109 East Palace (19 page)

Leaving the post for even a short time was not an easy proposition. The fence that enclosed Los Alamos was surrounded by an outer fence, separating the two-by-eight-mile-wide strip of land from the rest of the world. There were only two ways to access the closed city: the Main Gate, or East Gate Guard Tower, which was reached by the desert road from Santa Fe; and the less used Back Gate, or West Gate, which opened onto mountain country and woods and led down to the Valle Grande, an immense volcano basin now covered in pasture. Each guard station was posted with red-and-white warning signs that read:

U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
DANGER! PELIGROSO!
KEEP OUT

The uniformed sentries did not permit anyone to enter or leave the compound without proper authorization. The elaborate inspection process quickly became the bane of everyone’s existence. The passes handed out to people by Dorothy McKibbin when they first arrived in Santa Fe were good for only twenty-four hours, which required newcomers to report with dispatch to the Pass Office on the Hill, located in the old stone pump house. There they would be photographed and fingerprinted, and subjected to the first of many strange and humiliating interrogations. Did they have any unusual birthmarks? Identifying scars? All this would be duly recorded in their files and noted on their permanent passes. They would then be informed of all the secrecy regulations and required to sign the Espionage Act. But even then they were not home free. The credentials had to be renewed every two weeks in the Pass Office, or the MPs would solemnly shake their heads and they would not be allowed through the gate. Many an irate physicist and his tearful wife were detained at the gate, or turned away completely, because their passes had expired. Hans Staub, one of the project’s resident philosophers, was convinced he saw ominous implications in the steel fences. “Are those big, tough MPs, with their guns, here to keep us in or to keep the rest of the world out?” he demanded once, only half in jest. “There is an important distinction here and before I leave this place, I want to know the answer.”

Telephone calls were routinely interrupted by overzealous monitors, who cut the connection every time a curious relative asked a probing question in order to caution personnel before they replied. Security was also steaming open their mail and perusing the contents. Adding insult to injury, Groves denied this was happening and maintained that a policy of self-censorship was adequate. But as an experiment, Fermi once slipped a strand of his own hair into a letter to his wife. She reported back to him that when she opened it, the hair was gone. As the months went on, the rumors persisted that G-2 was opening and reading letters, and the complaints increased. Groves determined that censorship was not such a bad idea, and Oppenheimer went along with it.

A list of regulations was then drawn up by army officials and circulated to the staff. Specifically, this meant that in addition to not revealing any details about their location, they were not to mention the names of colleagues at the lab or anything relating to their work or equipment. Sending photographs of Los Alamos, drawings, even doodles, was strictly against the rules. They were instructed to put their mail in the box unsealed, and the censors would collect it, and cart it off to the cramped offices next to Dorothy’s on East Palace, where it would be read, sealed, and sent on its way. If the censors did not like what they read, they would blue-pencil the offending passages and send back the letter with suggested revisions. When Shirley Barnett sent her mother a sketch of how she had arranged the furniture in her new apartment, along with the dimensions of her tiny living room, the letter was returned with a note requesting she excise all the physical descriptions. Incoming mail was also read and resealed, and it arrived bearing the stamp “Opened by the Army Examiner.”

The system was simple, but the psychological repercussions were complicated and profound. Letters from Los Alamos tended to be terse. Bob Wilson’s wife, Jane, recalled being too “painfully self-conscious,” and altogether too terrified that she might in some way incriminate herself, to put pen to paper: “I couldn’t write a letter without seeing a censor pouring over it. I couldn’t go to Santa Fe without being aware of hidden eyes upon me, watching, waiting to pounce on that inevitable miss-step. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.” She wrote of a chance encounter with a college friend on the streets in Santa Fe that left her badly shaken. It had been thrilling to see someone “from the outside world, someone whose life wasn’t mixed up in supersecret matters. But even this encounter was against the rules”:

“Come have a Coke with me,” my friend suggested, little realizing the enormity of her proposition.

I was numb with embarrassment. Woodenly, I accepted the invitation, although my conversation was a succession of fluid grunts. A moment’s slip and I, by nature blabbermouthed, felt that I would find myself hurtling into the gaping entrance to hell. It was a relief to say goodbye. Then, like a child confessing she has been naughty, I reported my social engagement to the Security Officer. Everything had to be reported to the Security Officer. Living at Los Alamos was something like living in jail.

The scientists and their families tolerated these indignities and mourned their lost privacy and freedom. Accustomed to the lax atmosphere of university campuses, they reacted with varying degrees of resignation, anger, and dismay to their confinement. Even though they knew the importance of wartime secrecy, they could not help being disconcerted by the daily reality of being watched. On brief excursions into nearby Espanola or Santa Fe for supplies they might find themselves tailed by security. There were rumors that their apartments were bugged and that one or two physicists had been pulled aside and warned not to talk about their work at home. They felt security was always breathing down their necks, and Dorothy saw the toll it took on their behavior. They became increasingly stiff and unnatural in public, and at times the reply to the most casual question would suddenly freeze on their lips. They were so plagued by G-2, she wrote, that project members would turn pale with fright if they thought their cloak of obscurity was about to be lifted. “When a shopkeeper automatically inquired, prompted more by way of western hospitality, Where are you from?’ the answer was always a stammered Box 1663, as the speaker faded into the background. Security allowed them to say no more.”

For the most part, the scientists and their families tried to be cooperative with their guardians. They wanted to safeguard the secrecy of the project, even if many of the rules seemed contradictory and vague. But to Dick Feynman, who was very young, very bright, and barely out of school, the censors seemed pointlessly arbitrary and high-handed, and he delighted in foiling them at every turn. Feynman was precocious, even by Los Alamos standards, and full of mischief. Despite his youth, he was included in all the high-level meetings with the senior scientists because he was regarded as unusually brilliant and innovative. He had only agreed to come to Los Alamos with the promise from Oppenheimer that he could regularly visit his wife, who had tuberculosis and was convalescing in a sanitarium in Albuquerque, a few hours away. Feynman had married his high school sweetheart and wrote to her almost daily. To make the correspondence more amusing for them both, he suggested she write to him in a code of her own devising that he would then decipher. When her letters arrived, written in what appeared to be gibberish—“
TJXYWZTW1X
3”—the censors naturally queried the content. Feynman would explain that the text was written in code and that he did not know what it said because he did not have the key. The censors did not approve of this game, and after much back and forth, it was finally agreed that she would enclose a key so they could read the letter and that they would then remove the key before forwarding the letter to him. But after trying to figure out a few more Feynman missives, Captain Peer de Silva, the chief of security at Los Alamos, changed his mind and declared, “No codes.”

The fun did not end there. The Feynmans graduated to even more elaborate forms of cryptography. Letters from Feynman’s wife began to arrive with words whited-out, whole passages missing, and in one instance “a hole cut out of the paper.” One of the accepted rules of censorship on the post was that the censors only tampered with the outgoing mail. Everyone knew they also monitored the incoming mail, but “they were not supposed to take anything out.” In his reminiscences of Los Alamos, Feynman described in detail the way he exploited every loophole in the system to drive the censors to distraction:

There was always some kind of difficulty with the letters going back and forth. For example, my wife kept mentioning the fact that she felt uncomfortable writing with the feeling that a censor is looking over her shoulder. Now, as a rule, we aren’t supposed to mention censorship. We aren’t, but how can they tell
her?
So they keep sending me a note: “Your wife mentioned censorship.”
Certainly
, my wife mentioned censorship. So finally they sent me a note that said, “Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.” So I start my letter: “I have been instructed to inform you to not mention censorship in your letters.”
Phoom, phoooom
, it comes right back!

At a certain point, Groves decided he had had enough of the budding genius’s hijinks. This may have been when Feynman took to safecracking for his own entertainment and worked out how the Los Alamos combination locks functioned, which enabled him to open anyone’s safe just by listening to the tiny clicks the knob made when turned backward and forward. He enjoyed embarrassing colleagues by leaving their safes open so they would be scolded by security, or by putting little notes inside signaling that he had struck again. The last straw may have been when he chose to demonstrate how easy it was to get into the classified facility by finding a hole that had been cut in the fence by some of the local workmen, who used it as a shortcut. Feynman went out the gate and in through the hole, and out and in again, round and round until he finally caught the attention of the sergeant at the gate. It is likely the general drew the line at having one of his scientific minions, a jumped-up graduate student no less, holding his security measures up to ridicule. Oppenheimer was forced to run interference for Feynman again and again, and had he not been so gifted, and his wife so desperately ill, there would have been hell to pay. As it was, his pranks quickly became a favorite topic at dinner, and if nothing else, the rapidity with which his more outrageous escapades made the rounds testified to how efficient the classified community’s gossip network had become. “He caused a lot of trouble,” said Greene. “But Dick always looked distraught, and Oppie made allowances.”

All through the war, the mysterious little hole in the fence kept reappearing, and Indians from the nearby pueblos would climb through and come to the picture show, which cost twelve cents, and buy Cokes at the PX. There was a persistent rumor that Oppie was responsible for that hole.

For a very few, life behind Groves’ tall fences was too claustrophobic to bear. Worst affected were the recent refugees from Europe, for whom the guards, dogs, and concertina wire brought back memories of the internment camps they had recently left behind. “A few people were absolutely incompatible with Los Alamos,” acknowledged Greene. “One man arrived, his name I fortunately don’t remember, and left within twenty-four hours. One girl was actually sent away. Then there were a couple of people who didn’t get along very well but stuck it out. There always was the question [for Oppie], of whether you really should persuade someone to come because it was going to be such a close and difficult place to live and maybe they would be more trouble than they were worth.” One of the few women physicists, Jane Roberg, who worked on calculations for the fusion weapon, asked to leave because of personal problems. The Swiss-born theoretician Felix Bloch also could not stand it. He had managed to escape Hitler’s Germany and immigrate to America, only to find himself at the mercy of Groves’ restrictive policies and Oppenheimer’s equally autocratic management of the laboratory. The aristocratic Bloch made no secret of the fact that he was appalled by the experimental desert laboratory and felt the whole undertaking was a waste of time. In his opinion, radar, and not the bomb, would decide the war with Germany, and he asked to be released from the project. After weeks of simmering tension, Groves and Oppenheimer gave Bloch permission to depart, which they were loath to do given his abilities and how much he knew of the operation.

Teller always felt that his friendship with Bloch was a mark against him, and noted that the only time Oppenheimer invited him to join his regular poker games, a gathering of considerable status, was at the precise moment that Teller had promised to drive Bloch to the station. Teller viewed this as a typically manipulative Oppenheimer ploy and chose to see his friend off instead. As a parting gift, Bloch presented him with a plaque, purchased in one of the tourist shops, which fully expressed his contempt for the project: it depicted a car driving headlong into a tree.

SEVEN

Summer Camp

A
S THE CHIEF ARCHITECT
of their misery, Groves was blamed for everything that disgruntled the scientific populace. He had made the mesa his de facto headquarters, and he walked around the place as if he owned it and rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. He would march past Priscilla Greene’s desk heading straight for Oppie’s office and, without breaking stride, would rebuke her for the dirty fingerprints on the door, demanding, “Don’t you ever wash your hands?” Greene, who routinely listened in on all calls and took notes, as Oppenheimer could not possibly keep track of the dozens of conversations he had with people over the course of the day, would feel hurt and insulted when Groves bellowed, “Get her off the line.” She complained bitterly to Oppenheimer, who shrugged and said that the general was tough on subordinates as a matter of policy. “I remember Robert sitting me down and telling me about Groves, that he could be mean, and sometimes had a nasty tongue,” said Greene. “He said he did it on purpose, to keep people under his thumb, and to create an aura around himself.”