The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  “MLAD” IS UNDETECTED FOR OVER FIFTY YEARS

  Ted Hall, code name “Mlad,” continued to spy for the Soviets even after the war was over, passing secrets about the hydrogen bomb. But President Truman’s announcement of the first Soviet bomb in 1949 prompted him to end his double life just when he was about to come under FBI surveillance. He began a new career as a biophysicist and later moved to England. It was not until previously classified documents, the Venona papers, became available in 1995 that his role was uncovered.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Ted Hall, shown in his identification badge, was a Los Alamos physicist and atomic spy who provided detailed bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.

  Enormoz Espionage

  In this excerpt, Gregg Herken discusses Soviet espionage efforts during the beginning stages of the Manhattan Project, as well as early FBI and Army intelligence programs at the Radiation Laboratory run by Ernest O. Lawrence in Berkeley. This laboratory was seen as especially vulnerable to security breaches because many of the area’s most prominent scientists and academics had been involved with radical and leftist organizations prior to the outbreak of World War II.

  From Brotherhood of the Bomb

  BY GREGG HERKEN

  By spring 1943, the Manhattan Project was also a priority of the Soviet Union’s. Two years earlier, the NKVD—the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—had ordered its intelligence officers serving under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies and consulates to begin collecting information on the status of technical research in the West. The NKVD’s spies were supplemented by a parallel espionage network run by the Soviet army’s Intelligence Directorate, the GRU.

  Thirty-five-year-old Pavel Fitin, head of the NKVD’s First Directorate (Foreign Intelligence), had been instructed to focus his efforts upon answering some technical questions of particular interest. One of these concerned American progress toward a fission weapon. In preparations to steal U.S. secrets, Fitin had given his enterprise a code name appropriate to the Manhattan Project: Enormous (Enormoz). The cryptonyms that Fitin assigned to vital intelligence targets within the United States were borrowed from history. But they also reflected an ideological slant and, in some cases, a sense of humor: Washington, D.C., was Carthage; New York City was Tyre; San Francisco became Babylon.

  Nearly a generation’s experience of running spies in the United States had given the Soviets a base of operations that was both broad and deep. In the capital alone, the Russians had two active espionage rings stealing secrets from the U.S. government. The larger ring, headed by a Berkeley-trained economist, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (code name Robert), had twenty-seven members working in six different federal agencies. The spies in Robert’s ring included the assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White (Richard), and Lauchlin Currie (Page), a senior aide to President Roosevelt. Others recruited by the Soviets to spy included a congressman from New York (Crook), the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to prewar Berlin (Liza), and at least three State Department officials (Ernst, Frank, and Ales).

  With the outbreak of war, American intelligence, too, became a target of particular interest to Fitin. The Office of Strategic Services (Cabin) was compromised from its mid-1942 birth by more than a dozen agents, who reported on its activities to Moscow; as was the Office of War Information (Wireless), which split off from the OSS that same year. Not surprisingly, also of special interest to the Soviets were the U.S. government agencies responsible for spy hunting, the FBI (Shack) and army G-2 (Salt).

  To pass stolen secrets to Russia, Fitin established a residentura, a base for espionage operations, at the four-story townhouse on East Sixty-first Street that served as the Soviets’ New York consulate. He put an NKVD agent with a background in engineering—Leonid Kvasnikov, code-named Anton—in charge of spying on the bomb.

  Like agents at other Soviet diplomatic posts, Kvasnikov used Amtorg, the Soviet Union’s import-export agency, as a cover for espionage activities. As the clearinghouse for the wartime Lend-Lease program, Amtorg had offices in major cities on both coasts. Soviet couriers sent purloined documents by diplomatic pouch on Russian-bound ships, as well as via a special air connection from an Army Air Corps field in Great Falls, Montana.

  Shorter messages were encrypted and sent between Moscow and the Soviets’ diplomatic posts by regular commercial telegraphy. When the volume of cable traffic, including secrets, threatened to become overwhelming, the Soviets clandestinely installed illegal short-wave radio transmitters at their consulates in New York and San Francisco.

  But since research on a fission weapon had its true origins in England, it was through the NKVD’s British spies, rather than Fitin’s American network, that Moscow Center first learned about the bomb.

  On the same day in July 1941 that British scientists completed the M.A.U.D. report, the NKVD rezident in London, Anatoli Gorski (Vadim), had informed Moscow of its contents. The reliability of Vadim’s information was confirmed by another spy, code-named Rest.

  Rest was Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist and Communist who had fled to England in 1933. By 1941, Fuchs was working with M.A.U.D. Committee physicist Rudolf Peierls on gaseous diffusion and bomb physics at Birmingham University. Shortly after Germany’s invasion of Russia, Fuchs had begun passing information on British atomic research to Moscow through the Soviets’ military attaché in London.

  With the enemy at the gates, the Russians did not react to the news from Gorski and Fuchs until March 1942, when Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD, informed Stalin and the State Defense Committee of the secrets received from British spies. Beria recommended that the Soviet Union set up its own scientific panel to carry out research on the atomic bomb—which he had previously feared might be a plot by the West to trick the Soviet Union into wasting its talent and resources on a technological dead end.

  It was not until September 1942 that Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister and a member of the State Defense Committee, sent Mikhail Pervukhin, People’s Commissar of the Chemical Industry, the NKVD reports along with a request for advice on how to interpret them. Pervukhin, too, urged an independent assessment. The Soviet Academy of Sciences recommended thirty-nine-year-old Igor Kurchatov—a tall, barrel-chested physicist born in the Urals—to lead the review.

  Energetic as well as tenacious, Kurchatov had been nicknamed “the General” by his academy colleagues. In the early 1930s, after he and another scientist at Leningrad’s Institute for Physics and Technology had drawn up plans for a cyclotron, Kurchatov was invited to Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory by Lawrence. Kurchatov did not make the trip, but the Leningrad cyclotron was built in any event.

  Shortly after the Nazi invasion, Kurchatov, adopting the custom of Roman emperors in the time of war, announced that he would refuse to shave until the enemy was vanquished. Predictably, “the General” became “the Beard.”

  In the work he was assigned, Kurchatov benefited from the scientific publications that had appeared in the West prior to the secrecy embargo. These included the June 1940 Physical Review article by [Edwin] McMillan and [Philip] Abelson, which the British had feared would tip the Germans off to the discovery of neptunium. Kurchatov learned about neutron cross sections from a “Letter to the Editor,” written by [Luis] Alvarez, appearing in a 1941 issue of the Review. Like other Soviet physicists, Kurchatov correctly surmised that his American counterparts had gone underground when they abruptly stopped publishing their research.

  Kurchatov began by putting information from the pre-embargo journals together with the fragments of intelligence gathered by the NKVD. The result was a comprehensive report on atomic research in the West, which Kurchatov submitted to Pervukhin in two handwritten memos during early March 1943. “The Beard” underlined in blue pencil information he considered of special interest “that it would be desirable to obtain from abroad.”

  As in the West, the Russians’ initial focus was upon isotope separation. Kurchatov’s summary reflected cons
iderable interest in gaseous diffusion—the method favored in the M.A.U.D. report, and the one that Fuchs was most familiar with. The summary likewise showed that the Soviet Union had learned of the success of Fermi’s Chicago pile within six weeks of the event.

  But Kurchatov’s report also revealed some surprising gaps in the Russians’ knowledge. Among these was his conclusion that “the mass spectrography method… is… considered inapplicable to uranium.” His report to Pervukhin showed, too, that the Soviets were still ignorant of, and thus eager to learn, the critical mass of U-235.

  Kurchatov was most excited about the realization, arrived at through espionage, of “a new direction in tackling the entire uranium problem”—the fact that plutonium could also be used for a bomb—and stressed in his report that “prospects of this direction are unusually captivating.… In this connection I am asking you to instruct Intelligence Bodies to find out about what has been done in America in regard to the direction in question.”

  To help in identifying the next targets for Russia’s spies, Kurchatov listed for Pervukhin a number of laboratories in the United States where work on plutonium might be taking place. Berkeley’s Rad Lab was at the top of his list.

  Undercover Agents at Berkeley

  In February 1943, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned the Army that a major effort was under way to recruit “progressive” applicants to spy upon an unknown secret project at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. In response, the Army established an Intelligence Section to investigate people of “questionable loyalty” working at the Rad Lab.

  From Brotherhood of the Bomb

  BY GREGG HERKEN

  Hoover’s report arrived just as the army was setting up its own security and counterintelligence apparatus for the Manhattan Project. Early in February, Major General George Strong, the head of G-2, had appointed Captain Horace Calvert to run the project’s Intelligence Section. Calvert in turn picked an ex-FBI agent, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, to be G-2’s man in the Bay Area.

  Johnson moved into an office on the first floor of Berkeley’s New Classroom Building. To disguise its connection with the army’s war effort, a campus policeman was stationed at the door. The room used by Oppie’s grad students who were working on the project was just down the hall. Calvert had instructed Johnson to work closely with [Lieutenant Colonel Boris] Pash and his shadow organization across the Bay [see below]. Johnson bought a supply of 3-by-5-inch cards from a stationery store on Telegraph Avenue and began keeping a file on Rad Lab employees who the army believed to be of questionable loyalty.

  With the cooperation of the Rad Lab’s personnel director, Lyall Johnson placed army undercover agents on the research staff [in April 1943]. One, an engineer, joined the local chapter of the FAECT [Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians]. Another secret informant, a secretary at the lab, reported to the army on particular people and events up on the Hill.

  Across the Bay in San Francisco, Pash set up a dummy business office—the “Universal Subscription Company”—in a building just off Market as a staging area for his undercover agents. An army lieutenant, James Murray, headed the plainclothes operation under the nom de guerre of Paul Sheridan.

  Two enlisted men, former telephone repairmen, installed wiretaps and bugs for the army in cooperation with the local telephone company. Under the arrangement agreed to between Hoover and Strong, the army focused upon university employees under contract to the Manhattan Project, while the bureau concentrated upon known or suspected Communists with connections to the Rad Lab.

  As its surveillance efforts grew, the army rented a two-story house on Forest Avenue, a few blocks south of the Berkeley campus, to serve as a listening post. An undercover agent and his family lived downstairs; upstairs, in a back room, officers assigned to the Military Intelligence Division’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) recorded the telephone calls of selected Rad Lab employees.

  Berkeley operations were eventually shut down when the bulk of Manhattan Project research moved to the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  Jump Start for the Soviets

  In the first part of this excerpt, Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel describe a crucial day in the development of the American atomic bomb and the state of Soviet intelligence at that point. David Holloway then discusses the Soviet pursuit of an atomic weapons program under physicist Igor Kurchatov. Information provided by at least three independent Manhattan Project spies undoubtedly accelerated the design and production of a Soviet atomic bomb. At the end of this selection, Albright and Kunstel probe the motivations of the spies who believed that the secrets of the atomic bomb belonged to the world.

  From Bombshell

  BY JOSEPH ALBRIGHT AND MARCIA KUNSTEL

  On February 28, 1945, Oppenheimer, Groves, [James B.] Conant, [George] Kistiakowski, and three others met in Oppenheimer’s office and settled on a design for the bomb that would be tried at Alamogordo.… At another meeting about the same time, [physicist Bruno] Rossi heard Oppenheimer say, “Now we have our bomb.”

  February 28, 1945, was just as crucial a day in Stalin’s quest for the bomb. That was the day the NKGB finished its first comprehensive report on atomic intelligence in two years for Lavrenti Beria, the people’s commissar for internal affairs.… The report would rank among the more remarkable intelligence feats of World War II.… [T]he Soviets knew all the main elements of America’s secret weapon five months before it was tried out at Alamogordo…

  From Stalin and the Bomb

  BY DAVID HOLLOWAY

  In a memorandum written on March 16, 1945, Kurchatov reviewed intelligence material on “two possibilities, which we have not yet considered.” The first was the possibility of using uranium-hydride-235 (uranium-235 mixed with hydrogen) as the active material in a bomb, instead of metallic uranium-235. Kurchatov was skeptical about this idea, but withheld final judgment until “after serious theoretical analysis of the question has been done.” He was much more interested in the second possibility, implosion. “There is no doubt,” he wrote, “that the implosion method is of great interest, correct in principle, and ought to be subjected to serious theoretical and experimental analysis.”

  Three weeks later, on April 7, 1945, Kurchatov wrote another report which is clearly a response to the information provided by Klaus Fuchs in February. Kurchatov’s earlier memorandum, of March 16, seems to have been written in response to information provided by someone else, possibly by David Greenglass, a machinist who worked in the laboratory of George Kistiakowsky, head of the explosives division at Los Alamos. Greenglass later confessed to providing the Soviet Union with information about the high-explosive lens designed for use in implosion, and his testimony was the basis for the charge of espionage brought against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951.

  From Kurchatov’s memorandum of April 7 it is clear that the information from Fuchs was more important than the material Kurchatov reviewed three weeks earlier. It had “great value,” Kurchatov wrote. The data about spontaneous fission were “exceptionally important.” The data on the fission cross-sections of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 for fast neutrons of various energies had enormous significance, since they made it possible to define in a reliable manner the critical dimensions of an atomic bomb.

  KLAUS FUCHS PROVIDES FULL DETAILS

  In June 1945, shortly before the Trinity test, Fuchs provided the Soviets a report that “fully described the plutonium bomb… provided a sketch of the bomb and its components and gave all the important dimensions. He reported that the bomb would have a solid plutonium core and described the initiator which, he said, would contain about fifty curies of polonium. Full details were given of the tamper, the aluminum shell, and of the high explosive lens system.”

  —STATEMENT OF KLAUS FUCHS TO MICHAEL PERRIN, JANUARY 30, 1950

  From Bombshell

  BY JOSEPH ALBRIGHT AND MARCIA KUNSTEL

  During [Harry] Gold’s conversation with Fuchs in the German’s dilapidated c
ar, Fuchs for the first time expressed uneasiness about the bomb and the destruction it had brought to Japan. It was as though the scientist had never thought about the end result of what he had helped to create over nearly four years. Hall, to the contrary, had expected the bomb probably would be used and would cause terrible harm. But he believed that by sharing the technology with the Soviets, he was acting to prevent it from being used again. Both Fuchs and Hall thought the science fascinating as well as inevitable. The creation of an atomic weapon was going to happen, with their help or without, now or soon. They and Greenglass all believed that it must not be kept under the control of a single nation when it happened, but was something that belonged to the world. This was a rare phenomenon, unique in American history: Three individuals unknown to each other decided for reasons of political philosophy to commit espionage at the same time, in the same place, giving approximately the same kind of information to the same foreign government.

  TED HALL AVERTS AN AMERICAN MONOPOLY

  My decision about contacting the Soviets was a gradual one, and it was entirely my own.… [I]t seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.… I did not have an uncritical view of the Soviet Union. I believed the Soviet Union was a mixture of good and bad things… Of course the situation was far more complicated than I understood at the time.

  —TED HALL, 1995