that
someone had approached several scientists with requests to provide sensitive information to the USSR. Pressed for details by General Groves,
Oppenheimer after considerable delay changed his story: the approach
had been made to his brother Frank, who had then consulted him. According to Oppenheimer's new version, his friend Professor Haakon
Chevalier had asked Frank to provide atomic bomb secrets in early 1943,
and Oppenheimer had then personally rebuked Chevalier for the suggestion. Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he had been approached by
George Eltenton, a chemical engineer who had worked in the Soviet
Union. Eltenton asked Chevalier to act as an intermediary to feel out a
number of Manhattan Project scientists about privately sharing information (a polite euphemism for spying) with the USSR.

Oppenheimer had difficulty explaining to General Groves why he had
not reported the incident until months later and why his initial report
had been inaccurate. He also explained some things to Groves about his
brother Frank's role and asked Groves not to share the information with
Army security. Oppenheimer also provided information to Army security
about several young scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, including Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and David Bohm,
whom he knew to be close to the Communist Party and whose ideological loyalties raised questions of their trustworthiness. (All were excluded
from Manhattan Project work.) To complicate matters more, in 1946 Oppenheimer gave a third version of the incident to the FBI, stating that
only he had been approached by Chevalier and leaving his brother Frank
entirely out of the story.'6

Chevalier, for his part, denied Communist loyalties and said that he
had only casually mentioned to Oppenheimer that George Eltenton had
raised the sharing of information with the USSR with him but that he,
Chevalier, had rejected the suggestion at once. It is now clear that
Chevalier was a concealed Communist and so was Eltenton, whom U.S.
security officers observed meeting on several occasions in 1942 with
Peter Ivanov, a GRU officer operating out of the Soviet consulate in San
Francisco. The FBI questioned Eltenton in 1946. He admitted that at
the request of Ivanov he had asked Chevalier to approach Oppenheimer
and urge him to give the Soviets information about his scientific work.
Unlike Chevalier, Eltenton did not attempt to pass off his activities as
trivial, admitting to the FBI that he had a contact at the Soviet Consulate and that the information from Oppenheimer was to be transmit ted by concealed microfilm. Eltenton said that Chevalier reported back
that Oppenheimer had refused to cooperate, and he, Eltenton, so informed Ivanov.17

Deciphered KGB cables released in the mid-199os provided very little information about Oppenheimer and Soviet espionage. His name appeared in several messages in clear text when various Soviet sources reported on which scientists were supervising various aspects of the
Manhattan Project. These are reports about him by Soviet spies, not re-
portsfrom him. None suggested any compromised relationship with Soviet intelligence.rs

Two messages contain the cover name "Veksel," whom NSA/FBI analysts identified as Robert Oppenheimer. These mentions also were benign or ambiguous. In any case, documents recorded in Vassiliev's notebooks make it clear that this is one of the few cases where NSA/FBI
analysts erred in an identification: "Veksel" was Enrico Fermi, not Robert
Oppenheimer.ry

The documents in Vassiliev's notebooks, however, contain a great deal
of information about Oppenheimer, the KGB's high hopes that he might
be recruited, and its ensuing lengthy pursuit of him. The KGB had a small
station operating out of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. In December 1942 the San Francisco station chief, Grigory Kheifets (officially
Soviet vice-consul), sent Moscow information on a Communist scientist
known to Louise Bransten. The latter was a wealthy San Francisco political activist and so close to Kheifets that she was frequently referred to as
his mistress. The FBI, which closely monitored her activities during
World War II, described her as "the hub of a wheel, the spokes thereof
representing the many facets of her pro-Soviet activities, running from
mere membership in the Communist Party ... to military and industrial
espionage and political and propaganda activities."20

Bransten's scientist acquaintance was Alfred Marshak, a prominent
geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, described as "devoted
to us and honest," who had ties to both Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer, and "might be of interest." (Lawrence, a Nobel Prize winner,
was a close colleague of Oppenheimer and a leading Manhattan Project
physicist.) Late in January 1943 Moscow Center told Kheifets, "The
neighbors [GRU] have been cultivating Robert Oppenheimer since June
1942," but "his recruitment does not seem possible." This may have been
a reflection of the fact that GRU officer Ivanov had heard from Steve
Nelson that Oppenheimer had been distancing himself from his earlier
Communist connections as his involvement with the Manhattan Project increased. It may also have reflected the failed effort initiated by Ivanov
to approach the Oppenheimer brothers via Eltenton and Chevalier, although possibly this occurred later in 1943. In view of Moscow Center's
message that GRU was already attempting to approach Oppenheimer,
Kheifets apparently dropped his notion of using Marshak to approach
the physicist.2'

But Moscow Center's frustration with the lack of progress in penetrating the Manhattan Project grew. In July 1943 it rebuked the KGB
New York station: "`In the presence of this research work, vast both in
scale and scope, being conducted right here next to you, the slow pace of
agent cultivation in the USA is particularly intolerable. Instead of grabbing onto the smallest opportunities and developing them further, you
are not even following the specific courses of action that were suggested
to you on the basis of reports that you yourself sent over."' In August
Pavel Fitin, chief of KGB foreign intelligence, summarized atomic intelligence in a report to KGB chief Merkulov. Fitin allowed that "`the state
of agent cultivation of this problem and its outlook continues to be unsatisfactory, especially in the USA."' He then offered a solution: take over
GRU's atomic sources and prospects:

"1. The material received from our agents shows that work on the investigation of a new, extremely powerful energy source-`Enormous'-is being
conducted at a very intensive pace in the USA and England and is growing ever larger in scale. This problem has received a great deal of attention, it has been allotted extensive scientific and material support, and is
being worked on by a large contingent of leading physicists. As a result
even now, despite wartime conditions, exceedingly interesting and important results have been achieved, especially in the USA. This problem has
major national economic significance, and the application of these works'
results will be most significant primarily in the postwar period. A specific
issue is the application and use of the results for military technology,
namely for the manufacture of uranium bombs.... The special laboratory
at the Academy of Sciences, established at our request by a GKO [State
Defense Committee] resolution for the purposes of expediting our leading scientists' work on `Enormous' and realizing the results of the works
of English and Amer. scientists through the use of agent materials we
have obtained, is still in its organizational stage. The organizational pace
is entirely unsatisfactory and the project is taking a very long time to get
going.

2. Despite certain achievements by a section of the intelligence operation in
obtaining information on the work being done in England and the USA on `Enormous,' the state of agent cultivation of this problem and its outlook continues to be unsatisfactory, especially in the USA. As you know,
both we and the GRU NKO [Soviet military intelligence] are working simultaneously on the agent cultivation of this problem.... By simultaneously cultivating the same narrow, and at the same time authoritative, circle of scientists and specialists as the GRU, we are essentially doubling
our work. This creates unhealthy competition at work; the same people
are cultivated and recruited (May, Henry Norman-in London; Oppenheimer-in San Francisco and oth.), which leads to useless expenditure
of time and energy and could inevitably lead to the exposure of our intentions, plans, and intelligence activities, and ultimately even to exposures.
Therefore, I think it would be expedient to consolidate efforts to cultivate
this problem in the 1st Directorate of the NKGB USSR [KGB foreign intelligence] and to give it all available GRU agents."