Still working my way through American Prometheus, a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project stirred up a lot of debate about security, and I find reading these chapters very frustrating. The US Army and the FBI devoted quite a lot of effort to policing the scientists involved in the project, wiretapping phones (illegally), installing microphones in people's offices (illegally), reading everyone's mail, and so on. But they did not find any of the four (at least) Soviet agents working at Los Alamos. (The VENONA decrypts suggest that there was at least one more, but that person has never been identified.) The known spies were:
Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who had emigrated to Britain, joined the British atomic program, and then was sent to Los Alamos with a whole batch of British physicists;
Theodore Hall, a New York Jewish physics student who joined the program at the age of 18;
David Greenglass, an army machinist;
Oscar Seborer, an electrical engineer from New York.
None of the actual spies was ever identified during the war as a particular risk or given any special attention.
One of the reasons that the actual spies were not identified during the war was that the Army and FBI devoted a huge part of their energy to the Bay Area leftists who came into the program with Oppenheimer, and indeed to Oppenheimer himself. Oppenheimer kept trying to tell the Army that these men may have been communists but they were loyal Americans, but the FBI and some Army counterintelligence agents continued to believe throughout the war that intellectual leftists from Berkeley were the biggest security threat. So they spent their time doing things like bugging the phone of Oppenheimer's old girlfriend Jean Tatlock, flagged as a "likely Comintern agent," while the real spies worked right under their noses. It makes for depressing reading.
It's interesting that the FBI went against visible, relatively outspoken leftists, rather than following a Le Carre-style dictum that the ideal spy is a person nobody notices.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if part of the motive was a sense that the expression of lefist ideas was itself dangerous, especially (in the Bureau's view) from persons with some social status and institutional influence, but since it was not actionable under the law at the time, Hoover and his agents hoped to catch academic leftists in some illegal act they were "sure" such intellectual leftists were carrying out also.
One curious thing to note in the Oppenheimer saga is the emergence of not only the FBI but of military security officials. The story of their emergence would, I think, be an interesting counterpart to the seemingly better known story of the rise of the Bureau.
I have the impression that the FBI guys just really hated academic leftists. As you note, the relationships between Army counterintelligence and the FBI are interesting, especially since the counterintelligence guys had to report to General Groves, who set serious limits on who they could interview and for how long. He saw it as part of his job to protect his essential scientists from excessive harassment. This seems to have angered both the FBI and the CI guys, storing up bad feeling for later.
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