In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing

Edited by Richard Polenberg (Cornell University Press, 2002) 409pp.

Reviewed by CI Centre Professor Nigel West, intelligence historian and author

The hearings conducted in 1954 by the Personnel Security Board into the suspension of Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance continued through April and May and resulted in June in a confirmation of the decision taken by the Atomic Energy Commission to deny the father of the atomic bomb further access to classified information. The original transcript amounted to nearly a thousand pages, and in this volume Professor Polenberg has reduced the total by three-quarters, and provided an Introduction and short Conclusion.

The hearings were conducted against a background of widespread public anxiety about Soviet espionage, assiduously stoked by Senator Joe McCarthy, and Oppenheimer’s own determination to refute the facts upon which the decision had been taken, the previous December, to revoke his security clearance. On that occasion Oppenheimer had been given the opportunity to accept the suspension, and quietly withdraw, or to challenge the evidence before the PSB. Oppenheimer chose the latter and in doing so, according to Professor Polenberg, became ‘a casualty of McCarthyism’.

Polenberg has three fundamental objections to the way the hearings were handled, and is indignant that Oppenheimer was kept under FBI surveillance. Firstly, he says that ‘a virulent strain of cold war anti-Communism undermined ideals of decency, justice and fair play’, secondly that the FBI’s wiretaps gave the AEC’s lawyers an unfair advantage in the confontation, and thirdly that prior to the hearings the PSB had been granted access to the FBI’s dossier which contained ‘derogatory information, much of it unsubstantiated’. As for the FBI’s excuse that surveillance was necessary to prevent flight and defection, Polenberg describes this as ‘a preposterous fear’.

In his conclusion, Polenberg refers to the claim made by the former NKVD General Pavel Sudoplatov, in his 1994 memoir Special Tasks, that Oppenheimer had been one of several Soviet spies haemorrhaging secrets from within the Manhattan project. Sudoplatov had ‘provided not a shred of evidence to support his assertion’ and therefore his allegation deserved to be dismissed. But is Polenberg right to excoriate the AEC and Sudoplatov?

The background to the AEC hearings was the FBI’s certainty (not the fear) that the Manhattan project had suffered widespread hostile penetration during the war years. The proof, unmentioned by Polenberg, was contained in the VENONA texts which show the scale of Soviet espionage concentrated against Berkeley and Los Alamos. The hearings were not a manifestation of some groundless paranoia about Russian spies, but a direct consequence of the absolute confidence that dozens of NKVD agents had stolen huge quantities of atomic secrets. By the time the PSB hearings took place Allan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs had been convicted in England of supplying classified data to their Soviet contacts in the US, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been executed for running an atomic spy-ring, and Morton Sobell, Harry Gold and David Greenglass were serving long prison sentences for the same offence. Several members of the same network, including Morris and Lona Cohen, William Perl and Joel Barr had disappeared to Europe, Bruno Pontecorvo, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to Moscow, and several other espionage suspects had fled abroad. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the FBI felt it wise to keep a watch on Oppenheimer’s movements. Imagine the embarrassment of allowing such a figure to slip through their fingers, in much the same way MI5 had failed to prevent Donald Maclean from fleeing abroad (a blunder which brought the Security Service and its Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe much discomfort from J. Edgar Hoover).

In terms of evidence against Oppenheimer, the PSB was presented with two items of substance: the infamous Chevalier affair, where Oppenheimer had failed to report, and then waited months to file a bogus account of what was obviously a classic espionage ‘pitch’ made on behalf of the Soviets. The second accusation concerned his links with the CPUSA. Polenberg is strangely dismissive of both issues, and scarcely describes what really happened in 1943 when Haakon Chevalier approached his friend Oppie to relay an offer to convey technical information to someone in the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco who was proficient in the use of microfilms. The circumstances of that encounter can be pieced together from the statements of Professor Chevalier and his contact, George Eltenton, given to the FBI in simultaneous, but separate interviews (to avoid the possibility of collusion) in California in May 1946. Chevalier was a veteran CPUSA activist who regularly organised CPUSA meetings (although Polenberg only describes him as ‘left-wing’ and neglects to mention his status as the official CPUSA organiser at the university of California), while Eltenton was a British engineer and Cambridge graduate who had lived, trained and worked in Leningrad until 1938. Although not formally a CPUSA member, he was a union activist in a branch considered to be run entirely by Communists. More importantly, both he and his wife Dolly, who was a lifelong admirer of the Soviet union, were close to the NKVD rezident in San Francisco, Grigori Kheiffets, and his subordinate, Piotr Ivanov. According to Eltenton’s statement given to the FBI, and subsequently repeated to MI5 in October 1947 upon his return to London, he had been tasked by Ivanov to approach Oppenheimer, and had used their mutual friend Chevalier as a convenient conduit. The purpose, quite obviously, was espionage, but for various reasons he was never charged in the United States.

This encounter took place in February or March 1943, but Oppenheimer did not report it until August, and even when he did so he concealed the identities of Chevalier and Eltenton, and fabricated a story to protect them. Finally, in December 1943, Oppenheimer belatedly named Chevalier and Eltenton, but a comparison between the different versions of events supplied by the three participants obviously gave the FBI cause for concern. Chevaler said he had been dismayed by Eltenton’s suggestion, and then had explained the position to Oppenheimer, but neither had reported it. Eltenton, however, acknowledged having asked Chevalier to approach Oppenheimer, but insisted that Chevalier had raised no objection. Oppenheimer eventually said Chevalier had pitched him, but he had rejected him. The result was three different, contradictory statements, but what everyone could agree on was that a pitch had been made, and not reported fully for about ten months. In the opinion of the security personnel directly involved, Boris Pash and Peer de Silva (who both went on to enjoy careers in the CIA), Oppenheimer was a major security risk. On that basis alone should have been sufficient grounds to have anyone’s security clearance lifted, although clearly Polenberg takes a different view.

Polenberg also expresses his distaste for the guilt by association implied in the catalogue of Oppenheimer’s friends and family who were CPUSA members. He himself accepted that until 1942 he had been a member of ‘almost every Communist front organisation on the West Coast’ and it is a fact that his brother Frank, wife Kitty and mistress Jean were also CPUSA members, as were many of his closest friends. These associations, of course, did not make Oppie a spy, but they were significant in a security context, especially in the light of what is now known about the methodology adopted by the NKVD to exploit and manipulate the CPUSA as an intelligence-collection instrument. Research in Moscow’s archives in recent years, also unmentioned by Polenberg, has provided eloquent proof of the overlap between Earl Browder’s CPUSA and Operation ENORMOZ, the joint GRU/NKVD penetration of the Manhattan project. Beria’s spymasters saw Browder’s apparatus as an opportunity to cultivate likely sources, talent-spot scientists with ‘progressive’ views, check the political credentials of recommended candidates, pitch potential spies and actively run entire networks. The overlap was so comprehensive, giving the lie to the absurd pretence that the CPUSA was independent of the Kremlin, that it takes a very fine forensic study to distinguish between a Party organiser and either an intermediary of a fully-fledged case officer. There is, of course, a distinction, but it takes a skilled molehunter to spot the tell-tale clues which allow an activist like Steve Nelson to be labelled a spy, or a suspect like Frank Oppenheimer as a dupe. His elder brother, of course, had been the subject of just such an exercise, which was why he had lost his security clearance. It was not an arbitrary, unjustified example of a McCarthy excess, but a direct consequence of the counter-intelligence investigations that led to other similar suspensions, such as that endured by another celebrated nuclear physicist, Sir Rudolf Peierls. In the latter case, Peierls chose not to appeal the decision.

So was Oppie a spy? Polenberg regards the proposition as ridiculous, although Jerrold and Leona Schecter have come to the opposite conclusion in Sacred Secrets, and claim to have produced a ‘smoking gun’, in the form of a memorandum sent to the Kremlin in October 1944 which appears to show that Oppenheimer had been collaborating with Grigori Kheiffets from December 1941 onwards. If the document and its interpretation are authentic, then the debate is over and Polenberg’s position looks even more untenable than his essays suggest.

The issue before the PSB, however, was not whether Oppenheimer was, or had ever been, a traitor to his country. The only matter at stake was whether the decision to suspend his security clearance should be overturned. VENONA showed the FBI the hideous scale of hostile penetration, with nearly four hundred Americans in covert contact with the Soviets prior to 1949, of whom some two hundred were never fully identified. Although there is no evidence in the VENONA texts to link Oppenheimer to espionage, it does illustrate the extent to which Los Alamos was considered a priority target, and the resources deployed to gain access to the Manhattan project. Were the members of the PSB briefed on VENONA? Nobody knows, but it seems unlikely, given the security precautions taken to limit the number of those indoctrinated into what has been called ‘the greatest secret of the Cold War’. Nevertheless, VENONA had proved to be a significant component of the FBI’s molehunting and showed that Hoover’s G-men were not titling at windmills. They knew that penetration had occurred, and were equally sure that they had not caught all the culprits. In this context it seems unrealistic of Professor Polenberg to regard a telephone tap on Oppie’s home and office as unacceptable, or even, borrowing the physicist’s own verdict, “an abuse of the power of the state”.

Doubtless there is some weight in Polenberg’s argument that the PSB was not unpartisan, or had come to the hearings free of any prejudices, but he misses the point of the PSB, which was not a court of law undertaking a criminal trial. The burden of proof was not ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and national security required the PSB to err on the side of caution. One of Oppenheimer’s three lawyers was offered the opportunity to scrutinise all the FBI files previously furnished to the PSB, but he declined, insisting that he needed to share the information with his colleagues. As a result, he saw none of it, and one wonders whether, indifferent to the condition imposed, he served his client’s best interests but making such a stand of principle, especially as there was no chance of a further appeal beyond the PSB’s judgment.

Alas Polenberg does not speculate about what is likely to have been in the FBI’s secret papers, but it would have been helpful to mention that recent declassified releases have shown that in similar investigations the FBI relied heavily on physical and technical surveillance and. Perhaps more surprisingly, ran hundreds of confidential sources within the CPUSA. On the topic of whether Oppie was ever a CPUSA member (which the Schecters say can be proved by a reference in a Moscow document to his membership of a clandestine, unlisted cell) it is clear from the FBI files that, in conversation at least, several senior CPUSA aparatchiks in California certainly believed he was.

Whatever was contained in the FBI files that were not disclosed to Oppenheimer’s defence counsel, they were not sufficient to make the PSB’s final decision unanimous. There was a single dissenting voice, that of his fellow physicist and Los Alamos veteran Henry Smyth who acknowledged that Oppenheimer’s behaviour over the Chevalier episode was ‘inexcusable’ but felt that, on balance, it was in the country’s interests to retain the services of such a talented physicist. Smyth noted that Oppenheimer had been under continuous surveillance for eleven years, but the FBI had not come up with a single discreditable act. There was absolutely no evidence, he concluded, that the scientist had ever compromised a single secret, but his PSB colleagues nevertheless opted to confirm the suspension.

Polenberg’s analysis is flawed to the extent that Smyth’s minority report undermines the proposition that Oppenheimer was railroaded by a committee influenced by evidence that was never tested in public. He has also neglected to provide the security and political context in which the PSB hearings were held, and instead sought to blame McCarthyism. His problem is that VENONA has transformed the historical landscape, but that has gone unremarked.