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Predictably, Pash and G-2 were greatly interested in what they regarded as Oppenheimer’s reckless decision to meet privately with a card-carrying Communist. They already had sufficient reason to be concerned about Robert’s close connections with party members and insistence on hiring left-wing professors to work at Los Alamos, but the report that he had traveled from the highly classified atomic bomb laboratory for a reunion with someone as suspect and unstable as Tatlock provided fresh grounds for doubt. The question that confounded them was, Why would anyone in a position as highly sensitive as Oppenheimer’s continue to pursue associations with Communist adherents, especially in time of war? Why would he openly court suspicion, or even allow himself to be drawn into a situation that might possibly be construed as suspicious?
While these considerations might seem obvious, it is impossible to know what Oppenheimer, already bound in a fantastic web of secrecy and lies and false identities as proscribed by the project, actually viewed as risky behavior. In his arrogance, he may have believed that as director of the Los Alamos laboratory he was held to a different standard, that in effect his brilliance and importance to the project rendered him both irreplaceable and beyond reproach. “Look, I have had a lot of secrets in my head a long time,” he testified during the hearing. “It does not matter who I associate with. I don’t talk about those secrets. Only a very skillful guy might pick up a trace of information as to where I had been or what I was up to.”
In the same way that his egotism and air of superiority had once alienated many of his academic colleagues, they again worked against him with his military counterparts. Pash formed an immediate dislike of the haughty New York physicist and was far from convinced of his infallibility. As far as he was concerned, Oppenheimer’s meeting with a Communist “contact” like Tatlock provided all the ammunition he needed to alert Washington that they were dealing with a potential traitor. In late June, he forwarded a summary of the surveillance data to Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale, his chief at the Pentagon, along with his memorandum stating in unequivocal terms his judgment that “the subject,” his preferred term for Oppenheimer, was not to be trusted: “In view of the fact that this office believes that the subject still is or may be connected with the Communist Party in the Project…” He then spun his own elaborate conspiracy theories, including “the possibility of his developing a scientific work to a certain extent, then turning it over to the Party without submitting any phase of it to the US Government.” A hard-liner on security risks, Pash recommended that Oppenheimer be “removed completely from the project and dismissed from employment by the US Government.”
As a result of Oppenheimer’s flagrant flouting of the rules, the army security officers in charge of the Los Alamos site did not like or trust him. This all but guaranteed that their file on him, first opened by the FBI, would never be closed. Not only would the investigation into his past continue, he would be forced to submit to round after round of probing interviews. Much of the questioning was done by Lansdale, a young army intelligence officer and Harvard Law graduate, who was Groves’ chief aide on security matters. The thirty-one-year-old Lansdale had originally been recruited by Conant in early 1942 to keep tabs on the political activities of the Berkeley physicists. At the time, Conant, who was all too aware of how gossipy academics could be, worried that the notoriously left-wing Berkeley contingent could not be trusted to safeguard their atomic research with the zealousness the situation required and might allow information to fall into the wrong hands. His worst fears were confirmed when Lansdale reported back a few weeks later that while on Berkeley’s campus he had filled a notebook with snippets of conversations relating to atomic research, all of which Conant regarded as serious breaches of security. Conant, who feared that whatever the Nazis gleaned of the United States’ project would galvanize their efforts to build the first atomic weapon, immediately sent Lansdale back to Berkeley with instructions to put the fear of God into the physicists when it came to national security. In the months that followed, Lansdale had continued his monitoring of Berkeley’s security lapses and, during the early phase of the project, had focused his attention on the character of the newly appointed Oppenheimer, his Communist wife, and their many “pink” associations.
Lansdale had made a point of getting to know Kitty personally and later recalled that on one afternoon when he went to interview her, she offered him a martini. “Not the kind to serve tea,” he noted, implying that Oppenheimer’s wife took social drinking to a new level. Kitty made no bones about the fact that she knew exactly why Lansdale was snooping around. But at the same time, she made it clear that she was now totally committed to Oppenheimer and his career, and the young intelligence agent was struck by how passionately she had taken up the role of dutiful wife:
As we say in the lingo, she was trying to rope me, just as I was trying to rope her. The thing that impressed me was how hard she was trying. Intensely, emotionally, with everything she had. She struck me as a curious personality, at once frail and very strong. I felt she’d go to any lengths for what she believed in.
Lansdale, an affable, blue-blooded lawyer with little experience in spying, decided to play on her ambition for her husband to draw her out and tried to present himself as “a person of balance, honestly wanting to evaluate Oppenheimer’s position.” He believed she had been in sympathy with her first husband, who had been a member of the Communist Party, and doubted that her “abstract opinions” had altered much with time. As he explained years later, “feelings were her source of belief”:
I got the impression of a woman who’d craved some sort of quality or distinction of character she could attach herself to, who’d had to find it in order to live. She didn’t care how much I knew of what she’d done before she met Oppenheimer or how it looked to me. Gradually I began to see that nothing in her past and nothing in her other husbands meant anything to her compared to him.
Lansdale came away convinced that Kitty was never the least bit fooled by his tactics: “[She] hated me and everything I stand for.” While she was no conventional patriot, he had left with a grudging admiration for her sense of conviction, and he reported to Groves that her protectiveness of her husband might actually serve them well in the long run, as her “strength of will was a powerful influence in keeping Dr. Oppenheimer away from what we would regard as dangerous associations.”
In his long, rambling conversations with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, Lansdale tried to explore the physicist’s various friendships with Berkeley Communists. At one point, he even let Oppenheimer know that G-2 had doubts about the union activities of several of his former students. Their suspicions centered on Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, a gifted twenty-one-year-old physicist, who had been working for Oppie at Berkeley since the spring of ’42 and was being considered for promotion by Ernest Lawrence. Because of his position at the lab, Lomanitz was fully aware of the work being done and the kind of weapon it indicated. Toward the end of July, Lawrence, who had never had any interest in politics, went ahead and made Lomanitz a group leader. Security did not want to challenge Lawrence’s decision outright, but unhappy about having a campus radical with so much access to classified material, G-2 arranged for Lomanitz to be drafted. Instead of steering clear of this hot potato, and letting Lawrence fight his own personnel battles, Oppenheimer interceded on Lomanitz’s behalf, sending a telegram pleading his case to project headquarters. With nuclear physicists in short supply, Oppenheimer argued, Lomanitz was indispensable.
On August 10, Lansdale, during another of his lengthy interviews with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, counseled him against getting involved in such sensitive issues. Among his many doubts about Oppenheimer, Lansadale worried that the Los Alamos director’s extreme competence in his field led him to falsely believe he was also competent in other fields, whether it was playing at politics or matching wits with suspected Communists. Like many brilliant men, he could be surprisingly dense. “For goodness’ sake,” he told Oppenheimer, “lay of
f Lomanitz and stop raising questions.”
In the midst of the session, Oppenheimer turned to Lansdale and pointedly observed that when it came to his own staff, although he would not be concerned about a physicist’s past affiliations if his present frame of mind was constructive, he definitely did not want any current members of the Communist Party working at Los Alamos because there would always be a “question of divided loyalties.” The strong statement was surprising coming from Oppenheimer, and to Lansdale seemed out of character. It was one of many statements Oppenheimer would make that would later be hard for security officials to know how to interpret and would leave them wondering if he was simply trying to be conciliatory or was attempting to lead them astray.
Oppenheimer not only ignored Lansdale’s warning, he interjected himself even further into the Lomanitz mess. On August 25, he again traveled to Berkeley on business, and while he was there, he stopped by the campus security office in Durant Hall and asked the local chief, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, if it would be all right if he met briefly with Lomanitz. Johnson discouraged the idea, stating that he thought the young physicist was trouble, but allowed the Los Alamos director to do as he saw fit. Oppenheimer went on to have a brief but unsatisfactory meeting with Lomanitz, who admitted that he was still a party activist and claimed he was being framed. Annoyed and fed up, Oppenheimer, according to his own account, parted on bad terms with his ex-student. That might have been the end of it, but before leaving Johnson’s security office in Durant Hall that day, Oppenheimer mentioned in passing that he had been told by a friend that a certain British engineer named George C. Eltenton, who was employed by the Shell Development Corporation, had offered to supply technical data to the Russians. It is not clear why Oppenheimer chose that moment to help security by volunteering the tip about Eltenton, particularly since the conversation with his friend had taken place some eight months earlier. It is almost certain that he had no idea how inflammatory this action would prove to be.
As soon as Oppenheimer left, Johnson relayed the Eltenton tip to Colonel Pash, his superior, whose jurisdiction over the West Coast atomic facilities included Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory. Pash, who was already investigating leads that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, called Oppenheimer and asked him to come back the next day for a friendly chat.
On August 26, 1943, Pash and Johnson sat down with Oppenheimer in the security office on campus and asked him to elaborate on the Eltenton tip. Unbeknownst to Oppenheimer, Pash had arranged for an officer to surreptitiously tape the interview. Pash quickly got down to business and asked for the identity of his contact, but Oppenheimer balked at naming names. Oppenheimer was reluctant to drag in his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a lecturer in Romance languages at the University of California, whom he had met through the Teachers’ Union during his early dabblings in left-wing politics. Whether Oppenheimer was apprehensive about what his past might yield, or greatly underestimated his interrogators and the importance they attached to his Communist associations, is difficult to gauge. Certainly he wanted to protect Chevalier, who had stood by him after his scandalous elopement with Kitty and was so trusted a friend that the Oppenheimers had left their two-month-old baby son in the care of Chevalier and his wife while they took a badly needed vacation to New Mexico in the spring of 1941. Tired and distracted, he may not have seen why he should waste time and energy on something he regarded as a trifling matter.
In any case, under several hours of Pash’s persistent questioning, Oppenheimer refused to give up Eltenton’s contact and failed to give a coherent account of how he came to be approached by someone soliciting technical information about the bomb project for the Russians. He told Pash that the go-between was acting on Eltenton’s behalf and knew a man proficient at “microfilming” who could pass the information on to the Soviet consulate. He also added, according to the transcript of their conversation, that three other approaches had been made and that these three scientists “were troubled by them, and sometimes came and discussed them” with him. When Pash insisted again that Oppenheimer had a duty to furnish the name of the man involved in such subversive activity, Oppenheimer refused, saying that he had rebuffed the approach. Since no information was leaked, and the mission had failed, he did not see the need to impeach his friend.
A week after their meeting, Pash fired off a memo to Groves summarizing the interview. Drawing a direct connection between the Lomanitz situation and the Eltenton tip, Pash concluded that the reason Oppenheimer had suddenly spoken up about an incident that had occurred eight months earlier was that G-2 agents were closing in on his secret contacts, and he wanted to throw them off the trail and distract them from where his true sympathies lay.
It did not help matters that Los Alamos’s brash young security officer, Captain Peer de Silva, a handsome twenty-six-year-old who was two years out of West Point, had also taken an instant dislike to Oppenheimer. Cold, correct, and a stickler for details, de Silva, who was under Pash’s command, was one of several agents investigating whether Oppenheimer should be given final clearance, an issue that security was reluctant to sign off on. De Silva was appalled by the inconsistencies in Oppenheimer’s file and wrote Pash that the physicist “must either be incredibly naïve and almost childlike in his sense of reality, or he himself is extremely clever and disloyal.” Clearly de Silva inclined toward the latter. No doubt prompted by Pash, he sent his own memo to Washington on September 2 charging that Oppenheimer was involved in treachery:
The writer wishes to go on record as saying J. R. Oppenheimer is playing a key part in the attempt of the Soviet Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the United States.
All of these charges cast rather a dark shadow over the man Groves had chosen to head the Los Alamos laboratory. Moreover, their timing could not have been more awkward. The nervous sleuths in army intelligence had been proceeding at such a snail’s pace in granting clearances to the top physicists that Conant had worried this might “seriously delay” the bomb project and had pushed Vannevar Bush to recommend quick approval for Oppenheimer and other vital scientists despite their “unusual” backgrounds. Goaded into action, Groves ordered the directive on July 20, only five weeks before his top security officers would accuse the Los Alamos director of treason:
In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued for the employment of Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.
Despite the blemishes already on Oppenheimer’s record by that July, Groves had decided to back him. There was much not to like about Oppenheimer’s politics, and his lapses in judgment and occasionally undiplomatic comportment caused them all to worry if they had selected the right man to be the leader. But Groves had come to the same inescapable conclusion as Bob Bacher: there was no one else. Not one to take unnecessary chances, however, Groves decided to hedge his bet. Intent on assuring that Oppenheimer behaved and the project proceeded smoothly, Groves installed de Silva as head of security at Los Alamos. That way, his man could keep an eye on the restless laboratory director’s movements for the duration of the project and make sure he did not wander too far off the reservation.
If G-2’s intrusions into his life left Oppenheimer feeling he was no longer his own man, a letter from Groves on July 29 sealed his fate. Not only was he to be held accountable for his past indiscretions, Groves made it clear he was now a prisoner in a jail of his own making:
In view of the nature of the work on which you are engaged, the knowledge of it which is possessed by you and the dependence which rests upon you for its successful accomplishment, it seems necessary to ask you to take certain practical precautions with respect to your personal safety.
It is requested that:
(a) You refrain from flying in airplanes of any description; the time saved is not worth the risk. (If emergency demands their
use my prior consent should be requested.)
(b) You refrain from driving an automobile for any appreciable distance (above a few miles) and from being without suitable protection on any lonely road, such as the road from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. On such trips you should be accompanied by a competent, able bodied, armed guard. There is no objection to the guard serving as chauffeur.
(c) Your cars be driven with due regard to safety and that in driving about town a guard of some kind should be used, particularly during the hours of darkness. The cost of such a guard is a proper charge against the United States.
I realize that some of these precautions may be personally burdensome and that they may appear to you to be unduly restrictive but I am asking you to bear with them until our work is successfully completed.