From FBI headquarters, Groves hurried over to the AEC, where he told LaPlante of his concern “that the agent who interviewed him was not familiar enough with the incident or the subject matter and therefore could not properly evaluate historical data that he (Groves) would give to him.”54
Groves agreed to be interviewed a second time by the FBI, on December 21, at his home in Darien, Connecticut. Recent conversations with Consodine, as well as a letter from Lansdale and his own review of Manhattan Project documents, had “‘clarified’ his recollection,” Groves told the bureau’s agent, Edward Burke.55 Groves admitted that when he had ordered Oppenheimer in 1943 to give up the names of those contacted by Chevalier he had promised “to put it bluntly that it would not get to the FBI.”
Groves told Burke that he had prepared a statement to give to the press in the event that the truth became public. The agent noted that the general still felt some residual loyalty to his onetime friend: “Groves stated that he desired it made a matter of record that even at this time he is not breaching his promise to Oppenheimer and if friends of Oppenheimer should someday see this record it will appear that he only discussed the matter because the facts are already known.”
The following day, Hoover sent Brownell and Strauss a detailed summary of the information that had been given the FBI thus far by Lansdale, Consodine, and Groves. Hoover hardly needed to point out that the testimony of all three implicated not only Oppenheimer but Groves in more than one felony offense—withholding vital information about an espionage contact during wartime and lying to a federal official.*56
The last person to be interviewed in this round of interrogations was Frank Oppenheimer. Because of snowstorms blocking the mountain passes, the Denver FBI agent assigned to the task was not able to reach the ranch at Blanco Basin until December 29. Once there, he got right to the point. “Were you ever approached by Haakon Chevalier or anyone else for information on the Manhattan Project?” the agent asked Oppie’s brother. Frank’s reply was an unequivocal “No.” Frank went on to volunteer that he and his brother had never discussed being approached by Chevalier “or anyone else concerning MED projects.” However, he declined the agent’s request to sign a statement to that effect—lest “‘a false witness’ subsequently appear to contradict it.”57
* * *
As Strauss realized, this latest twist on the Chevalier incident cast the Oppenheimer investigation into a new and altogether different light. Lacking any firm evidence that Oppie had been a member of the Communist Party, Strauss believed that the decade-old approach by Chevalier would be key to any legal case that might be made against Oppenheimer. When he first learned of Borden’s letter, Strauss had gone to Bates to ask how long Oppenheimer had waited before reporting the Chevalier incident to Groves.58
As recently as December 8, when he returned with Eisenhower from a summit meeting in Bermuda, Strauss had seemed to be looking for an alternative to a loyalty hearing. LaPlante had suggested resolving the imbroglio by unilaterally canceling Oppenheimer’s consultancy contract—a simple solution favored, as well, by Murray and Cutler.59 Others had proposed empowering a special presidential commission to decide Oppie’s fate.60 At a tense AEC meeting on Thursday, December 10, only one commissioner—Joseph Campbell, a New York accounting executive whom Strauss had appointed to the post the previous summer—supported the idea of convening a Personnel Security Board investigation.61
Yet that same day, following his telephone conversation with Groves, Strauss took the first step toward a loyalty hearing by instructing William Mitchell, the AEC’s general counsel, to draw up a statement of charges against Oppenheimer over the weekend.62
By Monday, Harold Green, a young attorney in Mitchell’s office, had prepared a draft of the document, based upon Oppenheimer’s AEC security file and Borden’s letter.63 At the last minute, Green decided on his own to add seven more charges to the original thirty-one, all having to do with Borden’s accusations that Oppie had deliberately sabotaged the H-bomb effort. Green based the new charges upon the FBI’s 1952 interviews with Teller and Pitzer.64
Strauss had promised Hoover that the latter could personally vet the letter of charges before it was shown to Oppenheimer, in order to ensure that the bureau’s informants and wiretaps were not compromised.65 Hoover proposed only minor changes—among them, that Frank’s name be added to the charge dealing with the Chevalier incident.66
Elsewhere in the government, doubts about the wisdom of a hearing lingered. Strauss told Bates on December 14 that Brownell was complaining “‘our ducks are not in a row’ regarding Oppenheimer.”67
For those preparing the case against the physicist, however, the long, lingering memory of setbacks and slights suffered at Oppie’s hand finally overcame hesitation. To Strauss, putting his nemesis on trial—whatever the outcome—was likely to forever tarnish Oppenheimer’s reputation in Washington. With the nation’s political climate conditioned by war overseas and an undiminished hunt for “atom spies” at home, there was likely to be little forgiveness for those shown to be careless with secrets about the bomb. Not incidentally, an investigation of Oppenheimer also offered the prospect of sweet revenge for the humiliation that Strauss had suffered over the isotopes fiasco.
For Hoover, a PSB hearing—provided it did not divulge the FBI’s secrets—promised the outcome that the attorney general, HUAC, and the Joint Committee had thus far been unwilling, or unable, to deliver, without implicating the bureau in the process.
Moreover, Groves’s self-incriminating telephone call four days earlier had evidently steeled Strauss’s resolve—as did a visit on December 17 to the AEC by Hoover’s emissary, Belmont, who relayed the story of Groves’s tortured admission concerning the Chevalier incident. Strauss told Belmont that Groves had likewise given him
