109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  As the operation swelled in size, the office became so desperate for support staff that Oppenheimer had to send Priscilla Greene back to Berkeley to recruit secretaries. “Finding appropriate people was very difficult,” she said. “People called friends, and friends of friends. If you knew somebody who might be useful, they would be brought in.” The Serbers suggested Priscilla’s twenty-one-year-old kid brother, DeMotte, who had mastoids and was 4F, and the next thing she knew he was joining the project as a technician. Sam Allison came into the office from the Met Lab in Chicago and brought a secretary. Eventually, Bob Bacher called on his brother-in-law, David Dow, a New York lawyer, who arrived one day in a topcoat and bowler hat and took over a lot of the administrative tasks from Oppenheimer. “It became a proper office for a director of a large laboratory instead of just one fellow and a girl typing,” said Greene. In the meantime, Dorothy screened local employees and managed to hire a fetching blonde named Mary McCauley to help with the office work. She almost immediately caught the eye of the physicist Art Wahl, and everyone, including Oppie, enjoyed the sport of watching Los Alamos’s first budding romance.

  New people were arriving daily: electricians, engineers, plumbers, carpenters, machinists, clerks, soldiers, schoolteachers, nurses, doctors, even a much-needed post pediatrician. The post’s medical director, Louis Hempelmann, had been recruited from the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis, where he had worked in nuclear medicine using a cyclotron. He brought with him several classmates from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, including Henry Barnett, James Nolan, and Paul Hagemann. Henry Barnett had trained as a pediatrician and had only recently completed his degree when he was asked to enlist and issued his travel orders. Barnett and Nolan, the post’s obgyn, arrived in the nick of time. The story on the Hill was that when Hempelmann went to deliver his first baby, the young radiologist passed out at the sight of all the blood. When he woke up, he was recovering on a bed next to the new mother.

  When Henry Barnett and his twenty-four-year-old wife, Shirley, arrived at 109 East Palace Avenue in June, all they knew was that he had been temporarily stationed in Santa Fe, presumably before traveling on to Europe. Dorothy McKibbin gave them their passes and took them to lunch at La Fonda, where she gently broke the news that they were headed to Los Alamos and that once the gates closed behind them, they would be there until the war was over. When Shirley Barnett heard that she would be allowed no visitors, and no visits home, she burst into tears. “It was scary as hell,” she said. “The moment Henry and I were alone for a moment I said, ‘I don’t want to stay here.’ Of course, there was no choice. I wasn’t scared of the bomb because I didn’t know about it then. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to leave, or to see my family or home for months, even years. Henry was a pediatrician, but he was in the army and involved in who knows what. The whole picture was very frightening. I couldn’t believe it was happening.”

  Dorothy was warm, steady, and understanding, and she helped Shirley come around to the idea that as a wartime assignment, Los Alamos was not the worst place to be. Before lunch was over, Dorothy had her laughing over the maddening idiosyncrasies and foibles of army life, and the two women parted fast friends. In times of great uncertainty, friendships can flower in a matter of moments, and strangers can become inseparable in the blink of an eye. In their small, inward-turned society, it was only natural that like-minded people bonded quickly. Pretty, petite, and sharp as a tack, Shirley Barnett immediately hit it off with Priscilla Greene and Charlotte Serber, and on their recommendation, soon found herself working for Oppenheimer. (Beverly Agnew was pregnant, and Oppenheimer was once again in need of another assistant.) Thanks to an unforeseen baby boom, encouraged no doubt by the lack of distractions after dark, Henry Barnett became the most popular man on the mesa, and between the two of them, the Barnetts were privy to most of the unofficial secrets at Los Alamos.

  Working in Oppie’s office, Shirley Barnett should have been subject to a rigorous security clearance, but Oppie did not care and asked her to start before her clearance came through. All Los Alamos personnel, along with the family members accompanying them to the site, were expected to fill out the detailed questionnaires. At first glance, the government forms seemed standard, requesting information on family background, relatives, schools, military service, employment since 1935, and travel to foreign countries since 1935 and the reasons for each visit. But the most telling question, according to Barnett, was the one asking for a list of memberships in organizations since 1930. Three character references were also required, along with their addresses. “You could tell the clearance forms the G-2 filled out on people were mostly concerned with Communist connections—had they ever been Communists, did they have friends who were Communists, and so on,” she said. The security checks, supervised by the War Department counter-intelligence operations, could take upward of a month, though during heavy recruiting periods they could take much longer. Shirley worried about this for a while, but just sitting around waiting was driving her crazy, so she went to work.

  Every potential employee was investigated to some degree, but because of the thousands recruited to work at the Manhattan Project laboratories, support staff—truck drivers, cleaning staff, cafeteria workers—with no access to classified material were given only limited checks. By contrast, the background investigations of top physicists, particularly those who were foreign-born, were, in Groves’ words, “most thorough and might go back to infancy.” Everyone was fingerprinted, and the files forwarded to the FBI. The main barrier to clearance was any attempt to conceal an arrest record, although given the demand for certain highly skilled laborers, exceptions were made in cases of traffic violations and drunkenness. No one convicted of rape, arson, or narcotics charges was hired because of “demonstrated weakness in moral fiber.” The objective, according to Groves, was “to find out before employing anyone whether there was anything in his background that would make him a possible source of danger, paying particular attention to his vulnerability to blackmail, arising from some prior indiscretion.”

  A new person was supposed to be kept on “nonsecret phases” of the work until the hurried investigation could be completed, but in practice the employee’s lack of clearance was overlooked. Security officers never approved Shirley Barnett, even though she worked in Oppenheimer’s office and handled highly sensitive correspondence and classified documents. “Many people, including me, were never cleared because the standards were so ridiculous,” she said. “If you had any kind of leftist background—and anybody worth their salt would have had some connections during the 1930s when anti-fascism was popular among intellectuals—you were never finally cleared. We all sort of ignored it because we were all there, and they wanted us to work.” During the war, many clearance forms crossed Oppenheimer’s desk, and Shirley vividly remembered seeing one where Groves had impatiently scrawled: “The Communists are our allies in this war. It’s the Nazis we are fighting. Go look at them.” Thereafter, she had a soft spot for the general. “Groves did things his own way,” she said. “He wasn’t an idealogue. He cared about security, but he could be unorthodox when it suited him.”

  One way or another, the security arrangements continued to preoccupy their thoughts, particularly as the mesa’s population continued to mushroom, and the many new employees thronged the cafés and curio shops in Santa Fe, and uniformed WACs and navy officers began to out-number the tourists on the streets. Rumors circulated about what was going on up at Los Alamos, where so many people, packages, and delivery trucks kept disappearing. Oppenheimer was worried that people would start asking questions about all the scientists, and about the loud booms that had begun to ring out from the canyons and could be heard in Santa Fe on fine mornings. He asked Dorothy to try to discourage all the talk by reaching out to her wide network of friends and contacts, but despite her best efforts the gossip continued unabated. One popular story had it that Los Alamos was a wartime plant that made w
indshield wipers for submarines. Others insisted that workers were actually assembling submarines in a factory. This theory persisted even though there was no deep water for hundreds of miles around: against all reason, people actually believed the army had cut a secret passage to float the subs down the Rio Grande.

  A vacationing reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer followed up on the rumors and got as far as the first guard station before being turned back. Refusing to be deterred, he published an article entitled “The Forbidden City” and speculated excitedly about all the secret doings. The article was accompanied by a cartoon parodying the gate and the MPs in their battle helmets. “The Mr. Big in the city is a college professor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, called the ‘Second Einstein,’” he reported. “[A] widespread belief is that he is developing ordnance and explosives. Supporters of this guess argue that it accounts for the number of mechanics working on the production of a single device.” When the Plain Dealer break was picked up by The Santa Fe New Mexican, it sent security into a tizzy, and the Manhattan District’s Counter-intelligence Corps (CIC) came down hard on both papers.

  After that, the security boys really cracked down on the local press, patrols were increased, and everything tightened up. Even if keeping Los Alamos an absolute secret was a logistical impossibility—innumerable day workers, delivery truck drivers, Indian housemaids, and assorted cowboys passed through on a daily basis—if the army conceded the effort altogether, the project would have to close up shop. Instead, Oppenheimer decided it would be advisable to put out a “story” about the project that, he wrote in a memo to Groves, “if disseminated in the right way, might serve somewhat to reduce the curiosity of the local population”:

  We propose that it be let known that the Los Alamos Project is working on a new type of rocket and that the detail be added that this is a largely electrical device. We feel that the story will have a certain credibility; that the loud noises which we will soon be making here will fit in with the subject; and the fact, unfortunately not kept completely secret, that we are installing a good deal of electrical equipment, and the further fact that we have a large group of civilian specialists would fit in quite well. We further believe that the remoteness of the site for such a development and the secrecy which has surrounded the project would be appropriate, and that the circumstances that a good deal of work is in fact being done on rockets, together with the appeal of the word, makes this story one which is both exciting and credible.

  After gaining the approval of the governing board of the laboratory, Oppenheimer informed his staff of this “official” smoke story and, in an unnecessarily elaborate touch, further instructed them “neither to contradict nor to support a story of this kind should they run into it.” Oppenheimer and the lieutenant in charge of security decided that it would be a good idea to launch their rumor counteroffensive by organizing a small party of staffers to visit a few local watering holes in Santa Fe “for the purpose of deliberately spilling something about an electromagnetic gun.” Oppie’s first choice for the mission was Charlotte Serber, who it was generally agreed could talk the ear off anyone. Escorting her would be the always gregarious and charming John Manley.

  One afternoon, Oppenheimer summoned them into the director’s office, where Priscilla Greene and the G-2 lieutenant were already seated, and informed them of their mission. “No one is to be told of this assignment,” Oppenheimer said. “If you are successful, you will be reported on by G-2 in Santa Fe and by other Los Alamosites who overhear you. You will be protected if you get into trouble, but for the moment it is a secret mission.” The pair reluctantly agreed to go, but Charlotte requested that her husband be allowed to come along for moral support. Manley said he would take Priscilla and make their “spy ring” a foursome. With orders to spread false rumors all over town, they made a tentative date for the following evening. The four of them went down to La Cantina, the cocktail lounge at La Fonda, which was the main place in town and usually packed with locals as well as tourists, though on this particular evening business was rather slow. They got a table and drinks and began talking loudly among themselves in the hopes of ensnaring eavesdroppers, but their conversation was a bit awkward, and Charlotte could not help feeling a little silly and self-conscious. As Bob Serber recalled, it was “difficult to work electric rockets into the conversation”:

  Nobody paid any attention that we could see, so after a while we left there and decided to go to a low-down bar. The bar was jumping, jammed and crowded and full of Spanish-Americans. We got a booth and drinks, and John and Priscilla started to dance and talk about electric rockets. Pretty soon a Spanish-American kid came over and asked Charlotte to dance. It turned out that he’d had a job as a construction worker on the site for a while and couldn’t care less, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was his ambition to own a horse ranch.

  None of the patrons of Joe King’s Blue Ribbon Bar seemed the least bit interested in who they were or what they were saying. As the night wore on, they could see that their efforts were falling flat. Finally, Bob Serber announced, “Well, I’m just going to do it!” He bellied up to the bar and tried to draw the men on either side of him into conversation with the opening gambit, “Did you ever hear what they’re doing up there?” As Serber was usually a rather retiring person, Greene looked on with amazement as he practically seized a man by the coat lapels. “He couldn’t really get anyone to talk to him, and he was sort of a little bit drunk at that point—we all were—and he sort of shook one of them by the shoulders and shouted at him that we were building rockets,” said Greene. “The only problem was that this fellow was so drunk, we were sure there was no way he would ever remember.” It was 3 A.M. by the time they made it back to the post. On the long drive back, they all agreed they were flops at the spy business.

  In the end, the rocket rumor never took. The foursome made several more forays to the Blue Ribbon Bar over the next two months, but those outings proved no more successful. On one of their last outings, Charlotte attempted to spread false stories about the project at a Santa Fe beauty parlor, while John Manley worked the patrons at the local barber shop. They came away feeling embarrassed and decided to retire as counterespionage agents. While the army was never too happy about it, probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy’s scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.

  By August, people had relaxed and let down their guard a little. “The Santa Feans soon became accustomed to the queer ways of the scientists,” wrote Dorothy. “They claimed they could spot them from a great distance.” Laboratory personnel were permitted one day a month to do their shopping, and they streamed into town on weekends to hunt for luxuries like stockings and whiskey, which were always in short supply, and to fill up on Mexican food and take part in the local festivals. On Sundays, several couples would share their monthly government-issued C-coupons to buy gas, which was rationed during the war, and organize picnic outings to the Valle Grande, Jemez River, or Rio Frijoles, where there was good hiking and fishing and they could go for a dip in the river if the water level was high enough. Dorothy’s office, adjacent to the shady courtyard bordered by tall hollyhocks and zinnias, was a busy hub of activity for project members and their families on their prized visits to civilization. Dogs were tied outside. Babies napped in strollers under the huge elm tree outside her door while their parents dashed around doing errands. Bachelors loitered by her desk and asked her advice on their love lives or on the best place to eat or to buy turquoise trinkets and cheap silver.

  Dorothy invited them all to make her office their headquarters, a place where they could leave parcels, meet friends, or just stop by for a chat. “She had an air of handling people easily,” wrote Bernice Brode, who was married to the physicist Robert Brode. “Only later did I come to know the serious difficulties she avoided for us all”:

  She was very lovely, with shining hair and dressed in
blue tweed to match her eyes. She had a quiet grace in the midst of all the hubbub. She was a hostess rather than a chargé d’affaires…. So 109 East Palace, and Dorothy, our only link with Santa Fe, became our private, secret club in the capital of New Mexico. There we could talk and make plans and have no fear of being overheard.

  Dorothy gradually became more accustomed to dealing with her important charges and grew bolder within the secure confines of her office. She flirted with the handsome physicists and, between a wink and a nod, cultivated a breezy familiarity that endeared her to one and all. This was clever company after all, and with the world in such a terrible state, and the work so unrelentingly serious, she felt the least she could do was provide witty conversation and a spot of relief. In an unguarded moment, she might even be so forward as to blithely violate the security injunctions that regulated their every move and communication, and to tempt them to follow suit. It was a game they all played, and it made the long hours easier and their hearts lighter. “If there was no stranger around and I was feeling very wicked,” she wrote, “I would glance in all directions, examine the empty air, raise an eyebrow and whisper tensely, blowing through my teeth like a suppressed wind instrument, ‘Are you a phhh ht?’ And the young man would nod, and we would say no more, but smoulder within with shared excitement.”