Several current and prospective agents were also mentioned by their code names during the conversation. Nelson complained bitterly about the incompetence of two of the couriers who were responsible for liaison between the West Coast espionage apparatus and Browder. Bill Schneiderman, state secretary of the party, was said to be reluctant to involve Communists in such “special work.” But Nelson told Zubilin that he nonetheless had a new recruit, one that “you can add to your company—her name is Bernstein.”100
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The conversations intercepted by the FBI put a prompt end to the battle between the army and the bureau. On April 5, 1943, G-2’s Strong acknowledged to Hoover that the military was engaged in a secret “experimental program.”101 The following morning, Hoover’s personal assistant, D. Milton “Mickey” Ladd, and the FBI’s foremost Soviet expert, Lish Whitson, met with Lansdale and Groves in the general’s office at the New War Department Building. Without disclosing its goal—he spoke only of producing an unidentified “material”—Groves outlined the scope, cost, and significance of the Manhattan Project, adding, in notes taken by Ladd: “General Groves advised that which ever country got the material first would win the war and could dictate the terms of the peace. He further said that if Switzerland could make only so much of the material as would fill a small room, Switzerland could rule the world.”102
Groves’s speech was the first that Hoover would hear of the Manhattan Project—and the fact that it was already the target of Soviet spies. Following the meeting, the FBI director sent a bulletin to the bureau’s field offices, instructing them to report any instances of Communists soliciting information “re scientific experiments.”103 On May 7, Hoover sent FDR aide Harry Hopkins a memo outlining the Nelson-Zubilin conversation. (“I thought the president and you would be interested…”)104
The FBI intercepts also galvanized the army into action. The day before his meeting with the bureau, Lansdale had submitted detailed plans for a major counterintelligence effort in the Bay Area; Strong now approved it immediately.105
With the cooperation of the Rad Lab’s personnel director, Lyall Johnson placed army undercover agents on the research staff. One, an engineer, joined the local chapter of FAECT. Another secret informant, a secretary at the lab, reported to the army on particular people and events up on the hill.
Across the Bay in San Francisco, Pash set up a dummy business office—the “Universal Subscription Company”—in a building just off Market as a staging area for his undercover agents. An army lieutenant, James Murray, headed the plainclothes operation under the nom de guerre of Paul Sheridan.106
Two enlisted men, former telephone repairmen, installed wiretaps and bugs for the army in cooperation with the local telephone company. Under the arrangement agreed to between Hoover and Strong, the army focused upon university employees under contract to the Manhattan Project, while the bureau concentrated upon known or suspected Communists with connections to the Rad Lab.107
As its surveillance effort grew, the army rented a two-story house on Forest Avenue, a few blocks south of the Berkeley campus, to serve as a listening post. An undercover agent and his family lived downstairs; upstairs, in a back room, officers assigned to the Military Intelligence Division’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) recorded the telephone calls of selected Rad Lab employees.108 (On an early inspection visit, Groves nearly compromised the operation by arriving at the house in full uniform. Belatedly realizing that the neighbors might wonder what an army general was doing there, he wrapped himself in the diminutive Pash’s raincoat and dashed back to his car.)109
Lansdale ordered Pash to launch his own investigations at Berkeley—not realizing that the eager counterspy already had one under way.
Pash did not have to be persuaded that Oppenheimer was a security threat. Under the pretext of protecting Oppenheimer against Axis assassins, he had earlier assigned the physicist a pair of bodyguards, who reported regularly on Oppie’s activities. (Oppenheimer, however, foiled the eavesdroppers by keeping the back windows of the car open and by speaking in whispers.)110 A few weeks before, Pash had ordered a young MID lieutenant assigned to the Presidio, Peer de Silva, to begin a personal investigation of Oppenheimer. De Silva, just two years out of West Point, quickly came to share Pash’s suspicion that Oppie was a Soviet agent.111
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Despite the army’s efforts, it would be another two months before “Joe” was identified.112 The break in the case came about purely by chance. Early in June, a commercial photographer stationed near Sather Gate snapped a picture of Rossi Lomanitz arm-in-arm with David Bohm, Max Friedman, and Joe Weinberg. After the group left, an army undercover agent standing nearby purchased the negative.113
Several days later, CIC agents followed Lomanitz, Friedman, and Weinberg home to Berkeley from San Francisco, where the trio and a woman friend had attended a celebration in honor of Soviet writer Maxim Gorki. The address on Blake Street was passed along to Johnson, whose check of personnel records at the lab showed an exact match between Weinberg’s background and that of “Joe.”114 Army investigators also located a handwritten note that Weinberg had written to Oppenheimer on April 12—two weeks after Joe’s meeting with Nelson, and only two days before Weinberg filled out the required security questionnaire at the Rad Lab—indicating that he was already involved in the bomb project and eager to do more.115
Oppie had put Weinberg to work on magnetic field calculations—making a science out of what, for Lawrence, had been the art of focusing the cyclotron beam with iron shims.116 Despite Oppenheimer’s earlier reservations about hiring Weinberg, the urgent need to get the Calutrons running had short-circuited caution and the lab’s rudimentary security procedures.117
Army agents began following not only Weinberg but the other three in the photograph as well. Since Joe had indicated in his talk with Nelson that future secrets might be passed through his
