From previous surveillance, the army knew that the recipient, Al Flanigan, was a Berkeley graduate student and suspected party member who lived down the street from Chevalier and was a friend of Steve Nelson’s. Pash interpreted the “S.” and “B.” of the note to stand for Nelson and Bernadette Doyle. Suspecting that the note had originated with Oppenheimer, Pash asked de Silva to compare it with letters written on the typewriter in Oppie’s office at Los Alamos.38 Pash was also convinced that the note cast new light upon the purpose of Oppenheimer’s latest visit. As Murray wrote in his report to G-2: “The latent possibility that J. R. Oppenheimer tipped Weinberg off lies dormant.”39
Army wiretaps revealed that Oppie’s other grad students on the project continued to violate their promise to stay out of politics.40 Agents followed David Bohm to meetings of the Communist Party, which he had joined late the previous year.41 Until it was dissolved, Max Friedman had served as chairman of the Rad Lab’s FAECT Local, while Lomanitz was on its organizing committee and had been an active recruiter.42 (During one FAECT gathering, Lomanitz naively proposed organizing the campus police department. The idea was hooted down. The union had enough trouble “without inviting the FBI into the meetings,” grumbled one member, according to an agent’s report.)43
Having decided to keep Weinberg on campus in hopes that he might lead them to other spies, Groves and Lansdale resolved to rid the project of the other three.44 Friedman was summarily fired only a week after he had been hired by the university to teach physics to army recruits on campus.45 (“Promised jobs kept disappearing at the last moment,” Friedman wrote plaintively to Oppenheimer.)46 Bohm presented more of a problem, since Oppenheimer had recently asked him to come to Los Alamos. In a telephone call, Groves told Oppie that he could not approve the transfer since Bohm had relatives in Germany—an explanation that Oppenheimer found incredible but did not challenge.47 Weinberg and Bohm stayed on as teaching assistants in the physics department, where the two took over Oppenheimer’s course on quantum theory.48
Others at the Rad Lab who had been picked to go to Y-12—including Arthur Rosen, David Fox, and Bernard Peters—received similar notice that their assignments had been suddenly canceled, without explanation.49
Groves and Lansdale had already agreed that the simplest solution to the problem of what to do about Lomanitz was to draft him, since Rossi’s deferment was about to come up for renewal.50 On the same day that Lomanitz received a letter from his draft board, informing him that his deferment was canceled, he was ordered to report for a physical.51 Less than a week before, Lawrence had picked Rossi to supervise the operation of the Calutrons at Oak Ridge. At age twenty-one, he was the youngest group leader at the Rad Lab.52
More than six months of army and FBI surveillance had uncovered a wealth of intimate details about the four subjects under investigation, but no further incidents of espionage. (“There was a discussion of music, Russian Army songs, Paul Robeson, and bacteriology,” wrote the army agent monitoring Weinberg’s apartment of a typical evening that fall.)53
What the wiretaps and bugs did reveal was that Lomanitz and Friedman believed they had been fired from the Rad Lab for their left-wing views and union activity.54 It was their “firm conviction,” the two wrote Oppenheimer, “that union discrimination is the cause of all that has occurred.”55 Army agents overheard Lomanitz and Friedman drafting the letter to Oppie in Weinberg’s apartment, while Joe, in the background, offered advice.
That Weinberg’s friends remained ignorant of the real reason behind the army’s actions was evident even at the farewell party that Joe hosted for Rossi on the eve of his induction, where the conversation was in vino veritas:
Weinberg was heard to remark that people who live quietly never get their names in history books or in the newspapers.… Further discussion indicated that Weinberg was enjoying Lomanitz’ predicament. Lomanitz said “Both Joe and Dave have their necks out. Dave was my roommate and Joe has written three letters of recommendation for me.” Weinberg said he didn’t believe Max was in his present predicament because of his Union affiliations but because of something else.56
It was perhaps the closest that Weinberg would come to informing his friends that he was the source of all their troubles.57
The next morning, Joe drove Rossi to the induction center. The following week, Friedman, after borrowing a few road maps from Weinberg, left Berkeley at the wheel of his 1942 Pontiac on his way to Denver, Colorado, where he began the search for a new job.
* * *
Oppenheimer believed, mistakenly, that his confession to Pash had satisfied the G-2 man of his patriotism, or at least had drawn the bloodhounds off his trail. Pash, however, took Oppie’s smug evasions and refusal to name names as a provocation. He wired Groves that it was “essential that name of professor be made available in order that investigation can continue properly.”58 Pash asked Groves to find out exactly who had been contacted, and whether anyone else—“the professor, Eltenton, or some other party”—had approached Oppenheimer for information.59
Groves and Lansdale found an occasion to interrogate Oppenheimer further in early September, when the three shared a compartment on an eastbound streamliner. Between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Chicago, they discussed Oppenheimer’s interview with Pash as well as his meeting in Berkeley with Lomanitz, Weinberg, and Bohm. Oppie said he was confident that no further approaches had been made and no secrets lost. He offered to identify the professor who had been Eltenton’s intermediary if ordered to do so by Groves, but Groves demurred.60
Lansdale tried again to coax the story out of Oppenheimer when the physicist visited Washington later that month. Picking up Oppie at Union Station, Lansdale took him to Groves’s office, where another hidden microphone lay waiting. Oppenheimer was apologetic but adamant in refusing to
