7
BREAK, BLOW, BURN
BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO by the spring to host a benefit for Russian war relief, Louise Bransten introduced Gregori Kheifets to another prospective new recruit: Martin Kamen.1
For the past year, Kamen had been commuting between Berkeley and Y-12. At both places, the voluble chemist had a reputation as a ready and reliable source of information on what was happening in the project. Kamen had already been reprimanded once by Cooksey for indiscreet comments made at Berkeley’s Faculty Club.2
At the party, Kheifets asked for Kamen’s help in obtaining radiophosphorous treatments for a member of the Soviets’ Portland consulate who was suffering from leukemia. Kamen passed the request along to John Lawrence and did not hear from Kheifets again until late June, when the diplomat called to invite him to a farewell dinner.3 The meal was to thank Kamen for his help and to introduce him to Kheifets’s successor at the consulate, Gregori Kasparov.4 CIC agents monitoring the telephone call heard Kamen agree to meet the Russians two nights hence at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto in San Francisco.
On July 1, the morning of the meeting, an army agent in the guise of an electrician repairing a light in Kamen’s office saw the chemist pick up a scientific equipment catalog and a handful of unclassified reports on the medical use of radioisotopes before heading out the door to the rendezvous.5 Other undercover agents shadowed Kamen on the Key System train across the Bay Bridge, where the chemist and the two Russians caught a cab to the restaurant, located near the cable car turntable on Powell Street. The army agents were surprised to find Hoover’s men already waiting outside, their surveillance equipment—disguised as hearing aids—at the ready. (“It looked like a convention of the deaf,” recalled one gumshoe.)6
Following a hurried conference, the army agents took a table in the middle of the room while the bureau’s men—equipped with more sensitive technology—were seated in a booth adjoining that occupied by Kamen, Kheifets, and Kasparov.7 Amid the noise and bustle of the restaurant, the agents overheard only fragments of the conversation, including Kamen’s mention of “Lawrence,” “radiation,” and “military boys.”8
Following the meal, while his hosts accompanied Kamen to the nearby train station, another army agent snapped a picture of the three men from the upstairs window of a recruiting office across the street. In the photograph, Kasparov is seen clutching the thick sheath of papers that Kamen brought with him. A few days later, FBI agents tailed Kheifets to the docks, where he boarded a ship bound for Russia.9
Apprised of the incident, Groves ordered Kamen fired immediately. The unpleasant task fell to Cooksey, who wordlessly handed the stunned chemist his termination notice. The reason given was Kamen’s earlier loquaciousness at the Faculty Club. Kamen’s frantic telephone calls to Lawrence went unanswered; Fidler had already informed Ernest that since Groves himself had ordered the firing there could be no appeal.10 The chemist’s tearful farewells to Fidler and other well-wishers at the Rad Lab were recorded by army investigators.11
With the help of a friend, Kamen got a job a few weeks later as an inspector at Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards. His neighbors—seeing young, dark-suited men in late-model cars parked at the curb with their engines running—reported the license numbers to the local police, the selective service, and the gasoline rationing board.
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Having finally given up on trying to get a government job in New York or Washington, Haakon Chevalier, too, was back in the Bay Area by late spring 1944.12 Moving, with Barbara, into a guest cottage at Stinson Beach owned by his wife’s parents, Chevalier set about remodeling the house and attempting to repair his marriage. Commuting to Berkeley to teach part-time, he also began work on his long-deferred novel.
For almost a year, the army’s wiretaps and mail cover on Frank Oppenheimer’s East Bay home had revealed only the usual parenting problems of a mother left alone with two small children. Jackie’s dislike of the deep South had made her reluctant to join Frank in Tennessee. Agents reading their letters learned of routine social engagements, the apricots in Jackie’s victory garden, and the final illness to afflict Pushkin, the couple’s German shepherd.13
When Robert Oppenheimer returned to Berkeley that fall, army undercover agents followed him, driving a borrowed roadster, through the winding streets of Kensington to Eagle Hill.14 Oppie next picked up his brother and the two drove down Telegraph Avenue, where they met David Bohm in front of the Carlton Hotel. Following five minutes of conversation—Frank stood apart and did not participate, the agents noted—Robert and his brother drove across the bridge to Scoma’s, a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. While the Oppenheimers were eating, the agents searched Robert’s overcoat and luggage found in the car. (The items found included a bottle of antidiarrhea medicine, a mostly empty fifth of Black Bear Gin, a full pint of twenty-seven-year-old brandy, and underwear.)15
Leaving the restaurant an hour later, the brothers “walked around the block three times during which time they were engaged in earnest conversation, both gestulating [sic] frequently.” Frank then drove Robert to the railroad station in Oakland, where Oppie boarded the streamliner for Los Alamos.16
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By mid-1944, even the army seemed willing to concede that its counterintelligence operation in the Bay Area might have reached the point of diminishing returns. Several months earlier, a devastating critique of the CIC’s operations and methods by the army inspector general had resulted in Lansdale’s nameless box-within-a-box becoming part of the Manhattan Project’s security apparatus. Lansdale and staff moved from the Pentagon to an office next to Groves’s at the New War Department building on Twenty-first
