Transcripts For CSPAN3 Atomic Spies 20150103

Dont know if all of you have met him, dr. Vince houghton, he is the historian and curator of the museum. He holds a ph. D from the university of maryland where his Research Centered on u. S. Scientific and technological intelligence, specifically nuclear, in the Second World War and the cold war, which makes him ideally suited to deliver todays talk. He also got his masters degree focusing on the relationship between the u. S. And russia. So you may get some questions focusing on the current difficulties with russia. Hes taught extensively, including on the diplomatic history, cold war and history of sciences. He is a u. S. Army veteran, served in the balkans where he assisted in both civilian and military intelligence activities. So were just delighted to have you as our speaker, as our first speaker. So please help me welcome vince houghton. Thank you, peter. Thank all of you for coming here today. Getting a chance to talk about the atomic spies, about nuclear intelligence, this is my field, this is also my passion. I try to do everything i can to p 4q talk about this to anyone who wants to listen. So its nice to actually have people who are interested in this. It does look a little strange Walking Around d. C. Talking to myself about Nuclear Weapons on a daily basis, so it is always nice to have people who are here and interested. This is my first chance to speak to the smithsonian group. I came to the spy museum in march so i only know you by reputation. But the reputation is that you are, by far, the most educated and most intelligent audiences that we can possibly have here at the spy museum. Im sorry i dont want to come across like im pandering. Youre far too intelligent, good looking and well dressed to fall for any pandering. Have you lost weight . In all seriousness, this is my field. Nuclear intelligence was something that i fell in love with at a very early age. At 7 years old i saw a tv movie called the day after in the 1980s. I remember that. I really fell in love thats probably a weird word when talking about Nuclear Annihilation of the United States, but i fell in love with the intricacies of this weapons system that is the worst the world has ever seen, but at the same time might be primarily responsible for us not having a major war in 70 years. Just that dichotomy was something that really drew me to this field. Today were going to be focusing on the atomic spies who spied on] 8 the United States. Well start with a little background. In august of 1949, the United States was shocked to learn that the soviet union had detonated n3ù pr t hahp hc their first atomic bomb. They called it rds1, nicknamed it first lightning. Here in the United States, we called it joe1, little homage to joe stalin. The soviets bomb was detonated in kazakhstan. They did it there so no one would know about it. They actually warranted to keep this bomb secret. You would assume a big Public Relations coup. Their worry was when the United States found out the soviets had a bomb wed double or redouble our efforts to create the next generation of weapons system and create more bombs. Well, they were right. What the United States didnt know is the United States created a scientific Intelligence Platform to discover when the soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. We called this measurement and signature intelligence. It was a modified b29, the same type of bomber used to drop bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki. This was modified to take air samples around the world to try to find out if there are any fission biproducts in the air. 1 0 this discovered the bomb test days after it was done by picking up excess radiation, excess fission byproducts as it flew a racetrack pattern in the pacific ocean. Immediately the United States got this information. Secretary of defense Lewis Johnson didnt believe it at first. He couldnt come to grips with the fact the soviet union had developed the bomb long before anyone assumed they would do so. Truman also could not believe that the soviets were now a nuclear power. He very famously said, i couldnt understand how those asiatics were able to match what we had done so quickly. After 90 of u. S. Atomic physicists looked at the data brought back by this one flight, they concluded, without any real equivocation, yes, the soviet union had in fact detonated their first atomic bomb. So truman had no choice but to accept this and to announce to the American Public in september that the arms race had begun. Now congress did what it did best they rallied very gao quickly and started pointing fingers at everybody they could possible point fingers at. How could this possibly happen . How could we be so surprised that the soviet union had detonated a bomb long before we thought they were going to . How did they get it so quickly . The estimate the Intelligence Community had given them was 1953 as the most probable date for a soviet bomb. But the worst Case Scenario that the intelligence agencies had given the government was 1951. They were just too slow and too stupid to be able to get the bomb as quickly as they did. So new ideas, new hypotheses zmf were brought up, how did they possibly get this bomb rolling. The senate and house had a joint and Nuclear Energy committee 2kh3n brought together, and brought the cia in front of them and other witnesses. One thing was the intelligence was right, it was actually going to take them eight years to build a bomb. The fact is they started in 1941, so we werent really wrong. It did take them eight years. Now the fact that you didnt know when they started is a bit problematic if you want to say how good your intelligence was but this is something that made them feel a little bit better about themselves. They also argued that maybe they had better germans than they did. During the Second World War there was a huge policy which ill talk about a little bitu sn later that went and rounded up all the top german atomic physicists. You have a little bit of knowledge about this with operation paper clip and the space program. Well, the same thing was done with atomic physicists. We got all the good ones. The germans that were kind of secondrate, that were underlings were snatched by the soviets. But all of a sudden, well, maybe germans were better than ours. Nobody really bought this, but it made them feel a little bit better about them selves. Maybe thee had some germans we didnt know about. Well talk more about open Source Intelligence later on. These are open source resources the soviets could have used to find out information about the american bomb program. They also talk about the fact maybe the soviets used safety shortcuts. When we built the atomic bomb here in the United States, the Manhattan Project, out of 500,000 people working on the project, only two were killed during this time. This is exceptional for war time. Two people were killed every day doing building aircraft and tanks here in the United States. The fact that building an atomic bomb only killed two people meant two things. One, is that we were very good at what we were doing. And we were very lucky. The other one is that we actually had some very stringent Safety Standards that we imposed. Well, if the russians decided, because theyre russian they dont really care too much about human life to throw out these safety concerns, well, they could probably knock a couple years off this prod so congress was happy to hear that. Then of course, its possible they had smart scientists. We had dismissed them out of hand. Well talk a little bit more about our perception of soviet scientists but they everyone kind of chuckled to themselves thats not the reason the one they were able to latch on to was this idea of espionage. That the soviets were stupid, evil, but they were able to steal our ideas. They had nothing original on their own but they were able to come into the United States, deal with these commies giving secrets over. Today were going to focus on three major ideas, three major questions that are historically important for the atomic spies. One, who are the spies. What makes up their spy networks. What were their ideology, what was the reason that they were spying on the United States. Secondly, when did the United States discover the espionage effort and what did we do to try to stop it. Most of the American Public doesnt discover the espionage effort until late in the 1940s, and even into the 1950s with the rosenberg trial. When did the u. S. Government know it was going on . Finally, for my purposes, how much did it matter . It is one thing to say there were spies, it is one thing to say we were doing something about it, but how much of a difference did it make . This is the real historical question here. First two questions are relatively straightforward factual and informative questions. < this one is the real counterfactual, the whatif of history. Professional historians, 1lc academics like myself, we like to pretend we dont like these whatif questions, its above us, were the ivory tower, we v . q dont want to deal with these whatif questions. Were lying to you. We like them as much as anybody else. These are the kind of questions that academics sit around at 2 00 in the morning after having a little too much wine or Something Else and have these conversations like we all do. If i could have a time machine, if i could go back and punch out hitlers great great grandfather right before he met his great great grandmother, id be ugly to have hitler. This is the same basic idea. If the soviets didnt have espionage, would they have still gotten the bomb. If the soviets didnt have espionage, how quickly would they have gotten it . These are the kind of things we can have lots of debates about. Id love to talk to you a little bit about it afterwards question wise. Lets talk about the sources of atomic intelligence that the soviets were able to gather during this time period. First, volunteers, ideologues, these are the people who truly believed in the soviet system, that truly believed in the idea that communism was this new way of life that was going to take over capitalism in the long run. There is also open Source Intelligence. These are things widely publicized, whether publications actually put out by the u. S. uy government, or things like a course syllabus. The french were a key component. They get a bad wrap, sometimes kan rightly so, as cheese eating surrender monkeys. But they did have very brilliant scientists. The problem is their brilliant scientists were also communists. Finally, there was also targeted intelligence by officials. This is one of the least told stories of the atomic spy period. There were actually professionals who infiltrated the United States with the expression purpose of bringing back information about the american Atomic Bomb Program. Lets talk a little bit about the soviet espionage structure. These are actually professional organized infrastructure. At the very top was the nkvd but with some assistance from the gru. The nkvd is the predecessor it the kgb. Gru is soviet military intelligence. At the head of all of this was a man named laurenti beria. He was responsible for all the intelligence gathering for the soviet union. He was a horrible, horrible person. Well talk more about this in a second. But he was so good at infiltrating u. S. Atomic bomb program that stalin kept him around. You know any basics about soviet history, in the late 30s, early 40s right before world war ii, stalin essentially killed everybody. Took out his entire hierarchy. Anybody who could potentially be a threat to him in the future. Beria survived because of his ability to infiltrate the Atomic Bomb Program. Below him, we have others. There is a hierarchy here n developed by the soviet union from the resident here in the United States we call it the chief of station to those people directly responsible for running the atomic spies here in the United States. Work our way down to harry gold who was an american currier bringing messages from the atomic spies to the soviets. Finally the cpusa, the communist party of the United States, and their main person, steve nelson, who is responsible for establishing a very little known spy ring at colleges and universities in the United States. Lets break them down a little bit. At the top of the soviet hierarchy, beria. He is not a very nice person. Had he some very interesting tastes in young girls and boys. He really enjoyed torturing people. He wasnt somebody that ordered torture. He ordered it, then watched it and took a lot of real pleasure in it. Stalin did not like him very much. He was hated throughout the soviet system. But again he was so good at what he did that he was kept around. The interesting thing about beria is he was one of the pure architects of the red terror during this time period. Personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. He is, ironically, the last person who fell victim to the red terror. When Nikita Khrushchev took power and destalinized the soviet union, beria received karmic justice. The top soviet intelligence btwx person in the United States, not in washington, d. C. Actually stationed out of new york city, that was the main base for soviet intelligence during the war. Hierarchy continues with the senior case officer. This is the person who will be running the spies on a day to day basis. His real name was yaxsov, came to the United States under the pretense that he was the general counsel of the soviet union in new york city. Pretended he was a lawyer. This is really his cover for his activities as nkcbd senior case ju officer for this spy network. What makes him interesting and very important in this case is that his specialty was scientific and technological intelligence. You dont want to just send anybody if youre going to run an atomic spy ring. Atomic weapons are very complicated, especially in the 1940s when very few people understood what was going on with nuclear fission. You wanted somebody that m0 understood scientific and technological intelligence whichs made him the perfect person. Then alexander feklisov. He was the resident in the 1960s and where a lot of people may know his name is that he was the back channel for the cuban missile crisis. He was the man who Robert Kennedy and others spoke to to try to create this deal to trade the jupiter missiles in turkey for the missiles in cuba. His book is fascinating, called the man behind the rosenbergs. The title gives away everything. Theres not a lot of secrecy behind what the book is about. Really what this book does, it came out end of the cold war and really ended a lot of the debate about Julius Rosenberg. Well talk more about rosenberg in a second but there was always this left liberal debate was rosenberg scapegoated because he was jewish or was a liberal. This book ended a lot of that debate. Then youve got lower levels. Harry gold. Gold actually was a chemist by trade so he knew what he was looking for. He was somebody that made a lot of sense to run atomic spies. He was born to russianjewish immigrants. Never really gave up this russian side to him. Interestingly enough, he was a very successful chemist but he lost his job in the great depression. This is something that helped radicalize him. We talk about ideology and any time i talk to people who are 40 and below, they dont really underst nnjtq a uu n against their country and become a communist. Because communism for anyone that age was a dying institution that obviously doesnt work. But for those who grew up in the 1930s or who came of age during this time period and saw the great depression, the loss of jobs, the 20 to 25 unemployment and the idea of bread lines and the fact that people were going through such hardship, and then looked over at the propaganda coming out of the soviet union where everybody had a job, where everybody had a good life, where there were no class distinctions, where in some cases there were no religious or racial distinctions. Now this is a pipe dream. This is nonsense. But this is what was coming out of the soviet union. Ideolo0r y it is hard to explain but it is not hard to empathize with people who said this is the real wave of the future. Harry gold was one of these guys. When he lost his job in the great depression, this was one of the real stirs steps to led to his radicalization. He is a currier later on for arguably the most atomic spy. Steve nelson was the primary recruiter for a lot of universitybased professors who were giving information to the soviet union. Nelson was a naturalized citizen vlkp 1 o so he wasnt a natural u. S. Citizen to begin with. He had spent a lot of time in spain. He was an american volunteer that went and fought on the side of the republicans against the fascists during that time. Then moved to russia for several years, then returned to the United States in the early 1940s. Be forewarned, he was on our radar the minute he walked back into the country. He is not somebody that was able to sneak back in and get away with it. When he was here he was a member of the National Committee for the communist party of the United States and really the leader in california. He had no official title but he was really the guy who ran the california communist party. His specialty what he did during the war was direct activities at the university of california at berkeley which for those who went through the 60s, you know this became the hotbed of liberalism. This was certainly also the case in the 1940s. This was a targetrich environment for recruiting people into the communist party. He eventually would span out from california to recruit professors and grad students from many major universities. Chicago, Columbia University in new york, all focusing on people who were working on weapons design for the u. S. Government. Mostly nuclear but not always. Sometimes radar. Sometimes proximity fuses or things that could be stolen and used by the soviet union. Lets look at the recruits themselves. Ive broken the recruits down into three tiers. The top tier. These are the people that either are incredibly important when it comes to what information they provided the soviet union or the most well known, the most famous of the atomic spies. Alan nunn may is the first spy uncovered by western intelligence. Of course you have klaus fuchs. I have the next slide in front of me. The second tier doesnt mean they are less important, theyre just less well known. Mz a list here of not only scientists but also people like ethyl rosenberg who were somewhat controversial in whether or not they contributed to atomic spying. These are people who arent as well known but they are very important. Finally the third tier. Thats primarily steve nelsons ring. He created a ring of scientists that were able to provide bits and pieces of information to the soviets throughout the Second World War and the early cold war. None of these guys were individually responsible for the soviets getting a weapon, but they provided little bits and pieces throughout to give them this information. Now this acronym at the bottom is the federation of architects, engineers, chemists and technicians. Now lets talk about some of these guys individually. Alan nunn may is famous for being caught in many respects. He pled guilty and was sentenced by the british to ten years hard labor in 1946. He was caught because of a defector, a man who was a soviet clerk working out of the Ottawa Embassy in canada during the Second World War. That man came to canada and fell in love with the west like the real dangers that most of the soviets really feared is that when some of their people would get a taste of their freedom, that they would really embrace. Well, he embraced it. He was young, had a young wife and a young family. He liked the fact that you could go to movies any time you wanted to, you could walk around the country without being chased or followed and liked the fact that the canadian people really reached out to help the soviet union during the Second World War. We looked at the west and certainly the canadians they have this reputation for being the most polite people in the world. Even though they faced real hardships in canada, they did everything they could to give money, support and supplies to the soviet war effort. At the same time, he saw there was a real massive espionage effort against canada. This didnt sit right with him. To the soviet union in 1945 at the end of the war, he decided he wasnt going to go. His wife told him, if were going to leave, defect, lets have some actual ammunition. Grab everything you can. He grabbed every single piece of paper he saw lying around. Gave this information over to the canadians and part of this was this massive espionage effort directed at the american, canadian and british Atomic Bomb Program which outedalan nunn may who was arrested and pled guilty in 1946. May is really a topquality scientist. He studied with a man named james chadwick. Chadwick is famous. Acy n he discovered the neutrons. If you remember back to middle school science, the proton, electron and neutrons but we didnt know about the neutrons before chadwick. Nunn may studied under one of the top scientists of the 20th century. Nunn may like many of these other atomic scientists, there is a lot of controversy about whether or not he had a real fullfledged role in the Atomic Program. Well, in 2002 before he died he did a full confession. Called his children and said, i was spying. I was giving information, i gave a lot of information over. He spied for the gru, again soviet military intelligence, and he was responsible for giving samples of two isotopes of uranium. If you think back to middle school science, an isoto24a, type of element that has a keuo little bit different atomic number. Well, the atomic weight. A couple less neutrons or a couple more neutrons. In this case uranium had a lot of different isotopes. The ones that mattered were uranium 235 and to an extent uranium 233. He gave these samples over to the soviets and he also talked about the process of creating plutonium. Plutonium is not a naturally occurring element. If you look at a table, w hk plutonium comes after uranium. We thought uranium was the highest element on the table on earth. However, when you find uranium and put it through a process like a Nuclear Reactor, nunn may was able to provide the soviets with some Key Information about the manufacturing of plutonium. Then you have klaus fuchs. Fuchs is by far the most important of the soviet spies. He provided the soviets with the process called gaseous diffusion. E y its a naturally occurring element. But what we pull out of the ground you cant create a bomb out of it. This isotope cannot be used in a Nuclear Weapon so 99. 3 of 1,w uranium so i pull out a softball sized chunk of uranium. 99. 3 of that uranium is uranium 238, an isotope you cant use to make a bomb. 7 so about the size of a grain of race of that softball sized chunk is uranium 235. Thats what you can make a bomb out of. We talk about enriching uranium, talk about getting rid of uranium 238 and try to get out 12rn the uranium 235. A process that we found out worked really well for that was a process called gaseous diffusion. We came to that by trying dozens of different ways of refining uranium and it took us years to figure out the best way to do this. Well, fuchs provided the soviets with the answer to that question before it even began. Forget all the other ideas. Gaseous diffusion is the way to go. It cut years off their bomb program well, arguably. Well talk about that down the road. Beside that was a real integral part of the Manhattan Project. Fuchs was a group leader that was part of the broader process that create the atomic bomb. He only had one immediate boss. Q he was privy to all the ideas and conversations and plans for weapons improvements after the war. Something called boosted weapons where you go from the nagasaki bomb which was the equivalent of 20 kilo tons of tnt. To a few short years later you have boosted weapons have that of course the Hydrogen Bomb of the early 1950s where he starts talking about mega tons or millions of tons of tnt. Fuchs was in all these conversations. Fuchs was part of these conversations. All of them were leaked to the soviet union. Then you have greenglass. David greenglass gets a lot lf bad rap was he was the primary witness against the rosenbergs in the trial. Turns out he lied about a lot of things he was saying. He was a machinist at los alamos. It is one thing to actually make stuff. Thats one part of the process that mattered. You cant drop papers filled with equations on the germans or japanese and the war. Tic you actually have to drop a bomb. Actually make a physical product. So greenglass was part of this process. He actually helped develop the high explosive lens that was integral to the nagasaki bomb to directing the explosives inward. He also provided sketches and descriptions of not only the lens but also some of the dynamics of creating these Weapons Systems to the soviet union. He gave a list of personnel to the soviets that could potentially be recruited later on by soviet intelligence. Really what he comes down to l. N ai1e a rq omes down to she is the real supplement to fuchs. He, fuchs, was the one with the real ideas and providing the bomb whereas greenglass could provide the actual mechanics behind building these Weapons Systems. So together they provided the soviets with a lot of really Important Information. So we now actually have some of the greenglass sketches that he provided to the soviets during this time because of the end of the cold war and declassification of some of this. This first sketch is actually the sketch of the fat man boy, the plutonium bomb, they used implosion to create a Nuclear Chain reaction. In the explosive lenses are the things on the outside that instead of exploding, they imploded to create this Chain Reaction. This was an incredibly complicated process that greenglass was able to provide the soviets with this q y information. Then finally, most famous of all is Julius Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a true believer, an ideologue. He was someone that truly c believed in the idea that communism and the soviet system was the way of the future. Hes not somebody that kind of sort of believed. He was somebody that bought in 100 to the ideas coming out of qvbon the soviet union in the 1930s. Even before he was providing atomic information, providing military information to the soviet union, the most importantwbik c of these was the proximity fuse. The proximity fuse was a way to tell a weapons system, a missile or a bomb, to explode when it got close to something. Your missile didnt actually have to hit its target. It could get within a certain range, then would explode. He gave them this information when he was working even before the Manhattan Project when he was working at an Organization Called emerson radio, a corporation in new york city. This proximity fuse, interestingly enough, was used later on, a couple upgrades, a couple tweaks, to shoot down Francis Gary Powers u2 spy xq plane in the 60s. So this information comes from rosenberg. He also provides thousand of topsecret classified reports that the predecessor to nasa called naca, National Advisory committee on aeronautics. These are about aircraft plans, United States. Plan for that was given to the soviet union by Julius Rosenberg. Later of course, rosenberg was accused, and certainly we believe that he did so, to have recruited sympathetic individuals into nkb service. One of the spies was the one that provided all this naca no kr information to the soviet union. Lets jump to the obvious next step in this case. His wife, ethel. Ethel was part of what i considered the second tier of russian spies. Mainly because her role is really still up for debate. Julius, theres not much debate anymore. He was a fullfledged communist. Somebody that provided lots of hut information. Ethel, on the other hand, was tricky. There are questions if she was actually a spy. The reason she was convicted of this was David Greenglass said she typed up all the information for the spies that was eventually provided to the soviet union. So she knew about it, she aided and abetted this spy ring and by typing up all this information. Thats what greenglass said he lied about. So ethel probably didnt type up all this information. Was she a communist . Absolutely. She was as ideological as her husband. Was she involved in some way . Probably. Did she know about it . Almost certainly. Julius spied for the soviets forksauz so long that if ethel had no idea about it, im not sure how that could possibly be the case. They were true confidants with one another. They talked about everything. More than anything else, we assume that ethel knew about it. Does this mean that she should be executed for it . Well, thats certainly a debate thats still up for grabs. 5y then a very interesting scientist, ted hall. He was the youngest scientist at los alamos. Only 19 years old when he went there. But he was a fullfledged believer. Really got sucked into communism at an early age. His importance rivals fuchs. Not quite there but hes about as key component to the eventual design of the soviet bomb as you can get. He gave a detailed description of the fat man plutonium bomb to the soviet union. And also gave several processes for purifying plutonium that the their own. The interesting part about this is that the bomb that went off, d jy joe 1, the first soviet atomic bomb, was almost a mere image of the nagasaki fat man bomb. So halls information directly led to this design. He also gave them a lot of information about the little boy bomb which is the hiroshima bomb, the uraniumbased Nuclear Weapon, including what we call the Critical Mass. This is the amount of fissile material, the amount of uranium necessary to create a Chain Reaction. This is a calculation ro not only took the americans years to figure out, but actually is what derails the german Atomic Bomb Program. They just couldnt figure out the Critical Mass. They made some math errors and they thought the Critical Mass was going to be huge. J americans took some time to figure out what it was. Hall handed this over to the soviets. They didnt have to do a lot of the same calculation that it took the United States. Then like fuchs he provided [2xu information about the next generation of Nuclear Weapons, about boosted fission weapons, on then eventually about hydrogen weapons. Then there is bruno pontecorvo. He is someone that is a little more controversial as far as his role in the atomic bomb spy ring. His scientific bona fides are undoubtable. He studied under a famous italian scientist who later becomes a key component to the american bomb program. He could have actually 4 discovered fission. He didnt know. It would eventually be a german team. Instead of uranium thinking about breaking into two smaller things which is what fission is, they thought they built bigger stuff. They looked at the results, they discovered fission, made a mistake in their conclusions. Bruno was part of that team. This is a toplevel scientists. He worked with the british program during the Second World War. But the argument he made and 87 argument he made to the death was that he work on reactor programs, not weapons. So there is still some controversy about his role. Working on Nuclear Reactors ym still gives you a lot of the physics and theoretical information to help build Nuclear Weapons, but he still i hen claims he never gave them any military secrets but he did n xtn acknowledge he was a spy. This is his quote, when he was asked why did you do it. He didnt beat around the bush. The simple explanation is d1t this i was a cretan. The fact that i could be so stupid and many people close to me could have been quite so stupid. Then he trailed off. He just couldnt finish that sentence. He really understood the pipe dream of the soviet system but far, far too late to actually do anything about it. So these are the recruits. These are people that were targeted by soviet intelligence to provide information. But theres one last spy i want z4 to talk about. This is the professional. This is the individual that was sent specifically in the United States to do spying on the american Atomic Bomb Program. A man named george koval. Koval was born in iowa, but he went at a very early age to the soviet union. Sts both of his parents were russian natives and he was brought to the soviet union at an early he actually went to college in the soviet union before coming back to the United States. The great story is, he became an electrical engineer in the soviet union, did all the physics and Chemistry Research there, had a degree. Then was sent into the United States as somebody who had never gone to college before. When he went to college in the United States, everybodys like, this guy is a natural he learns everything so quickly you know, he was acing tests without studying. He was kind ever this guy is just like all these top scientists. Because he had already learned all this stuff already. He was noticed, for obvious reasons, by the u. S. Military and sent to be part of the < atomic bomb project. We know how important he was. As you can see on the slide. When this was finally declassified in russia in november 2007, putin himself named koval a hero of the Russian Federation, the highest possible award you can get. Xpaqn what made him so dangerous is that his role in the Manhattan Project wasnt as a scientist, it wasnt as a technician. It was as a Health Physics officer. Essentially what that was, was it was his job to make sure nobody was getting too much radiation and that nobody was actually getting a dangerous level of any kind of possible carcinogen or anything else that could possibly cause them problems. We talked about safety considerations. What this allowed him to do was have free access to everyone and everything. There was no laboratory he couldnt go into. There was no one he couldnt talk to. He could go from all the eqvcqnn different labs from los alamos to oak ridge where they were building the fissile material for the bomb, talk to everyone from oppenheimer on down. He could supply them with any information he could possibly want. The most Important Information was about the fat man bomb, again the bomb that was tested in 1949. J cz we realized at a very early b8 stage that using plutonium as a fissionable product for Nuclear Weapon was difficult to do because plutonium was so highly reactive. You actually needed something to slow down the Chain Reaction because if you didnt, youd have a fizzle. You would get a small nonatomic maybe a big bomb compared to other bombs but it ndw wouldnt be this big, massive atomic blast. You needed something to slow down the neutrons. When we discovered that we could cyuq use another substance, another element called polonium as an initiator. If i go back quickly to this drawing. That thing in the center of the fat man bomb was the polonium based initiator. When the bomb imploded, this sphere in the middle of the bomb slowed it down. This is some99buqra ju by accident. This is something that was one the most important discoveries during the process to build the atomic bomb. Koval gave it to the soviets. In many cases, koval was a good spy, but a lot of times it was pure luck. He just happened to find himself in the right place at the right time. He traveled from los alamos to oak ridge to washington. He just so happened to be where they were discussing this and was able to get the plans and bring them back to the soviet union. This is something well talk about later on and the impact of this thats too hard to understate. But again, well talk about that in a second. I want to move on now to our second stage of this conversation. That is, u. S. Counterintelligence. What did we know about this and what were we doing about this. Most of the American Public doesnt find out about this later on but when does the government discover what happens happening. In the beginning it was faced with significant handicaps that prevented them potentially finding out what was going on. How did we not see this coming, how did we not do anything to stop . The answer is we saw it coming and did everything we possibly could to try to stop it. But some things were standing in the way of doing something significant in this respect. First is war time mobilization. When the Second World War began, some of these hastily designed organizations like the oss, like the Manhattan Project, like the fact that the state department doubled and tripled in size in a span of a couple weeks, if not a couple days, was a real problem for security, for doing what you normally would need to do to make sure that the people that youre hiring on are not communist sympathizers or not spies. In some cases with the oss, for instance, and with some of the Manhattan Project scientists, there was only eightday background check to be brought on to Government Service. Now if any of you who have worked in the government know, an eightday background check now it is a yearandahalf in some cases for topsecret clearance. But you didnt have the time to do that. There were just so many people being brought flu Government Service at the beginning of the war that needed to have topsecret clearance and there were so few investigators that it just was done very haphazardly. The Manhattan Project itself grew to a number of 500,000 people employed by the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project begins in 1942. And ends in 1945. In three years it grows from zero to 500,000. There are not enough fbi agents to check everybodys background as much as we would like them to. So this is a real problem. The next one, very tongueincheek, scientists are pinkos. A lot scientists, certainly in the 30s and 40s tended to be leftleaning, intellectuals and liberals who if you wanted them to work in your government you had to overlook the fact they had somewhat leftist sympathies. If you wanted the best of the best, you had to embrace the fact that Robert Oppenheimer was very, very left wing and he was a fellow traveler as the terminology in the 1950s was used with a lot of communists. His exmistress was a fullfledged member of the communist party. His brother, frank, had been a member of the communist party. It is not just oppenheimer. It is a good number of top american scientists were left wing, were at least communist leaning. You had to overlook this if you were going to build a bomb. The next real handicap is science is universal. We dont own the physical theory behind atomic weapons. It was something that was developed in germany and europe. It was something that was understood by scientists from japan, from germany and russia, the United States and all over the place. It wasnt something we could keep secret. It wasnt something we could hide. It was an understood idea. The next major handicap, compartmentalization, the idea that one side didnt know what the other side was doing. The fbi didnt know what the Manhattan Project was doing. And vice versa except at the very highest levels. Fbi agents who were trying to hunt down spies could have bi uju q well with the counterintelligence guys, but they werent talking to each other. S3 x scientific intelligence is hard. This is something that is incredibly difficult. Most fbi agents dont have a scientific background. If you tell them to protect scientific secrets, some more important than others, they may not know what they should be looking for or they should be protecting. This is especially true in a whole other ball game for our spies that we sent out into germany and other places to look for what the German Program was doing. Q30u÷ having a scientist and a spy together was something we didnt have very many of. The spies were good at spying. The scientists were good at science. Not so much crossover. This is a real problem. And finally, i have been teasing you. Some of these open source ideas were really interesting. ÷9n one real handicap was the fact that when american scientists rallied to work at los alamos, m they stopped teaching at their universities across the country. It was very easy for any spy, german or soviet, to start uf, looking at course syllabi or schedules from princeton and columbia and berkeley and chicago and realize, fermi is not teaching his class anymore, sudden. None of these top scientists are teaching anywhermkg ÷ where are they . They must be somewhere else. It is not a far stretch to look at train schedules and to look at people who all of a sudden, why are all of these people going to new mexico in the middle of nowhere . That is open source. That is something you can find in the yellow pages. All of a suddejin . T enheimer isnt publishing anything anymore. Why arent there american scientists publishing stuff on Nuclear Physics anymore. These are things you dont need to steal secrets to find out and they cant be protected. Theyre common sense. Nothing that we can do about it. Inbn finally, the french problem. I alluded to this before. Primarily this is a very specific frenchman, a made named fredrick joliet curie. The last name curie rings a bell. He is the soninlaw of the famous marie curie and pierre curie. Their daughter irene was also a physicist. Married frederick. Together, they ran the most important lab in france. This lab was taken over by the germans when they invaded, but l cnc with the liberation of paris, curie wanted to reenergize his n1p lab and reach out to some of the french sciences that had left to go to canada to work for the british program and start working on the british programs. That was their Manhattan Project. The problem was, curie was a cardcarrying member of the communist party. Nq6yi thats thrown around a little bit, but he literally had a membership card. He was somebody that joined the communist party, was a fellow traveler, worked hand and foot to do everything he could. He was a very good physicist. And had access to a lot of information. The fbi couldnt stop him. He was in france. The american counterintelligence could do very little to stop him from sending information over to the soviet union. So how was ci set up during this time . You really have two different major organizations that were doing counterintelligence during this time period. One was the fbi. The fbi paid attention to this atomic spying during and after the war. They were the primary domestic counterintelligence wing. One of their main targets was an american federation, the federation of american scientists. That scientists began creating formal organizations to talk about Nuclear Weapons policy. There were organizations around the country. There is the atomic scientists of chicago. A the association of oak ridge scientists. Association of los alamos scientists. Eventually, they came together evo as a federation of atomic scientists and later the federation of american scientists. The fas is now an organization that is today doing some really good work not only on atomic weapons but general for. Policy. Turned into a bit of a think tank today. The fbi thought this was a frontf for all of the commie pinkos that were running around the United States. The fbi made a real focus on this organization. They gathered information. All the way to the fbi doing it. They surveilled scientists. After meetings. They took down license plates. They followed people from place to place. They had undercover fbi agents attend meetings themselves. They gathered literature. They used wiretaps to tap the meetings, to tap the homes of these scientists. Z f were talking about oppenheimer and others in this case. They used informants to spy on these agencies, everything from taxi drivers who overheard conversations in taxis to recruiting far right conservatives from universiti 7xqv to pretend that they were p leftwing to infiltrate these organizations. In all the time they spent doing this, they caught no one doing anything wrong. an they spent millions of taxpayer dollars and ran and chased their tails. What is up here is an interesting document from hoover himself to the special assistant to fdr Harry Hopkins, where he talked about the fact, and this is again from early in the war, that we had known from an early stage that the soviets had been spying on the United States. Then there is the second tier, 85 arguably the better tier, of the ci bureaucracy. This is the manhattan engineering district. c or the m. E. D. This is the fancy name for the Manhattan Project, had its own intelligence branch. Its own counterintelligence wing. The top of this was the head of the Manhattan Project itself, Brigadier General Leslie Groves who ran everything. If you want micromanaging, look he actually wrote theres part of my Dissertation Research is running into luckily a 1960s era Business Management textbook that was taught in bqb3,mm school and groves had a chapter in it. It was how to manage. The entire chapter was dont delegate anything. Do everything yourself. No one had ever really brought t t this this was gold for me as far as a researcher was concerned. He had two people he trusted to do this for him. One was Lieutenant Colonel john lansdale. Lansdale was his intelligence chief. On the manhc0 ajat u he would go on after the war to to become an anesthesiologist. You talk about research, he wrote a book that was never published. The only place you can find the manuscript of his book is in the association of anesthesiologists on their website. Again, gold i found. 56s finally, Lieutenant Colonel boris cash. He would do some Amazing Things in discovering what was q happening with the german Atomic Bomb Program, bt first he was one of the top 5 counterintelligence ageance for the Manhattan Project. This is an interesting quote from lanzslansdale from his unpublished book. Talking about the germans and japanese as an enemy. This isnt a case where the cold war brought about this animosity. This is a case where from the very beginning of the war, from 1942 or earlier, russia was regarded as an intelligence enemy, as somebody we needed to keep as far away from the Manhattan Project as we possibly could. What pash did under groves direction was to run the westerty Defense Command intelligence branch. J az in doing so, western meant he was in charge of california. He really targeted a lot of these programs run by steve nelson and others trying to infiltrate the american program. ath1; declassified, is counterintelligence,p7hd]i qq in this case, typed files about these different scientists that he was surveilling. And theyre declassified because . g,n i foia requested them and whined and moaned for so many years. Heres an example, youre not expected to read this stuff, just an idea to the extent to which pash was doing research on the left, his notes about frank oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimers brother, who he did a lot of Extensive Research all these things. Pash really focused on the scientists. Pash cleared Robert Oppenheimer for work on the Manhattan Project. Thats how much general groves trusted him. He looked at frank oppenheimer. Those who were suspected were put under surveillance. The one on the right is the surveillance chart for a man named leo solar. K l anyone heard his name before . He is famous for being the first person to warn the United States about the potential of an atomic bomb. i q you may have heard of the einstein letter. a einstein didnt write the einstein letter to fdr. Leo solar wrote the letter and signed it. Reason he didnt write it is because fdr, just like you, so he said, look, albert, they ru riends, please put your name on this so you get the einstein letter. Pash was researching and surveilling everybody, including robert and frank oppenheimer, leo solard. Across the board. So he followed these guys. They miked up their houses in places they frequented like bars and restaurants. iau÷ they went into the houses and changed the telephone cords so their phones, not only so they could tap the phones, so they could turn the phones themselves into microphones so they could listen to all the conversations throughout the house. All of this without warrant. No fisa court. This is about as far of an overreach as you could possibly get when it comes to, you know the kind of invasion of privacy that you could expect from it. These were investigations into 8zad scientists who were suspected leftists. These are two of the scientists i gave you on the third tier of nelsons group. I am blowing this up a little bit, so that you can see it a little biuafu ill read it in case you cant. This is about one of the scientists in nelsons rank. In the middle under remarks it says, subject has been an active member of the communist party, and while his Party Affiliations are not evident at present, he is still considered to be ywm qjjt s ommunist party leaders, and it is believed that he is still sympathetic with communist principles. For this reason subject is dangerous as an employee at the radiation laboratory. 1x this is the cal laboratory. Pash singlehandedly could keep people from getting jobs inside the Manhattan Project. Here you have three of the top o people on that thirdt scientists under steve nelsons command. I want to read you the recommendation for max friedman, who was one x uys providing information. It is recommended that subject be immediately separated from his employment on this project. oa drafted into the army, and then removed as soon as possible to an outpost where he is not in position to obtain additional ;jbi information about the project or transmit information that he already possesses. There is a second letter where what he means. Send him to siberia. Or send him anywhere but here. So thats really what pash is trying to do. There is actually a third wing. Counterintelligence diplomacy. An attempt to use agreements and 84x international processes to keep the soviets from getting this the first is the quebec agreement. o÷xpu this is between the United States, canada and Great Britain that says that we will not, either of us in this case, the United States and Great Britain, communicate any information about tube alloys, thats the british name for the Manhattan Project, to third parties except by mutual consent. Were saying were not going to u7c tell anybody else. The real reason for this is we didnt want the british to tell vn] the french anything about the Atomic Bomb Program. Then you get the combined Development Trust in june of 1944. This is the idea that the british and americans are going to do everything they can to buy up all of the uranium worldwide that we possibly could. We didnt understand at the time that uranium was everywhere, but we thought there was uranium in czechoc dq rptheres a lot in north korea, in the belgian congo. Lets make a deal and buy it all up so they wont have any for themselves. If we dug straight down, we would run into uranium. Its everywhere. Fonc we didnt really have that understanding. We were trying the best we could. Theres something a little bit controversial called the smythe report. This is named of a princeton physicist who did not work on the atomic bombs. General groves wanted someone to come into the project and write about it. That sounds kind of cow a 9qu q ya u omes to the idea of keeping things secret. The idea that groves had was that you could have somebody write about the science of the atomic bomb, we could publish this, and that would provide parameters by what you could say and what you couldnt say. X,un does that make sense . I know it doesnt. At first im like why would you tell anybody . The idea was that, at the point in 1945, groves sat down with the scientists and said, what is going to be widely understood information in the world of International Science in the next year . What can a first Year Graduate t student in physics figure out from the atomic bombs in the next year or so . Lets release that information lets put it out there so everyone knows at this point what they can and cannot say to journalists and foreign operatives. Or anything else. They said, we are going to release the smythe report and this is as much as you can talk about. When oppenheimer was interviewed after the war, all these atomic the war was over, they knew they already released in the smythe report. For groves this is a way to kind of contain the information. To say anything outside of this, youre instantly breaking the law. Finally the mcmahon act and this is really heavy handed. In june of 1946, after allen ps0sx nunn may was outed, it looked as though there was some pretty significant leaks in the britishowe Atomic Bomb Program. We didnt think there were any 92ft÷ leaks in our program, but the british were leaky. emy the mcmahon act was passed, named after Brian Mcmahon who was the head of the Atomic Energy commission in congress, saying that we basically were cutting the british off. Were saying thanks for helping us build the bomb during the war, but youre on your own. ÷e n we are no longer going to share information with you about atomic weapons. This is an attempt to plug the leaks from the british side and keep this information from getting out. Of course, the argument has been made in the last 60 years about, why didnt we do enough . Hopefully, ive shown you we did a significant amount. Im even going to argue today that we did too much. Im a leftwinger myself, but there was some significant counterintelligence overreach. During this time period. Zyt it actually had some detrimental effects for the american scientific community, and in essence the American National security community. There is a real backlash against nuclear theorists in the United States. Because of claude fuchs, allen nunn may, the rosenbergs and others, every theorist was painted with this brush of theyre leftists, theyre communists, theyre sympathizers. The argument made at the time 4 oppenheimer has said this to one of his subordinants, when alger hiss was outed, it didnt make lawyers everywhere look like theyre communist when one one or two nuclear theorists are outed, every i thererist was looked at as a security risk. It had real implications on american science. Most universities around the country instituted loyalty oaths for their professors and scientists. Even berkeley had a loyalty oath. That tells you a lot. It caused a real brain drain. It caused a real problem with retaining toplevel scientists in Government Service or nonGovernment Service. J rn by the spring of 1949, berkeley lost all of its theorists. Every single one of the resigned because they either refused to take the loyalty oath or because they were outed as being too left wing. This had a real problem, real impact on u. S. National security. If you want top scientists in the field of government, if y y,en want people building the next vv atomic bomb or the next Fighter Aircraft or the next spacecraft, you need scientists. Scientists were having a real problem getting clearance. From the u. S. Government. Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 scientists and engineers were backlogged waiting for clearance in the early 1950s every year. Thats 20,000 to 50,000, these are top people that we needed to beat the russians into space. Top people that we needed to develop the plane to rival the mig15. But they were waiting, they couldnt get clearance because of this overreach, and this fear of soviet spies everywhere. So im going to read you i was going to read you a longer one, but this is the money sentence at the very end, someone that was talking in front of a group of scientists during this time of real overreach and he ends a long talk when he talks about the fact that we need to have an environment of trust, an environment of openness in science with this. Its such an atmosphere talking about this atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Such an atmosphere is unamerican. The most unamerican thing we have to contend with today. It is a climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the Police States propaganda line. Not steve nelson. Its not some berkeley scientist, its president harry s. Truman. Si3nn speaking before a group of scientists in 1948. This gives you an indication about how far we have gone. This is before mccarthy. Im stil2 king 1948 and the problem that scientists ran into. Okay, so finally, and then ill wrap up and open up for questions. How much does the spying matter . How much did it make a difference . Would they still have gotten the bomb . Great quote the only secret about the atomic bomb was whether or not it would work and that question had been answered by hiroshima and nagasaki. The man doing the quote is glenn seaborg. Discoverer of plutonium, the Manhattan Project scientist, he nv chairman of the Atomic Energy commission, somebody who knows. There is a longer quote im not going to read all of, but this is from a man who was the chief scientist for what is called the] 8n American Mission to discover . pp what the german Atomic Bomb Program was doing he understood scientific intelligence. So this is after the bomb, right after the soviet bomb came out. And said, the recent revelations of early leaks of atomic ; j information to russia reflects a state of mind which should fill each of us with grave concern. 41s the general impression seems to be russia has a bomb, therefore someone must have given her our secrets. We skip down to the bottom. By all means let us understand clearly and admit openly that the russians constructed their bomb all by themselves without any help from us or from captured germans. Judqv it is very wrong to underestimate ones adversaries. The question is, did they get the bomb because of the spies . wi the answer to that is that probably not. They were going to get it anyway. Atomic science is not nationalistic. We talked about this before. The basic tenets were understood worldwide. The discovery of fission opened u ag n the field completely. Within minutes of hearing about the discovery of fission enrico fermi held up his hands in the United States and said this much uranium and poof its all gone. And within days after the discovery of fission robert hvy oppenheimer was drawing crude designs of bombs on his this is instantaneous understanding. This wasnt something that was going to be a secret for long. a]ln the argument that soviet pnfx scientists were idiots, as much as we tried to embrace that gn argument, theres a great story here i have to tell you. A man named herbert york, and york was a Second Generation Manhattan Project scientist. He was a very young guy in the Manhattan Project and then ;9h became one of the top people o working on the later project. York told a great story in his memoirs that come out later on. He says he was called in by the the soviets sneaking in a suitcasesized bomb into washington or new york and then starting world war iii by blowing up one of these cities with a secret bomb. So tnrf69 1m55a vju k s this a possibility . Could the soviets do this and york said absolutely not, theres no chance. And the general is like, how can you be so sure . York said tongueincheek, the soviets havent mastered the technology of the suitcase yet. o so thats the perception a lot of people had of soviet science. But soviet science was as good as everybody else. We just didnt want to believe they knew what they were doing. The same people that the american Manhattan Project scientists studied under in europe in the 1930s the soviet scientists studied under. This is the country of mendleyev. They have a long tradition of having topquality scientists. This is going to happen one way or another. Im actually going to skip this because it is really long. This is the first real talk about atomic bombs. Look at when it is. 3jfgh 1914. H. G. Wells wrote a book called the world set free where he talks about the atomic bombs being used in a war in the future. This wasnt an idea that we came up with. This is an idea that had been of the 20th century. So the idea that we were going to be the only ones to have the bomb and the soviets were too stupid, it would have happened one way or the other. Flen so the spies can be forgiven for that. Now the other question that matters, how much more quickly . How much faster would they have gotten the bomb . More quickly based on what . That is a key question involved in all of this. The american scientists had one vision of this. Academics like oppenheimer saying theyre going to get the bomb in a year or two. Dont underestimate these guys. Government scientists were giving a much broader prediction. Herbert york is giving you an idea. bbiahp hc the military people, Leslie Groves, were pre÷b very famously when asked when would the soviets get the bomb, said never. Pqyky3 that asiatic comment gives you an idea of what he was thinking. then the intelligence agencies, they had a different view. So they had some ill go through this quickly. The fircnw q 5q erq the soviets would get the bomb in 1946. Soviets would develop an atomic bomb sometime between 50 and 53. The next estimate was the joint Nuclear Energy intelligence committee, december 47 same prediction as before, by july 48, they acknowledge its impossible to determine when theyre going to get the bomb, bought maybe by 1950, most probable date, mid 1953. nt not a lot changes here. June 49 report, same as above. July 49 report, just a month before. The office of scientific intelligence said informatq cc now available substantiates the date already estimated in the 49, 48, 47 and 46 report, 0 earliest date mid 50s, most probably mid 53 but new information says not before mid 1951. My eaixf d report of september 1949, predicted a first soviet bomb in mid1953. This is 23 days after all right. oq,r so you can see how well the Intelligence Community was doing when it came to predicting this. Real quickly, the argument for important weve already gone through all this. Intelligence showed the soviets what path not to take. The mistakes we made they didnt have to make. The Russian Defense Ministry Later on, when koval was awarded 2007 hero of the Russian Federation said that the intelligence allowed the soviets to make the initiator prepare to the recipe provided by coval. 9 stalin, beria, soviet science, all these wanted american they were doing. Stalin said i dont believe what our scientistsqneataahr ee the west has done it first. Dun technical drawings are very important. The ones that greenglass b in this case, its not about buildqa xja aj its about building lots and lots of bombs. So the Technical Capability of building this stuff was not something you could provide with just drawings and information. Ijst most of the claims about how great the soviet intelligence was comes from retired kgb officers. So take that for what its worth. You just give the recipe, means they had to redo a lot of the experiments, investigate competing processes for separating uranium and plutonium and it still took longer for them to pull off than the Manhattan Project. This isnt primarily because of uranium and industrial capacity. It took them much longer to f refine uranium and much longer to build all of these apparatuses in this industrial background. We had to build cities for the Manhattan Project. Oak ridge tennessee was built from the ground up, not to mention los alamos which was just desert. That took time. The soviets needed to catch up with that industrial capacity. So arguments for, arguments against. I will end it there and take questions. I want to give you guys a chance i could talk forever but i dont want to do that. c im going to make steve go crazyxs wvc pq by taking the mike and moving around. So good luck. I dont like standing in one spot. Wait for the microphone to get to you. Laura right there. Thanks very much for the hnfu presentation. Not only do you know a lot aboutmt this stuff you structured it very, very well to help us. A couple of questions of detail. Should we believe David Greenglass when late in life he says he lied . ;gcn secondly, what was steve nelsons background before he became a naturalized american . Im dreading that youll say he was a brit. So we actually dont know a lot about steve nelson before he answer that question second. iigu he actually gave different stories for where he came from. we knowikz he was naturalized at one point. Again the documents, because he was a private citizen, that ze wasnt under surveillance before that, theres not a lot of research into his background. He wasnt a brit. 2vhu ahsj sr q y something russian background. There are arguments about was he latvian . Or was he one of the prebaltic. But he was from Eastern Europe or eurasia beforehand. To answer your first question, it is always tricky when youre dealing with deathbed confessions or later in life confessions but what makes greenglass perhaps believable was his motivation at the time for lying. He wanted to make sure his wife was not implicated in this. Pdl so pushing off and agreeing to testify against ruth im sorry ruth was his wife, againstq÷ ethel and Julius Rosenberg was his way of keeping the blame from being pushed onto his wife. So it is one of those kind of courtroom, get immunity for v telling a lie kind of things, 7z where it is more bkmyy1 er my mind that ethel probably was certainly knowledgeable, but a willing participant. She didnt know anything. ;u qc she really could have done nothing but type. And if typing gets you the death penalty, that is a pretty steep process even hoover, interestingly enough, j. Edgar hoover was gung ho behind lets c6jx is there any evidence that soviet participants with the d9sn research were giving information to the west about the progress of the soviet Atomic Program . Yes. a i . That is a great question. We get to go the other direction. I love that. Eventually there would be a book about that. [ its in the process. Yes, there are some. There are a lot of hints that come out of the soviet union that there is a process happening. There is an active offensive h intelligence operation to try to discover what is happening inside the soviet union. So there are people, we call it the scientific underground, passing information from scientist to scientist to scientist. That becomes really problematic. Its like the game of telephone. You whisper something in one persons ear and then it goes around the room because by the time it gets back to the United States its gone through 15 different iterations and all of y real or not. The real issue we run into at that time is its double sided. One is the american intelligence apparatus collapses after the war. With the collapse of the oss, the cia takes a long time to get going. The cia gets going, but intelligence gets left behind a little bit. 49[sn you dont have the office of scientific intelligence, which is the office created to do foreign intelligence towards the Atomic Program. Until the very beginning in 1949. 2t thats when the program is created. It takes some time to get their act together. By the time the russians had the bomb, you could see what they are putting out. Its not very good. The second problem is that there is no real impetus to have a strong scientific Intelligence Program for the soviets. Most americans think they are a bunch of idiots. Most am]l the soviets from the perspective that the scientists are stupid, that their industry is so backward that there is no way they could produce these kind of weapon systems. That it will take them years to e refine enough uranium. To make a bomb. The fact the soviet system itself is not designed for innovative science and innovative technology. H . 5 t hahp hc the idea of bush, who was the mr Second World War, wrote a book actually in 1949 talking about mh . ] ]a orld will always have better science than the totalitarian world. Basically said the nazis, the soviets, same basic idea, you just dont have the creativity to do high level stateoftheart science. So we had this perception that 01n they just couldnt do the stateoftheart. There really wasnt a lot of pressure behind american intelligence to find out whats happening. Inside the soviet union. And some actually historians have written about, incorrectly,k about that there was this real big program to figure out what they were doing. T 9 rg bits and pieces of documents from the archives, look, soandso was trying to find out what was happening. This person was hunting down uranium. a but it is kind oi that proves the rule in many respects. H we can find a couple of these examples that try to make it look like its a program. Theres no program. At the highest levels, nobody cared. Again, groves, was in charge of this 20 years. He didnt care about the scientists. He thought they were smart. He said they cant reproduce what i did. Groves was a proud man. 21;n he ; epprealized theqnrv u. S. Built three cities and spent 2 billion on the Manhattan Project in 1941. You can extrapolate that to hundreds of billions of dollars today. u about the cost of one f35. But lots and lots of money. 6 . 4tn dfcj the soviets just didnt have that infrastructure, or at least he thought they didnt have that infrastructure. So it was somewhat, nah, theyll eventually get it but well be ready for them when they do. Right here. Yeah. Last year, i read diana wests latest book on the new deal era,[qa the roosevelt times. She went into great detail about Harry Hopkins being a soviet agent of influence, and also she talked about somebody saying k z that, that Nuclear Materiel was shipped through montana by air to the soviets. Do you agree with that . Those t6t Harry Hopkins. They got 2. 5 pounds. nvnl 2. 2. They got one kilogram. The soviets requested tons of uranium, refined uranium. You had people within the administration hopkins being d5fj one of them, certainly henry la wallace being another the story of Henry Wallace is fascinating. He wasnt a communist himself all his friends were. And he was Vice President of the United States until he was replaced by harry truman. And all of his top aides were spying for the soviets. So if fdr had died with Henry Wallace as his Vice President the president of the United States would have been the greatest conduit to the soviet union you ever had. Thats tan gentle. The answer to the question is they asked for tons of enriched uranium. Of course the 7z ujauaq greed because diplomacy carried the day. But groves got in the middle of it. Groves went berserk, as you can f expect, went to george marshall. Groves was one person as a onestar general that could walk into George Marshalls office lntu screaming and throwing stuff and not get courtmartialed for it. He went into the office screaming bloody murder. Convinced marshall of the stupid idea. Then convinced stimson this is a really stupid idea. Groves got in the middle, slowed it down and eventually conceded d4 h< as a compromise to give them one kilogram of enriched uranium. 2. 2 pounds which you cant do a whole lot with. This is like 10 refined you couldnt even make a Nuclear Reactor out of this. You need about 80 , 90 refinement of uranium to make a bomb. So, yes, he was very much b ,n they were very much looking to please the soviets because they were allies, but there was no b n transfer of uranium that made a difference at this point. a noa n yeah, right back there with the glasses. And then directly next to you after that. And i saw you up here. I have a couple questions real quick. Could you say the germans were going about it the wrong way with this heavy water . Right. Was that absolutely the wronghpp y way to go in light of what the United States did . P e second question is, do you thinkka its true that the counterintelligence under Leslie Groves was actually investigating and spying the wrong people . Question first. Vmf yes and no. R as far as the wrong people. Pash very widely identified almost every member of steve nelsons spy chain. He got all the low hat 0 he fruit. He got all the lower tier people. The issue was pash, by the time bjngjlc it mattered, by 1943 when the american Atomic Bomb Program was in full swing, when you could have potentially stopped the clock, he doesnt come over ly until then, you could have qtzaaaaju t ash with all the experience of counterintelligence, the best of the best, had a new mission and it was to go over to europe and find out what the germans were doing. He became an offensive intelligence guy. See, you lost a lot of this xy Institutional Knowledge at this time. Im a big fan of boris pash and im biased in this regard but thats my answer to that question. The first part, heavy water is an interesting concept. The germans do not mess up because of heavy water. Heavy water is something we. Investigated as well. Heavy water is a water where f2yrn the Hydrogen Atom actually has its two protons. 5tbn its d2o. wb z its heavy hydrogen. Thats all we need to talk about. So its a process that you can potentially use to create 4 fissile material. We did it in this country and found it didnt work very well. Vp ery bad way to try to create the the the kind of nn necessary materiel for creating a Nuclear Chain reaction. We ended up using graphite in i n this country instead of heavy water because graphite had a much better job in absorbing neutrons which you need to do. O or you need to be able to absorb neutrons. O graphite was easier to use. L1 heavy water was much more difficult to develop. Heavy water in the german case was an easy target. X ux the german heavy water plant was a capture plant in norway. We sent the british sent two missions of saboteurs of special forces in to try to take out this heavy water plant. It did it temporarily. Groves wasnt very happy with that so groves bombed it into the stone age. And decided he wanted to make r0 sure that he wasnt going to tip off the germans that he was targeting a heavily water plant so he bombed several other cities around it, too, just for good measure to try to he was actually bombing. Over 1,000 planes went over. Thats how groves did things. What really derailed the german c0qz Atomic Bomb Program is a simple math mistake. Q2 thats one of those what ifs of lkx history that is fantastic. There were trying to figure out the Critical Mass for building an atomicj ÷ how much material did you need tw 6ld a bomb . 1 the head of the program turned to one of his top, top scientists, a guy who was, theoretical math beyond any of us, said figure it out, do the math. The guy took a couple of days did the math. This is math that took like a whole notebook for one equation. Did the whole thing and said we need way too much Critical Mass. We need instead of pounds we bzn need tens of pounds or even hundreds of pounds of mass. And hes like thats too much. Its impossible to do. It turns out he made a simple math mistake in the middle of the calculation. For us it would be the equivalent of not carrying a oneeoe or doing something very simple. For him, it was a differential equation. But for somebody at that level, nu7 it was a simple math mistake but no one checked it. Because everyone assumed this is the best guy we had for math. You could have given a first year grad student his equation and he would have said oh, theres a mistake here. The mistake ended up when highsenberg was called in front. K2uk of german command said can this be done . Maybe. Its going to take a lot of resources. Its going to be very difficult to do. And the german high command said unless you say defin jeut can do it for cheap were not 2iahp hc going to do it. We need to build bombs, we need to build tanks, submarines, we dont have the money to do both, so since you say maybe and its going to take a lot of money the plan is to just kind of do laboratory research. At the same time the americans were ramping up the Manhattan Project in 1942 the germans were ending their real Serious Research into an atomic bomb. ┌ and so a lot of what happens after that, like the bombing of the heavy water plant, was overkill. It was groves flexing his muscles to make sure. We didnt know that yet. End of 1944. We a d2uju huj the nazis with a bomb is the ultimate terror at this time. The gentleman right next to yeah. Like you, i run around the city talking about different topics. But what hit me when you mentioned ethel ,0 urosenberg was the similarities between theyfnx execution of e strxthel rosenberg and marry surat, she may not have been involved but she knew about it. Really what got her was the Political Climate of the time. Exactly. How much of what happened applied to what happened to ethel rosingberg . Theres no question. I think, if you look at the ybkt spying since then, if you look at some of the spies the atomic bomb is about as important as it gets. But there have been spies we have captured since then. Robert hansen, aldrich ames, john walker, who arguely had a gabj5e iw larger impact on forget the atomic bomb, had a larger impact om on u. S. Foreign policy and they 9s1n÷w w6 q uj qv idnt get were not executing people anymore for even the most heinous of espionage crimes. Xo9n ethel didnt do anything. Even if she did type stuff up, she typed stuff up. She wasnt stealing secrets, she wasnt passing stuff on to the soviet union. So theres no way, in my opinion, to ghi[f uqaj without saying that its with absolutely was a blood lust based on the political environment of the time. The mccarthyism is really coming into full swing. The idea that it looked like the United States was losing the cold war. At this time period. If you look at the progression of events from 1948 on, you have the berlin blockades, the soviet bomb, losing china, the korean i2s r t hahp hc war, you know, 1953, in 1954 the soviets get the Hydrogen Bomb. It looks like were going backwards. It looks like were losing the war so within this hysteria, within the red scare you get all of a sudden these are the guys that gave them the bomb. I mean, its if ethel wasnt executed she may have been strung up in the town square. Thats how much animosity was t against this. And if you look at the polling sz from the time period, the le majority of americans wanted her taken out. Even if they had they understood that there was still was there any espionage activity in the hanferred Engineering Works . There was an attempt. Hanford was difficult because the process there was somethin1b quite understand. Hanford was primarily producing plutonium, and most people at the very beginning did not know or what it did. An american discovers it. It was the discovery during the Manhattan Project. It was accidental. In many respects. So hanford was a target later in7zt the war when people said plutonium might be an issue. When ted hall and fuchs were able to pass some secrets, this plutonium thing is something you might want to Pay Attention to. So there was, hanford especially from the northern californian spies. Steve nelsons group. Steve nelsons group had been outed by boris pash so we knew exactly what to look for and we were able to keep them out of 2 e r t hahp hc hanford. They were far more successful at oak ridge and los alamos, but these are higherlevel spies we werent expectq x hanford tended to be more of an industrial plant. Pa it was not a lot of innovative t vn research happening there. Once you figured out how to do it at los al motion and refined it at oak ridge then it finally went to hanford as a finished product to many extents. So the Real Research wasnt being done there. Thats why you didnt have a lot of the scientists being sent to hanford. Does that make sense . The microphone right there. The last one. The last question. Make it a good one. Udx getting back to the germans and the atomic bomb, in baseball lore there is a story about mo byrd, who was a mediocre catcher, but a terribly brilliant person. Right. He knew seven languages and couldnt hit in any of them. Twelve. Is it true that he was recruited by the oss to go to the meetings in switzerland . Lg if youre hysenberg, and byrd was to take out his revolver and shoot him. Lpf is that a true story . It is a true story. So byrd is the one we had at the7z spy museum yesterday nicolas n xf÷ davidov to wrote the book the catcher was a spy. He was here. He talked about it. Its the 20th anniversary of that book. Made him feel a little older than he wanted to. o x, yes, it is absolutely true. D;q p÷ so mo byrd so heisenberg was somebody we were terrified was going to be integral in building heisenberg takes Quantum Mechanics, which is the other real major physics movement of the 20th century, the relatively theory which is einsteins movement, and then quantum b c mechanics which wasnt invented by heisenberg, he was the one who made it work. n he made Quantum Mechanics make sense. He won a nobel prize andet, createder the uncertainty principle which is arguably the most important principle in qu he is as good a scientist or perhaps better than the einsteins of the world, than the oppenheimers and fermis of the world. E. 3 he was the head of the german Atomic Bomb Program. What we found out through the scientific underground is he was going to get a talk in zurich, switzerland. This is on a neutral country during the war. Zurich was a neutral city where everyone kind of went to talk to each other and deal with people from other countries. We found out about this and byrd was sent in. Now he was sent in for several reasons. One is that he spoke very many languages and did it very well. The other was that when he was earlier put on the American Mission to determine what the germans were doing program, as a member of the oss, he realized he needed to know a little bit about this whole 3hmn atomic bomb thing, so he grabbed all thera rauptum theory books and read them on a flight from rome to the United States. 1 . D then about 20 hours he learned quantum theory. We talk about being brilliant. And so he attended this lecture and the lecture was a little bit over his head still it was about materic mechanics which is what x n heisenberg wanted to know. He followed along a little bit, but yes, if any time during this talk heisenberg indicated that the germans working on the bomb program he was instructed to stand up, pull out his pistol and shoot heisenberg in the head. The story is better than that. Hes inside the theater and hes waiting for the speech to begin and in front of him walked the 9 entire german top scientists. One of the top guys named in the einstein ma< u nd some0le of the other top germans sit directly in front of him, in the row in front of mo byrd. Not only could he shoot. O7u heisenberg he could have gone down the line and shot all the top german scientists and taken them out. At the talk itself theres nothing that indicates that heisenberg is working on the bomb program so byrd says im not sure yet. Hes invited to the after party. So this after party one of our top agents in europe who organized all this, and so burgh is there talking to these top ]o n german scientists, talking to heisenberg. Tcn the whole time he doesnt know hes dealing with an american agent. A7azn bergs german oaot spectacular and it was good enough and p2tp were drinking enough that no one knew he was an american. Still got nothing from it. Berg arranged it to when heisenberg left berg left at the same time the two of them walked through the streets of zurich together back to their hotels. Chatting. About topics of the x Nuclear Physics. Other things. Heisenberg having no idea hes an american, no idea hes a lqb4 jewish american, no idea he has a pistol in his pocket waiting a to kill him and by the time the night is over berg is convinced theyre not working on the bomb program. Heisenberg talks about germany qn lostn8 war, theres no hope. I cant wait to start working on real science again theres nothing here. 0bn a . Sasqas him live, they heisenberg doesnt know he was dealing with an american agent until decades later when finally 8 the mission is declassified. You dont realize how close to death he was. 0 yes, its very much right out of a movie, but its absolutely true. 4w 8kzngn so i by the way before you leave since davidov was here yesterday he signed a lot of copies of the book the catcher is a spy which are in the book bxdu store right now if youre ju interested in the signed and learning more about the guy, he wrote the story. Thank you for being here, guys. I really enjoyed it. Kr9ud great presentation. Great way to start. Youve been watching American History tv on cspan3 bg and we want to hear from you. Follow us on connect with us on facebook at facebook. Com cspan history where you can leave comments. And check out upcoming programs on our website, cspan. Org history. Every saturday at 6 00 and 10 00hs. Tv p. M. On American History tv, its the civil war. Bringing you to the battlefields, hearing from scholars and watching reenactments with the latest forms on historical subjects. 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