Difference between revisions of "J. Robert Oppenheimer"

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Merkulov reported to [[Lavrenty Beria|Beria]], "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer... informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade [[Grigory Kheifetz|Kheifitz]],<ref>NKVD ''[[rezident]]'' (station chief), San Francisco. Robert L. Benson, ''[http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf The Venona Story]'' (Fort George G. Meade, Md.: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001), p. 41</ref> confirmed by [[Earl Browder|Comrade Browder]], he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder."<ref>[http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111512 Merkulov to Beria, 2 October 1944], Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars</ref> (Browder's niece, [[Helen Lowry]], was a Soviet agent married to [[Iskhak Akhmerov]],<ref>[[#refHKV09|Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009]]: 234, 218, 239, 486, 503</ref> the leading [[NKVD]] "illegal" in the United States.)<ref>[[#refHK99|Haynes, Klehr 1999]]: 154</ref> Schecter concludes that Oppenheimer “was being used as a Soviet intelligence asset by the Communist Underground to help obtain atomic secrets.”<ref>[http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.publications&doc_id=43900&group_id=13349 Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake], Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars</ref>
 
Merkulov reported to [[Lavrenty Beria|Beria]], "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer... informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade [[Grigory Kheifetz|Kheifitz]],<ref>NKVD ''[[rezident]]'' (station chief), San Francisco. Robert L. Benson, ''[http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf The Venona Story]'' (Fort George G. Meade, Md.: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001), p. 41</ref> confirmed by [[Earl Browder|Comrade Browder]], he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder."<ref>[http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111512 Merkulov to Beria, 2 October 1944], Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars</ref> (Browder's niece, [[Helen Lowry]], was a Soviet agent married to [[Iskhak Akhmerov]],<ref>[[#refHKV09|Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009]]: 234, 218, 239, 486, 503</ref> the leading [[NKVD]] "illegal" in the United States.)<ref>[[#refHK99|Haynes, Klehr 1999]]: 154</ref> Schecter concludes that Oppenheimer “was being used as a Soviet intelligence asset by the Communist Underground to help obtain atomic secrets.”<ref>[http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.publications&doc_id=43900&group_id=13349 Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake], Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars</ref>
 +
 +
Sergei Leskov, science correspondent for ''Izvestia'', a Moscow newspaper in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, reported in 1994 that Russian government officials informed him
 +
{{cquote|that as well as Klaus Fuchs, who was imprisoned for espionage in Britain for 14 years, and "Perseus," an unidentified agent who has been mentioned frequently in recent years, there were 10 agents of similar caliber working in the West. Six worked in the United States, four in Britain. They were significant figures who remain unknown to the FBI to this day.<ref>Sergey Leskov, "An Unreliable Witness," ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=VAwAAAAAMBAJ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]'', July/August, 1994, p. 36</ref>}}
  
 
====The Chevalier incident====
 
====The Chevalier incident====

Revision as of 18:36, January 14, 2014

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Julius[1] Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was an American theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of four laboratories[2] involved in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. He was also a secret member of the Communist Party.[3]

Early life

Oppenheimer was born in New York in 1904,[4] the eldest son of Julius and Ella (née Freedman) Oppenheimer. His father was a wealthy textile importer who had immigrated from Germany in 1895, his mother a scion of Philadelphia society who had studied painting in Paris.[5] They collected original art, including a Renoir and three Van Goghs; they also owned a 40-foot yacht,[6] and his father gave him his own 27-foot sloop.[7] Precocious but socially backward, Oppenheimer began collecting minerals at age five, was elected to the New York Minerological Club at eleven,[8] and delivered his first paper there at age 12.[9] His shy awkwardness earned him the nickname "Booby" Oppenheimer among his peers; he was bullied, culminating in being locked naked in an icehouse overnight as retribution for alleged tattling.[10]

Oppenheimer's parents were of Jewish descent, but did not observe religious traditions, sending him (via limousine)[11] to New York's elite[12] Ethical Culture[13] Society School.[14] Ethical Culture, a secular humanist religion,[15] is indifferent to the existence of God, replacing the Ten Commandments[16] with a commitment to "social justice."[17] Such an education conditions students to yield to "the totalitarian temptation,"[18] as Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek observed:

“ 'Social justice' can be given a meaning only in a directed or 'command' economy (such as an army) in which the individuals are ordered what to do; and any particular conception of 'social justice' could be realized only in such a centrally-directed system.[19] ”

Oppenheimer never did embrace Judaism, turning instead to philosophical Hinduism. He apparently never studied Hebrew but learned Sanskrit and read the Bhavagad Gita in the original language; he would later list it as one of the the ten books that did most to shape his “philosophy of life.”[20] What flashed through his mind upon witnessing the Trinity explosion, he said, was a line from this Hindu scripture:

“ I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.[21] ”

Education

Oppenheimer attended Harvard University, where he majored in chemistry, graduating summa cum laude in just three years.[22] One of his physics professors, Percy Bridgman, noted in his graduate-school recommendation that "it appears to me that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character."[23] Oppenheimer went to England for postgraduate study at Cambridge University, where he hoped to work under the Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford. "But Rutherford wouldn't have me," according to Oppenheimer.[24]

At Cambridge, Oppenheimer became deeply depressed and jealous of the success of some of the people around him, particularly of his tutor, the future Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett, three years his senior. According to Oppenheimer's friend John Edsall:

“ Oppenheimer's feeling toward Blackett was one of intense admiration, combined perhaps with an intense jealousy—jealousy because of his feeling that Blackett was brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm, and combining all this with great brilliance as a scientist—and I think he had a sense of his own comparative awkwardness and perhaps a sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett and so on.[25] ”

In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer left a "poisoned apple" laced with chemicals (possibly cyanide) from the laboratory on Blackett's desk.[26] University authorities immediately informed Oppenheimer's parents (who were visiting Cambridge at the time) what had happened. According to a Pulitzer Prize-winning[27] biography of Oppenheimer:

“ His father frantically—and successfully—lobbied the university not to press criminal charges. After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London. This Freudian analyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was a hopeless case and that "further analysis would do more harm than good".[28] ”

Oppenheimer went to Paris for a rest. His boyhood friend Francis Fergusson visited him there, and mentioned that he had become engaged. For the second time, Oppenheimer committed an apparent attempted murder:

“ "I leaned over to pick up a book," Fergusson recalled, "and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping."[29] ”

In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen in Germany. He developed a reputation for obnoxiousness, once chiding a graduate student couple for what he called their "peasant" ways in not being able to afford a baby-sitter.[30] He had a habit of interrupting others (including his professor) and commandeering the blackboard; the future Nobel Prize-winner Maria Göppart once presented Oppenheimer's faculty adviser, Max Born, with a petition threatening a boycott of his seminar unless the "child prodigy" were reigned in.[31] Oppenheimer obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1927, then obtained a National Research Council fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.[32] He did post-doctoral work at Harvard, then the California Institute of Technology, finally taking a position as an associate professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Scientific contributions

Oppenheimer worked with other scientists such as Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Willard Libby, and Eugene Wigner, who won Nobel prizes, although Oppenheimer never did.[33] Oppenheimer's best-known scientific contribution was to suggest a limit to the size of neutron stars; larger neutron stars would collapse into black holes according to the theory of relativity. But Oppenheimer is best known not for any scientific contribution, but for his managerial role as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, under the supervision of project director Gen. Leslie Groves.

Personal life and Communist affiliation

At Caltech, Oppenheimer had befriended the "long-serving Soviet tool"[34] Linus Pauling, and wrote him poems Pauling found "troubling," which included allusions to pederasty. Pauling broke off the friendship after Oppenheimer made a pass at his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, who told her husband, "I think he was in love with you."[35] At Berkeley, rumors circulated of an affair between Oppenheimer and a homosexual student who lived with him,[36] but in 1936 he began an affair with Jean Tatlock, a medical student at Stanford[37] and daughter of Oppenheimer's fellow Berkeley professor John S.P. Tatlock,[38] a contributor to The Nation.[39]

Oppenheimer's mistress Tatlock was a Communist.[40] In 1939, Oppenheimer began an affair with another Communist,[41] the German-born Katherine "Kitty" Puening Dallet Harrison, widow of Communist political commissar Joe Dallet, killed in the Spanish Civil War[42] (perhaps by his Soviet superiors, or fragged by his own men, according to various rumors).[43] After moving in with Oppenheimer and becoming pregnant,[44] Kitty abandoned her third husband,[45] a cancer researcher at Caltech,[46] to marry Oppenheimer in 1940, though he continued his affair with Tatlock until at least June 1943. (In January 1944, Tatlock would be found drowned in her bathtub, in circumstances termed "suspicious.")[47] During the war, while married to Kitty, Oppenheimer began an affair with another married woman, Ruth Tolman, the wife of Caltech physicist Richard Tolman, whom Oppenheimer testified was "a very close and dear friend of mine."[48] The affair "devastated Richard Tolman,"[49] who died, according to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Lawrence, "of a broken heart."[50] Kitty took to drinking.[51]

Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, and Frank’s wife Jackie, were also active members of the Communist Party,[52] as was even Oppenheimer's landlady; in addition, several of Oppenheimer’s closest friends and protégés among his graduate students at Berkeley, including Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joe Weinberg, David Bohm, Philip Morrison and Bernard Peters were Communist Party members.[53]

During the Nazi-Soviet pact (August 1939-June 1941), the Federal Bureau of Investigation expanded its surveillance of suspected Nazis to include Communist Party leaders.[54] In 1940, William Schneiderman, the California state chairman of the Communist Party, met with Isaac Folkoff,[55] West Coast liaison between the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence,[56] at the home of then-secret (later confessed) Communist[57] Haakon Chevalier. Also present at this meeting, according to FBI surveillance, was J. Robert Oppenheimer.[58] The following year, Oppenheimer was added to President Franklin Roosevelt's Custodial Detention Index,[59] listed as “Nationalistic Tendency: Communist.”[60]

Communist front activity

Upon his father's death in 1937, Oppenheimer inherited over $300,000[61] (equivalent to more than $4.5 million today),[62] and began contributing approximately $150 a month[63] (equivalent to more than $2,000 a month today),[64] at first via Communist fronts[65] such as the Spanish Aid Committee[66] (aiding the Soviet-armed forces in the Spanish Civil War), then directly to Folkoff or Communist Party official Thomas Addis.[67]

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942,[68] Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast."[69] In September 1943, he repeated to Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, that he had "probably belonged to every Communist-front organization on the west coast."[70] Later that month, Lt. Col. John Lansdale, Jr., head of Security and Intelligence for the Manhattan Project, interviewed Oppenheimer, stating: "You've probably belonged to every front organization on the coast"; Oppenheimer reiterated: "Just about."[71]

More than a decade later, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was considering whether to renew his security clearance, Oppenheimer would change his story, writing that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was “a half-jocular overstatement.”[72] Yet less than four months after writing this, when the AEC got Oppenheimer on the witness stand, he would again change his story: Asked, “If you said that to Colonel Lansdale, were you jocular?” Oppenheimer would admit under oath, “I don’t think I could have been jocular during this interview.”[73]

Oppenheimer confessed, "I was associated with the Communist movement,"[74] and admitted having subscribed to the Communist Party organ People's World[75] "for several years."[76] Throughout the Nazi-Soviet pact, when many other formerly stalwart Communists dropped out of the movement in disgust, Oppenheimer was, by his own admission, active in a number of Communist fronts. He admitted having been a member of the western council of the Consumers Union[77] (according the FBI, he actually became a member of the Board of Counselors of this organization),[78] which was designated as subversive by the Dies committee in 1939,[79] during the pact. In addition, from 1939 until at least 1942[80] (throughout the duration of the pact), admitted Oppenheimer, he was a member of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which was identified by HUAC as a Communist front in 1942 and by a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations as subversive and un-American the following year.[81] Oppenheimer claimed not to remember sponsoring the American Friends of the Chinese People[82] (identified as a Communist front by HUAC in 1944),[83] but the organization listed him as a sponsor[84] in 1940,[85] during the pact.

In addition, according to the FBI, Oppenheimer reportedly co-founded the Berkeley Conference for Civic Betterment (identified by the FBI as a “front group”); was “a member of the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, a Communist Party front group [in 1939, during the pact]”;[86] a member of the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy[87] (identified by HUAC in 1944 as one in a "series of Communist enterprises");[88] a member of the National Emergency Conference for Democratic Rights (identified as as subversive and un-American by a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations in 1943, and as a Communist front by HUAC the following year);[89] and a donor to the Spanish Aid Committee,[90] identified as a Communist front by HUAC in 1944 and as Communist by Truman administration Attorney General Tom Clark in 1949.[91]

Communist Party membership

But Oppenheimer “was not simply a casual Popular Front liberal who ignorantly bumped up against the CPUSA in some of the areas in which it operated," according to John Earl Haynes, a Soviet espionage expert in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress:[92] "He was, in fact, a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 1930s,” write Haynes, Emory University Professor Harvey Klehr and ex-KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev.[93] “Robert Oppenheimer was a member of a so-called closed unit of the Communist Party's professional section in Berkeley, from 1938 to 1942,” agrees Gregg Herken, a former senior Historian at the Smithsonian Institution.[94] Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein, an expert on Oppenheimer, concurs that "it seems to me far more likely than not from the amalgam of evidence that Oppenheimer was a member, at least covert, for a few years."[95]

Berkeley cell

During 1938-42, throughout the Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group,"[96] which was later identified by fellow members Chevalier[97] and Gordon Griffiths[98] as a “closed” (secret)[99] unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty. If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he was the only member of this group who was not.[100]

In addition, if he was not a Communist, Oppenheimer fooled his close friends in this small, secretive group into thinking he was. According to Chevalier, “O. had been, from 1937 to 1943, a CP member, which I knew directly.”[101] He added that he and Oppenheimer belonged to “the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942.”[102] Griffiths, who served as the Communist Party's “liaison with the Faculty group at the University of California,” confirmed that among the “members of the communist group” at Berkeley were “Haakon Chevalier of the French Department and Robert Oppenheimer of Physics.”[103]

Oppenheimer was the primary author of a report signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California,” which he also paid to have printed, said Chevalier.[104] It defended the Soviet invasion of Finland (during the Nazi-Soviet pact), calling President Roosevelt a "counter-revolutionary war-monger."[105] The report contains unusual wording characteristic of Oppenheimer’s writing, suggesting that Oppenheimer might at least have "had a hand in editing a draft," according to historian Martin J. Sherwin.[106] MIT physics professor emeritus (and former Oppenheimer pupil) Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist,[107] confirmed that in 1939 (during the Pact) he delivered to the printers a pamphlet Oppenheimer wrote (and paid for) taking “the strict Party line in defending the Soviet invasion of Finland.”[108]

Alameda County Communist Party

If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he also fooled Communist Party officials into thinking he was. Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County in 1941, testified that Oppenheimer had been a Communist at that time, and even described the interior layout of his home:[109]

“ Chairman: Is there any doubt in your mind that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party?

Crouch: No, sir, none whatever. I met him in a closed meeting of the Communist Party in a house which was subsequently found to have been his residence at the time... and following that I met him at quite a number of Communist Party affairs in Alameda County.[110]

”

In 1945, in an Executive Committee meeting of the Communist Party branch for Alameda County,[111] both the Communist Jack Manley and his wife, Communist Party functionary Katrina Sandow (alias “Katherine Sanders”),[112] according to FBI surveillance, “stated that Oppenheimer was a Communist Party member.”[113]

Soviet intelligence

If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he not only convinced the Communist Party he was, he convinced Soviet intelligence itself. A 1944 report by NKVD San Francisco rezident (station chief) Grigory Kheifetz[114] states: “According to 'Uncle' (Isaac Folkoff),[115] both brothers [Robert and Frank Oppenheimer] were associated with the fellowcountrymen,"[116] NKVD code name for the Communist Party.[117] That year, NKVD agents Gaik Ovakimian and Andrei Graur reported to NKVD chief Boris Merkulov, identifying the code name "Chester" as "Robert Oppenheimer, b. 1906, an Amer. Jew, secret member of the fellowcountryman org., a professor at the U. of California, works on ‘En-s’,"[118] i.e., 'Enormoz,' Soviet code name for the Manhattan Project.[119] Merkulov, reporting in turn to Soviet Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria, identified “one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer,” as “an unlisted member of the apparatus of Comrade Browder,” General Secretary of the CPUSA.[120]

Cover-up

In April 1942 Oppenheimer's name was formally submitted for security clearance for the Manhattan Project; the following month, observed William L. Borden, executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), Oppenheimer "either stopped contributing funds to the Communist Party or else made his contributions through a new channel not yet discovered."[121] Oppenheimer "appears to have dropped out of the party in early 1942,” write Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev.[122] According to Jerrold L. Schecter, spokesman for the National Security Administration in the Carter administration, “Robert Oppenheimer’s long time membership in the Communist Party of the United States was made secret in 1942.”[123]

FBI surveillance in 1942-43 reported that Alameda County Communist Party Secretary Bernadette Doyle told John Murra, a “suspected intelligence agent of the USSR,” that “OPPENHEIMER was a party member but that his name should be removed from any mailing lists in John Murra’s possession and he should not mention it in any way,” and told Comintern agent "Steve Nelson" (Stjepan Mesaros), according to a telephone intercept,[124] “that she believes the matter should be taken up with the state committee regarding the two OPPIES, inasmuch as they were regularly registered [as members of the Communist Party] and everyone in the county knew they were Communists."[125]

According to Kheifetz, "due to their special military work, the connection with them [Robert and Frank Oppenheimer] was suspended.”[126] Ovakimian and Graur reported to Merkulov: “In view of the special significance and importance of the work he does... the fellowcountryman organization received orders from its center to break off relations with ‘Ch.’ [i.e., "Chester," Oppenheimer's code name] to avoid his exposure.”[127] Merkulov summarized:

“ Due to complications of the operational situation in the USA, dissolution of the Comintern[128] and explanations of Comrades Zarubin and Kheifets on the Mironov affair[129] it is expedient to immediately sever contacts of leaders and activists of the American Communist Party with scientists and specialists engaged in work on uranium.[130] ”

A 1945 Soviet code-message refers to instructions to “send GURON [‘Huron’][131] to CHICAGO to re-establish contact with VEKSEL….” The National Security Agency’s Venona project analysts identified VEKSEL as “Probably Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer.”[132]

Espionage at Los Alamos

In testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), Crouch was asked about Oppenheimer:

“ The CHAIRMAN. ...Is there any doubt in your mind... [that] Oppenheimer was under Communist party discipline at the time you were attending these Communist meetings with him?

Mr. CROUCH. No, sir, none whatever.

The CHAIRMAN. And if he were under Communist party discipline, he, of course, would be bound to turn over any atomic secrets to them that he had available?

Mr. CROUCH. That the party directed.

The CHAIRMAN. And naturally they would be interested in any atomic information he had?

Mr. CROUCH. Yes, sir. Just as a matter of fact, the Communist Party might have chosen to direct him to turn over the information; they might have chosen to direct him to appoint other Communists to key positions who would in turn, turn over the information. It is a matter of record that Dr. Oppenheimer has appointed many Communists to key positions to the atomic energy program..."[133]

”

Among those Oppenheimer brought into the project were his former grad students Bohm, Peters and Lomanitz; his brother Frank; and David Hawkins—all of whom were well known to him to be “members of the Communist Party or closely associated with activities of the Communist Party.”[134] Frank testified that he was a member (under the cover name "Frank Fulsome") from 1937 until 1940 or '41;[135] Hawkins testified that he was a member at Berkeley from 1938 to 1943;[136] Bohm officially joined the Communist Party in 1942[137] and later testified that he was a member at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory during World War II.[138]

In 1942, FBI surveillance recorded Lomanitz telling Nelson he was working on a highly secret weapon; Nelson advised Lomanitz to keep his Party activity quiet[139] as he was now considered a member of the underground.[140] Oppenheimer said he knew "for a fact" by August 1943 that Lomanitz was a Communist Party member.[141] Yet when, following an espionage investigation,[142] the Army released Lomanitz from Berkeley, causing him to lose his draft deferment, Oppenheimer sent an "urgent request" by telegram, urging Lomanitz' "continued availability to project,"[143] and subsequently attempted to get the Army to release Lomanitz to return to the Radiation Laboratory.[144]

In 1949, just before Lomanitz was to testify before HUAC, Oppenheimer met him on a sidewalk in Princeton, N.J., (where presumably "the FBI found it difficult to monitor his conversations"),[145] and discussed what he would say to the committee. Oppenheimer testified that the meeting was by chance, and that he only advised Lomanitz to tell the truth. But when he testified, Lomanitz refused on grounds of potential self-incrimination to answer whether or not he had been a Communist.[146]

Oppenheimer also testified that he knew "for a fact" by August 1943 that Weinberg was a Communist Party member[147] and had heard even at Berkeley that Weinberg had been a member of the Young Communist League.[148] FBI surveillance recorded Weinberg, who had gotten into the Manhattan project using Oppenheimer as a reference, telling Nelson he had been a Communist Party member since 1938.[149] Nelson warned Weinberg to burn his party membership book.[150] In 1943, FBI surveillance recorded Weinberg ("Scientist X") reading to Nelson "what appeared to be a technical formula used in the Project," which Nelson copied down.[151] Weinberg told Nelson he had to return the formula to the University of California Radiation Laboratories in the morning. Several days later Nelson met with Peter Ivanov (a GRU agent operating out of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco,[152] where Kheifetz was under cover as vice consul),[153] and gave him a package.[154] A few days later, "Zubilin" (Vasily Zarubin, NKVD station chief in the U.S. from 1941 to 1944) was transferred from the Soviet Embassy in Washington to the San Francisco consulate. Shortly thereafter, Zubilin gave Nelson ten bills of unknown denominations.[155]

At least three of the five scientists under Oppenheimer's direct supervision leaked secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. These include Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass.[156] KGB archival data smuggled out by Vassiliev reveal that two more spies, Boris Podolsky (code-named Quantum) and Russell McNutt (code-named Fogel, later changed to Pers), were also at Los Alamos during Oppenheimer's tenure.[157]

Allegations against Oppenheimer

According to Herbert Romerstein, former chief of the U.S. Information Agency's Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active Measures:[158] "Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performed work on behalf of the Soviet Union."[159] Oppenheimer supplied the Soviets with classified reports on atom bomb development—in part via Elizabeth Zarubina (wife of Vasily Zarubin), who was in direct contact with Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty—according to Pavel Sudoplatov, Moscow-based overseer of Soviet atom-bomb espionage. In his 1994 memoir, Sudoplatov wrote:

“ I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us..... We received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on. One agent cited Oppenheimer's stressing that information should be leaked so as not to be traceable to those who worked in Los Alamos. In all, there were five classified reports made available by Oppenheimer describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.[160] ”

Sudoplatov's allegations are corroborated by a 1982 letter he wrote to then-Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, stating: "Department S [Sudoplatov's department] rendered considerable help to our scientists by giving them the latest materials on atom bomb research, obtained from such sources as the famous nuclear physicists R. Oppenheimer, E. Fermi, K. Fuchs and others."[161] Romerstein and Breindel comment: "It would have made no sense for Sudoplatov to lie to Andropov, the former head of KGB and dictator of the Soviet Union, who would have easily found him out."[162]

According to FBI surveillance in 1943, Nelson (who often visited Oppenheimer's wife in Berkeley)[163] advised Weinberg "that OPPENHEIMER had indicated to him the basic idea of the project";[164] in 1945, Jack Manley would state that “Oppenheimer told Steven Nelson several years ago that the Army was working on the atomic bomb.”[165]

Merkulov reported to Beria, "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer... informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade Kheifitz,[166] confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder."[167] (Browder's niece, Helen Lowry, was a Soviet agent married to Iskhak Akhmerov,[168] the leading NKVD "illegal" in the United States.)[169] Schecter concludes that Oppenheimer “was being used as a Soviet intelligence asset by the Communist Underground to help obtain atomic secrets.”[170]

Sergei Leskov, science correspondent for Izvestia, a Moscow newspaper in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, reported in 1994 that Russian government officials informed him

“ that as well as Klaus Fuchs, who was imprisoned for espionage in Britain for 14 years, and "Perseus," an unidentified agent who has been mentioned frequently in recent years, there were 10 agents of similar caliber working in the West. Six worked in the United States, four in Britain. They were significant figures who remain unknown to the FBI to this day.[171] ”

The Chevalier incident

In 1943, the Soviets tried to establish direct contact with Oppenheimer. Ivanov instructed George Eltenton (a British-born Soviet intelligence source code-named “Dorin”)[172] to feel Oppenheimer out about covertly leaking American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, according to Eltenton’s statement to the FBI.[173] Eltenton said he asked Chevalier to pitch the idea to Oppenheimer.[174] Chevalier approached Oppenheimer in February or March 1943, but Oppenheimer failed to report the incident for some eight months.[175]

Overruling the objections of security officers, according to Groves, on July 20 he issued written orders that:

“ In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued to Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.[176] ”

The following month, after Oppenheimer's security clearance had come through, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, the security officer at Berkeley, questioned Oppenheimer about Lomanitz, whom Oppenheimer had tried to keep on the Manhattan Project, even though he had supplied highly sensitive information to the Soviets.[177] Oppenheimer stated that he had heard that Eltenton, too, had offered to supply technical data to the Soviets.[178] Johnson immediately called Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash, Chief of Counter-Intelligence for the Ninth Army Corps on the West Coast.[179] The following day, Pash and Johnson interrogated Oppenheimer about Eltenton. Oppenheimer stated:

“ I think it is true that a man, whose name I never heard, who was attached to the Soviet consul, has indicated indirectly through intermediary people concerned in this project that he was in a position to transmit, without any danger of a leak, or scandal, or anything of that kind, information, which they might supply. ”

Oppenheimer then named Eltenton, stating:

“ He has probably been asked to do what he can to provide information. Whether he is successful or not, I do not know, but he talked to a friend of his who is also an acquaintance of one of the men on the project, and that was one of the channels by which this thing went. ”

Johnson asked whether "there was a particular person, maybe a person on the project that they were trying to pump information from."

Oppenheimer answered, "I have known of 2 or 3 cases, and I think two of the men were with me at Los Alamos—they are men who are very closely associated with me." Eltenton, he added, "had very good contacts with a man from the embassy attached to the consulate who was a very reliable guy (that's his story) and who had a lot of experience in microfilm work, or whatever the hell." Eltenton did not contact anyone on the Manhattan Project directly, said Oppenheimer, but through an intermediary, "a member of the [Berkeley] faculty, but not on the project."[180]

The following month Colonel Lansdale told Oppenheimer that "we have known since February that several people were transmitting information about this project to the Soviet Government." Oppenheimer said the intermediary, whom he still refused to name, was "an acquaintance of mine, I've known over many years," adding, "I know him as a fellow traveler." Lansdale confronted Oppenheimer, stating: "I have reason to believe that you yourself were felt out, I don't say asked, but felt out to ascertain how you felt about it, passing a little information, to the party." Then Lansdale struck home:

“ L. [Lansdale] How about Haakon Chevalier?

O. [Oppenheimer] Is he a member of the party?

L. I don't know.

O. He is a member of the faculty and I know him well. I wouldn't be surprised if he were a member, he is quite a Red.[181]

”
In March 1945 Moscow orders agent "Guron" (Byron Darling)[182] to reestablish contact with "Veksel" ("probably" Oppenheimer).[183]
Oppenheimer refused to admit Chevalier's involvement for ten months.[184] Finally, in December 1943, Groves told Oppenheimer to divulge the name. "I told him if you don't tell me, I am going to have to order you to do it," Groves would later testify. Oppenheimer promptly answered that it was Chevalier. When Groves asked the names of the three people Chevalier had approached, however, Oppenheimer changed his story: there were not three people, but only one—Oppenheimer himself. From what Oppenheimer told him, Groves concluded:
“ that there was an approach made, that Dr. Oppenheimer knew of this approach, that at some point he was involved in that the approach was made to him—I don't mean involved in the sense that he gave anything—I mean he just knew about it personally from the fact that he was in the chain, and that he didn't report it in its entirety as he should have done. ”

Groves did not believe Oppenheimer's new story, testifying that he "had the very definite impression that Dr. Oppenheimer wanted to protect his friends of long standing, possibly his brother."[185]

But Oppenheimer insisted that what he had told Pash about the three contacts was actually just “a cock-and-bull story.”[186] "This whole thing was a pure fabrication except for the one name Eltenton," testified Oppenheimer, who called his previous story "a piece of idiocy" that was "wholly false."[187] Asked "You lied to him?" Oppenheimer answered "Yes." Asked under oath for an explanation of why he had lied, the brilliant physicist testified, “Because I was an idiot.”[188] Despite this incident, Oppenheimer was still meeting with Chevalier a decade later, including once in Paris,[189] where, again, presumably "the FBI found it difficult to monitor his conversations."[190]

Policy influence

The successful development of the atomic bomb gave the United States an enormous advantage over the Soviet Union. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria "said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Szilard and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament," according to Sudoplatov. "Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage."[191] On October 3, 1945, President Truman read an address to Congress stating that "atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas."[192] The speech advocated "the renunciation of the use"[193] of the atom bomb, and proposed "international collaboration and exchange of scientific information"[194] about it. On October 19, wrote Henry Wallace,[195] Oppenheimer "told me that the President’s statement to Congress had been written by Dean Acheson’s assistant, a Mr. Herbert Marks,[196] and that he [Oppenheimer] had had something to do with helping Marks on the message."[197]

Peace offensive

Two days previously, Wallace and Oppenheimer had attended a meeting at Washington's Statler Hotel[198] with Szilard, Fermi, Edward U. Condon,[199] Harlow Shapley,[200] and others. "The scientists presented in very vigorous terms the peril in which the United States now finds herself... chiefly... the threat to peace," wrote Wallace. "Oppenheimer said he very much wanted to see me and I made arrangements..."[201] At their meeting two days later, wrote Wallace:

“ I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent... He has been in charge of the scientists in New Mexico and says... that all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb... He wanted to know if I thought it would do any good for him to see the President. I said yes, and he is going to try to get either Secretary Patterson[202] or Senator Kilgore[203] to make an appointment for him.[204] ”

Within a week, Oppenheimer met with Truman at the White House. Oppenheimer urged the President to surrender the U.S. nuclear monopoly to international control. Truman was outraged, telling Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again."[205] Nevertheless, Truman later appealed to Oppenheimer for help in "giving the army permanent control over atomic energy."[206] Oppenheimer did just the opposite, using his influence to turn the army's control of nuclear power over to the the civilian AEC in 1946.[207] That year, Oppenheimer was one of the primary architects of the Acheson-Lillienthal Report, which proposed turning control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over to the United Nations.[208]

During their June 2000 meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent, told U.S. President Bill Clinton a story concerning "Joseph Stalin's decision to put his secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, in charge of ferreting out the secrets of the American crash program to develop the atomic bomb during World War II."

“ Putin had words of praise for the American scientists who willingly helped the USSR develop its own A-bomb. They were not traitors to their country, he said. Rather, they were serving the cause of international peace.[209] ”

In 2012, according to Russia's government news agency Itar-Tass, Putin amplified these remarks:

“ You know, when the States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels ... They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases! ... It was the cream of the scientific world that was gathered in America, and I personally have gotten the impression that they consciously gave us information on the atom bomb ... They did this consciously because the atom bomb had been used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and scientists from mankind’s intellectual elite at the time understood what unilateral possession of such a weapon might lead to.[210] ”

The H-bomb

In 1947, Oppenheimer became Chairman of the AEC's General Advisory Committee (GAC) on Science.[211] On September 23, 1949, Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their own atomic bomb.[212] (Within a month of breaking the U.S. nuclear monopoly, Soviet-backed Communist rebels would seize control of China, inaugurating a regime that would eventually murder some 70 million Chinese;[213] within a year, Soviet and Communist Chinese-backed North Korea would invade its neighbor to the south, launching a war that would claim more than 30,000 American lives.)[214] AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss, president of the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (where Oppenheimer was director), responded with a proposal that the U.S. make it "highest priority" to build a hydrogen bomb (then called the "super bomb").[215]

On October 14, 1949, one GAC member, Glenn Seaborg, then a future Nobel Laureate (and future AEC Chairman), wrote to Oppenheimer, “I have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should not” proceed with this crash program to develop an H-bomb. “I would have to hear some good arguments before I could take on sufficient courage to recommend not going toward such a program."[216]

Yet, ten days later, Oppenheimer told the AEC that among GAC members there was “a surprising unanimity—to me very surprising—that the United States ought not to take the initiative... in an all out program for the development of thermonuclear weapons.”[217] He claimed that didn't know how Seaborg felt about it, as he “was in Sweden, and there was no communication with him.”[218] Oppenheimer later confessed that he had received Seaborg's letter before he made these claims, yet he repeated them three months later, before the JCAE.[219] When nuclear physicist Edward Teller, a Hungarian Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany[220] known as the "father of the H-bomb,"[221] had sought Oppenheimer's support to build an H-bomb at Los Alamos in 1945, Oppenheimer had refused. Now, argued Teller, the need for an H-bomb had become urgent. Oppenheimer disagreed, signing his name to an official statement that "a super bomb should never be produced."[222] With Fermi and others, he lobbied Henry Wallace to stop H-bomb development; Wallace complied, issuing a statement that “we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”[223] As Teller would later testify:

“ In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act... in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more... If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.[224] ”

Although he made no accusations, Teller's testimony against Oppenheimer made him a pariah. The left accused him of smearing an innocent man and blamed him for ending Oppenheimer's career. The hearing transcript contradicts that conclusion, but to some, Teller’s anticommunist views alone were enough to justify bitter feelings against him. Many never forgave him.

HUAC hearing

In 1943, Lansdale had asked Oppenheimer, "Do you know a fellow named Rudy Lambert [chief of security for the California Communist Party, identified in Venona as a Soviet intelligence source on uranium]?"[225] Oppenheimer answered, "I'm not sure, do you know what he looks like?"[226] Yet in 1949, Oppenheimer testified before HUAC that he had met Lambert half a dozen times before 1943, and not only knew then that he was a Communist official,[227] but even described him ("A lean, rather handsome man, moderate height, rather an effective speaker in conversation.")[228] The following colloquy would ensue:

“ You knew what Rudy Lambert looked like, didn't you?

A. Sure.

Q. Why did you ask Lansdale what he looked like?

A. I don't know that I did.

Q. If you did, Doctor, would it mean that you were ducking the question?

A. I would think so.[229]

”
Although Oppenheimer has long been presented as a "martyr to McCarthyism," it has been suggested that had Oppenheimer not been stripped of his clearance, he might be disrespected (like Elia Kazan)[230] for "naming names"[231] to save his own skin.[232] Oppenheimer testified that he thought one of his graduate students, Bernard Peters (husband of Communist Party official Hannah Peters),[233] told him circa 1938 that he [Peters] had been a member of the Communist Party.[234] Yet in 1942 or '43 Oppenheimer invited Peters to join him at Los Alamos.[235] A few months later, during a background interview to obtain his security clearance, Oppenheimer identified Peters "as a Communist."[236] The following year, Major Peer De Silva, chief of security at Los Alamos, interviewed Oppenheimer. Among his former students, Oppenheimer named Bohm and Peters as "truly dangerous,"[237] according to De Silva's report, singling out Peters in particular as a "crazy person" who was "quite a red."[238] Oppenheimer also testified before HUAC that Peters told him that he had been "a member of the German National Communist Party."[239]

After this testimony was leaked to the press,[240] Condon, then Director of the Commerce Department's National Bureau of Standards (dealing with classified data on nuclear weapons, radar, and guided missiles), wrote a letter to the editor containing “a severe attack on Dr. Oppenheimer”[241] and tried to start various rumors alleging that Oppenheimer was either losing his mind or converting to the Catholic Church.[242] He also wrote Oppenheimer a letter accusing him of trying to "buy immunity for yourself by turning informer"[243] and demanding that he "try to make restitution," threatening that if Oppenheimer's own "file were ever made public, it would be a much bigger flap":[244] "You know very well that once these people decide to go into your own dossier and make it public that it will make the 'revelations' that you have made so far look pretty tame."[245]

Under pressure from Condon and others, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the editor that "retracted some of the testimony," stating that "Dr. Peters has recently informed me... that I was wrong in believing... that he had ever held a membership in the Communist Party."[246]

Oppenheimer "was very much influenced [in 1942]... by the influence of Dr. Condon," according to Groves. Condon, Groves testified, "did a tremendous amount of damage at Los Alamos in the initial setup."[247] Groves testified that he believed that Condon was "responsible for the rules—that tended to break down compartmentalization" at Los Alamos, thus making it difficult to control the diffusion of secrets and prevent espionage. Just before the Trinity explosion, the Soviets scheduled a scientific conference in Moscow. The Kremlin invited several U.S. scientists to attend—a fact that a member of the State Department tried to keep secret from the Army, according to Groves. Among those invited was Condon, but the U.S. government revoked his passport to prevent him from attending. Condon "made a terrific battle to go," testified Groves:

“ That battle was so unrealistic and so completely lacking in appreciation of what was the best interest of the United States that you couldn't help but feel that either he was such an utter fool that he could not be trusted, or else that he put his own personal desires above those of the welfare of the country and therefore he was in effect disloyal, even if it was not a case of deliberately going out to aid the enemy.[248] ”

AEC hearing

Pursuant to President Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953, new security standards were applied to all federal officials, including Oppenheimer. On May 15, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), Chairman of the PSI, asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover if the Bureau would object to the PSI holding hearings on Oppenheimer. Hoover told him that the FBI had no objections. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, a blood relative of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt (and a friend of Oppenheimer's) delivered a seven-page letter to the White House asking Ike to block the investigation.[249]

The prospect of a McCarthy hearing spooked the administration into finally taking action: on June 22, Strauss asked Hoover to get McCarthy to hold off until the AEC could conduct its own hearings. In November, Borden wrote to Hoover, stating in his “exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."[250] The following month (the same month Oppenheimer met with Chevalier in Paris), after reviewing material brought to his attention by the Department of Justice, Eisenhower, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization and the AEC Chairman, ordered that, pending a security review, “a blank wall be placed between Dr. Oppenheimer and any secret data,”[251] and the AEC notified Oppenheimer that his clearance was under review, sending him a letter laying out charges against him.

On March 4, 1954, Oppenheimer sent a written response to AEC General Manager K.D. Nichols. The following month, Oppenheimer released the text of the administration's charges to the press, along with his response.

PSB Hearing

On April 12, the AEC's Personnel Security Board (PSB) opened hearings on the charges. The PSB was a three-member panel headed by former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, President of the University of North Carolina (after whom it is sometimes referred to as the “Gray board”). Also on the PSB were Ward V. Evans, professor emeritus of chemistry at Loyola University of Chicago; and Thomas Morgan, 66, a retired businessman.

Oppenheimer was represented pro bono by the white shoe firm[252] of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, joined by former AEC general counsel Herbert Marks, the former Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson who, with Oppenheimer's help, had written Truman's 1945 address proposing international sharing of nuclear secrets.

After eight weeks of testimony and cross-examination, and exhibits including transcripts and FBI reports, the panel voted 2-1 to strip Oppenheimer of his “Q clearance” access to atomic secrets. Gray and Morgan carried the majority, with Evans dissenting. Joseph and Stewart Alsop, "long-standing Oppenheimer partisans," used their influential syndicated columns to put forward a conspiracy theory: the Gray board's findings, alleged the Alsops, were part of a conspiracy by AEC Chairman Strauss to even an old personal grudge against Oppenheimer. Despite the fact that it "conveniently overlooked the matter of Gray's record and integrity,"[253] the left adopted the Alsops' conspiracy theory as the dogmatic explanation of Oppenheimer's security problems.

Appeal

Oppenheimer appealed the PSB's decision to the full Atomic Energy Commission. Joining his legal team was former Democratic Party presidential candidate John W. Davis,[254] fresh from his defeated defense of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.[255] Davis had previously testified as a character witness for Soviet agent Alger Hiss.[256]

Citing “proof of fundamental defects in his ‘character’,” to wit, “his associations with persons known to him to be Communists,” which associations, said the AEC, “have extended far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint which are to be expected of one holding the high positions that the Government has continuously entrusted to him since 1942,” the commission upheld the decision stripping the former chairman of its own GAC[257] of his security clearance.[258]

Legacy

In 1963, President Johnson reinstated Oppenheimer's clearance, and the AEC awarded him the Enrico Fermi Award.[259]

In June 1997, the KGB museum in Moscow featured an exhibit of "leading atomic espionage agents and espionage documents." The exhibit featured Oppenheimer's image, displayed along with a photograph of convicted Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and a shot of a Manhattan Project laboratory site. "Oppenheimer and other top scientists cooperated with us," former KGB official Yuri Kolesnikov told reporter Michael Chapman of Human Events. They weren't Soviet agents, Kolesnikov said. But they "gave us information about the atom bomb," first because they were fearful that Hitler might defeat the Soviet Union in World War II and later because "Oppenheimer and the other scientists wanted to create a balance of power between the United States, which had the bomb, and the USSR, which didn't."[260] "Oppenheimer was not a Soviet agent like Fuchs," the museum's director told Chapman. "But, yes, he did cooperate with Soviet intelligence. That's why his picture is here."[261]

According to Haynes and Klehr, "Throughout his life Oppenheimer declined to provide a detailed or accurate accounting of his relationship with the CPUSA in the late 1930s and early 1940s and of his knowledge of Communists who worked on the Manhattan Project."[262]

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Although Oppenheimer always insisted that the initial J. in his name stood for "nothing" (Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma [Ivan R. Dee, 2004] ISBN 1566635691, p. x), his birth certificate identifies him as "Julius Robert Oppenheimer." Pais, Crease 2006: 355
  2. ↑ The others were the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, under Arthur Compton;Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, under Martin Whitaker; and the Hanford Engineer Works in Hanford, Washington, under Crawford Greenewalt. S. L. Sanger, Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford (Continuing Education Press, 1995) ISBN 0876781156, p. 3. Cf. Manhattan Project Map, United States Department of Energy
  3. ↑ Alexander Vassiliev, tr. Philip Redko, Yellow notebook #1 (Cold War International History Center, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), orig., PDF p. 6; trans., p. 10. Cf. Haynes 2008: 120; Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 49
  4. ↑ AEC Hearing: 7 (PDF 17)
  5. ↑ The Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945, Los Alamos National Laboratory
  6. ↑ Pais, Crease 2006: 4
  7. ↑ Rhodes 1986: 123
  8. ↑ The Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945, Los Alamos National Laboratory
  9. ↑ Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (Fromm International Pub. Corp., 1985) ISBN 0880640219, p. 11
  10. ↑ Smith, Weiner 1995: 4
  11. ↑ Jonathan Beard, "Biographies: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Patrick Blackett," New Scientist, December 25, 2004
  12. ↑ Herken 2003: 431
  13. ↑ Sean McManus, "If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?" New York, April 21, 2008
  14. ↑ J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967), atomicarchive.com
  15. ↑ Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 101 U.S. App. D.C. 371, 249 F.2d 127. Cf. Jone Johnson Lewis, Ethical Culture as Religion, American Ethical Union Library, 2003; Tom Flynn, Secular Humanism Defined, Council for Secular Humanism; Humanist Manifesto II, American Humanist Association
  16. ↑ Is Ethical Culture based on Judaism and the Ten Commandments?, Washington Ethical Society
  17. ↑ Joseph Chuman, Ethical Culture and the Ongoing Quest for Social Justice, The Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County
  18. ↑ An "unacknowledged desire to live under Stalinism, not in spite of what it is, but because of what it is." Jean François Revel, The Totalitarian Temptation (Doubleday, 1977) ISBN 0385122748, p. 25
  19. ↑ Friedrich August Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (University of Chicago Press, 1978) ISBN 0226320839, p. 69
  20. ↑ Christian Century, May 15, 1963, p. 647, cited in James A. Hijiya, "The Gita of Robert Oppenheimer," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2 (June 2000), p. 130 (PDF p. 8)
  21. ↑ "The Eternal Apprentice," Time, November 8, 1948
  22. ↑ Smith, Weiner 1995: xvii
  23. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 39
  24. ↑ Rhodes 1986: 123
  25. ↑ Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (University of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN 0226798453, p. 39
  26. ↑ Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Harvard University Press, 2008) ISBN 0674028287, p. 142
  27. ↑ The 2006 Pulitzer Prize Winners, Biography or Autobiography
  28. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 46
  29. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 47
  30. ↑ David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (Random House, Inc., 2001) ISBN 0385258917, p. 147
  31. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 60
  32. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 68
  33. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 90
  34. ↑ Stephen Schwartz, "Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now," FrontPageMagazine.com, July 8, 2002. A 1951 investigation by HUAC, then chaired by Democrat John Stephens Wood, concluded that Pauling was "primarily engrossed in placing his scientific attainments at the service of a host of organizations which have in common their complete subservience to the Communist Party, USA, and the Soviet Union. Professor Pauling has not deviated a hair's breadth from this pattern of loyalty to the Communist cause since 1946." (House Committee on Un-American Activities, Report on the Communist "Peace" Offensive, the Attempt to Disarm and Defeat America [Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951], p. 86) In 1970, the Soviet government would reward Pauling for his long service with the Lenin prize.
  35. ↑ Thomas Hager, Force of nature: the life of Linus Pauling (Simon & Schuster, 1995) ISBN 0684809095, pp. 150-152
  36. ↑ Silvan S. Schweber, In the shadow of the bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the moral responsibility of the scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN 0691049890, p. 203, n. 69. Oppenheimer's colleague Abrahaim Pais wrote that "I was convinced that strong latent homosexuality was an important ingredient in Robert's emotional makeup." (Abraham Pais, A tale of two continents: a physicist's life in a turbulent world [Oxford University Press, 1997] ISBN 0198501994, p. 241) One biographer comments, "it seems fairly likely that sexual ambivalence was one aspect of Oppenheimer's youthful problems of identity." Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (University of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN 0226798453, p. 51
  37. ↑ Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (Random House, Inc., 2004) ISBN 081297302X, p. 236
  38. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 109
  39. ↑ Author Bios: John S.P. Tatlock, thenation.com
  40. ↑ Pais, Crease 2006: 36
  41. ↑ Rhodes 1996: 122. Cf. Romerstein, Breindel 2000: 270
  42. ↑ Hoover to Lansdale, May 23, 1944 (FBI file: Katherine Oppenheimer, PDF p. 2)
  43. ↑ William Herrick, Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (AK Press, 2001) ISBN 1902593421, p. 237
  44. ↑ David Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (Pi Press: 2004) ISBN 0-13-147996-2, pp. 186-187
  45. ↑ Richard Rhodes, "Nuclear Options," The New York Times, May 15, 2005
  46. ↑ Smith, Weiner 1995: 214
  47. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 232, 253. Some writers suspect Soviet involvement in Tatlock's death. Stephen Schwartz mentions "Khyron" -- the Cyrillic transliteration of Chyron, ferryman of the dead in ancient Greek mythology (Stephen Schwartz, From West To East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Free Press, 1998) ISBN 0684831341, p. 380. Cf. Cornell Simpson, The Death of James Forrestal (Western Islands, 1966) ASIN B0006BOU86) -- which was also Kheifets' code name.
  48. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 363
  49. ↑ C. Mott Woolley, "The tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," Asia Times, May 10, 2006
  50. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 365
  51. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 407-409
  52. ↑ “The Brothers,” Time, June 27, 1949
  53. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 2006: 147
  54. ↑ As soon as Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933, FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull told the FBI to investigate German Nazi groups in the United States; the following year Roosevelt ordered the Bureau to investigate "the activity of the Nazi movement in this country." During the Hitler-Stalin pact, when the Soviet Union was a Nazi ally in the invasion of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania (and Nazi collaborator in the conquest of France and Battle of Britain), this investigation was expanded to include the CPUSA. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1995) ISBN 0300061838, p. 11
  55. ↑ AEC Hearing: 185 (PDF 195)
  56. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 1999: 357
  57. ↑ Chevalier to Oppenheimer, July 23, 1964 (Robert Oppenheimer papers, Library of Congress)
  58. ↑ FBI Report: J. Robert Oppenheimer, March 28, 1941, FBI file: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Internal Security - C, Sec. 1 (not paginated). Cf. CINRAD: 228 (PDF 237)
  59. ↑ On September 6, 1939, in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, FDR directed the FBI "to take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage..." (Frank J. Rafalko, ed., A Counterintelligence Reader: An American Revolution Into the New Millennium (Office of National Counterintelligence Executive), Vol. 1, Ch. 4, p. 177) Three days later, FDR created the Emergency Detention Program (EDP), giving the Justice Department the power to “arrest and detain those persons deemed dangerous in the event of war, invasion, or insurrection in and of a foreign enemy.” (Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: political surveillance from Hoover to the Huston plan [Temple University Press, 1978] ISBN 0877221413, p. 40) (The EDP would provide the basis for Roosevelt's wartime internment of Japanese, Germans and Italians in the United States during World War II.) That month, in a reference to the Red Scare of 1919, Attorney General Cullen Murphy stated, “There will be no repetition of the confusion and laxity and indifference of twenty years ago.” The CDI originated the following year in the Justice Department's Special Defense Unit (previously known as the Neutrality Laws Unit), later renamed the War Division. During the Hitler-Stalin pact, the list was expanded to include Communists.
  60. ↑ Custodial Detention Memorandum, May 27, 1941, FBI file: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Internal Security - C, Sec. 1 (not paginated)
  61. ↑ “Oppenheimer: A Life,” Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California, Berkeley
  62. ↑ Inflation Calculator, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics
  63. ↑ AEC Hearing: 185 (PDF 195)
  64. ↑ Inflation Calculator, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics
  65. ↑ Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House Report 1311 on the CIO Political Action Committee, March 29, 1944, pp. 82, 140, and 180; Attorney General Tom Clark, letter to Loyalty Review Board, released April 27, 1949; both cited in 85th Congress, 1st Session House Document No. 226, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (Washington: US GPO, 1957), p. 69 (PDF p. 85)
  66. ↑ CINRAD: 227 (PDF 236)
  67. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 123. Cf. Haynes, Klehr 1999: 352
  68. ↑ AEC Hearing: 9 (PDF 19)
  69. ↑ "Filling in a security questionnaire, Oppie had lately admitted that he had been 'a member of just about every Communist-front organization on the West Coast'..." Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (Simon and Schuster, 1984) ISBN 0671461427, p. 49. Cf. "As Oppenheimer was to write on a 1942 security questionnaire... : '...I have been a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast.'" Rachel Teukolsky, "Regarding Scientist X," Berkeley Science Review, Issue 1 (Spring 2001), p. 17; "When he joined the atomic bomb project he admitted in his security questionnaire that he had been 'a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast.'" J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1904 - 1967), "Race for the Superbomb," American Experience, PBS
  70. ↑ AEC Hearing: 159 (PDF 169). Cf. Philip M. Stern with Harold P. Green, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) ISBN 0246640359, p. 15
  71. ↑ AEC Hearing: 204 (PDF 214)
  72. ↑ AEC Hearing: 9 (PDF 19)
  73. ↑ AEC Hearing: 204 (PDF 214)
  74. ↑ AEC Hearing: 110 (PDF 120)
  75. ↑ AEC Hearing: 8 (PDF 18)
  76. ↑ According to the FBI, he was subscribed as early as 1938. (CINRAD: 227 [PDF 236]) Asked if his subscription expired after he joined the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer said: "Since I don't know when it was, I can't answer that question." He admitted, "I think I paid for it" and "I don't believe I canceled the subscription." AEC Hearing: 157 (PDF 167)
  77. ↑ AEC Hearing: 9 (PDF 19)
  78. ↑ CINRAD: 227 (PDF 236)
  79. ↑ Paul Gray, Tom Curry and Jane Van Tessel, "Evaluating the Buyer's Bible," Time, February 20, 1995
  80. ↑ AEC Hearing: 158 (PDF 168)
  81. ↑ AEC Hearing: 3 (PDF 13)
  82. ↑ AEC Hearing: 9 (PDF 19)
  83. ↑ AEC Hearing: 3 (PDF 13)
  84. ↑ Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, California Legislature, Un-American Activities in California, 1948: Communist Front Organizations, Fourth Report (Sacramento, 1948), p. 144 (PDF p. 154)
  85. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 124
  86. ↑ Under threat of being listed by HUAC in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the ACLU purged any "member of any political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country, or who by his public declaration and connections indicates his support of such a principle" (including future CPUSA Chairman Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) from its Executive Committee in 1940, although its continued front activity caused it to be listed as a Communist front by a joint committee of the California Legislature in 1943: “The American Civil Liberties Union may be definitely classed as a Communist front or ‘transmission belt’ organization.” Communist Front Organizations, Fourth Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Committee On Un-American Activities, California Legislature, 1948, p. 107 (PDF p. 117)
  87. ↑ Oppenheimer was listed as a donor to this organization in People's World, January 29, 1938, cited in CINRAD: 227 (PDF p. 236)
  88. ↑ Committee on Un-American Activities, Annual Report, House Report 2233, June 7, 1946, p. 27; Cited in 85th Congress, 1st Session House Document No. 226, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (Washington: US GPO, 1957), p. 55 (PDF p. 71)
  89. ↑ Special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, Report, April 21, 1943, p. 3; Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House Report 1311 on the CIO Political Action Committee, March 29, 1944, VV- 48 and 102; both cited in 85th Congress, 1st Session House Document No. 226, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (Washington: US GPO, 1957), p. 62 (PDF p. 78)
  90. ↑ CINRAD: 227 (PDF 236)
  91. ↑ Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House Report 1311 on the CIO Political Action Committee, March 29, 1944, pp. 82, 140, and 180; Attorney General Tom Clark, letter to Loyalty Review Board, released April 27, 1949; both cited in 85th Congress, 1st Session House Document No. 226, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (Washington: US GPO, 1957), p. 69 (PDF p. 85)
  92. ↑ Patricia Villamil, "2009-2010 Kluge Staff Fellow," Newsletter, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2009), p. 6
  93. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 58
  94. ↑ Gregg Herken, Documents, Brotherhood of the Bomb
  95. ↑ Charles Burress, "The Oppenheimer Riddle: New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist," The San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 2004
  96. ↑ Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (Random House, Inc., 2004) ISBN 081297302X, p. 267
  97. ↑ Chevalier to Oppenheimer, July 23, 1964 (Robert Oppenheimer papers, Library of Congress); Barbara Chevalier, "Robert Oppenheimer and Haakon Chevalier: From the Memoirs of Barbara Chevalier," excerpts (brotherhoodofthebomb.com)
  98. ↑ Gordon Griffiths, "Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor," excerpts
  99. ↑ Jessica Mitford, A fine old conflict (Knopf, 1977) ISBN 0394499956, p. 67
  100. ↑ S. S. Schweber, “A Puzzle of a Man,” American Scientist, Vol. 2, No. 5 (September-October 2004)
  101. ↑ Herken 2003: 431
  102. ↑ Herken 2003: 341, n. 35
  103. ↑ Gordon Griffiths' Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor (excerpts), Brothehood of the Bomb
  104. ↑ Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (Random House, Inc., 2004) ISBN 081297302X, p. 267
  105. ↑ Herken 2003: 31-32
  106. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 144-145
  107. ↑ Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 82d Cong., 2d sess., Subversive Influence in the Educational Process, Parts 7-14 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1955), p. 899
  108. ↑ Gregg Herken, "The Oppenheimer Case: An Exchange," The New York Review of Books, Vol. 51, No. 5 (March 25, 2004)
  109. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 440
  110. ↑ Crouch, Paul (1953-09-15). United States Senate, "Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Vol. 3, 83d Cong., 1st sess., 1953, pp. 1837 (PDF p. 37)
  111. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 46
  112. ↑ Testimony of Dickson P. Hill, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings on Communist Activities in the San Francisco Area—Part 2 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1954), pp. 3193-3196 (PDF pp. 45-48)
  113. ↑ M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, p. 318, fn.; Bird, Sherwin 2006: 46
  114. ↑ Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Fort George G. Meade, Md.: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001), p. 41
  115. ↑ Haynes 2008: 56
  116. ↑ Alexandr Vassiliev, White Notebook #1 (tr. Steve Shabad), p. 138
  117. ↑ Haynes 2008: 36
  118. ↑ Vassiliev Yellow Notebook #1 (Orig.), PDF p. 6; (Trans.), p. 10. Cf. Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 45
  119. ↑ Herken 2003: 87
  120. ↑ Merkulov to Beria, 2 October 1944, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  121. ↑ AEC Hearing: 837 (PDF 849)
  122. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 58
  123. ↑ Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  124. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 234
  125. ↑ The FBI report adds: "It is believed that the two OPPIES mentioned above had reference to subject J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER and his brother FRANK OPPENHEIMER." FBI report: J. Robert Oppenheimer, December 2, 1943, FBI file: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Internal Security - C, Sec. 1 (not paginated). Cf. CINRAD: 229 (PDF 238); M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, p. 316-318
  126. ↑ Alexandr Vassiliev, White Notebook #1 (tr. Steve Shabad), p. 138
  127. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 45
  128. ↑ In 1943, Stalin officially dissolved the Comintern (Dissolution of the Communist International, Marxists Internet Archive), forcing Soviet intelligence to reorganize its espionage channels in the United States. (Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). The International Department of the CPSU Central Committee was created that year essentially to carry out functions previously performed by the Comintern (Departments of the Central Committee, Soviet Union, Country Studies, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1989), which included “control over the CPUSA,” (Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kirill Mikhaĭlovich Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), ISBN 0300071507, p. 48)—gradually transferring Comintern assets and networks to direct NKVD control. Preface, Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and The American Response, 1939-1957 (NSA/CIA, 1996)
  129. ↑ In 1943, Lt. Col. Vasili Mironov, an NKVD officer in the Washington, DC rezidentura, sent an unsigned letter to J. Edgar Hoover, exposing the intelligence activities of the Zarubins and Kheifets.
  130. ↑ Merkulov to Beria, 2 October 1944, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  131. ↑ Huron was identified in the Gorsky memo in 1948 by Anatoly Gorsky (NKVD rezident in Washington in 1945) as Byron T. Darling, who would be fired from a post as associate professor of physics at Ohio State University in 1953 when he refused to answer a question about his Communist Party ties before HUAC.
  132. ↑ Venona 256 Moscow to New York, 21 March 1945
  133. ↑ Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Vol. 3, 83d Cong., 1st sess., 1953, pp. 1840-41 (PDF pp. 40-41)
  134. ↑ Decision and Opinions of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Washington, D.C., June 29, 1954 (Avalon Project, Yale Law School)
  135. ↑ Rhodes 1996: 359. Cf. Bird, Sherwin 2006: 402
  136. ↑ Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 81st Congr., 2d sess., Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Radiation Laboratory and Atom Bomb Project at the University of California, Berkeley, Calif., Vol. 3 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 3418 (PDF p. 9)
  137. ↑ F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Basic Books, 1997) ISBN 0201328208, p. 58
  138. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 122
  139. ↑ Katherine A. S. Sibley, "Soviet Military-Industrial Espionage in the United States and the Emergence of an Espionage Paradigm in US-Soviet Relations, 1941-45," American Communist History, Vol. 2, Iss. 1 (June 2003), pp. 21-51
  140. ↑ San Francisco FBI report 15 March 1947, COMRAP file. Cf. Haynes, Klehr 1999: 325; Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (Random House, Inc., 2004) ISBN 081297302X, p. 267
  141. ↑ AEC Hearing: 875 (PDF 887). Cf. Bird, Sherwin 2006: 245; Herken 2003: 111
  142. ↑ AEC Hearing: 128 (PDF 138)
  143. ↑ AEC Hearing: 123 (PDF 133)
  144. ↑ AEC Hearing: 124 (PDF 134)
  145. ↑ "THE ATOM: A Matter of Character," Time, June 14, 1954
  146. ↑ AEC Hearing: 151 (PDF 161)
  147. ↑ AEC Hearing: 875 (PDF 887). Cf. Bird, Sherwin 2006: 245; Herken 2003: 111
  148. ↑ AEC Hearing: 194 (PDF 204)
  149. ↑ CINRAD: 14 (PDF 16)
  150. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 2006: 148
  151. ↑ CINRAD: 6 (PDF 8)
  152. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009
  153. ↑ Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  154. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 1999: 325
  155. ↑ Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 81st Cong., 1st sess., Hearings Regarding Steve Nelson (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), pp. VIII-IX (PDF pp. 12-13)
  156. ↑ For Karl Fuchs, see: Andrew & Mitrokhin 1999, p. 114-115, 127-128, 131-132, 155, 164, 397 Noting that Klaus Fuchs, a committed Stalinist, began spying while in Great Britain after fleeing Nazi Germany, and continued when he came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. For Theodore Hall, see: Andrew & Mitrokhin 1999, p. 128-129, 131-132, 147-48, 164-65, 205 (Cf. "Scientist, Spy for Soviets Dies," The Associated Press, November 10, 1999). For David Greenglass, see Andrew & Mitrokhin 1999, p. 128, 131. For all see also also LANL 2007
  157. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 73, 339
  158. ↑ Congressional Record, Vol. 142, Iss. 143 (Monday, October 21, 1996), p. S12415
  159. ↑ Romerstein, Breindel 2000: 449
  160. ↑ Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994) ISBN 0316821152, pp. 192, 196, 206-207
  161. ↑ Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994) ISBN 0316821152, Appendix.
  162. ↑ Romerstein, Breindel 2000: 275
  163. ↑ Rachel Teukolsky, "Regarding Scientist X: Big Science, the War Effort, and Communist Activity at Berkeley Radiation Lab (1929-1949)," Berkeley Science Review Issue 1 (Spring 2001), p. 18
  164. ↑ CINRAD: 26 (PDF 28)
  165. ↑ M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, p. 318, fn.
  166. ↑ NKVD rezident (station chief), San Francisco. Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Fort George G. Meade, Md.: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 2001), p. 41
  167. ↑ Merkulov to Beria, 2 October 1944, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  168. ↑ Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev 2009: 234, 218, 239, 486, 503
  169. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 1999: 154
  170. ↑ Was Oppenheimer a Soviet Spy? A Roundtable Discussion with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Gregg Herken and Hayden Peake, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
  171. ↑ Sergey Leskov, "An Unreliable Witness," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August, 1994, p. 36
  172. ↑ Haynes 2008: 48
  173. ↑ Rhodes 1996: 548
  174. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 200. Cf. Herken 2003: 92
  175. ↑ Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the secret city of Los Alamos, (Simon and Schuster, 2005) ISBN 0743250079, p. 175
  176. ↑ Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project (Harper & Row, 1962), p. 63
  177. ↑ Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (University of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN 0226798453, p. 75
  178. ↑ Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the secret city of Los Alamos, (Simon and Schuster, 2005) ISBN 0743250079, p. 175
  179. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 190
  180. ↑ Transcript of Conversation between Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer, Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash, and Lt. Lyall Johnson, August 27, 1943, AEC Hearing: 845-847 (PDF 857-859)
  181. ↑ Transcript of Interview with Dr. Oppenheimer by Lt. Col. Lansdale, September 12, 1943, AEC Hearing: 871-877 (PDF 883-889)
  182. ↑ Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Translation of KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55.
  183. ↑ Romerstein, Breindel 2000: 499
  184. ↑ "The Atom: A Matter of Character," Time, June 14, 1954
  185. ↑ AEC Hearing: 167 (PDF 177)
  186. ↑ AEC Hearing: 137 (PDF 147)
  187. ↑ AEC Hearing: 149 (PDF 159)
  188. ↑ AEC Hearing: 137 (PDF 147)
  189. ↑ AEC Hearing: 150 (PDF 140)
  190. ↑ "THE ATOM: A Matter of Character," Time, June 14, 1954
  191. ↑ Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994) ISBN 0316821152, pp. 207-208
  192. ↑ Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima (Cambridge University Press, 1981) ISBN 052128239X, p. 1
  193. ↑ Paul Vorbeck Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006) ISBN 0812973267, p. 4
  194. ↑ Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, United States Congress, Mobilization of Civilian Manpower (Hearings) (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1945), p. 3
  195. ↑ Three years later, Wallace would run for President as the candidate of the Progressive Party—a creation of the Communist Party, growing out of CPUSA General Secretary Eugene Dennis' February 12, 1946 order "to establish in time for the 1948 elections a national third party." (Arthur Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000] ISBN 0618219250, pp. 455-456) Wallace once said if he were to become President, he would appoint Soviet agent Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State; had FDR died a few months earlier, Wallace would indeed have become President. (Ethan Bronner, "Witching Hour; Rethinking McCarthyism, if Not McCarthy," The New York Times, October 18, 1998) Wallace would finally recant his support for the Soviet Union in 1952. (Henry Agard Wallace, “Where I Was Wrong.” This Week, September 2, 1952) Three years later, the Jenner subcommittee would cite the Progressive Party on its list of subversive organizations, identified as a Communist front.
  196. ↑ The following year, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Anthony Panuch, in charge of security, would accuse Marks (along with Alger Hiss and others) of being part of “an enormous espionage ring in Washington” seeking to make information about the use of “atomic energy... as an instrument of war... available to the Soviet Union” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: the American Experience [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999] ISBN 0300080794, p. 69); at his confirmation hearing to become an AEC commissioner in 1947, a witness would testify that she had attended Communist Party meetings with Marks. Senate Section, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, United States Congress, Hearings on Confirmation of Atomic Energy Commission and General Manager (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1947), p. 165
  197. ↑ Henry Agard Wallace (John Morton Blum, ed.), The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) ISBN 0395171210, p. 494
  198. ↑ Less that four months before, this very hotel was the scene of FBI surveillance recording State Department official John Stewart Service handing off "a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence" (Report of the United States Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, 1950, Vol. 2, appendix, p. 2051) to the secret Communist Philip Jaffe. Philip Jaffe, The Amerasia Case from 1945 to the Present (New York: Philip J. Jaffe, 1979), p. 1
  199. ↑ Condon, a classmate of Oppenheimer's at Göttingen, was among those (along with Alger Hiss) who would be named by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State J. Anthony Panuch, in charge of security, the following year as part of “an enormous espionage ring in Washington” seeking to make information about the use of “atomic energy... as an instrument of war... available to the Soviet Union” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: the American Experience [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999] ISBN 0300080794, pp. 68-69). Condon was such a blatant security risk that Gen. Leslie Groves—who considered Oppenheimer an acceptable risk—would kick him out of the Manhattan Project after just six weeks. M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), ISBN 978-1-4000-8105-9, pp. 325-326
  200. ↑ Shapely, a member of at least 20 Communist fronts (Louis Francis Budenz, The Techniques of Communism [New York: Ayer Publishing, 1977] ISBN 0405099428, p. 239), was the object of praise from no less an authority than CPUSA General Secretary William Z. Foster. William Z. Foster, "The Communist Party and the Professionals," The Communist, No. 17 (September 1938), pp. 805-809
  201. ↑ Henry Agard Wallace (John Morton Blum, ed.), The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) ISBN 0395171210, pp. 493-494
  202. ↑ Robert P. Patterson was then Secretary of War.
  203. ↑ Senator Harley M. Kilgore (D-WV) accused U.S. "military government officials" in occupied Germany of putting "our national security and the security of our allies... in jeopardy" for "private and selfish ends," due to "their connections with industrial and financial enterprises which had close pre-war ties with the Nazis." Howard Watson Armbruster, Treason's Peace: German Dyes & American Dupes (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947), p. 401
  204. ↑ Henry Agard Wallace (John Morton Blum, ed.), The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) ISBN 0395171210, pp. 496-497
  205. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 331-332
  206. ↑ Bird, Sherwin 2006: 331
  207. ↑ Civilian Control of Atomic Energy, 1945-1946, The Manhattan Project, An Interactive History (Department of Energy)
  208. ↑ Jessica Wang, American science in an age of anxiety: scientists, anticommunism, and the cold war (Phoenix: UNC Press Books, 1999) ISBN 0807847496, p. 15
  209. ↑ Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona Schecter, Sacred secrets: how Soviet intelligence operations changed American history (Brassey's, 2002) ISBN 1574883275, p. xix
  210. ↑ "Putin praises Cold War spies, Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey), February 22, 2012
  211. ↑ "J. Robert Oppenheimer, Atom Bomb Pioneer, Dies," The New York Times, February 19, 1967
  212. ↑ Statement by the President on Announcing the First Atomic Explosion in the U.S.S.R., September 23, 1949, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum
  213. ↑ Courtois et al. estimate Communist China's murders at 65 million (Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin [Mark Kramer, ed.; Jonathan Murphy, trans.], The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999] ISBN 9780674076082, p. 4); Jung and Halladay estimate "well over 70 million" (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story [London: Jonathan Cape, 2005] ISBN 0224071262, pp. 3, 560, 651); Rummel estimates 77 million. R.J. Rummel, "Death by Government: Stalin Beat Hitler but Mao Surpassed Both," Orthodoxy Today, December 4, 2005
  214. ↑ John W. Chambers, II, ed. in chief, The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-19-507198-0, p. 849
  215. ↑ Letter on the development of the Thermonuclear Bomb, From: Lewis L Strauss, To: Harry S Truman, President of the United States of America, Date: November 25, 1949
  216. ↑ AEC Hearings: 238 (PDF 248)
  217. ↑ AEC Hearings: 77 (PDF 87)
  218. ↑ AEC Hearings: 233 (PDF 243)
  219. ↑ AEC Hearings: 239 (PDF 249)
  220. ↑ "Edward Teller Is Dead at 95; Fierce Architect of H-Bomb," The New York Times, September 10, 2003
  221. ↑ Francie Grace, "'Father Of The H-Bomb' Dies At 95," CBS News, September 10, 2003
  222. ↑ Rhodes 1996: 401
  223. ↑ Andrew Jon Rotter, Hiroshima: the world's bomb (Oxford University Press, 2008) ISBN 0192804375, p. 256
  224. ↑ Although he made no accusations, Teller's testimony against Oppenheimer made him a pariah. The left accused him of smearing an innocent man and blamed him for ending Oppenheimer's career. The hearing transcript contradicts that conclusion, but to some, Teller’s anticommunist views alone were enough to justify bitter feelings against him. Many never forgave him.
  225. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 1999: 324
  226. ↑ AEC Hearing: 201 (PDF 215)
  227. ↑ AEC Hearing: 140 (PDF 150)
  228. ↑ AEC Hearing: 9, 139-140, 155, 183 (PDF 19, 149-150, 165, 193)
  229. ↑ AEC Hearing: 201 (PDF 215)
  230. ↑ In 1999, when Kazan received an honorary Academy Award, many Hollywood liberals present, including Warren Beatty, Helen Hunt, Meryl Streep, Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, Ian McKellen and Amy Madigan, petulantly refused to applaud.
  231. ↑ Kai Bird, quoted in Transcript: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, authors, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Book World Live, Washington Post, April 12, 2005
  232. ↑ Carrie Rossenfeld, The Red Scare, The Race for the Hydrogen Bomb, atomicarchive.com
  233. ↑ AEC Hearing: 589, 825, 877 (PDF 599, 837, 889)
  234. ↑ AEC Hearing: 122 (PDF 132)
  235. ↑ AEC Hearing: 120 (PDF 130)
  236. ↑ Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN 0691049890, p. 121
  237. ↑ AEC Hearing: 150 (PDF 160)
  238. ↑ AEC Hearing: 877 (PDF 889). Cf. Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (Random House, Inc., 2009) ISBN 1400095263, pp. 189-190; F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Basic Books, 1997) ISBN 0201328208, p. 90
  239. ↑ AEC Hearing: 211 (PDF 221)
  240. ↑ AEC Hearing: 210 (PDF 220)
  241. ↑ U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: transcript of hearing before Personnel Security Board and texts of principal documents and letters (MIT Press, 1971) ISBN 0262710021, p. 1018
  242. ↑ "THE ATOM: A Matter of Character," Time, June 14, 1954
  243. ↑ Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN 0691049890, p. 125
  244. ↑ AEC Hearing: 212 (PDF 222)
  245. ↑ Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN 0691049890, p. 125
  246. ↑ AEC Hearing: 213 (PDF 223)
  247. ↑ AEC Hearing: 166 (PDF 176)
  248. ↑ AEC Hearing: 173 (PDF 183)
  249. ↑ Barton J. Bernstein, "The Oppenheimer Loyalty-Security Case Reconsidered," Stanford Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 6 (Jul., 1990), pp. 1383-1484
  250. ↑ AEC Hearing: 837 (PDF 849)
  251. ↑ “AEC Statement,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc.), May 1954, p. 187
  252. ↑ Martin, Justin (2001). Greenspan: The Man Behind Money. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0738205249. Retrieved on 8 August 2010. 
  253. ↑ "THE ATOM: A Matter of Character," Time, June 14, 1954
  254. ↑ Alan Simpson, "The Re-Trial of the Oppenheimer Case," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc.), Vol. 10, No. 10 (December 1954), p. 387
  255. ↑ Judge Arnette R. Hubbard, "Brown, et al v. Board of Education," Illinois Commission on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
  256. ↑ Doug Linder (2003), "The Trials of Alger Hiss: A Commentary," The Alger Hiss Trials, 1949-50, Famous Trials (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law)
  257. ↑ From 1947 to 1952, Oppenheimer had served as chairman of the GAC. Smith, Weiner 1995: 328
  258. ↑ Decision and Opinions of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Washington, D.C., June 29, 1954
  259. ↑ J. Robert Oppenheimer receiving the AEC Enrico Fermi Award, photograph and description, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  260. ↑ Stephen Goode, "We Told You So: Secret Venona Intercepts," Insight on the News, Vol. 13, No. 37 (October 6-13, 1997)
  261. ↑ "The Week," National Review, July 14, 1997; "The Week," National Review, July 28, 1997
  262. ↑ Haynes, Klehr 1999: 330

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