Australia and he and Fermi had missed the deadline for filing challenges. Some of their claims overlapped the French work. “This is, I am afraid, an irreparable loss,” he told Compton. He had now started writing down his own inventions, he said, and hoped to file a number of patents in the near future. Until he had done so he wanted to be removed from the payroll of the University of Chicago to avoid legal complications. In the meantime he would toil on once again as a free volunteer: “It would not be my intention to interrupt or slow down the work which I am doing in the laboratory at present.”
Conant bumped Compton's letter up to Bush, who answered it personally and to the point with Yankee canniness. Inventions scientists made after joining the project belonged to the project, Bush told Compton; unless Szilard had disclosed his previous inventions to the University of Chicago at the time of his employment he had only a very short leg to stand on, if any at all. Genially the OSRD director outlined the proper legal procedure for secret patent filings and then kicked at the leg Szilard had left: “It is my understanding that none of this procedure has been gone through with in the case of Dr. Szilard.” Bush either did not understand or chose to misunderstand Szilard's idea of an autonomous organization of scientists to guide nuclear energy development: “I gather that Dr. Szilard is particularly anxious that the proceeds arising from his early activity in invention in this field, if such eventuate, should in some way become available for the furtherance of scientific research.” He thought that was admirable, but he also thought it had nothing to do with the government. Nor did he intend that it should.
By the time Bush's letter reached Compton the Met Lab director had gone another round with Szilard. Szilard asked for a raise based upon the value to the project of his inventions. Compton took the position that Szilard had signed over all his rights to his inventions to the government for as long as he was in the government's employ. Szilard would not sign a renewal contract under those terms. Trying to keep him aboard, Compton proposed raising his salary from $550 to $1,000 a month on the basis that the higher level was “comparable with the other original sponsors of this project, Messrs. Fermi and Wigner.” That might have been acceptable to Szilard, since it tacitly acknowledged the special worth of the three physicists' participation, including presumably their early inventions, but Compton had to clear it with Conant. Until the arrangement was cleared and a new contract signed Szilard would remain off the payroll.
Compton reported Bush's response to Szilard in late March. There matters stood until early May, when Szilard with restrained exasperation proposed to proceed with filing patent applications. He asked that Groves designate someone to act as his legal adviser. The Army general supplied a Navy captain, Robert A. Lavender, who was attached to the OSRD in Washington, and Szilard met frequently with Lavender in the spring and early summer to discuss his claims.
Somewhere along the way Groves put Szilard under surveillance. The brigadier still harbored the incredible notion that Leo Szilard might be a German agent. The surveillance was already months old in mid-June when the MED's security office suggested discontinuing it. Groves rejected the suggestion out of hand: “The investigation of Szilard should be continued despite the barrenness of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and until we know for certain that he is 100 % reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.” He apparently equated disagreement with disloyalty and scaled the ratio of the two conditions directly: anyone who caused him as much pain as Leo Szilard must be a spy. It followed that he ought to be watched.
The surveillance of an innocent but eccentric man makes gumshoe comedy. Szilard traveled to Washington on June 20, 1943, and in preparation for the visit an Army counterintelligence agent reviewed his file:
The surveillance reports indicate that Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.
Armed with these profundities a Washington agent observed the Subject arriving at the Wardman Park Hotel at 2030 hours — 8:30 p.m. — on June 20 and composed a contemporary portrait:
Age, 35 or 40 yrs; height, 5'6”; weight, 165 lbs; medium build; florid complexion; bushy brown hair combed straight back and inclined to be curly, slight limp in right leg causing droop in right shoulder and receding forehead. He was wearing brown suit, brown shoes, white shirt, red tie and no hat.
Szilard worked the next morning at the Carnegie Institution with Captain Lavender. Wigner arrived at the Wardman Park for an overnight stay (“Mr. Wigner is approximately 40 years of age, medium build, bald head, Jewish features and was conservatively dressed”) and the two Hungarians, both of them presumably with justice on their minds, went off for a tour of the Supreme Court (the cabbie “said that they did not talk in a foreign tongue and there was nothing in their conversation to attract his attention… He said they more or less gave him the impression that they were ‘on a lark’”). In the evening they sat “on a bench by the [hotel] tennis courts where both pulled off their coats, rolled up their sleeves and talked in a foreign language for some time.”
Wigner checked out early in the morning; Szilard took a cab to the Navy Building at 17th and Constitution Avenue, “entered the reception room… and told one of the ladies that he wished to see Commander Lewis Strauss about personal business. He stated that he had an appointment… He also told the lady that he was a friend of Commander Strauss' and was interested in getting into a branch of the Navy.” The Naval Research Laboratory had continued work on nuclear power for submarine propulsion independently of the Manhattan Project and that institution may have been the one Szilard had in mind. Or he may have been practicing misdirection. Strauss took him to lunch at the Metropolitan Club and apparently discouraged him from transferring; back at his hotel he wired Gertrud Weiss that he expected to arrive at the King's Crown at 8:30 p.m. and left that afternoon for New York.
Since he worked for Vannevar Bush, Lavender was hardly a disinterested consultant; when he met again with Szilard on July 14 he informed the physicist that his documents “failed to disclose an operable pile,” meaning that in his opinion Szilard could not claim a patentable invention. (Ten years after the end of the war Szilard and Fermi won a joint patent for their invention of the nuclear reactor.) Szilard realized then, if not before, that he needed private counsel and asked that an attorney who could act in his behalf be cleared.
The battle was almost decided. Szilard retreated to New York. He negotiated now not only with Lavender but with Army Lieutenant Colonel John Landsdale, Jr., Groves' chief of security. In an October 9 letter to Szilard, Groves summed up the blunt exchange over which the three men bargained: “You were assured [by Lavender and Landsdale] that as soon as you were able to convey full rights [to any inventions made prior to government employment], negotiations would be entered into with a view to acquisition by the Government of any rights you may have and your reemployment on Government contracts… I repeat this assurance.” That is, Szilard could trade his patent rights, if any, for the privilege of working to beat the Germans to the bomb.
Groves and Szilard arranged a temporary truce — the general may have imagined it was a surrender — at a meeting in Chicago on December 3. The Army agreed to pay Szilard $15,416.60 to reimburse him for the twenty months when he worked unpaid and out-of-pocket at Columbia and for lawyers' fees.
The general had attempted several times to force Szilard to sign a document promising “not to give any information of any kind relating to the project to any unauthorized person.” Szilard had consistently agreed verbally to that restriction and just as consistently refused as a matter of honor to sign. He meant to continue protesting and on January 14, 1944, he began again with a three-page letter to Vannevar Bush. He knew fifteen people, he told Bush, “who at one time or another felt so strongly about [compart-mentalization] that they intended to reach the President.” The central issue as always was freedom of scientific speech: “Decisions are often clearly recognized as mistakes at the time when they are made by those who are competent to judge, but… there is no mechanism by which their collective views would find expression or become a matter of record.”
In this letter for the first time Szilard emphasized a purpose to his urgency beyond beating the Germans to the bomb: that the bomb might be used and become grimly known.
If peace is organized before it has penetrated the public's mind that the potentialities of atomic bombs are a
