Meekly, I asked if I could tell my husband, Bob, for how was I to explain many trips to Santa Fe with John? This seemed to make sense, so our “spy ring” was expanded to include Bob and Priscilla. We thus had a foursome for our expeditions to town.
Slightly bewildered, we left the office and made a date for that evening. The obvious place to go was the bar of La Fonda Hotel since it is a favorite with local businessmen as well as with the tourist-trade. We arrived there about 9 P.M. feeling a little silly and self-conscious. We found a table between two occupied ones and quietly ordered drinks. Our conversation was singularly dull as we each wondered how to bring electric rockets into it. We told little stories about Los Alamos, mentioning the forbidden name boldly and loudly. But no ears cocked in our direction; no one peered around at us. A few bored people quietly sipped their drinks and showed not the slightest interest.
After another round of drinks and no obvious sign that La Fonda business would pick up or wake up, we decided to try a less elegant bar. We might meet some construction laborers who worked on the Hill. They surely would be curious about what we were building and be anxious to learn our secret. To them, the people of Santa Fe, and not to the snobs and intellectuals, we would talk of electric rockets. We found a fairly crowded bar which sported a dance floor and were ushered to a booth. John and Priscilla got up soon, deciding that the dance floor might be a good place to be overheard. Instead of asking me to dance, Bob abandoned me without a word, went over to the most crowded part of the bar, and ordered himself another drink. No sooner had he gone than a young Spanish-American fellow, quite handsome, was bowing formally before me and requesting the honor of this dance. I recognized Bob’s plan then, accepted with pleasure, and assumed my role of Mata Hari.
My innocent voice was solemn. He danced well and said nothing. I asked if he lived in Santa Fe.
“Yes.”
I asked him what he did.
“Nothing.”
“How come you’re not in the service?”
“4F. Was working at Los Alamos, but I quit. Want to get a job on a ranch.”
I was excited. The plan was working. This boy was familiar with Los Alamos and would certainly be curious. “We’re up at Los Alamos now,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s quite a place, don’t you think?” I persisted. “So mysterious and secret, and it seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. Notice all the different license plates?”
“Yeah. You know, I sure want to run a ranch someday. That’s the only thing I want…”
“But what do you suppose they’re doing at Los Alamos?” I eagerly asked.
“I dunno. You sure dance fine. Hated working at the place. Didn’t pay it no attention. Just want to get me a ranch and own some horses. Come to town often? You sure dance fine.”
“We come to town as often as we can, but they don’t like to let us out much. What’s your guess about what cooks up there?”
“Beats me. Don’t care. May I have another dance later?”
The dance ended and a rather dejected Mata Hari was graciously thanked and shown back to her table. John and Priscilla came back looking about the same. No one had listened to them. No one cared about the visitors from Los Alamos. But then Bob appeared. Bob, the quiet member of our group, who was only tolerated on this jaunt in order to avoid a family scandal, came back with success and smug self-satisfaction written all over his face.
We all asked at once, “Quick. What happened? Why are you so cheerful?”
It seems that he had gone up to the bar and landed next to a local rancher. He started a conversation like mine, and there was a similar lack of interest. However, instead of giving up, his story is that he practically took the man by his coat lapels, and said, “You know why they’re making all those loud noises and explosions up there, don’t you? They’re tests. They’re making electric rockets. That’s what they’re doing at Los Alamos.” The rancher grunted and ordered another drink.
We gave up and started home. Bob was congratulated on his success, but in the car he confessed that the rancher had been so drunk he probably would not remember a thing when he woke up the next day. John and I decided to quit. We were obvious flops at building an electric rocket. Let G-2 work on that gadget. We would stick to the atomic bomb.
U.S. Department of Energy
No one could enter Los Alamos without showing a pass to the guards stationed at one of the two entrance gates.
BAN ON THE “U” WORD
There were lots of security personnel on and off the reservation. We were told not to talk about “uranium” or any other aspect of our work. If you did and were overheard, retribution was quick.
I had one experience that was mildly harrowing. In December 1944, my wife to be and I were traveling by train from Cincinnati to Knoxville. She was taking a course in geology at Ohio State and began talking about uranium as a marker for determining the age of rocks.
I, of course, turned green when she began using that word where she might be overheard. Quietly I whispered, “Dear, shut up. I’ll explain someday. Just shut up!” Thankfully, after giving me that “What’s the matter with you?” look, she did.
Security personnel were everywhere, listening for loose conversations. We were innocent and nothing came of it. Eight months later the first bomb was dropped. No further explanation was necessary.
—RICHARD E. HECKERT
CODE FOR A KISS
I used to sit in Pajarito Canyon and write letters to my future wife. My first encounter with security was when they sent back my first letters and said, “You can’t say that.”
“Can’t say what?”
Well, on the outside of the envelope were the letters “S.W.A.K.,” which if you’re my age, you know means “Sealed With A Kiss.” So I explained that, but “No, it’s code, you can’t say that.” So from then on, I didn’t put that!
—MCALLISTER HULL
A Spy in Our Midst
Laura Fermi recalls a group picnic to Frijoles Canyon with members of the British Mission, including a mild-mannered scientist who drove her car over the rough back roads. Later, Laura and others at Los Alamos were shocked to realize that this companionable person, Klaus Fuchs, was a Soviet spy.
From Atoms in the Family
BY LAURA FERMI
On one of our first afternoons in Los Alamos, Genia Peierls came to propose a picnic in Frijoles Canyon.
“You must take car,” she asserted. Members of the British Mission were far more austere than the Americans: they cooked in the scanty supply of GI pots and pans, they owned no cars. “We’ll be large group. Mind me, you’ll always be in large groups here. It’s merrier. Today all cars will be filled up. Persons who come don’t all have spare coupons. You can drive a car. It’s only eighteen miles through Western Gate, and we’ll go after five, so Western Gate will be open and we’ll avoid long detour through Eastern.”
I was hesitant. Frijoles Canyon contains ruins of the oldest Indian pueblos in that region and some well-preserved cave dwellings. I had never seen either. On the other hand, I am a timid driver, I had never driven in rough country, I mistrusted the road and the several-hundred-foot drop I knew it took from the edge of a mesa down to the bottom of the canyon.
“Mind me, Laura,” Genia said. “Somebody will drive your car. All have driving licenses in group.” It was impossible to resist Genia’s spirits and her enthusiasm for any sort of action.
I found at the steering wheel of my car an attractive young man, slim, with a small, round face and dark hair, with a quiet look through round eyeglasses. He could not have been much over thirty years of age. I tried to make friends with him and asked him some questions, which he answered sparingly, as if jealous of his words. Perhaps he was absorbed by the driving. He was not a good driver and wriggled the car jerkily on the narrow road. He must have been nervous.
I extracted little information from him: that he was born in Germany; that he had been a refugee in England and ha
d British citizenship; that he was a member of the British Mission and had recently arrived in Los Alamos. My attempts at friendliness seemed lost on him, although he was extremely polite and of refined and cultured manners. I never understand names when I first hear them and had not caught his. When we said goodbye in front of my home after the picnic, I asked him to repeat it. He was Klaus Fuchs.
Even as he spoke to me, he was leading a double life—that of highly competent and appreciated physicist among friendly colleagues and that of spy. He was giving secret information to the Russians on the progress of the atomic bomb. He had aroused no suspicion. When in 1950 Fuchs confessed his spying activities, he claimed he had some sort of split personality and could keep his friends and his political ideals in separate compartments. He said: “It had been possible for me in one half of my mind to be friends with people, to be close friends, and at the same time to deceive and to endanger them.”
In Los Alamos we all trusted him and saw him frequently, for he attended many of the numerous parties that went on constantly. There was little else to do at night: men could not talk of their work with their wives; the only places of entertainment were the movies. So we had frequent parties, and Fuchs came often. He seemed to enjoy himself, playing “murder” or charades with the others, and said only a few words. We all thought him pleasant and knew nothing about him.
Early in 1950 he made a full confession under very little pressure, almost of his own free will. There was hardly any evidence against him, but he was having increasing scruples about Russia’s true aims and the sincerity of communism. Enrico and I followed the investigation and the trial through the papers. One fact struck us as peculiar and hard to believe: that Fuchs was never conscious of the full import of his behavior. He felt guilty of deceit toward his friends, not of betrayal toward the country he had elected for his own and had sworn allegiance to. He did not expect to be held responsible to mankind for the danger he had brought about. He had not even foreseen the legal consequences of his confession, the judge’s sentence, his prison term. He was aware, he said to the British investigator, that it might be better if he resigned from his post at Harwell, once his past was disclosed.
Harwell is the British counterpart of Los Alamos, the place where secret atomic research is carried on, where Fuchs held a prominent, directive position. Although he had not applied the word “spy” to himself, still he realized that a man with a record like his could hardly be trusted with important secret work. But he was certain he would have no difficulty obtaining a teaching position at one of the English universities!
U.S. Department of Energy
Physicist Klaus Fuchs, shown in his Los Alamos identification badge, was convicted of sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union.
“Never… in our wildest dreams”
A refugee from Germany, Lilli Hornig left Harvard, where she was working as a chemist on a wartime project, to go to Los Alamos with her husband, Don Hornig. She refused a secretarial position and became one of the few female senior scientists. In the following interview, she talks about her encounters with two infamous spies at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass, who provided information to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
From “The Story with Dick Gordon,” WUNC
INTERVIEW WITH LILLI HORNIG
When the Russians first detonated an atomic bomb, everybody was pretty stunned. We had quite a lot of confidence in the fact that we were all good people and were going to keep it secret. And of course we were harboring our own spies right at Los Alamos. In fact, we had very close contact with them.
Klaus Fuchs, the British subject who was convicted and imprisoned for espionage, was a person who was clearly not very open. But it certainly never occurred to us in our wildest dreams that he was a Russian spy.
Fuchs was a very good physicist and made great contributions to our own efforts. He came to our weekly staff meetings, took notes on everything we had done for the week, and often gave us very good advice. He was a brilliant guy.
But the joke was that one of my jobs in that group was working on the precise design of the high explosive lenses that surrounded the plutonium. I had to take the drawings and specifications for them down to the machine shop every few days to get the things made the way we needed them. And the person I dealt with there was David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother. Of course, Greenglass was very much involved in passing along secrets to the Soviets.
The Youngest Spies
In Bombshell, Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel tell the story of Ted Hall, a young Los Alamos physicist who decided to share Manhattan Project secrets with the Russians in 1944. Using a code based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ted Hall passed information through his former Harvard roommate to his Soviet contact, Sergei Kurnakov, that proved to be invaluable to the Soviets.
From Bombshell
BY JOSEPH ALBRIGHT AND MARCIA KUNSTEL
All Ted Hall knew when he stepped off the train in the high desert of New Mexico was that he had been offered a secret job that involved physics. He had finished his course work at Harvard, so wouldn’t miss much by being off campus for six months before the Class of 1944 was due to graduate. Despite his speculation about the nature of the project, this gifted, moody teenager hadn’t come close to guessing that he was on his way to the most important secret scientific enterprise of the twentieth century.
It was January 27, 1944, six months before the Allied landing at Normandy. Ted had ridden the Santa Fe Super Chief from Chicago with Roy Glauber. The two physics students from New York were about to join a Noah’s Ark of other science prodigies at a military base that hadn’t existed one year earlier. At eighteen, Hall and Glauber were the youngest scientists ever recruited for what Oppenheimer called “this somewhat Buck Rogers project.”
On October 15, [1944]… Ted Hall left Los Alamos for two weeks of annual leave. Ostensibly he was going home to celebrate his nineteenth birthday with his parents in New York. However, by the time he departed, Ted Hall had all but decided he would try to inform the Soviets about the existence of the secret bomb project.
A few phrases, a few passages of poetry, that’s all it took to fool the censors. Ted Hall and [his former Harvard roommate] Saville Sax had perfected the Walt Whitman code during Ted’s October furlough, perhaps while they were in the rowboat in Central Park. Each owned the same edition of Leaves of Grass, and they decided to make certain pages of it their codebook. Their cipher system was really quite primitive. All it could communicate was a time and date for a clandestine meeting in New Mexico.
Now that Ted Hall had the codebook near his bed in Los Alamos, he had to face whether he really wanted to get in deeper with the Soviets. Hall was still irritated at [Soviet agent Sergei] Kurnakov’s blatant indiscretion in turning up at Penn Station. Was this whole scheme too risky? What he had given Kurnakov was scarcely more than a peek at the work of Los Alamos. A few names and some interesting data on secondary neutrons, perhaps. But nothing approaching the actual design of a bomb. Would he now convey a fuller, more current picture? Or should he simply not activate the Walt Whitman code?
Not many weeks after Ted’s furlough, he and Sax began to exchange letters. Through the Walt Whitman code they arranged a meeting in Albuquerque. It was to take place on a certain day, a day “a few months” after Hall’s furlough, said someone who knew the truth. And as things turned out, Leaves of Grass was the ideal codebook for fixing dates. Whitman had attached to each of his verses a number from one to thirty-one and beyond, and each verse had a dozen lines or more. The Leaves of Grass method was something that Hall and Sax invented without help from Kurnakov; in the whole history of Soviet intelligence this was the only known instance when secret information was ever transmitted by the ancient cryptography system known to cipher experts as “book code.” Had the Manhattan Project censors caught on, chances are Hall would have been drafted and sent off to the Arctic. His career in nuclear physics would have been ruined, but the odds were he wo
uld not have been prosecuted. Back then, the priority for the Manhattan Project was to isolate the risk and move on.
Ted’s rendezvous with Saville Sax [in Albuquerque] was so amateurish it would have made Kurnakov cringe if he had known. Instead of converging on the meeting place, Ted and Savy approached on foot from the same direction. They “bumped into each other in the street” some distance from their pre-planned meeting spot, something that would have appalled any NKGB trainer.
Hall had taken a room in a hotel near the Albuquerque train station and Savy was already checked in at another Albuquerque hotel. After reaching a private spot for their meeting, Savy took out a single piece of paper that he had brought inside his shoe all the way from New York. On the paper was a question typed in English given to Sax by a Soviet intelligence officer. The question was “some specific technical little thing” involving the use of sulfur dioxide—or so Ted Hall would tell a few friends in England in the 1990s. Sulfur dioxide for what? There was no answer. But the mere fact that Soviet intelligence was asking at the end of 1944 about a sulfur compound was intriguing: One of the chemicals used at Los Alamos in the summer of 1944 was uranium 235 sulfate. In fact, it was the key ingredient in one of the first Los Alamos experiments to calibrate the critical mass of uranium. If Ted ever told Savy anything about sulfur dioxide, neither of them has talked about it. Sax and Hall spent only that one evening together in Albuquerque before Ted had to hurry north to Los Alamos.
Sax carried back to New York a piece of paper far more important than a response on sulfur dioxide. It was only a page or two, something Hall had written by hand during one of his breaks from work in the Gadget Division. What Ted Hall gave his Harvard roommate that day was a bold new concept for assembling a critical mass so rapidly that all risk of a fizzle could be eliminated. The idea would become the key to the invention of the plutonium bomb.
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