Posted on 03/10/2024 4:32:45 PM PDT by L.A.Justice
To be a communist party member or unenrolled supporter in that era means that one was willing to be a spy. I am hard put to imagine that Oppenheimer never volunteered nor was ever called upon to spy for the Soviets.
I have not read enough on Oppenheimer to be confident of an opinion. The movie is said to be a reasonably accurate adaptation of the source material, American Prometheus, which I have not read. The movie does show Oppenheimer being approached, more than once, but suggests that he deflected the approaches — while maintaining his ties to the people who had approached him and lying about the particulars later to the FBI.
At the very least, he was monumentally indifferent to security concerns, partly due to personal arrogance and partly because he was a man of the left, comfortable swimming in a red sea. To Oppenheimer, Hitler’s anti-semitism put Germany clearly in the enemy camp. I don’t know that he ever saw Stalin, the USSR, and communism as enemies — which was the default fellow traveler position. The anti-communist liberals of that era were honorable people who despised both Hitler and Stalin. But the “no enemies to the left” types tended to turn a blind eye to communism, and they provided useful cover for the spies and agents of influence.
Oppenheimer's lack of candor with the FBI and Army counter intelligence is deeply troubling and an indication of conflicted and unreliable loyalty. I believe that his security clearance was revoked for good cause.
I agree.
The movie doesn’t handle all this as well as it might have, but Leslie Groves’/Matt Damon’s remark towards the end is important. He is asked by the review board deciding on Oppenheimer’s clearance whether, in retrospect, he thinks Oppenheimer should have gotten a security clearance in the first place. He answers that — in retrospect — he wouldn’t have cleared “any of them,” meaning that the whole project was so riddled with security risks that in anything other than an extreme wartime crisis situation, a LOT of people shouldn’t have been cleared.
Too much of this is left in the shadows in the movie, and in the histories of the period, which tend to focus too narrowly on the Oppenheimer case (and sometimes Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass). It would be interesting to know, for example, how many people were considered for the Manhattan Project and refused a clearance. That would put Oppenheimer’s case in better context.
My open question has for years been David Greenglass. How the heck did he get assigned to Los Alamos, given that Julius Rosenberg was already running a significant Soviet industrial espionage ring, and given that Greenglass’ personal history was also highly problematic? I’ve always wondered if Greenglass was placed, and if so, by whom. Klaus Fuchs at least had scientific expertise that could plausibly have led investigators to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Greenglass was a machinist — a highly skilled one, I’m sure, but still ... — and his background, along with his sister and BIL’s, should have triggered a closer look. Were security really that sloppy, or was Greenglass placed?
As for Manhattan Project security, the need for physics and math talent was so great that a lot of people were recruited and waved in in spite of security issues. The intense security that surrounded the project was thought to be a way to hedge against the ensuing risks.
There is reason to suspect that FDR's aide Harry Hopkins was a Soviet spy and sent A-bomb secrets and materials directly to the Soviets. Washington had numerous Soviet spy rings, with many of them escaping detection and prosecution. Most historians seem disinclined to pursue such troubling issues for fear of what might be found.
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