The gathering took place at the new home on Eagle Hill that Robert and Kitty had bought that August.92 The modern, Spanish-style house was close by Kenilworth Court and had a sweeping vista of Berkeley and the Bay. The meeting had just begun, Kamen remembered, when it “broke up in some disarray” after Oppenheimer admitted, in response to Kamen’s question, that he had failed to notify Lawrence of his plans.93
Predictably, Lawrence was enraged to learn of the incident the following day. Before Kamen, Ernest unburdened himself that “Oppie had given him much trouble in the past with his fuzzy-minded efforts to do good.”94 As a result, Lawrence said, he was having difficulties getting Oppenheimer a security clearance.
Lawrence took Oppie aside a few days later to warn him against any further political activity. Ernest was surprised when his friend turned angry and defiant.95 Oppenheimer defended his actions on the grounds that “underdogs” should be helped by the more fortunate. Lawrence replied with equal heat that the best way to help humanity was by subordinating all political activities, unionizing included, to defeating the Nazis, and the best way to achieve that goal was by attending to the scientific work of the lab. Since he had brought Oppenheimer into the S-1 Project in the first place, Lawrence none-too-subtly reminded him, he was the one who bore the responsibility for getting him access to its secrets. Ernest insisted that Oppie’s “leftwandering” must stop.96
The confrontation ended on a bitter note. In the coming weeks, its memory rankled with both men.
* * *
Robert Oppenheimer officially came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in late March 1941, the date that the FBI opened its file on him. Oppie entered the bureau’s penumbra of suspicion by accident, when he attended a special meeting of his discussion group at Chevalier’s home the previous December.97 Agents had written down the license plate number of Oppie’s Chrysler parked on the street outside. Ironically, it was not Oppenheimer but others at the meeting—specifically, Issac Folkoff and William Schneiderman—who were the real target of the bureau’s surveillance.98
Schneiderman, a longtime Communist, was the party’s secretary in California.99 “Pops” Folkoff was a sixty-year-old Latvian émigré who owned a clothing repair shop, the Model Embroidery and Pleating Company, in downtown San Francisco.100 Although Folkoff had been in the United States since 1904, he still spoke with a thick guttural accent; a burn he received from a steam press in his youth had left him with a maimed right hand. Folkoff was best known to the FBI as a dogmatic Marxist and the party’s local “bag man,” who collected monthly dues in the Bay Area.
For almost a year, the bureau had been surreptitiously listening to the telephone calls of both Folkoff and Schneiderman, from wiretaps secretly installed in their homes and at Communist Party headquarters on Market Street. The wiretaps were part of a clandestine FBI program targeted against the Soviet Union’s so-called Comintern Apparatus, and hence known by the shorthand label “COMRAP.”101
For round-the-clock surveillance, a hidden third wire would be added to the telephone mouthpiece, converting it into an open microphone.102 Conversations picked up either by wiretap or by such “bugs” were recorded on large cellulose-covered metal platters—known as Presto disks—at the bureau’s listening post in Oakland. Because the early taps were not only secret but of questionable legality, information gained from them was puckishly identified in FBI reports as coming from “Informant T-1” or “an informant of known reliability who is not available to testify.”103
The man in charge of the COMRAP program in San Francisco was Robert King, a young lawyer who had joined the bureau early in 1940, shortly after receiving a law degree from Georgetown University. Following months of fruitlessly driving up and down the West Coast, looking for saboteurs and smugglers, King was reassigned in midyear to the task of identifying political subversives. King boasted that he was the office’s “one-man commie squad.”104
In the case of the December 1940 meeting at Chevalier’s house, King’s interest had been piqued by Folkoff’s comment, intercepted by the bureau’s bug, that the gathering was to be of “the big boys.”105 Through its technical surveillance—tesur in FBI parlance—the bureau learned of subsequent meetings and conversations that took place between Oppenheimer, Addis, and Folkoff.106
On Sunday, October 5, 1941, the FBI bug picked up plans for a meeting later that day between Oppenheimer and Steve Nelson, the Bay Area’s top Communist. The rendezvous had been arranged by Folkoff, whom Oppenheimer had promised a donation of $100 for striking California farmworkers. However, at the last minute Folkoff had begged off and telephoned Oppenheimer, asking that he meet with Nelson instead. Nine days later, shortly before leaving for the Schenectady meeting, Oppie had phoned Folkoff and asked that Steve contact him.107
A mysterious figure to the FBI, Nelson had only recently become a focus of the bureau’s attention in San Francisco. Born Stefan Mesarosh in Croatia in 1903, “Nelson” had entered the United States with fraudulent immigration papers at the age of seventeen and became a naturalized American citizen five years later.108 He joined the Communist Party in 1923, at Pittsburgh. During the early 1930s, Nelson was trained in espionage techniques at Moscow’s Lenin Institute and, in 1933, served as an active agent for the Soviet Comintern in Europe and China. Later volunteering for Spain, Nelson became a political officer, or commissar, in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.109 Returning to the United States, he traveled around the country raising money and recruits for the Loyalist cause.
More than politics had brought Oppenheimer and Nelson together; the two also shared a personal bond. Nelson had been a friend of Kitty’s late husband in Spain and was the one to tell her of Joe Dallet’s death. After Dallet was killed, Kitty had
