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At the FBI’s San Francisco field office late in 1942, Robert King, the bureau’s “one-man commie squad,” was puzzled by Oppenheimer’s suddenly frenetic travel schedule. Since the conversation intercepted in Steve Nelson’s office that October, Oppie had become a subject of renewed interest to the bureau. Forbidden by Roosevelt’s attorney general from tapping Oppenheimer’s telephone, King and Special Agent-in-Charge Pieper were reduced to vicariously following the physicist around the country through the telephone company’s log of his collect calls home to Kitty.78 The only information gleaned thus far was that Oppenheimer seemed conscientious about keeping in touch.
Early in 1943, Pieper sent two of his agents across the Bay to talk with Harold Fidler, the army’s area engineer in Berkeley. Fidler confirmed that there was indeed a secret military project going on at the Radiation Laboratory, and that Oppenheimer was involved, but he was unwilling or unable to say more.79 (Conspicuous in their raincoats and fedoras, the two agents sat on the porch of the Faculty Club until Fidler pointed out Oppenheimer walking by.)
Frustrated at the army’s lack of cooperation, King next called Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, the head of counterintelligence at the Presidio. Pash, as it turns out, was also Lansdale’s handpicked man on the West Coast.
An intense and pugnacious bantamweight, Pash for the past two years had headed G-2, military intelligence, for the Western Defense Command and was the Fourth Army’s foremost Soviet expert. Although born in San Francisco, he had fought the Bolsheviks in Russia’s civil war; his father was the senior bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in America. When the White armies were defeated, Boris returned to the United States with little job experience beyond coaching volleyball for a church youth camp in Sebastopol. For sixteen years, Pash headed the athletic department at Hollywood High School.80
Called to active duty following Pearl Harbor, Pash was assigned to running a network of army undercover agents sent into Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to intercept saboteurs landed by Japanese submarines.81 Although he encountered neither submarines nor saboteurs, Pash realized he had found his calling. Embracing the role of spycatcher, he assembled a personal collection of wigs, voice-altering devices, and disguises that he always carried with him on his travels.82
Pash abruptly told King that he had “no cognizance” of any military project across the Bay.83 Disgusted, King asked the agent he had assigned to shadow Oppenheimer to draft a report on the physicist. Pieper sent the eighteen-page report to Hoover on February 10, 1943, and also had a copy hand-delivered to Pash at the Presidio.
The FBI director promptly forwarded Oppenheimer’s file and an accompanying report on FAECT to G-2 headquarters in Washington.84 Hoover warned the army that a major effort was under way by the radical union to recruit “‘progressive’ applicants” to spy upon an unknown secret project at the Rad Lab.85
Hoover’s report arrived just as the army was setting up its own security and counterintelligence apparatus for the Manhattan Project. Early in February, Major General George Strong, the head of G-2, had appointed Captain Horace Calvert to run the project’s Intelligence Section.86 Calvert in turn picked an ex-FBI agent, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, to be G-2’s man in the Bay Area.
Johnson moved into an office on the first floor of Berkeley’s New Classroom Building. To disguise its connection with the army’s war effort, a campus policeman was stationed at the door. The room used by Oppie’s grad students who were working on the project was just down the hall. Calvert had instructed Johnson to work closely with Pash and his shadow organization across the Bay. Johnson bought a supply of 3-by-5-inch cards from a stationery store on Telegraph Avenue and began keeping a file on Rad Lab employees who the army believed to be of questionable loyalty.
Ironically, the sudden interest in Oppenheimer had set off a turf war between the army and the bureau. General Strong’s response to Hoover’s warning had been to ask the FBI to cease its surveillance of the physicist—who, as Strong pointed out, was now the army’s, not the bureau’s, responsibility.87 Believing that the bug in Steve Nelson’s office had shown Oppenheimer complicit in espionage, however, the FBI director was reluctant to abandon his quarry. Thus, while Hoover dutifully instructed Pieper to close the file on Oppenheimer, he simultaneously approved the agent’s plan for a new offensive aimed at uncovering Soviet spies in Berkeley. Titled “Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory,” the FBI’s latest file would become known at the bureau by its shorthand moniker, “CINRAD.”88
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A scant two weeks later, on March 29, 1943, the bureau’s bug in Steve Nelson’s home yielded the first hard evidence of espionage against the Manhattan Project. William Branigan was the FBI agent whom King had assigned to the wiretap.
Late that evening, Branigan monitored a conversation between Nelson’s wife, Margaret, and a man who identified himself only as “Joe.”89 Told that Steve would not return from a union meeting until early morning, Joe agreed to come to the house to wait, since he said he had urgent and important information to convey.
When Nelson finally arrived, it was clear from his conversation with Joe that this was not their first encounter. The two had met a few days earlier with Bernadette Doyle, Nelson’s assistant at Communist Party headquarters.90 Steve apologized for not being able to speak more freely with Joe on that occasion, but “he would not discuss such matters even with the most trusted of Comrades.”
Alone at the FBI listening post, Branigan alerted King, who dispatched Branigan’s partner, Mike Cassidy, to Nelson’s home in hopes of taking a photograph of Joe. Branigan frantically scribbled notes while he listened to the dialogue that took place in Nelson’s living room: “Steve said that he was looking
