* * *
Just five days before Groves picked Oppenheimer, the FBI had obtained new and disturbing evidence of the physicist’s “leftwandering.”
On October 10, 1942, the FBI bug in Steve Nelson’s office picked up a conversation between Nelson, Lloyd Lehmann—a Bay Area labor organizer affiliated with the Young Communist League—and another, unidentified member of the YCL.53 According to bureau notes of the conversation:
Lloyd told Steve about an important weapon that was being developed and indicated that he was on the research of it. Steve asked if “he” suspects you to be a YCLer. Steve then talked about a man, saying he was too jittery: he used to be active, but was inactive; was considered a “Red” and mentioned that the reason the Government lets him remain was because he was good in the scientific field. Steve indicated this man had worked in the Teachers’ Committee and the Spanish Committee; and could not cover up his past.
The men in Nelson’s office then went on to discuss someone else they knew in the project at Berkeley:
Lloyd said [this individual] was in favor of coming out in the open more; said he had a three month deferment on the basis of war work; was 21; and had graduated. The unknown man then said Rossi was trained to do theoretical physics and should stay with that. Nelson said the project was extremely important and the third party said he would have to be an undercover Party member as if he quit his work they did not know what political work he could do as he might be drafted.
Further discussion revealed that “Rossi” was considering quitting the Berkeley project in order to organize workers at the Richmond shipyards. Nelson urged his visitors to persuade Rossi to remain at his current job as an undercover member of the party, since it was important “to have knowledge of such discoveries and research developments.”54
Portions of the intercepted conversation were indistinct or garbled. The agents listening in did not recognize “Rossi” and knew nothing of the project at the Rad Lab. At the time, no one in the FBI had yet been made privy to that secret. In the army, Lansdale was still assembling his nameless box-within-a-box.
* * *
On October 19, Oppenheimer was back in Washington to see Groves. That morning, the general took the physicist along for a meeting with Bush at OSRD headquarters. When the Military Policy Committee had expressed objections to Oppie, Groves challenged its members to come up with a better candidate. He had yet to hear back from the committee. Getting Bush to approve Oppenheimer was likely the last hurdle to having the physicist appointed director. If Bush raised any objection, there is no record of it.
Oppenheimer, indeed, had already begun some discreet recruiting on his own—asking Bethe and Teller for the names of other scientists who might be brought into the fold. Immediately after the meeting with Bush, Oppie broke the news in a letter to Bethe:
It is about time that I wrote to you and explained some of my wires and actions. I came east this time to get our future straight. It is turning out to be a very big order and I am not at liberty to tell you all that is going on. We are going to have a laboratory for the military applications, probably in a remote spot and ready for use, I hope, within the next few months.55
On a walk together along the shores of Lake Michigan, Oppenheimer sought Teller’s advice about how best to organize the new lab. Later, sharing a berth on a train to Washington, Oppie was unusually solicitous of Edward—even rebandaging an infected wound on the latter’s finger.
But Teller professed to find an ominous undertone in an innocuous remark that Oppenheimer uttered during the trip. Complaining, good-naturedly, about the restrictions that Groves was already imposing upon the project in the name of secrecy, Oppie predicted that the time would come “when we will have to do things differently and resist the military.”
Teller, taken aback, voiced his objections. Privately, he wondered whether Oppie’s comment did not foreshadow some future, unspecified act of civil disobedience, or worse. Oppenheimer, he noted, abruptly changed the subject. But the distance between them, Teller felt, had begun to grow.56
Three weeks after receiving Bush’s wary benediction, Oppenheimer gave the army a list of personnel to be recruited for the new laboratory. The list contained forty-four names—McMillan, Segrè, Serber, Teller, and Bethe were prominent among them. Fermi would remain behind in Chicago, at least initially, to continue work on the atomic pile. Alvarez, originally suggested by Bethe, was stricken from the list by Oppenheimer and Teller. Luie was already busy with the radar project at MIT in any case, and his oversized ego may also have been a factor against him.57
On November 16, Oppenheimer and McMillan met up with John Dudley, an army colonel from the corps’s Manhattan District, at the Hilton hotel in Albuquerque. From there the trio proceeded through a light snowstorm in an unmarked army sedan to the remote spot that Dudley had picked for the lab.58
The site, Jemez Springs, was a deep and heavily wooded canyon an hour’s drive northwest of Santa Fe. Oppenheimer and McMillan found the location depressing—too dark, too confining. Groves, joining the group, worried about flash floods and the difficulty of building housing for the 265 people he told Dudley he thought the lab would employ.59 Another headache was the close proximity of an Indian reservation, which Groves feared might require him to divulge the greatest secret of the war to Harold Ickes, FDR’s garrulous secretary of interior.60
At Oppenheimer’s suggestion, the group drove out of the canyon and up
