“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]
I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.
Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you.
She sent me a screenshot of pages from Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel’s magisterial The Venona Secrets, which I then found in my copy of the book.[2] Venona refers to a series of 1940s-era Soviet cables, which the US intercepted, decrypted, and selectively made available to researchers.
The evidence is clear [Romerstein and Breindel write] that the NKVD [Soviet interior ministry] had contact with Oppenheimer and that the nuclear scientist and his wife were surrounded by people with Soviet intelligence connections. But since this was only circumstantial evidence, it did not prove that Oppenheimer provided secret information to the Soviets.[3] (274)
And that’s where most people, it seems, leave the matter. Not proven. Innocent until proven guilty. Just enough “there” there to make for a juicy story (and blockbuster movie), but “no receipts,” to coin a cliché.
But there are receipts.
The direct evidence was given by Pavel Sudoplatov, a Moscow-based overseer of Soviet atom bomb espionage, who claimed in his 1994 book, Special Tasks, that Oppenheimer supplied the Soviets with classified reports on atom bomb development. He also said that some information came through the wife of the NKVD Rezident in the United States, Zarubina, who traveled frequently to California and was in direct contact with Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty.[4]
The American intelligentsia greeted Sudoplatov’s claims about Oppenheimer with the breathless contempt their ideological heirs reserve for Trump’s claims (about anything). Romerstein and Breindel continue:
The old KGB operative Sudoplatov might possibly have lied to his coauthors, Jerry and Leona Schecter, who were experienced journalists, but the Schecters found documentary evidence to back his story. Sudoplatov had been jailed in 1953 by the Soviet government because of his close association with the then-discredited Lavrenti Beria. In 1968 he was released and tried in succeeding years to get a Communist Party hearing to rehabilitate him and restore him to the good graces of the Soviet leadership. In 1982, for example, he sent an appeal to Yuri Andropov and the Politburo outlining his career and asking for rehabilitation. In this secret document, Sudoplatov boasted that he had “rendered considerable help to our scientists by giving them the latest materials on atom bomb research, obtained from such sources as the famous nuclear physicists R. Oppenheimer, E. Fermi, K. Fuchs, and others.” It would have made no sense for Sudoplatov to lie to Andropov, the former head of the KGB and dictator of the Soviet Union, who would have easily found him out.[5]
This testimony provided what the cables could not, namely, the certainty “that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union” which altered the trajectory of the post-war world.
That does not mean that the gatekeepers of acceptable public discourse rolled over and played dead. When in 1995 former Defense Secretary Les Aspin re-opened the issue, FBI Director Louis Freeh denied that the Bureau is “in possession of any credible evidence that would suggest that” those distinguished physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer,
engaged in any espionage activity on behalf of any foreign power to include that involving atomic bomb secrets. Indeed, the FBI [Freeh continued] has classified information available that argues against the conclusions reached by the author of Special Tasks.
That is, reached by Sudoplatov. At a press conference, Jerry Schecter challenged Aspin about his subscription to Freeh’s opinion, asking Aspin if the release of Venona would support it. Aspin said it would, but also that it was too sensitive to be released.
Senator Pat Moynihan got it released less than a year later.
According Romerstein and Breindel, it was the KGB’s turn to go into denial mode, but they were contradicted by retirees who leaked to the Russian press information supportive of Sudoplatov’s testimony.[6]
A 1996 Pravda article, based on Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (in which Vladimir Putin had served the Soviet state from 1975 to 1991, rising to the rank of colonel) reported that “documents obtained from Oppenheimer and other important Western scientists are still in the secret Soviet archives.”[7] The authors then provide a substantial paragraph from that article:
It is no secret that first-hand information on [a] nuclear reaction experiment performed in 1942 by the Italian physicist E. Fermi in Chicago was obtained through scientists close to Oppenheimer. The source of this information was a former staff member of Comintern, G. Kheifitz, our Rezident in California and a former secretary to N. Krupskaya [Lenin’s wife]. He was the one who informed Moscow of the fact that the development of the nuclear bomb is a practical reality. by this time, Kheifitz had established contact with Oppenheimer and his circle. In fact, the Oppenheimer family, in particular his brother, had links with the the illegal Communist Party of the U.S. on the West Coast. One of the locations for illegal meetings and contacts was the house of the socialite Madam Bransten in San Francisco. It is precisely here that Oppenheimer and Kheifitz met. For our intelligence, people who were sympathetic to Communist ideas were extremely valuable for establishing contacts. . . . Madam Bransten’s salon lasted from 1936 to 1942. The Soviets supported it. Kheifitz helped transfer the funds for its financing.[8]
The Romerstein and Breindel volume was published in 2000, so the
evidence it presents was available to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin when they composed American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which came out five years later. They apparently chose not to avail themselves of it.
Neither did Christopher Nolan when he wrote Oppenheimer’s screenplay on the basis of Bird and Sherwin’s narrative. The movie leaves millions with the cinematic impression (the only one most people will form about any historical matter) that evidence of Oppie being not just a pinko, but also a spy, even a traitor, is inconclusive. Why ruin a good flick with the suggestion that Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the right track, and that its sympathetic protagonist who helped end the war with Japan supplied Stalin with some of the contents of those suitcases?
Notes
[1] Steve Gutterman, “Putin praises Cold War moles for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets,” Reuters, February 22, 2012.
[2] Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, Regnery, 2000, xvi + 608pp. What follows quotes from Chapter 8: Atomic Espionage—California Phase, 255-281.
[3] Venona Secrets, 274.
[4] Venona Secrets, 274.
[5] Venona Secrets, 275.
[6] Venona Secrets, 274-275.
[7] Venona Secrets, 277.
[8] Venona Secrets, 277. The Pravda article is dated April 26, 1996. “Socialite Madam Bransten” is Louise Rosenberg Bransten Berman. See also Hugh E. Welles, “The Red-Handed Heiress,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 17, 1948, 152.