The First War of Physics (70 page)

Robb then turned his attention to the night that Oppenheimer had spent with Jean Tatlock. He first established that Oppenheimer had no grounds for believing that in 1943 Tatlock was no longer a Communist, before levelling an accusation.

‘You spent the night with her, didn’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes’, Oppenheimer replied.

‘That is when you were working on a secret war project?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you think that consistent with good security?’

Oppenheimer’s reply was shot through with the sound of defeat: ‘It was, as a matter of fact’, he said. ‘Not a word – it was not good practice.’

In his testimony the next day, Groves explained that while he hadn’t liked some of the things that Oppenheimer had done, it had not been his job as head of the Manhattan Project to like everything his subordinates did. He felt that Oppenheimer had made a mistake regarding the Chevalier incident through a misplaced desire to protect a friend, but he also felt that he had eventually got what he needed and had decided not to make an issue of it. However, under Robb’s cross-examination he was obliged to admit that under the terms of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, ‘I would not clear Dr Oppenheimer today if I were a member of the Commission on the basis of this interpretation’.

Character witnesses were brought before the hearing to testify for Oppenheimer’s integrity and loyalty. Among them were Bethe, Conant, Fermi, Kennan, Lilienthal and Rabi. Vannevar Bush questioned the entire basis for the hearing, declaring: ‘[H]ere is a man who is being pilloried because he had strong opinions [about the H-bomb], and had the temerity to express them.’ He concluded his testimony with the statement: ‘I think this board or no board should ever sit on a question in this country of whether a man should serve his country or not because he expressed strong opinions. If you want to try that case, try me …’

Although some, like von Neumann, had disagreed with Oppenheimer’s position on the H-bomb programme, he did not doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to America. Others, including Wendell Latimer and Kenneth Pitzer, testified against Oppenheimer. A turning point in the hearing was reached when Teller took the stand on 28 April.

Robb asked Teller about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Teller replied that he did not doubt his loyalty.

‘Now, a question which is a corollary of that’, Robb continued. ‘Do you or do you not believe that Dr Oppenheimer is a security risk?’

‘In a great number of cases,’ Teller replied, ‘I have seen Dr Oppenheimer act – I understood that Dr Oppenheimer acted – in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more.
In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.’

Under cross-examination later that afternoon, Teller was asked by Gordon Gray, chairman of the Security Board, if granting clearance to Oppenheimer would endanger American defence and security. Teller delivered this indictment:

‘I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance. If it is a question of wisdom and judgement, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance …’

There lay the rub. Oppenheimer was to be indicted for his stubborn refusal to bow to political pressure and sanction the development of a weapon that he had believed to be both unnecessary and technically unfeasible. As Teller left the hearing room, he walked past Oppenheimer. He extended his hand and said, ‘I’m sorry’. Oppenheimer shook hands and replied: ‘After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean.’

The Personnel Security Board voted two-to-one to deny clearance and their verdict was returned on 23 May. Oppenheimer had violated no laws or security regulations, but with regard to the H-bomb he was guilty of poor judgement, of ‘conduct… sufficiently disturbing as to raise a doubt’.

Oppenheimer lost his Q-clearance just one day before it was due to expire. He was visibly aged by the proceedings. As an influential advocate of clear-thinking atomic policy and international arms control, he was finished.

If it could be called a victory, then it was surely hollow. Within the physics community Teller became a pariah. After the hearing, Strauss tried to block Oppenheimer’s reappointment in October 1954 as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. He failed. When Strauss sought appointment
as Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration in 1959, the Senate voted marginally against. Accusations of an abuse of power while chairman of the AEC were factors in the Senate decision.

TEODOR KhOLL

Fuchs was tried at the Old Bailey in 1950 for transmitting atomic secrets in breach of the Official Secrets Act. He had initially imagined that he was facing the death penalty. But despite the judge declaring in his summary that his crime was ‘thinly differentiated from high treason’, this was not the crime for which he was tried. Instead he received the maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment.

Gold was sentenced to 30 years in prison in December. Greenglass was sentenced to fifteen years on 6 April 1951. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, also tried for espionage, not treason, nevertheless received the death penalty on 5 April for a crime declared by the judge to be ‘worse than murder’. The Rosenberg case became something of an international cause célèbre, sparking mass protests and vigils. Intent on martyr status, the Rosenbergs refused to confess or co-operate, and both went to the electric chair on 19 June 1953. Lamphere, who had been heavily involved in providing evidence for the case, experienced mixed emotions: ‘I felt, not satisfaction, but defeat. I knew the Rosenbergs were guilty, but that did not lessen my sense of grim responsibility for their deaths.’

By coincidence, Theodore Hall and his wife Joan were on their way to a dinner party on the evening of the executions and drove past Sing Sing prison in New York, where the executions were scheduled to take place. Hall, too, was experiencing mixed feelings. After leaving Los Alamos he had moved to Chicago, were he had worked for a time with Teller. He had met Joan Krakover in 1946 and they had married on 25 June 1947. Hall’s friend and one-time espionage contact Sax had also moved to Chicago and Joan was made aware of their past activities in support of the Soviet cause. Hall and Joan were drawn increasingly into political activism, and joined the American Communist Party in late 1947. They joined in full knowledge of how such affiliation was likely to be received in Cold War America. It also
meant that Hall could not continue with his clandestine activities, as there was obviously nothing clandestine about Communist Party membership. He wrote to Sax, by now also married and living back in New York, that it was time for him to cut ties with the Soviet spy network.

But it was not to last. Sax had retained his Soviet contacts and they now argued that Hall was still desperately needed. Despite the tacit agreement he had made with his wife, Hall decided to return to espionage. Without the requisite security clearance, Hall no longer enjoyed access to atomic secrets. However, it seems possible that he gleaned at least some important secrets about the production of polonium-210, an isotope used in the initiators of fission weapons, from other scientists working at Hanford. By August 1949 Joan was four months pregnant with their first child, and Hall once again wanted to terminate his espionage activities. They both met Morris and Lona Cohen in a New York City park to discuss the matter. The Halls were not persuaded. When Truman announced on 31 January 1950 that the Soviets had tested Joe-1, Hall figured that his work was already done. He told Sax to advise his Soviet contacts that his career as a Soviet spy was over.

It was to prove a timely decision. During the spring of 1950, Meredith Gardner at Arlington Hall was assembling a report based on a partially decrypted NKGB cable dated 12 November 1944. It pointed to a Los Alamos spy named Theodore Hall:

BEK visited Theodore Hall [TEODOR KhOLL], 19 years old, the son of a furrier. He is a graduate of HARVARD University. As a talented physicist he was taken on for government work … According to BEK’s account Hall has an exceptionally keen mind and a broad outlook, and is politically developed. At the present time H. is in charge of a group at ‘CAMP-2’ [SANTA-FE]. H. handed over to BEK a report about the CAMP and named the key personnel employed on ENORMOUS. He decided to do this on the advice of his colleague SAVILLE SAX [SAVIL SAKS], a GYMNAST living in TYRE … We consider it expedient to maintain liaison with H. [1 group unidentified] through S. and not to bring in anybody else. MAY has no objection to this …

BEK was the codename for Sergei Kurnakov. GYMNAST probably meant the Young Communist League, and TYRE was the codename for New York City. MAY was Stepan Apresyan, the Soviet vice consul in New York.

The cable had been sent before the codenames for Hall and Sax had been assigned. Of all the messages decrypted in the Venona project, this was one of the most clear and unambiguous in its identification of atomic spies.

The Hall case was passed to FBI agent Robert McQueen. Gardner made the connection between Hall and the spy codenamed MLAD, and a cable dated 23 January 1945 indicated that MLAD (whose codename had by then changed to YOUNG) had been called up into the army but was left to work at Los Alamos. The timing coincided precisely with Hall’s personnel record.

This was damning evidence, but the Venona decrypts themselves were inadmissible. McQueen needed to gather evidence that Hall was still an active spy or he needed to secure a confession. It was not going to be plain sailing. Both Hall and Sax were now highly politically active, extremely unusual behaviour for supposedly active spies. The FBI had yet to make a connection with Morris and Lona Cohen, but this husband-and-wife spy team had quietly left America and made their way to the Soviet Union, arriving in Moscow in November 1950.

Hall and Sax were separately picked up by the FBI for interrogation on 16 March 1951. However, both had anticipated this eventuality and had prepared for it. Although McQueen’s suspicions were even further aroused by Hall’s coolness during three hours of questioning, the case went no further forward. Intense surveillance turned up no new evidence. McQueen was taken off the case in late 1951, and it slipped down the FBI’s list of priorities.

Despite his coolness during interrogation, Hall was churning inside. In mid-1952 he was again approached by Soviet intelligence. He and Joan moved to New York in the autumn of that year. It is not known what, if any, secrets Hall might have transmitted to the Soviets in this third and final phase of his espionage career, but as the Rosenbergs faced execution he offered an extraordinary exchange to his Soviet controller. He offered to
show that the Rosenbergs were not wholly responsible for atomic espionage by giving himself up and confessing his own wartime role. ‘I would have done it,’ he later told a friend, ‘I felt that strongly about it. But he [Hall’s Soviet controller] felt it wasn’t a good idea at all, and so it came to nothing.’ The Soviets had already decided that the Rosenbergs were expendable.

After the news of the explosion of the first Soviet thermonuclear device in 1953, and the realisation that Joan was expecting their second child, Hall decided to break off contact with Soviet intelligence for the last time. His Soviet controller thanked him for everything he had done.

Hall went on to build a reputation as an academic biophysicist, and moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in July 1962, bringing Joan and their three daughters with him to England. Although they remained nervous that Hall’s espionage activities could still be exposed (especially after the arrest and trial of Morris and Lona Cohen, caught masquerading as antiquarian booksellers Peter and Helen Kroger in London in March 1961 ),
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as time went on the possibility receded. It was only with the July 1995 release of the Venona decrypt of the 12 November 1944 cable that Hall’s wartime role as a Soviet spy was finally revealed. Hall would never be called to account in court, but the publicity surrounding his case eventually forced him to explain his actions. Hall died in November 1999. In April 2003 Joan published a long memoir, in which she concluded:

But in 1995, when the whole story came out, I was glad. For us personally the danger was clearly past, and Ted now had a chance to tie together the two ends of his life in a coherent way. This gave him more confidence that in the end he had done something worthwhile in addition to his scientific work – something he had paid for with long years of anxiety and constraint. Ted’s efforts and those of Fuchs, and of others who tried in legal ways to contain the nuclear threat, probably helped to stave off a violent crisis for several decades during which the ‘socialist’
nations tried to control the arms race. There is good reason to believe that the delay gave humanity an extended time of hope – a time during which our children and grandchildren, with millions of others, grew up to take the reins of struggle into their hands.

Unusual suspects

Nobody was immune from suspicion. Harwell physicist Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the summer of 1950 while on holiday with his family, eventually to reappear in Moscow. He later told a Russian journalist that he had defected because he feared arrest for his wartime espionage activities, although the precise details of this espionage are unclear.

The Venona decrypts revealed more codenames, names of spies clearly connected either centrally or peripherally with the Manhattan Project. The FBI compiled substantial dossiers on other physicists, such as Bethe, Fermi, Peierls, Lawrence, Serber and Szilard. Some of the codenames remain to this day unidentified; names such as QUANTUM and VOGEL/PERS.