Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (20 page)

It is, nonetheless, possible that the document is genuine. If genuine,
it contains information that, in light of Vassiliev's notebooks and the
Venona decryptions, greatly embellishes the status of KGB atomic intelligence at that time. Its claim that Oppenheimer, while a secret member of the CPUSA in 1942, informed the Soviets about the beginning of
work on an atomic bomb is congruent with Steve Nelson's claim to
Joseph Weinberg (discussed below) that Oppenheimer had told him
about the preliminary atomic bomb research being done at Berkeley
prior to Oppenheimer's joining the Manhattan Project. The claim that
Oppenheimer had enabled Soviet sources to gain access to atomic research may be an exaggerated comment on the number of Communists
hired to work on "Enormous." In its early stages Oppenheimer had been
indifferent to the Communist background of his proteges at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley; it was, after all, a background he shared.
But Oppenheimer began to distance himself from his old CPUSA ties
and counseled his younger colleagues to do so as well. And in 1943 he
identified those who were still active in Communist affairs to Army security, resulting in their exclusion from participation in the project.
There is no evidence that a relative of Browder's ever worked on the
Manhattan Project.

Points in the document and in the discussion of Oppenheimer in Sacred Secrets are contradicted by numerous KGB documents quoted in
Vassiliev's notebooks. In 1944 Moscow Center recalled Kheifets from San
Francisco; the reason was stated in several KGB documents already
quoted and summed up in a Pavel Fitin note of November 1944:
"Kheifets recalled from the U.S. for failing to cope with his job." Kheifets
arrived back in Moscow in August and wrote a report defending his work,
dated 9 September 1944, one month before the Merkulov memo to Beria produced by the Schecters. In his report he discussed his contacts in the
scientific community in the San Francisco area. At no point does he even
hint he ever met directly with Robert Oppenheimer and notes only having heard about Oppenheimer's left-wing politics and pro-Soviet inclination from Louise Bransten and George Eltenton. He discusses his cultivation of Stanford professor Holland Roberts because he believed
Roberts was a friend of Oppenheimer. He specifically notes: "`Lion'
[Roberts] prepared a meeting with `Chemist' [Oppenheimer] for me, but
for various reasons the meeting fell through." Kheifets suggested an excuse for his lack of contact with Oppenheimer, noting that the link to
Robert and Frank Oppenheimer had been via the CPUSA but that Isaac
Folkoff, the party's West Coast liaison with the KGB, had told him that
after the Oppenheimer brothers joined the Manhattan Project, "due to
their special military work, the connection with them was suspended."
Kheifets also refers to the KGB's belief that GRU might have been cultivating Oppenheimer and that he "was supposed to be turned over to
us. This matter, however, has not moved forward."41

By Kheifets's own statements, he had not had contact with Oppenheimer before leaving San Francisco in late July 1944, contradicting Sudoplatov's claims and the Merkulov document the Schecters produced
from an unidentified source. And what of the complex scheme by which
Kitty Harris, working with Lev Vasilevsky, chief of the KGB Mexico City
station, used old KGB contacts in California to connect Elizabeth Zarubin with the Oppenheimers? It was Vasilevsky who authored the late 1945
Moscow Center action plan (discussed above) that declared one of the
KGB goals as contacting the Oppenheimer brothers. If his subordinate,
Harris, had already done so when Vasilevsky had been running the Mexico City station, he would not have included this goal in his plan.42

The claim advanced by Sudoplatov and supported by the Schecters
that Oppenheimer had direct contact with the KGB and actively assisted
Soviet atomic espionage was based on one man's memory (an inherently
weak source) and sparse documentation with no provenance. It is not
only not corroborated by the ample KGB documentation in Vassiliev's
notebooks and in the Venona traffic, but it is also directly and repeatedly
contradicted. Additionally, Sudoplatov's allegations about Enrico Fermi
and Leo Szilard are also unsupported. The extensive material in Vassiliev's
notebooks about the KGB's Enormous project does not show any contact, or even attempted contact, with Szilard. The KGB did attempt to
reach Fermi, but Vassiliev's notebooks show that the American agent chosen for the task, Byron Darling, never carried out the mission.

On the evidence, Oppenheimer's ties to the Communist Party up
through 1941 were very strong. He was not simply a casual Popular Front
liberal who ignorantly bumped up against the CPUSA in some of the arenas in which it operated. He was, in fact, a concealed member of the
CPUSA in the late 193os and appears to have dropped out of the party
in early 1942. Until he went to Army security officials and General Groves
in 1943, Oppenheimer's attitude toward possible Communist espionage
came very close to complete indifference. It was as if at some point in
the first half of 1943 his views had changed sufficiently that he realized
that there actually was a serious security issue involved. Even then, it appeared he wanted only to give security officials enough information to
neutralize the problem but not enough to expose associates to prosecution for what they already might have done. (They were, however, excluded from the project.) This paralleled a shift in his political views in
which he increasingly distanced himself from the CPUSA and its ideology. While the weight of the evidence argues overwhelmingly against Oppenheimer as an active Soviet source, there is one matter that cannot be
ruled out. The possibility exists that up to the time he reported the
Chevalier approach to security officials in mid-1943, he may have turned
a blind eye to the conduct of others whom he had reasonable grounds to
suspect, a passivity motivated by his personal and political ties to them.

Throughout his life Oppenheimer declined to provide a detailed or
accurate accounting of his relationship with the CPUSA in the late 1930s
and early 194os and of his knowledge of Communists who worked on the
Manhattan Project. It was this unwillingness to speak honestly about his
ties to the Communist movement that ultimately gave his critics the ammunition that led to Oppenheimer's loss of his security clearance in 1954.
With what is known in zoo8, it is clear that in 1954 Oppenheimer was
not a security risk, and his continued possession of a security clearance
and advice on nuclear issues were in America's interest. But those making the decision in 1954 did not have the benefit of what is now known.
What they had to contend with was clear evidence that Robert Oppenheimer had in the past and in sworn testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission knowingly lied about his past relationship to the Communist Party. That they would decide to deny him a security clearance
under those circumstances was understandable. On the more important
question of espionage, however, the documents recorded in Vassiliev's
notebooks add evidence of such quality and quantity that the case for
Oppenheimer's innocence of the charge of assisting Soviet espionage is
overwhelming: the case is closed.

The stories of Russell McNutt and Robert Oppenheimer were part of
the complicated and convoluted story of the KGB's pursuit of atomic information. Moscow received definite word of the existence of the American atomic bomb program in March 1942. For the next two years Soviet
intelligence pursued a variety of leads and prospects, none of which
yielded significant results. Ultimately, however, it succeeded. The USSR
detonated its first nuclear bomb on 29 August 1949, at least two years
before Western intelligence had predicted. The Red bomb was a copy of
the American "Fat Man," the plutonium implosion bomb dropped on
Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, and a dramatic demonstration of the greatest triumph of Soviet intelligence.

Nuclear physics had made great strides in the 192os and 1930s, and
by the late 1930s leading scientists in several nations realized that the
enormous energy released by the splitting of the atom could potentially
fuel a weapon of staggering destructiveness. Germany, Great Britain,
France, and the Soviet Union possessed highly talented nuclear physicists capable of designing an atomic bomb. Building a working weapon,
however, was more than a matter of scientific talent. It required an astoundingly large investment of industrial, engineering, and technological resources in research and development to figure out what theoretical
approaches could be realized in a practical form. Equipment, devices,
and massive industrial facilities had to be designed, built, redesigned, and
rebuilt before success was achieved. France's nascent atomic energy program came to a halt with the country's defeat and occupation in 1940.
Nazi Germany, possessing some of the world's most talented nuclear
physicists, started an atomic project, but with its industrial resources
strained by more immediate war needs, the program made only limited
progress. Similarly, the USSR established a project, but with its resources
fully mobilized for conventional military requirements, the Soviets had
little more than a scientific office preparing plans for a postwar effort.
Great Britain established an atomic program but quickly realized that it
could not divert sufficient industrial resources from its other war commitments to get very far. While the Soviets turned to espionage, Britain
finessed the difficulty by temporarily merging its effort with the American atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project. During World War II,
the United States was the sole nation with industrial, engineering, and
technological resources of sufficient depth that it could not only supply
its own armed forces with everything they needed but also supply, through Lend-Lease, significant additions to the British and Soviet war
effort and make the staggering investment necessary to produce the
working atomic bombs that ended the war against Japan in 1945.

The KGB's "Enormous" supplied the Soviet atomic project with about
ten thousand pages of technical papers from the British and American
atomic programs. The relationship between intelligence and the Soviet
atomic program was so close that Igor Kurchatov, its scientific head, reviewed the intelligence product supplied by the KGB and provided detailed technical follow-up questions to be raised with its sources. Atomic
espionage allowed the Soviet bomb program to skip much of the research
and development phase and move swiftly to final engineering and production. It did not have to go down blind alleys, resort to expensive and
time-consuming trial-and-error, or experiment with impractical approaches; all of that had already been done by the Manhattan Project.
The result was a huge savings in time and resources for the Soviet bomb
program. The saving of resources was particularly important given that
Soviet infrastructure had been badly damaged by the war and that the
postwar reconstruction effort severely strained Soviet industrial capabilities .43

That the first Soviet bomb was a plutonium bomb triggered by implosion was itself a demonstration of the advantage that espionage provided the Soviet bomb program. Scientists initially assumed that the most
direct way to a working bomb was through splitting the uranium atom.
And the first atomic bomb used in combat, the "Little Boy" dropped on
Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, was a uranium bomb. But Manhattan Project scientists and engineers quickly realized that producing uranium
bombs raised a very practical problem. Uranium in nature consists largely
of two isotopes, U-z38 and U-z35. More than 99 percent is U-z38, useless as the fuel for an atomic bomb because it is too stable-not "fissile"
in technical terms. A fission chain reaction required a concentrated
amount of U-z35, sometimes termed enriched uranium or bomb-grade
uranium. The technical barriers to separating U-z38 from U-z35 to produce enriched bomb-grade uranium were daunting but were ultimately
overcome by the Manhattan Project. Another major problem, however,
remained. Despite investment of tremendous engineering and industrial
resources, all of the methods to extract U-z35 were extremely time-consuming and would severely limit the number of bombs that could be
manufactured. If atomic bombs could be constructed using only U-z35,
while one could be (and was) prepared for use in late summer 1945, it
would be 1946 before a second uranium bomb was ready.

American and British scientists, however, worked out a substitute for
U-235: plutonium. Plutonium does not occur in nature. It was first created in 1941 by chemist Glenn Seaborg, who used a cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley, to bombard easily available uranium U-238
with neutrons and produce the first artificial element: plutonium. Manhattan Project scientists soon discovered that plutonium could be produced in significant quantities in uranium-fueled nuclear reactors and in
only a fraction of the time needed to produce U-235 enriched uranium.
Plutonium was highly fissile, even more so than U-235, and could easily
be stimulated to produce a fission chain reaction.

However, another problem quickly appeared. Plutonium was, in fact,
too fissile. "Little Boy," the uranium bomb, had a simple triggering
method. One mass of highly enriched uranium was shot down a barrel (as
if in a rifle), using conventional explosives, at tremendous speed at a target at the end of the barrel that also consisted of highly enriched U-235.
When the two collided, the energy generated by the collision stimulated
the U-235 to become "critical"-that is, to fission and set off a chain reaction that produced a nuclear explosion. In the case of the "Little Boy"
bomb, the explosive force was equivalent of about fifteen thousand tons
of TNT.

Plutonium was so fissile, however, that the gun-type design was unworkable. When a mass of plutonium was fired at a plutonium target, a
chain reaction began so rapidly when the two came together that most of
the fuel was blown apart before the reaction had spread to all of the plutonium. The result was a "fizzle," a premature explosion perhaps enough
to blow up a city block, but not the massive blast envisioned. The technical breakthrough developed at Los Alamos was an implosion design.
Instead of the firing of one mass at another, a single plutonium hemisphere was completely encased by conventional explosives. The encasing explosive was set off simultaneously all around the hemisphere, configured in a shaped charge, sometimes called an explosive lens, that
directed most of the force of the explosion inwardly in a uniform fashion,
squeezing all of the plutonium simultaneously with great energy and turning it critical. The resulting chain reaction affected all of the plutonium,
and a full nuclear explosion resulted. In the case of the "Fat Man" bomb
used against Nagasaki, the explosion was the equivalent of twenty-one
thousand tons of TNT. As a result of espionage, the Soviet bomb program skipped the Manhattan Project's hard-learned lessons on the practical limitations of a uranium bomb and went directly to a plutonium
bomb with its implosion trigger.44