poisoned atmosphere of the high Cold War years.
Two shocking quantitative measures of the extent of Soviet wartime atomic espionage emerge in contemporary and retrospective accounts. In a letter to Lavrenti Beria dated September 29, 1944, Igor Kurchatov refers to “new, very extensive [espionage] materials… concerning the uranium problem” he has been reviewing — that is, materials that had been acquired after the large collection he had already reviewed — and notes parenthetically that these materials constitute “(about 3,000 pages of text).” And the Soviet physicist Yakov Petrovich Terletsky reports that when he joined the special department of the NKVD set up after the end of the war to deal with atomic espionage, he found “about 10,000 pages of… reports in the safes… for the most part American classified reports (there were also British materials). They outlined the content of the basic experiments on determining the parameters of nuclear reactions, reactors, and the description of various types of uranium reactors, the description of gaseous-diffusion installations, journal entries on the testing of the atomic bomb and so on.”
One early focus of Soviet espionage was the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1941, under the direction of the Nobel laureate American physicist Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, physicists at the Radiation Laboratory began developing electromagnetic isotope separation, a technology eventually enlarged to industrial scale at Oak Ridge that processed most of the U235 used in the Little Boy bomb. Robert Oppenheimer guided early work on atomic- and hydrogen-bomb theory from offices at Berkeley before he moved to Los Alamos in 1943 to direct actual bomb design. Oppenheimer's wife Kitty had been a member of the Communist Party during the 1930s; his brother Frank and Frank's wife Jackie were members from 1937 to 1941. Oppenheimer himself was “a fellow traveler,” as he put it, until 1942, who contributed to Communist causes.
Kitty Oppenheimer's first husband, Joe Dallet, had been a Communist Party official who had volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, Kitty had gone to Spain to meet Dallet. One of her husband's comrades- inarms, Steve Nelson, a naturalized American born in Croatia who was a lieutenant colonel in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, met her instead and broke the news that her husband had been killed during the siege of Madrid. Nelson had joined the American Communist Party in the late 1920s. He had trained at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in the early 1930s and was known there to be affiliated with the OGPU, the predecessor to the NKVD. He had worked for the Communist International in Shanghai during the same period when Sonia was active there for the GRU; Arthur Ewert, an agent high in the ranks of the Communist Party of Germany, was a significant connection between them. After the Spanish war, when he may have attended the Barcelona Intelligence School with Morris Cohen, Nelson turned up in Berkeley, a friend of Kitty Oppenheimer “assigned,” according to a congressional committee investigation, “as organizer for the [Communist] Party in the Bay area… He was also given the underground assignment to gather information regarding the development of the atomic bomb.”
Nelson made contact with several of the younger physicists working at Berkeley. Manhattan Project security officers observed him acquiring and passing information on electromagnetic isotope separation to the Soviets:
Late one night in March 1943, a scientist at the University of California, who identified himself as “Joe,” went to the home of Steve Nelson… Nelson was not present but arrived at about 1:30 on the morning of the following day. Upon his arrival at his home, Nelson greeted Joe and the latter told him that he had some information that he thought Nelson could use. Joe then furnished highly confidential information regarding the experiments conducted at the [Radiation Laboratory] of the University of California at Berkeley…
Several days after Nelson had been contacted by Joe, Nelson contacted the Soviet consulate in San Francisco and arranged to meet Peter Ivanov, the Soviet vice consul, at some place where they could not be observed. Ivanov suggested that he and Nelson meet at the “usual place.”
… The meeting [took] place in the middle of an open park on the St. Francis Hospital grounds in San Francisco. At this meeting, Nelson transferred an envelope or package to Ivanov. A few days after this meeting… the third secretary of the Russian Embassy in Washington, a man by the name of Zubilin… met Nelson in Nelson's home and at this meeting paid Nelson 10 bills of unknown denomination…
Nelson apparently explored the Oppenheimers’ susceptibility to espionage. “Nelson later reported [to his Soviet contacts] that neither the physicist nor his wife were sympathetic to communism,” the congressional committee found. If Nelson approached the Oppenheimers, neither of them ever reported the contact.
An approach to Oppenheimer through a different intermediary also failed, but Oppenheimer delayed reporting it, identified the intermediary only reluctantly and later changed his story, vacillations which eventually caused him great trouble. The intermediary was one of his Berkeley friends, a professor of French named Haakon Chevalier; Chevalier was acting on behalf of an Englishman named George Eltenton who was, Oppenheimer would testify, “a chemical engineer… [who] had spent some time in the Soviet Union” and worked for Shell Development.
In his first version of the events, which he offered in August 1943 to Colonel Boris L. Pash, a Manhattan Project security officer, Oppenheimer connected the Eltenton/Chevalier approach to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco:
A man whose name I never heard, who was attached to the Soviet consul, has indicated indirectly through intermediate people concerned with the project that he was in a position to transmit without any danger of a leak or a scandal or anything of that kind information which they might supply.
Oppenheimer identified Eltenton; “if you wanted to watch him,” he told Pash, “it might be the appropriate thing to do.” The physicist added that he did not know “the name of the man attached to the consulate. I think I may have been told and I may not have been told… He is and he may not be here now — these incidents occurred in the order of about five, six or seven months ago.” Five to seven months before August 1943 would place the incidents around the time Igor Kurchatov, in Moscow, was reviewing isotope-separation technology and assigning research. Kurchatov asked the distinguished Soviet physicist Lev Artsimovich to explore electromagnetic isotope separation; it would have been logical to give Artsimovich any information available on the subject, and according to a Russian scientist, Artsimovich “was introduced to American [espionage] materials on electromagnetic isotope separation.”
With the phrase “these incidents,” Oppenheimer made evident in 1943 what he would later characterize as “a pure fabrication,” “a piece of idiocy”: that a military attache at the Soviet Consulate, through intermediaries, had approached several people connected with the Manhattan Project who had subsequently moved to Los Alamos, and those people had in turn come to Oppenheimer for advice. “I might say the approaches were always made through other people who were troubled by them,” Oppenheimer explained, “and [who] sometimes came and discussed them with me and that the approaches were quite indirect.” Oppenheimer added: “I know of two or three cases, and I think two of the men are with me at Los Alamos. They are men who are closely associated with me… They told me they were contacted for that purpose [i.e., for information].”
The rationale Oppenheimer's troubled colleagues reported to him, as the physicist described it to Pash, was the standard rationale that Soviet intelligence offered scientists:
Let me give you the background. The background was, well, you know how difficult it is with relations between these two allies and there are a lot of people that don't feel very friendly towards Russia. So the information, a lot of our secret information, our radar and so on, doesn't get to them, and they are battling for their lives, and they would like to have an idea of what is going on, and this is just to make up in other words for the defects of our official communication. That is the form in which it was presented. Of course, the actual fact is that since it is not a communication that ought to be taking place, it is treasonable.
Oppenheimer himself believed that the world would be safer in the long run if the issues raised by the development of the atomic bomb could be discussed among the Allies, including the Soviet Union, before the end of the war — but he did not believe espionage was the proper channel for such a discussion:
To put it quite frankly, I would feel friendly to the idea of the Commander in Chief… informing the Russians who [sic: that we?] are working on this problem. At least I can see there might be some arguments for doing that but I don't like the idea of having it moved out the back door.
