Except for the information passed by “Joe” to Steve Nelson, the results obtained by Soviet espionage at Berkeley amounted to little, in retrospect. Yet the “California trouble” had become an early and main focus of the counterintelligence campaign by Groves and Lansdale for one simple reason: Oppenheimer.
In April, Jim Murray, Pash’s top counterspy, was transferred to Chicago, where the FBI and Groves had recently uncovered an espionage ring passing Met Lab secrets to Moscow through the Soviets’ New York consulate.17
That May, Lansdale made preparations to shut down the listening post on Forest Avenue and likewise close the army’s dummy storefront office in San Francisco.18 To save money, the remaining agents and their recording equipment were moved to a new headquarters in Oakland and given a different cover name: the “Universal Adjustment Company.” (One hapless visitor, seeking an insurance adjuster, was politely run off by Murray’s replacement.)19
In the fall, Lyall Johnson would be put in charge of security at Hanford, which soon began regularly shipping plutonium to Los Alamos in converted army ambulances.
Still unaware that the story Oppenheimer had told Pash was a fabrication, army agents continued their dogged search for the three Berkeley scientists whom Chevalier had supposedly asked to pass secrets to the Russians. Oppie himself had meanwhile done nothing to let the agents know that they were following a false trail. Instead, during a trip to Santa Fe with de Silva in early 1944, Oppenheimer had given the Los Alamos security officer the name of another possible suspect: Rad Lab physicist Bernard Peters.20
Lansdale was confident that he had meanwhile neutralized the threat represented by the four grad students originally suspected of spying. After trailing Lomanitz and his girlfriend across the country to Oklahoma and back, the army had assigned an agent in uniform to accompany Rossi through basic training. Lomanitz’s shadow followed him to a billet at Fort Lewis, Washington, and ultimately to the Pacific without observing any effort on Rossi’s part at surreptitious contact.21 Bohm, like Weinberg, was still teaching physics in Berkeley.22 Following a succession of failed efforts to find work, Max Friedman had finally returned to being a student, enrolling in graduate physics classes at the University of Puerto Rico.
Lansdale himself had recently shifted his attention to more pressing concerns—including the need to provide security for the growing tide of men and equipment being sent to the Pacific to drop the atomic bomb.23
Notably, Groves had raised no objection when Robert Oppenheimer brought his brother to Los Alamos in spring 1945.24 (Army monitoring remained in place, however. When Teller griped once more about security strictures at the lab, Oppie snapped: “What are you complaining about? I can’t even talk to my own brother.”) Robert put Frank in charge of security at the desolate desert site where the bomb was to be tested.25
A few months earlier, Frank had shared a Pullman compartment on the way to Y-12 with Lawrence. Ernest repeated for Frank’s benefit the advice he had given Oppie at the start of the war—that the best way to serve humanity was not by becoming involved in politics but by doing science.26
At Los Alamos—where project officials were still innocent of the fact that the nation’s real atomic secrets were being driven out the front gate in Klaus Fuchs’s blue Buick—de Silva was handed another assignment by Lansdale: investigating Kitty Oppenheimer’s complaint that the army was opening the letters she received from her parents.*27
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At Y-12 that summer, Lawrence was trying to rush the atomic bomb to completion by drastically increasing the number of Calutrons. “The primary fact now is that the element of gamble in the over-all picture no longer exists,” he had written to Conant in May.28 Ernest asked Groves to approve construction of two more Alpha II racetracks, even though the first of the new machines had barely begun operating.29
Novel ways were also being found to improve efficiencies elsewhere. Unable to account for a discrepancy between the Calutrons’ calculated rate of production and the amount of enriched uranium actually being shipped to New Mexico, Lawrence had ordered the chemical processing plant at Oak Ridge taken down and the pipes in its labyrinth sawn in half. The missing uranium was found, and the facility was quickly rebuilt to a new design.30 In late June 1944, Los Alamos received the first shipment of highly enriched U-235 from the Beta machines.31
As the production of uranium gradually picked up at Y-12, so, too, did Groves’s mood. In July, Groves gave Lawrence the go-ahead to begin work on a revolutionary new thirty-beam Calutron—even though Ernest admitted that the machine could not begin producing weapons-grade uranium until mid-1945 at the earliest.
In August, Groves reported to the Top Policy Group that the scientists at Los Alamos were sufficiently confident of the uranium gun working that they advised it could be used in combat without a prior test. (Thin Man, the original high-velocity plutonium gun, had meanwhile been replaced by a shorter, low-velocity uranium gun, dubbed “Little Boy.”)32 The success of the Fat Man plutonium implosion weapon, on the other hand, remained problematic; a test was scheduled for the following year.
Groves believed that the first atomic bomb might be ready to drop on the enemy as early as the end of March 1945. He estimated that between the spring and the summer Los Alamos would be able to produce from five to eleven implosion gadgets.33
By November 1944, all nine Alpha racetracks were running at full capacity—daily feeding more than 100 grams of U-235 into two Beta tracks.34 Low-grade uranium from gaseous and thermal diffusion plants was also being sent through the Alpha and Beta Calutrons.35 Weekly shipments of enriched uranium to Los Alamos had begun. Army officers dressed in civilian clothes and carrying concealed sidearms accompanied the special suitcases containing the precious metal as it was transported by ambulance and train to New Mexico.36
Just before Thanksgiving, Lawrence telephoned Groves from Oak Ridge to exult that “things are really booming down here.” The production of U-235 in November equaled all previous
