by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Like many Hill wives, Charlotte Serber worked in the Tech Area. And though G-2’s security file on the Serbers noted her family’s left-wing background, Charlotte’s job as scientific librarian literally made her the gatekeeper for The Hill’s most important secrets. Oppenheimer placed enormous trust in her. Casually dressed in jeans or slacks, Charlotte presided over the library as a social hangout and a “center for all gossip.”
One day, Oppenheimer called Charlotte into his office. Oppie explained that rumors were beginning to circulate in Santa Fe about the secret facility on the mesa. He had suggested to Groves that it might be wise to plant their own rumors as a diversion. “Therefore,” said Oppie, “for Santa Fe purposes, we are making an electric rocket.” He then explained that he wanted the Serbers and another couple to frequent some of the bars in Santa Fe. “Talk. Talk too much,” Oppie said. “Talk as if you had too many drinks. . . . I don’t care how you manage it, say we are building an electric rocket.” Accompanied by John Manley and Priscilla Greene, Bob and Charlotte Serber soon drove down to Santa Fe and tried to spread the rumor. But no one was interested, and G-2 never picked up any talk about electric rockets.
Richard Feynman, an incorrigible practical joker, had his own way of dealing with security regulations. When the censors complained that his wife, Arline, now a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, was sending him letters in code and asked for the code, Feynman explained that he didn’t have the key to it—it was a game he played with his wife to practice his code-breaking. Feynman also drove security personnel to distraction when he went on a nighttime safecracking spree, opening the combination locks for secret file cabinets all over the laboratory. On another occasion, he noticed a hole in the fence surrounding Los Alamos—so he walked out the main gate, waved to the guard, and then crawled back through the hole and walked out the main gate again. He repeated this several times. Feynman was almost arrested. His antics became part of Los Alamos lore.
The Army’s relations with the scientists and their families were always shaky. General Groves set the tone. In private with his own men, Groves routinely labeled Los Alamos civilians “the children.” He instructed one of his commanders: “Try to satisfy these temperamental people. Don’t allow living conditions, family problems, or anything else to take their minds off their work.” Most of the civilians made it clear that they found Groves “distasteful”—and he made it clear that he didn’t care what they thought.
Oppenheimer got along with Groves—but he found most of the Army’s counterintelligence officers obtuse and offensive. One day Captain de Silva barged into one of Oppenheimer’s regular Friday afternoon meetings of all the group leaders, and announced, “I have a complaint.” De Silva explained that a scientist had come into his office to talk and, without asking his permission, had sat on the corner of his desk. “I didn’t appreciate it,” fumed the captain. To the amusement of everyone else in the room, Oppenheimer replied, “In this laboratory, Captain, anybody can sit on anybody’s desk.”
Captain de Silva, the only West Point graduate resident at Los Alamos, could not laugh at himself. “He was profoundly suspicious of everyone,” recalled David Hawkins. That Oppenheimer had appointed Hawkins, a former Communist Party member, to the lab’s security committee, only fueled De Silva’s suspicions. Oppenheimer liked Hawkins and thought highly of his abilities. He also knew that Hawkins was a loyal American, whose left-wing politics—like his own—were reformist rather than revolutionary.
Some of the security restrictions were deeply annoying to everyone. When Edward Teller said that his people were complaining about their mail being opened, Oppie replied bitterly, “What are they griping about? I am not allowed to talk to my own brother.” He chafed at the notion that he was being watched. “He complained constantly,” Robert Wilson recalled, “that his telephone calls were monitored.” At the time, Wilson thought this “somewhat paranoiac”; only much later did he realize that Oppie had indeed been under near-total surveillance.
Even before Los Alamos opened in March 1943, Army counterintelligence instructed J. Edgar Hoover to suspend FBI surveillance of Oppenheimer. As of March 22, Hoover complied, but he instructed his agents in San Francisco to continue their surveillance of individuals who might have been connected with Oppenheimer in the Communist Party. On that date, the Army informed the FBI that it had arranged for full-time technical and physical surveillance of Oppenheimer. A large number of Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) officers had already been placed in undercover assignments even before Oppenheimer arrived in Los Alamos. One such agent, Andrew Walker, was assigned to serve as Oppenheimer’s personal driver and bodyguard. Walker later confirmed that CIC officers monitored Oppenheimer’s mail and his home telephone. Oppie’s office was wiretapped.
OPPENHEIMER, meanwhile, was himself becoming highly security-conscious. The once casual college professor now could be seen carefully pinning a classified memo inside his hip pocket so as not to lose it. He even tried to placate the Army security officers, giving them his valuable time and complying with virtually all of their requests. But the pressure of the work, the sensation of being constantly watched, the fear of failure—all of this and more—began to take its toll. At one point in the summer of 1943, Oppenheimer confessed to Robert Bacher that he was thinking of quitting. He felt hounded by the investigations into his past. Besides, he told Bacher, the strain of the job was just too much. After listening to Oppie list his inadequacies, Bacher told him simply, “There isn’t anybody else who can do it.”
So Oppie persevered. But once, in June 1943, he did something which he should have known would surely heighten the concerns of CIC officers. Despite his marriage to Kitty, Robert had continued to see Jean Tatlock about twice each year between 1939 and 1943. He later explained, “we had been very much involved with one another, and there was still very deep feeling when we saw each other.” He and Jean had met around New Year’s Eve in 1941 and occasionally ran into each other at parties in Berkeley. But Oppie also visited Jean at her apartment and in her office at the children’s hospital where she was employed as a psychiatrist. Once he went to see Jean at her father’s house around the corner from his own home on Eagle Hill Drive, and on another occasion they had drinks at the Top of the Mark, an elegant restaurant with one of the best views in San Francisco.
Oppenheimer may or may not have resumed his love affair with Jean during these years; we know only that he continued to see her and that the emotional bonds between them were unbroken. Sometime after Robert married Kitty in 1940, Jean was visiting their old friend Edith Arnstein, now married, in her San Francisco apartment. Jean was standing at the window, holding Edith’s baby girl, Margaret Ludmilla, when Edith asked her if she regretted refusing to marry Oppie. She replied “Yes,” and that she probably would have married him “had she not been so mixed up.”
By the time Oppenheimer left Berkeley in the spring of 1943, Jean was Dr. Jean Tatlock, a woman on the threshold of a rewarding medical career. She was a pediatric psychiatrist at Mount Zion Hospital, where most of her patients were mentally troubled children. She seemed to have found a career that suited her temperament and intellect.
Jean had told Oppie that she “had a great desire” to see him before he and Kitty left that spring for Los Alamos. But for some reason, Oppie refused. Security could not have been the issue, since he had made a point of saying good-bye to Steve Nelson. Perhaps Kitty objected. Whatever the case, he left for Los Alamos without saying good-bye to Jean, and he felt guilty about it. They corresponded, but Jean told her friends that she found his letters mystifying. She implored him in several anguished letters to return. Robert knew she was seeing a psychologist, his good friend Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, Freud’s disciple and the leader of the study group he had attended regularly for several years. Oppenheimer knew that Dr. Bernfeld was Jean’s training analyst—and he also knew that “she was extremely unhappy.”
So when he had occasion in June 1943 to return to Be
rkeley, Oppie made a point of calling Jean and taking her to dinner. Military intelligence agents stalked him throughout his visit, and later reported to the FBI what they had observed: “On June 14, 1943, Oppenheimer traveled via Key Railway from Berkeley to San Francisco . . . where he was met by Jean Tatlock who kissed him.” They then walked arm in arm to her car, a 1935 green Plymouth coupe; she drove him to the Xochimilco Café, a cheap combination bar, café and dance hall. They had a few drinks with dinner and then at about 10:50 p.m. Jean drove them back to her top-floor apartment at 1405 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. At 11:30 p.m. the lights were extinguished, and Oppenheimer was not observed until 8:30 a.m. next day, when he and Jean Tatlock left the building together. The FBI report noted that “the relationship of Oppenheimer and Tatlock appears to be very affectionate and intimate.” Again that evening, the agents watched as Tatlock met Oppenheimer at the United Airlines office in downtown San Francisco: “Tatlock arrived on foot and Oppenheimer rushed to meet her. They greeted each other affectionately and walked to her car nearby; thence to dinner at Kit Carson’s Grill.” After dinner, Jean drove him to the airport, where he caught a flight back to New Mexico. Oppie never saw her again. Eleven years later, he was asked by his interrogators, “Did you find out why she had to see you?” He replied, “Because she was still in love with me.”
Reports of Oppenheimer’s visit with Tatlock, a known Communist Party member, made their way to Washington, and soon she was being described as a possible conduit for passing atomic secrets to Soviet intelligence. On August 27, 1943, in a memo justifying a wiretap on Tatlock’s phone, the FBI suggested that Oppenheimer himself “might either use her as a go-between or use her telephone from which to place important calls affecting the Comintern Apparatus. . . .”
On September 1, 1943, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote the Attorney General that in connection with the Bureau’s investigation of Soviet Comintern espionage agents “it has been determined that Jean Tatlock . . . has become the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort.” Hoover asserted that Tatlock was “a contact of members of the Comintern Apparatus in the San Francisco area and it is reported that she is not only in a position to solicit secret information from the man with whom she associates, but is also in a position to pass the information on to espionage agents within the Apparatus.” Hoover recommended tapping her telephone “for the purpose of determining the identities of espionage agents within the Comintern Apparatus,” and late that summer one tap was installed by either Army intelligence or the FBI.
On June 29, 1943, just two weeks after Oppenheimer spent the night with Tatlock, Col. Boris Pash, Chief of Counter-Intelligence on the West Coast, wrote a memo to the Pentagon recommending that Oppenheimer be denied a security clearance and fired. Pash reported that he had information that Oppenheimer “may still be connected with the Communist Party.” All of his evidence was circumstantial. He cited Oppenheimer’s visit to Tatlock, and a phone call Oppenheimer made to David Hawkins, “a party member who has contacts with both Bernadette Doyle and Steve Nelson.”
Pash believed that if Oppenheimer himself was not prepared to transmit scientific information directly to the Party, “he may be making that information available to his other contacts, who, in turn, may be furnishing” knowledge about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Pash naturally wondered whether Tatlock could be the conduit. He would also have learned from his FBI colleagues that, as late as August 1943, Tatlock was politically active in Communist Party affairs.
In Pash’s mind, Tatlock was a prime spy suspect and he was hoping that a wiretap on her phone would prove it. Short of that, Pash intended to use the fact of Oppenheimer’s relationship with Tatlock as a weapon against him. In late June, he marshaled his thoughts along these lines in a long memo to Groves’ new security aide, Lt. Col. John Lansdale, a smart thirty-one -year-old lawyer from Cleveland. Pash told Lansdale that if Oppenheimer could not be fired outright, he should be called to Washington and threatened in person with the “Espionage Act and all its ramifications.” He should be informed that military intelligence knew all about his Communist Party affiliations and that the government would not tolerate leaks of any kind to his friends in the Party. Like General Groves, Pash thought Oppenheimer’s ambition and pride could be used to keep him in check: “It is the opinion of this office,” Pash wrote, “that subject’s personal inclinations would be to protect his own future and reputation and the high degree of honor which would be his if his present work is successful, and, consequently, it is felt that he would lend every effort to cooperating with the Government in any plan which would leave him in charge.”
By then, however, Lansdale had met Oppenheimer and, unlike Pash, he liked and trusted him. But he also understood that while Oppie was a key man in the project, his political associations were troubling. Shortly after receiving Pash’s recommendations, Lansdale wrote Groves a concisely worded, two-page memo summarizing the evidence. Lansdale listed all the “front” groups (as defined by the FBI) Oppie had joined over the years, from the American Civil Liberties Union [sic] to the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom. He cited his association and friendship with such known or suspected communists as William Schneiderman, Steve Nelson, Dr. Hannah L. Peters—identified by Lansdale as “organizer of the Doctors Branch, Professional Section, Communist Party, Alameda County, California”—Isaac Folkoff and such personal friends as Jean Tatlock, “with whom Oppenheimer is alleged to have an illicit association,” and Haakon Chevalier, “believed to be a Communist Party member.” Most damaging of all, Lansdale noted that Steve Nelson’s assistant, Bernadette Doyle, “is reported by a very reliable informant [i.e., a telephone intercept] to have referred to J. R. Oppenheimer and his brother, Frank, as being regularly registered within the Communist Party.”
Yet Lansdale did not recommend firing Oppenheimer. Instead, he advised Groves in July 1943, “you should tell Oppenheimer substantially that we know that the Communist Party . . . is attempting to discover information” about the Manhattan Project. Tell him, Lansdale wrote, that “we know who some of the traitors engaged in this activity are. . . .” Others, he noted, remained concealed, and for that reason the Army was going to methodically remove any individuals from the project who seemed to be followers of the Communist Party line. There would be no mass discharges, only careful investigations based on substantial evidence. To this end, Lansdale wanted to use Oppenheimer: “He should be told that we have hesitated to take him into our confidence in this matter . . . because of his known interest in the Communist Party and his association with and friendship for certain members of the Communist Party.” Lansdale seemed to think that this approach would encourage Oppenheimer to name names. In short, Lansdale was telling Groves that if he intended to keep Oppenheimer as his scientific director, he should press him to become an informer.
OVER THE ENSUING MONTHS and years, indeed, as long as Oppenheimer was in the employ of the government, he was harassed by variations of the Pash-Lansdale strategy. At Los Alamos, he was assigned assistants who in reality were “specially trained Counter Intelligence Corps agents who will not only serve as bodyguards for subject but also as undercover agents for this office.” His driver and bodyguard, Andrew Walker, was a CIC agent who reported directly to Colonel Pash; his mail was monitored, his phone tapped, his office wired. Even after the war, he was subjected to close physical and electronic surveillance. His past associations were raised repeatedly by congressional committees and the FBI, and he was made to understand—repeatedly—that he was himself suspected of being a Communist Party member.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Oppenheimer Is Telling the Truth ...”
I would be perfectly willing to be shot if I had done anything wrong.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER to Lt. Col. Boris Pash
GENERAL GROVES AGREED WITH Lieutenant Colonel Lansdale’s recommendations. They would keep Oppenheimer as scientific d
irector of the project, but Lansdale would set out to reel Oppenheimer into his security web. Not surprisingly, Pash vigorously objected to this subtle strategy, but on July 20, 1943, Groves instructed the Manhattan Project security division to issue Oppenheimer his security clearance. This was to be done “irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.” Pash was not the only security officer who seethed at this decision. When Groves’ aide, Lt. Col. Kenneth Nichols, informed Oppenheimer that his clearance had been issued, Nichols warned him, “In the future, please avoid seeing your questionable friends, and remember, whenever you leave Los Alamos, we will be tailing you.” Nichols already strongly distrusted Oppenheimer, not merely because of his past associations with communists but because he believed Oppenheimer was endangering security by recruiting “questionable people” at Los Alamos. The more he saw of Oppenheimer, the more Nichols grew to despise him. That Groves didn’t share this sentiment, and was actually coming to trust the physicist, irritated Nichols and only accentuated his resentment of Oppenheimer.
If Oppenheimer couldn’t be eliminated, there were others more vulnerable—Oppenheimer’s protégé Rossi Lomanitz, for example. On July 27, 1943, the twenty-one-year-old physicist was called into Ernest Lawrence’s office and told that he was being promoted to group leader in the Radiation Lab. But three days later, as the result of an investigative report by Pash, Lomanitz received a special-delivery letter from his draft board ordering him to appear for a physical examination the very next day. He immediately called Oppenheimer in Los Alamos and told him what had happened. Oppie fired off a cable that afternoon to the Pentagon, saying that a “very serious mistake is being made. Lomanitz now only man at Berkeley who can take this responsibility.” Despite this intervention, Lomanitz was shortly inducted into the Army.