The bureau’s plans had hit a snag. In Weinberg’s case, Fidler wrote, “no written evidence was available and other evidence [was] difficult to obtain”—a veiled reference to the fact that the information gathered by the bureau’s bugs and wiretaps might not be admissible in court.45
Fidler informed the FBI that there was another potential complication in the Weinberg case—namely, the army’s policy of avoiding embarrassment to high project officials: “Since testimony establishing fact that (Weinberg) was working on [Manhattan Project] problems for Rad Lab would probably best be given by JRO or EOL … it is recommended that FBI in Washington be requested to withhold action since involving either of these men at this time might not be desirable.”46
Temporarily stymied in prosecuting those he suspected of being Soviet spies, Hoover sent to the White House that fall the FBI’s dossier on Robert Oppenheimer and gave Truman’s attorney general the bureau’s recently completed “Report on Soviet Espionage in the United States”—a single-spaced, fifty-one-page document that amounted to a historical compendium of Russian spying since the Bolshevik revolution.47 The report gave the names and backgrounds of dozens of Soviet and American citizens whom the bureau believed to be agents. Weinberg, Kamen, Bransten, and Chevalier were among them.48
Yet Hoover also had a backup plan, should legal obstacles frustrate the hoped-for prosecutions: he sent a second copy of the bureau’s massive spy report to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which Congress had made a permanent body earlier in the year.49
* * *
Across San Francisco Bay, the Russians, too, were busy tying up loose ends at their consulate, although their efforts had little to do with the return of peace.50
A mid-November 1945 cable from San Francisco to Moscow confirmed that Apresyan was still following the movements of local atomic scientists—including Lawrence and both Oppenheimer brothers—even as he warned the NKVD that “scholars who have taken part in these pursuits are under the surveillance of the American counterintelligence.”*51
Indeed, an assessment of the Smyth report that the consulate sent Fitin two weeks later included a surprisingly cocky assurance on Apresyan’s part that he could get whatever secrets Moscow needed. While the published report contained “no information about the quantity of uranium being (processed),” May telegraphed, a scientist and agent he identified as “D.” had learned the essential details from those involved in the work and could “turn it over to us at any time.”52
Apresyan’s cable showed not only that the Bay Area espionage ring remained active in peacetime, but that—despite the end of hostilities—the war between spy and counterspy continued unabated.
By that spring, one major combatant, the army’s Military Intelligence Division, was no longer in the fight. By February, Lansdale’s once massive counterintelligence operation in the Bay Area had dwindled to just a few agents in Oakland.53 Harold Marsh and Rufus Shivers received orders from Washington to close the Universal Adjustment Company and send its secret files to the FBI. After driving a borrowed truck containing the files to San Francisco, Marsh handed the documents over to Branigan, the bureau’s CINRAD expert.54
The last act fell to Shivers, who had earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the local head of G-2 to take the one remaining car that army agents had used in their surveillance: a beige 1939 Plymouth, registered to a fictitious owner. Given strict orders by Marsh to lose the car, Shivers returned to the Presidio late one night and left the Plymouth in the Officers Club parking lot with the keys in the ignition. After removing the license plates, he took a trolley home to pack his bags.
* * *
Without fanfare, cyclotroneers who spent the war years in secret exile at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos had begun returning to the Rad Lab. Luis Alvarez, arriving in mid-September 1945 from Tinian, was surprised to find his Berkeley colleagues fretting over the moral implications of the bomb.55
While still in the Pacific, Alvarez had worked out the design for a novel type of linear accelerator. Luie and Ernest were already talking to Alfred Loomis about obtaining financial backing for the new atom-smasher, and Groves had meanwhile promised a freight-trainful of surplus radar vacuum tubes for the machine that Alvarez called the “Linac.”56
Ed McMillan had similarly ambitious plans. While still at Los Alamos, lying in bed one sleepless night shortly before the Trinity test, Lawrence’s brother-in-law had hit upon a clever way to synchronize the movement of particles in a cyclotron. McMillan’s invention of “phase stability” promised not only to get around the relativistic limits predicted for machines the size of the 184-inch, but also to boost the energies obtainable to 1 billion electron volts or more. Lawrence and McMillan dubbed the new machine the “Synchrotron.”57
Insulted when Birge offered him only a lowly assistant professorship at Berkeley, Emilio Segrè coyly sought offers from other universities.58 At archrival Chicago, Seaborg pursued a similar tack. (Sproul eventually caved in—promising Seaborg a new laboratory and the chemistry department “higher salaries and subsequent expansion.”)59 But Segrè did not return to campus until spring 1946, partly to repay Birge for his snub. Even then, he elected to work in the physics department rather than the Rab Lab—having decided that “although an excellent Maecenas, Lawrence was too demanding a boss.”60
After assessing the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Serber had come home in late December. Birge assigned him to teach Oppenheimer’s quantum mechanics class, while Oppie dithered about returning to Berkeley.61 Serber’s wife, Charlotte, who had been in charge of the classified reports library at wartime Los Alamos, applied for the job of Rad Lab librarian; Oppie wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation.62
Frank Oppenheimer wasted no time before becoming once more involved in the kind of political activity that his brother and Lawrence had repeatedly warned him against.63 That October, he protested the Rad Lab’s dismissal of a graduate student, Ted Finkelstein, for repeated security violations.64 In November and
