When foreigners’ work permits were revoked in spring 1938—more fallout from Stalin’s terror—the Eltentons showed little enthusiasm for returning to Manchester. Instead, they elected to move to California.
In 1946, George Eltenton would tell the FBI that he and his wife first met Kheifets and Ivanov on Berkeley’s College Avenue one evening in November 1941, following a Cal football game, when they overheard the two diplomats speaking Russian. George said that he and Dolly ran into the two men again a few weeks later, at a cocktail party held in the home of a Berkeley professor, and shortly thereafter, during a benefit for Russian war relief held at the Chevaliers’ house.58
The Eltentons invited Kheifets and Ivanov to their holiday party in 1941, as well as to subsequent social gatherings during the following year.59 It was on one such occasion, in late spring 1942, that Kheifets asked Eltenton for the names of prominent American scientists who might be favorably disposed toward the USSR, and thus candidates for honorary membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The NKVD had traditionally used such awards and prizes as a first step in the recruitment of prospective agents. (A week or two earlier, on May 8, 1942, Ernest Lawrence and Berkeley chemist Gilbert Lewis had been elected to honorary membership in the Soviet Academy. The following year, the two men and Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, would be guests of honor at the Soviet embassy in Washington; Russian chargé d’affaires Andrei Gromyko personally presented the men with the little red-bound book that certified membership in the academy.)60
Eltenton told the FBI that he had raised Kheifets’s question with Robert Oppenheimer. Oppie’s suggested candidates included Vannevar Bush and the Compton brothers. Eltenton—who said he subsequently passed this information along to Kheifets—told the FBI that his contact with Mr. Brown had ended there.
Late in 1942, however, when the tide of battle had begun to turn at Stalingrad, it was Ivanov rather than Kheifets who came to the Eltentons’ home. After dinner, Ivanov confided that he knew the work going on at the Radiation Laboratory was of military value and that it was connected with atomic energy. “Do you know any of the guys or any others connected with it?” Ivanov asked Eltenton.61
Ivanov’s particular interest was with how well Eltenton knew Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and a third scientist at Berkeley. (Eltenton subsequently said that he thought the individual was Alvarez, but he could not be sure.) Eltenton informed Ivanov that Lawrence was a most unlikely candidate for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Regarding Oppenheimer, Eltenton proposed that a mutual friend—Chevalier—act as an intermediary and approach the physicist. But Eltenton said that Chevalier had come back almost immediately afterward with the news “that there was no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data and Dr. Oppenheimer did not approve.”62
How, Eltenton had asked Ivanov, would the information be given to the Russians? The Soviet diplomat had assured him, Eltenton subsequently told bureau agents, that the transfer would be “by very safe methods” and that the information could even be back in the informant’s hands the same evening. Eltenton distinctly remembered Ivanov’s description of the process by which secrets would be passed: it “went ‘click, click, click.’”63
* * *
A friend of both Eltenton’s and Kheifets’s at this time was a thirty-three-year-old San Francisco socialite, Louise Bransten. Born Louise Rosenberg, the granddaughter of Gold Rush pioneers, she had inherited a fortune from her parents’ dried fruit importing business.64 Dubbed the “apricot heiress” by the local press, Bransten was also well-known in the city as an advocate of progressive causes. In 1929, Louise had married Richard Bransten, the scion of another prominent San Francisco family who went on to embrace communism.65 During 1933, the two had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union.
Although Louise later divorced Bransten, she kept her former husband’s name, and the couple remained on good terms. When San Francisco dockworkers were blocked from organizing a protest meeting during the waterfront strike, the two used their own money to hire the city’s Scottish Rite Hall. Earlier, Louise and Richard had taken a course—“The Economics of Capitalism”—from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, then a young professor at St. Mary’s College in San Francisco.66
By 1941, Louise was assistant to the director of San Francisco’s American-Russian Institute.67 Dolly Eltenton and Thomas Addis served on the institute’s board.68 Like Haakon Chevalier, Bransten volunteered her home for parties benefiting political and humanitarian causes like the Spanish Loyalists and Russian war relief.69
Bransten’s association with Kheifets had also made her an early target of the FBI’s COMRAP investigation.70 Bureau agents planted two bugs in her elegant home at 2626 Green Street, just around the corner from the Soviet consulate. The microphones—installed in an archway outside the library and in a light fixture in her bedroom—recorded dinnertime conversations and Bransten’s romantic assignations with several individuals, including Kheifets, but yielded little of intelligence value.71
It was probably at Bransten’s house that Kheifets first met Robert Oppenheimer, possibly at the benefit for veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that Oppie attended the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor.*72 Like Eltenton and Bransten, Chevalier was another social contact whom the Russian diplomat had been careful to cultivate.73 Frustrated about his stalemated career and stuck in an unhappy marriage, Chevalier had persuaded his department chairman to grant him a sabbatical for the coming academic year. Haakon decided to go to New York, where he hoped to get a literary job; he already had a contract with Dial Press to translate a novel by Salvador Dali.74 But Chevalier also entertained notions of a more glamorous and exciting role. “I have filed application for some kind of work in one of the War services,” he wrote to Jacques at Yale. “I am trying to wangle something through people who might remember me, but this is all very uncertain.”75 Bransten, also New York bound, was one of those helping Chevalier make connections on the East Coast.
In early April 1943, a few weeks after he had bid farewell to Oppie,
