museum andtional spy smithsonian associates cohosted this 90 minute event. >> we are delighted to have our own historian. dr. vince houghton. he is the historian and curator of the museum. he holds a phd in military history from the university of maryland, where his research centered on u.s. scientific and technological intelligence in the second world war and the cold war. it makes them ideally suited to deliver today's talk. he also got his masters degree focusing on the relationship .etween the u.s. and russia you may get some questions focusing on our current difficulties with russia. on thetalked extensively history of u.s. intelligence, diplomatic history, the cold war . he is a u.s. army veteran, serving in the balkans where he assisted in civilian and military intelligence activities. we are delighted to have you as our speaker. please help me welcome vince houghton. [applause] >> thank you, peter. thank you for coming here today. any chance to talk about the atomic spies, nuclear intelligence, this is my field and this is also my passion. i try to do everything i can to talk about this to anyone who wants to listen. it is nice to have people interested in this. it is nice to have people 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 i reputation. you're by far the most educated and the most intelligent audience that we can possibly have your at the spy museum. i do not want to come across what i am pandering. you're far too intelligent, good-looking, well-dressed. have you lost weight? .his is my field nuclear intelligence was something i fell in love with at a very early age. at seven years old, i saw a tv movie called the day after and i remember that. i fell in love -- probably a weird word -- i fell in love with the intricacies of this weapon system that is the worst the world has ever seen him but might be responsible for us not having a major war in seven years. the dichotomy was something that -- was something that drew me to this field. we'll will be focusing on the atomic spies who spied on the united states. august 1949, the united states was shocked to learn that the soviet union had detonated their first atomic bomb. they called it already s 1 -- rds1. detonateds bomb was -- they want to keep this bomb secret. their worry was that the united states found out the soviets had a bomb, we would double or redouble our efforts to create the next generation weapon systems. they were right. what they did not know was that the united states had created a scientific intelligence platform to discover when the soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. 29th -- modified the b29. this was modified to take air samples around the world. this was called afoat-1. bombs byovered the picking up excess radiation as it flew a racetrack pattern in the pacific ocean. the united states got this information. the secretary of defense did not believe it at first. he did not come to grips that the soviet union had developed a bomb long before anyone assumed they would do so. truman also did not believe the soviets were a nuclear power. after 95% of u.s. atomic physicists looked at the data brought back by this one flight, a concluded without any real equivocation, yes, the soviet union had detonated their first atomic bomb. truman had no choice but to accept this and to announce to the american public that the arms race had begun. congress did what it did best. they rallied very quickly and started pointing fingers. how could this possibly happen? how did they get it so quickly? the estimate was 1953 as the most probable date for soviet bomb. was 1951. scenario we were too slow and too stupid. hypotheses, how do they possibly at this bomb? the senate and the house had a joint nuclear energy committee brought together. it brought in the head of the cia and they started to brainstorm possibilities. they started earlier than we thought. it was going to take them about eight years to build a bomb. they started in 1941. the fact that you did not know when they started is a bit problematic. this is something that made them feel a little bit better. they also argue that maybe they did.etter germans than we you have a little bit of knowledge about this with operation paperclip. the same thing was done with atomic physicists. we got all the good ones. the germans that were second rate, underlings, were snatched by the soviets. maybe the germans were better than ours. no one really bought this but they felt a little better about themselves. intelligence -- these are publicly available resources the soviets could have used to find out information about the american bomb program. maybe the soviets used safety shortcuts. we build the atomic bomb, the as of theproject, 500,000 people working on the project, only two were killed. two people were killed every day andding aircraft and tanks united states. the fact the building an atomic bomb only killed two people meant that we were very good at what we were doing. if the russians decided to throw out the safety concerns, they could knock a couple of years off this program. congress was happy to hear that. it is possible they have smart scientists and we missed them. the one they were able to latch onto was this idea of espionage. the soviets were stupid and evil and they were able to steal our ideas. got the bomb.ey that will be the premise of our conversation today. we will be focusing on three major ideas, three major questions. who are the spies? what makes up their networks? what was their ideology? when did the united states discover the espionage effort? most of the american public does not discover the espionage effort until late 1940's with the rosenberg trial. we did the u.s. government know what was going on? ?ow much should a matter it is one thing to say there were spies. how much of a difference did it make? the first two questions are relatively straightforward. what if of the real history. we like to pretend we don't like these what if questions. we are the ivory tower. we are lying to you. these are the kind of questions that academics sit around at 2:00 in the morning after having too much wine and how these conversations. if i could have a time machine, if i could punch out hitler's great -- great grandfather. the could go back and stop jfk assassination met with the beatles still be together -- assassination, with the beatles still be together? these the kind of things we get lots of debates about. the sources oft atomic intelligence. the people, the rosenbergs, the people who truly believe in the soviet system. they believe in the idea that communism was this new way of life that would take over capitalism. there is also open source intelligence. these are things that are widely publicized. collegeyllabi, university schedules. then there are foreign sources of intelligence. the french were a key component. they get a bad rap as cheese eating surrender monkeys. but they did have some very brilliant scientists. they were also communists. espionageelligence by professionals. this is one of the least told stories. there were professionals who infiltrated the united states with the express purpose of bringing back information. let's talk about the espionage infrastructure. these are not one-off lone wolf spies. at the very top was the nkvd with some assistance from the gru. at the head of all of this, it a man named beria. he was stalin's intelligence chief. he was a horrible, horrible person. infiltrating, at keptn cap him around -- him around. eventually killed everybody. he took out his entire hierarchy. beria survived because of his ability to infiltrate the u.s. of atomic bomb program. you can see that there is a hierarchy developed at the soviet union. from the resident here in the united states to those people directly responsible. we work her way down to mary gold, an american courier -- to career.ld, an american the communist party of the united states and their main person steve nelson, responsible for establishing a little-known spy ring at colleges and universities. let's break them down. at the top is beria. he is not a very nice person. he has some very interesting case in young girls and boys. he really enjoyed torturing people. stalin did not like him very much. he was hated throughout the soviet system, that he was so good at what he did, he was kept around. he was one of the pure architects of the red terror. personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. he is the last person who filled the tub to the red terror -- fell victim to the red terror. waslast summary execution beria. a nice little karmic justice. and then you have the soviet intelligence resident. we call this the chief of station. stationed out of new york city. that was the main base for soviet intelligence during the war. with the continues senior case officer. the person who would be running the spies on a day-to-day basis. -- he came to the united states under the pretense that he was the general counsel of the soviet union in new york city. this was really his cover for his activities. ist makes them interesting his specialty was scientific and technological intelligence. you just don't want to spend -- send anybody. atomic weapons are very complicated. very few people understood what was going on with nuclear fission. he was the perfect person for this. the directu have handler of julius rosenberg and his spy ring. he was the resident in the 1960's. he was the back channel for the cuban missile crisis. he was the man robert kennedy spoke to to create this deal. fascinating, the man behind the rosenbergs. he yelled to resolve the cuban missile -- the title gives away everything. not a lot of secrecy about what the book is about. this book came out at the end of the cold war and a lot of the debate about julius rosenberg. there was always this liberal debate about was rosenberg scapegoated because he was jewish or liberal? this book ended a lot of that debate. then you have lower levels, harry gold. gold was a chemist by trade. he was somebody that made a lot of sense to run atomic spies. he was born of russian jewish immigrants. interestingly enough, he was a very successful chemist, he lost his job in the great depression. this was something that helped radicalize them. any time i talk to people who are 40 and below, they don't really understand how people could turn against their country and become a communist. communism was a dying institution that obviously does not work. for those who grew up in the 1930's and saw the great depression and the idea of bread lines and the fact that people were going through such hardship and looked over at the propaganda coming out of the soviet union were everybody had a job and a good life, where there were no class a stations. -- class distinctions. this is what was coming out of the soviet union. .t is hard to explain was one of these guys. he lost his job in the great depression and this was a first step that led to his radicalization. he is a courier later on. he also worked with julius rosenberg. steve nelson is one of the most unknown of the atomic spy ring leaders. he was the primary recruiter for a lot of the university-based professors who were giving information. nelson was a nationalized citizen. he spent a lot of time in spain. he was the political commissar for the abraham lincoln brigade. moved to russia for several years and return to the united states in the early 1940's. he was on her radar the minute he worked -- he was on our radar the minute he walked back into our country. when he was here, he was a party.of the national communist california party. his specialty was directing activities at the university of california at berkeley, which for those who went through the 1960's, this became a hotbed of liberalism. this was also the case in 1940's. he would spin out from california to recruit professors and grad students from many major universities. university,umbia all focusing on people who were working on weapons design for the u.s. government. mostly nuclear, but not always. let's take a look at the recruits themselves. i've broken them down into three tiers. these are the people that either are incredibly important when it comes to what information they provided or the most well-known. may, he is the first spy uncovered by western intelligence. klaus fuchs. the second tier does not mean they are less important. they are less well known. you have a list of scientists and people like apple rosenberg -- ethel rosenberg, somewhat controversial. these are people that are not as well-known, but are very important. primarilytier is steve nelson's ring. he created a ring of scientists. guys wereese individually responsible for the soviets getting a weapon, but they provided little bits and pieces throughout to give them this information. the acronym at the bottom is the federation of architects chemists and technicians. it was a labor union that was prime recruiting ground for communists. let's talk about some of these guys individually. alan nunn may is famous for being caught. he pled guilty and he was 10 years hard labor in 1946. he was caught because of a defect or, working out of the ottawa embassy in 10 years hardn 1946. he was caught because of a defect canada. he came to canada and fell in love with the last. he was young, he had a young wife and a young family they like the fact that he did go to movies, walk around, could move around the country without being chased or followed. the canadian people really reached out to help the soviet union during the second world war. we looked at the west and , evennly the canadians though they were facing real hardship, they did everything they could to give money and supplies to the soviet war effort. this did not sit right with him. when he was called back to the soviet union in 1945, he decided he was not going to go. his wife told him, let's have some actual ammunition. before you left the embassy in ottawa, he grabbed every single piece of paper he saw lying around. part of it was this massive espionage effort directed at the american, british, canadian atomic bomb effort. top-quality scientist. he studied with a man named james chadwick in britain. chadwick is famous, he discovered the neutron. remember back to middle school science. may delete under one of the top scientists in the 20th century. -- studied under one of the top scientists in the 20th century. died, he did a whole confession. he spied for the gru and he was responsible for getting samples to two isotopes of uranium. if you think back to middle school science, and isotope is a type of element that has a little bit different atomic number. all of the different atomic weight. in this case, uranium had a lot of different isotopes. he gave the samples over to the soviets and he talked about the process of creating the ternium. -- plutonium. if you look at the periodic table, or it comes after uranium. we thought uranium was the highest element on the periodic table that you could find on earth. when you put it through a process, you create elements that are heavier than uranium. the ternium is one of these -- plutonium is one of these. may was able to provide the soviets with some key information about the manufacturing of plutonium. klaus fuchs. uranium is not something you can pull out of the ground and stick inside a nuclear weapon. it is all over the world. the uranium that we plot of the ground -- that we pull out of the ground, you cannot trade a bomb out of it -- create a bomb out of it. uranium is uranium 238 and you cannot use it to make a bomb. about the size of a grain of rice of that softball sized chunk is 235. that is what you can make a bomb out of. we are talking about getting rid out the 235.tting the process to do that is called gaseous diffusion. outook us years to figure the best way to do this. uchs provided they answer to the soviets. it cut years off of their bomb program. he was an integral part of the manhattan project. he was a group leader. he ran other scientist and was part of the broader process to create the atomic bomb. his only immediate boss was oppenheimer. he was privy to all the ideas and conversations for weapons improvements after the war. boosted weapons, were you go from the not the sake bomb -- hundreds ofb to kilotons of tnt. of course, the hydrogen bomb. in all of these conversations. he was part of these conversations and all of these early to the soviet union. glass.u have david green he was the primary witness against the rosenbergs. it turns out that he lied about a lot of the things he was saying. a good possibility that ethel rosenberg was executed because some of his lies. he was a machinist. it is one thing to have a lot of scientific theory. it is one thing to come up with these grand ideas. papers filledp orh equations on the germans the japanese. you actually have to drop a bomb and make the physical product. ring glass was part of this process -- greenglass was part of this process. he also provided sketches and descriptions of the lens and some of the dynamics of creating these weapon systems. he gave a list of personnel to the soviets that could be recruited later on. supplement to fuchs. fuchs was the one with the big ideas. he provided the real physics. greenglass could revive the actual mechanics. -- could provide the actual mechanics. we have some of the sketches you provided to the soviets. sketch is actually the sketch of the plutonium bomb. it used implosion to create a nuclear chain reaction. instead of exploding, they imploded to create a chain reaction. this was an incredibly complicated process. all is juliuss of rosenberg. he was a true believer, an ideologue, somebody who truly believed in the idea that communism and the soviet system was the way of the future. not somebody who kind of sort of believed. 100%.ght in even before he was providing atomic information and military information to the soviet union, it was the proximity fuse. it was a way to tell a weapon system to explode when they got close to something. your missile did not have to hit its target. it could get within a certain range. he gave the misinformation when he was working an organization called emerson radio. this proximity fuse was used the spy to shoot down plane in 1960's. he also provided thousands of classified top secret reports nasa.the predecessor to this is a national advisory committee on aeronautics. aircraft plans, the first jet later, rosenberg was accused to have recruited sympathetic individuals. spies was thergs one who provided the information to the soviets. -- ethel was part of the second tier of russian spies first stop her role is still up for -- russian spies. her role is still up for debate. ethel is strictly. -- tricky. the reason she was convicted of this was because david green glass said she typed up all of the information for the spies provided to the soviet union. she knew about it, she aided and abetted the spy ring, and by typing misinformation. that is what he said he lied about. she probably did not type up all of this information. she was as ideological as her husband. did she know about it? certainly. julius spied for the soviets for so long. if she had no idea about it, i am not sure how that could possibly do the case. they talked about everything. we assume that ethel knew about -- does this mean she should be executed? that is a debate up for grabs. a very interesting scientist, he was the youngest scientist at los alamos, only 19 years old. he was a full-fledged believer. he really got sucked into communism at an early age. fuchs.ortance rivals .e gave a detailed description an interesting part about this is that the bombs that one out -- went off was a mere image of the nagasaki bomb. the information directly led to this design. he also gave a lot of information about the little boy bomb.the hiroshima including the critical mass. the amount of missing material, the amount of uranium necessary to create a chain reaction. they thought the critical mass was going to be huge. the americans took some time to figure out what it was. paul handed this to the soviets -- hall handed this to the soviets. he provided information about the next generation of nuclear weapons. and then there is someone is a little more controversial as far as his role. his scientific bona fides are in doubt about. he studied under the famous italian scientist. discovered have nuclear fission. it eventually would be a german team. fermi discovered it two years earlier, but they thought it was something else. they thought -- i looked at the results, they discovered fission, they made a mistake in their conclusion. pontecorvo was part of that team. he worked with the british program during the second world war. the argument he made was that he worked on reactor programs, not weapons. still some controversy about his role. he still gives you a lot of the physics and theoretical information. he still claims he never gave the many military secrets. he did it knowledge that he was a spy. -- acknowledge that he was a spy. " i was agreed in. -- a cretin. " he really understood the pipe dream of the soviet system, but far too late to do anything about it. these are the recruits, the people that were targeted by soviet intelligence to provide information. there is one last spy want to talk about. this is a professional, the individual that was sent specifically to do spying. he is a man named george ko val. he was born in iowa. at an early age, he went to the soviet union. both of his parents were russian natives. he 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 and that all of the physics and chemistry research to the unitedce states as somebody who never went to college before. sitting tests -- acing tests. noticed for obvious military ande u.s. sent to be part of the atomic bomb project. we know how important he was. ,hen this was declassified putin named him a hero of the russian federation. what made him so dangerous is that his role in the manhattan project was not as a scientist or a technician. it was as a health physics officer. it was his job to make sure nobody was getting too much radiation. we talked about safety considerations. there was no laboratory you couldn't go into. there was no when you couldn't talk to. he could go from all the different labs, from los alamos oak ridge, where they were building material for the bomb. he talked to everyone from oppenheimer on down. the most important thing he gave them was about the fat man bomb, the bomb that was tested in 1949. we realized at a very early stage that using plutonium as a product for a nuclear weapon is difficult to do because plutonium was so highly reactive. you needed something to slow down the chain reaction. if you didn't, you would have a fizzle. before the atomic blast, you would get a small monotonic -- a big bomb compared to other bombs, but it wouldn't be this massive blast. you needed something to slow down the neutrons. when we discovered we could use another substance, another substance called polonium as an initiator -- i'm going to step away from the mic for a second -- that thing in the center of the fat boy bomb was the polonium-based initiator. when the bomb imploded, this sphere was able to slow down the chain reaction to make it nuclear. this was something we discovered by accident. this is something that was one of the most important discoveries during the process to build the bomb. koval gave it to the soviets. in many cases, he was a good spy, but many times it was pure luck. he traveled from los altos most to oak ridge. he just so happen to be at the place where they were discussing this initiator and was able to get the plan and bring them back to the soviet union. this is something we will talk about later ron, the impact of this. it is too hard to overstate. on to is ouro move second stage of this conversation. that is u.s. counterintelligence. what were we doing about this? most of the american public doesn't find out until later on, but when does the government discover what is happening. counterintelligence from the beginning was faced with significant handicaps that prevented them potentially from finding out what was going on and stopping it. in hindsight, we look back and say, how did they not see this coming? we saw it coming, and we tried everything we could do to stop it. there are some things stand in the way of us doing something significant. the first is wartime mobilization. when the second world war began, some of these hastily designed organizations like the oss, the manhattan project, the fact that the state department doubled size in a span of a couple of weeks, if not a couple of days, was a real problem for security, for doing what you normally would need to do to make sure that the people you are hiring on are not communist sympathizers or spies. in some cases with the oss and some of the scientists, there was only an eight day background check to be brought onto service. if any of you who have worked in the government -- you know an eight-day background check -- now it is a year and a half or top-secret clearance. you didn't have the time to do that. there were so many people being brought into government service that needed to have top-secret clearance. there were so few investigators, it was done haphazardly. for the manhattan project itself, this grew to a number of 500,000 people employed. this -- the manhattan project in 1945. 1942 and ends from three years, it grows from zero to 500,000. this is a real problem. arenext 1 -- scientists pinkos. a lot of scientists tended to be left-leaning already, intellectuals and liberals who, if you wanted them to work in your government, you have to overlook the fact that they had somewhat leftist sympathies. if you want to the best of the best, and to beat the germans we wanted the best of the best, we had to embrace the fact that robert oppenheimer was very left wing and that he was a fellow with a lot of communists. his ex mistress was a full-fledged member of the communist party. his brother frank had been a member. it is not just oppenheimer. it is a good number of the top american scientists who were at least communist-leaning. you had to overlook this. the next real handicap is science is universal. we don't own the physical theory behind atomic weapons. this is something that was understood worldwide. it was developed in germany and europe. it was understood from scientist from japan, russia, the united dates, -- united states, and all over the place. it was an understood idea. the next major handicap, compartmentalization, the idea that once i didn't know what the other side was doing. the fbi didn't know what the manhattan project was doing. fbi agents who were trying to hunt down spies could have worked well with the counterintelligence guys, but they weren't talking to each other. scientific intelligence is hard. this is something that is incredibly difficult. don't have ats scientific background. if you tell them to protect secrets, they may not know what they should be protecting. this is especially true in a whole other ballgame, for our spies that we sent into germany and other places. having a scientist and a spy together was something we didn't have many of. the spies were good at spying. the scientists were good at science. not so much crossover. i have been teasing you. some of these open source ideas were really interesting. one real handicap was the fact that when american scientists rallied to work at los alamos, they stopped teaching at other universities. it was very easy for any spy, german or soviet, to start looking at course syllabi or schedules from princeton and columbia and berkeley and chicago and realize, fermi is not teaching his class anymore, oppenheim or is gone -- oppenheimer is gone. where are they? it is not a far stretch to look at train schedules and to look at people -- why are all of these people going to new mexico? that is open source. that is something you can find in the yellow pages. all of a sudden, oppenheimer isn't publishing anything anymore. why aren't there american scientists publishing anymore? these are things that can't be protected. they are common sense. finally, the french problem. namedily, and man frederick juliett curie -- he is the son-in-law of the famous marie 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 with the liberation of paris, re-energize to his lab and reach out to some of the french scientists who had left for canada. was, curie was a card-carrying member of the communist party. he literally had the membership card. he joined the communist party, was a fellow traveler, worked on everything he could. he was a very good physicist. the fbi couldn't stop him. the american counterintelligence could do very little to stop him from sending information over to the soviet union. how was ci set up? you had two major organizations doing counterintelligence during this time. 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. scientists began talking about nuclear weapons policy. there were organizations around the country. there is the atomic scientists of chicago. the association of oak ridge scientists. eventually, they came together as a federation of atomic scientists and later the federation of american scientists. is now an organization doing great work on not only atomic weapons but general foreign policy. it has turned into a bit of the think tank. the fbi thought this was a front for all of the commie pinkos that were running around the united states. the fbi made a real focus on this organization. .hey gathered information they surveilled scientists. they took down license plates. they follow people from place to place. they had undercover agents at meetings themselves. they used wiretaps to cap the meetings, to tap the homes of these scientists. they used informants to spy on these agencies, everything from taxi drivers who overheard conversations to recruiting far right conservatives from universities to pretend that they were left-wing to infiltrate these organizations. in all the time they spent doing this, they caught no one doing anything wrong. they spent millions of taxpayer dollars and ran and chase their tails. what is up here is an interesting document from hoover himself to the special assistant to fdr and hopkins, where he talks about the fact that we had known from an early stage that the soviets had been spying on the united states. then there is the second tier, arguably the better tier, of the ci bureaucracy. this is the manhattan engineering district. it had its own intelligence branch, its own counterintelligence wing. the top of this was the head of the manhattan project itself, prettier general leslie groves. if you want micromanaging, look at leslie groves. there is a part of my assertation -- running into 1960's-era business management textbook that was taught in business schools, and groves had a chapter in it. the title was, don't delegate anything. [laughter] do everything yourself. it 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. he would go on after the war to become a tennessee geologist -- become an anesthesiologist. theonly place you can find manuscript of his book is in the association of anesthesiologists on their website. finally, lieutenant colonel boris cash. he would do some amazing things in discovering what was happening with the german atomic he was one of the top counterintelligence agents for the manhattan project. this is an interesting quote talking about-- the germans and japanese as an enemy, but then he said -- from the beginning, russia was regarded, from an intelligence standpoint, as an enemy. 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. was to run the western defense command intelligence branch. in doing so, western meant he was in charge of california. he really targeted a lot of these programs ran by steve nelson and others trying to infiltrate the american program. pash's files have just been declassified, is counterintelligence, typed and they are declassified because i requested them and whined and moaned for many years. of the extent to research --as doing on the left, his notes about frank oppenheimer, robert oppenheimer's brother, surveillance, wiretapping, all of these things -- pash really focus on the scientists. pash cleared robert oppenheimer for work on the manhattan project. 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 so large. he is famous for being the first person to warn the united states about the potential of an atomic bomb. you may have heard of the einstein letter to fdr. einstein didn't write the ft -- the letter. leo wrote it and gave it to einstein, and einstein signed it. fdr hadn't heard of leo. yourid, albert, please put signature on this. was researching and surveilling everybody, including the oppenheimers, leo solard. he followed these guys. their houses. all of this was without a war it -- warrant. this is about as far of an overage as you could possibly h is possiblyac get -- as you could possibly get. these were investigations into scientists who were suspected leftists. these are two of the scientists i gave you on the third tier of nelson's group. i am blowing this up a little bit. this is about one of the scientists in nelson's rank. it says, subject has been an active member of the communist party, and he is still considered to be associated by local communist party leaders, and it is believed he is still sympathetic with communist principles. subject is dangerous as an employee at the radiation laboratory. pash single-handedly could keep people from getting jobs inside the manhattan project. here you have three of the top ofple on that third tier scientists under steve nelson's command. i want to read you the recognition for max friedman, one of these guys providing information. it is ruckman to the subject immediately separated from his employment on the project, drafted into the army, and removed as soon as possible to obtain additional information about the project. there is a second letter where they say they want to clarify what he means. send him to siberia, anywhere but here. [laughter] that is really what pash is trying to do. there is a third win. counterintelligence diplomacy. an attempt to use agreements and international processes to keep the soviets from getting this information. the first is the québec agreement. this is between the united states, canada, and britain that says we will not communicate any oysormation about tube all to third parties except by mutual consent. the real reason for this is we didn't want the british to tell 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 didn't understand at the time that uranium was everywhere, but we thought there was uranium in korea, belgium, so let's make a deal and buy it up. if we dug straight down, we would run into uranium. it's everywhere. we were trying the best we could. there's something a little bit controversial called the smiles report. this was named after a princeton physicist who actually did not work on the atomic bomb. general groves wanted someone to come into the project and write about it. that sounds kind of counterintuitive when it comes to the idea of keeping things secret. the idea that gross had was you could have somebody read about the science of the atomic bomb, we could publish this, and that would provide parameters by what you could say -- for what you could say and could incite. does that make sense? first, i'm like, why would you tell anybody? the idea was, at that point in 1945, groves sat down 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 student in physics figure out from the atomic bombs in the next year or so? let's release that information now. let's put it out there so everyone knows at this point what they can and cannot say to journalists and foreign operatives. they said, we are going to release this report, and this is as much as you can talk about. when oppenheimer was interviewed after the war, if they knew they could only talk about what was already released in the report. for groves, this is an idea to contain information, to say, anything outside of this, you are breaking the law. finally, the mcmahon act -- as is heavy-handed. outed, itn on may was looks as though there were some significant leaks in the british atomic bomb program. we didn't think there were any leaks in our program, but the british were leaky. the mcmahon act was passed and named after brian mcmahon, the head of the atomic energy commission and congress, stating that we were basically cutting the british off. thanks for helping us build the bomb, but you are on your own. 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 didn't we do enough? hopefully, i've shown you we did a significant amount. i'm going to argue that we do too much. myself, butinger there was some significant counterintelligence overreach. it actually had some detrimental effects for the scientific community and the american national security community. there is a real backlash against nuclear theorists in the united states. theorist was painted with this brush of, they are leftist, they are communist sympathizers. the argument made at the time -- oppenheimer has sent this -- when alger hiss was outed, it didn't make lawyers everywhere look like they were communists, but when one or two theorists are outed, every theorists is looked at as a security risk. it had real implications on american science. most universities around the country instituted loyalty oaths. even berkeley had a loyalty oath. that tells you a lot. it caused a real brain drain. it caused a real problem with retaining top-level scientists in government service or nongovernment service. by the spring of 1949, berkeley lost all of its theorists. some refused to take loyalty oaths. this had a real impact on u.s. national security. inyou want top scientists the field of government, if you want people building the next fighter aircraft or spacecraft, you need scientists. scientists were having a real problem getting clearance. somewhere between 20,000-50,000 scientists and engineers were backlog waiting for clearance in the early 1950's. that is 20,000-50,000, top people we needed to beat the russians into space, top people we needed to develop the plane to rival the mig-15. you -- i wasread going to read you a longer 1 -- this is the money sentence, someone talking in front of a group of scientists at this time of real overreach. he talks about the fact that we need to have an environment of trust and an environment of openness and science. such an atmosphere -- talking about this atmosphere of fear -- such an atmosphere is un-american, the most un-american thing we have to contend with today. it is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the propaganda line. it is not steve nelson. it is president harry s truman speaking before a group of scientists in 1948. this gives you an indication about how far we have gone. this is before mccarthy. we are still talking about 1948. i will wrap up and open up for questions --how much did the spying matter? how much did it make a difference? would they still have gone the bomb? the only secret about the atomic bomb was whether or not it would work, and that question had been answered by hiroshima and nagasaki. glenn seaborg was the discoverer of plutonium, a manhattan project scientist, he is somebody who knows. there is a longer quote i'm not going to read all of, but this is from a man who was the chief scientist for what is called the american mission to discover what the german atomic bomb program was doing -- he understood scientific intelligence -- this is after the bomb, right after the soviet bomb came out. he said, the recent revelations of early leaks of atomic revelation to russia reflect a state of mind which should fill each of us with grave concern. in general -- the general impression seems to be, russia has the bomb, therefore someone must've given her our secrets. let's admit openly that the russians constructed their bomb all by themselves without any help from us or capture germans. it is wrong to underestimate one's adversaries. the question is, did they get the bomb because of the spies? the answer to that is probably not. they were going to get it anyway. atomic science is not nationalistic. the basic tenants were understood worldwide. the discovery of fission opened the field completely. within minutes of hearing about the discovery of fission, and fermi held -- renrico up his hands and said, this much uranium, it's all gone. robert oppenheimer was drawing crude designs. this was instantaneous understanding. this wasn't something that was going to be a secret for long. as much as we try to embrace the argument that soviet scientists were idiots -- this is a great story -- york was a second-generation manhattan generation -- manhattan project scientists. he became one of the top people working on the later project. york told a great story in his memoirs. he says he was called in by the u.s. military, a bunch of generals who were worried about the soviets seeking in a suitcase-sized bomb into washington or new york, and starting world war iii by blowing up one of the cities. the generals asked him, is this a possibility? york said, absolutely not. the general was like, how can you be so sure? york said tongue-in-cheek, the theets haven't mastered science of the suitcase yet. [laughter] soviet science was as good as anybody else. we just didn't want to believe they knew what they were doing. the same people manhattan project scientists studied under in europe, the soviet side -- scientists studied under. they have a long tradition of having top-quality scientists. this was going to happen one way or another. i'm actually going to skip this because it is really long. first real talk about atomic bombs. 1914. hg wells wrote a book called " the world set free" where he talks about atomic bombs being used in a war in the future. this is an idea that had been around since the beginning of the 20th century. the idea that we were going to be the only ones with a bomb and the soviets were too stupid, it would've happened one way or the other. the spies can be forgiven. 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. had oneican scientists vision. academics were saying they were going to get the bomb in a year or two. government scientists were giving and much broader prediction. the military people, leslie groves, were predicting 20 years before the soviets got the bomb. politicians like harry truman said never. that asiatic comment gives you an idea. then the intelligence agencies, they had a different view. in 1946. estimate estimate was the joint nuclear energy intelligence committee, december of 1947. the same protection. by july, it is impossible to determine, but maybe by 1950. most probable date, mid-1953. july 1949, one month before -- the osi report said, information now available substantiates the date already estimated in 1948, 1947. suggests it will not be before 1951. theavorite was in 1949 -- first soviet bomb in mid-1953. this is 23 days after. [laughter] you can see how well the intelligence community was doing when it came to predicting this. real quickly, the argument for the idea that spies were important -- we have gone through this -- intelligence showed which paths not to take. the russian defense ministry later on, when koval was awarded hero of the russian federation -- intel allowed soviets to make their initiator prepare to the recipe provided by koval. stalin very famously said, i do not believe what our scientists say until i see the west of the first. drawings are very important. and then, of course, we talked about uranium separation of plutonium production. it took a year to figure out. the quick argument against -- this might report. -- the smythe report. this provided a lot of information they gave the soviet theory behind the atomic bomb. it provided form but not function. did notce recipe but get the experience of -- in how to cook the meal. my wife and i have very different ways. we knew how to cook. the soviets did not. we provided them with a recipe but not with the spirit of how to do things. in this case, it is not about building one bomb. it's about building lots and lots. you couldsomething provide would just drawings. most of the claims about how great the soviet televisions sovietrom retired -- the intelligence was comes from retired kgb officers. they still had to redo a lot of the experiments, and investigate competing processes. and it still took longer than the manhattan project. this is primarily because of uranium and industrial capacity. it took a much -- them much longer to build the apparatus and the industrial apparatus. we had to build cities. los alamos. 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 to ask questions. i'm going to make c-span go crazy by taking the mic and moving around. i do not like standing in one spot. wait for the microphone to get to you. >> thanks very much for the presentation. you structured it very, very well to help us. a couple of questions of detail. should be believe when david said he lied? secondly, what was steve nelson's background before he became a naturalized american? i'm grinning because he's a brit. lot do not know an awful about steve nelson before he came to the united states. he gave different stories for where he came from. he know he was naturalized at one point. because he was a private citizen that was not under surveillance before that, there is not a lot of research into his background. he was not a brit. he was most likely something russian background. there are arguments about was he latvian? he's from eastern europe or eurasia. to answer your first question, it is always tricky when you're dealing with deathbed confessions or later in life confessions, but what makes gree nglass believable was his motivation for lying. he wanted to make sure his wife is not implicated. so pushing off and agreed to testify against -- against 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 telling a lie kind of things, where it is more believable in my mind that helpful probably was certainly knowledgeable but a willling discipline. she did not know anything. she could've done nothing but type. the deathgets you penalty, that is a pretty steep -- j edgar hoover was gung ho behind let's get them thrown in prison. we need to get them convicted. when the judge passed down the death sentence, he was like, whoa. i was not expecting that. it was very harsh. certainly for a phone -- for eth el. julius certainly gave information. but if you compare them to what they servedknew -- moretime and gave way information then did the rosenbergs. we get harsher punishments in the united states than other places. yes? wait for the microphone. >> is there any evidence that soviet participants -- with his research were giving information to the west about the progress of the soviet atomic program? >> yes. that is a great question. we get to go the other direction. i love that. eventually there would be a book about yet. so, 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 intelligence operation to try to discover what is happening inside the soviet union. so there are the scientific information passing from scientists to scientists. that becomes problematic. it is like the game of telephone. you whisper something in someone's ear -- by the time he gets back to the united states, it is gone through 15 iterations. who knows whether it is real or not? the real issue you ran into at that time was it's double-sided. one is the american intelligence apparatus collapses after the war. with the collapse of the oss, the cia face a long time to get going. types of intelligence gets left behind. you do not have the office of scientific intelligence, which is the office created to do foreign intelligence towards the atomic program. this was the beginning of 1949. that is where 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. 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 americans are looking at 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 weapons. years toill take them refine enough uranium. the fact the soviet system itself is not designed for innovative science or technology. top u.s.of bush, the scientists during the second world war, wrote a book in 1940 nine talking about how the free world will always have better scientist than the totalitarian world. the book said the nazis, soviets, do not have the criteria need to do high-level state-of-the-art science. we had this perception. there was not a lot of pressure behind american intelligence to find out what was happening inside the soviet union. historians have written about, incorrectly, about that there was a big program to figure out what they were doing. they are taking bits and pieces of documents from the archives, trying tond-so was find out what was happening. this person was hunting down uranium. but it is kind of the exception that proves the rule. these find a couple of examples that try to make it look like it is a program. there was no program. at the highest levels, nobody cared. charge ofves, was in this -- 20 years. he did not care about the scientists. she said, they cannot produce what i did. gross was a proud man. in 19s. spent $2 billion 40. it is about the cost of one f-36 today. thatoviets did not have infrastructure, or at least he thought they did not. it was somewhat nah. they will eventually get it, but we will be ready for them when they do. right here. >> yeah. west'sar, i read diana latest book on the new deal era, the roosevelt times. she went into great detail about a sovietins being agent of influence, and also, she talked about somebody saying that nuclear material was airped through montana by to the soviets. do you agree? they got -- >> 2.2. they got one telegraph. the soviets requested tons of uranium, refined uranium. you had people within the administration -- hopkins being one of them, certainly henry wallace being another -- the story of henry wallace is fascinating. he was not a communist but all of his friends were. he was vice president of the united states before he's replaced by truman. bby theaids were spies soviets. they asked for tons of enriched uranium, and of course, the white house agreed because diplomacy carried the day. gross went berserk. went to george marshall. one-starperson as a person that can walk into george marshall's office screaming and throwing stuff and not get court-martials. he went into the office screaming bloody murder. convinced marshall of the stupid idea. then convinced stimson this is a very stupid idea. middle, slowede it down, and conceited as a compromise to give him one kilogram of enriched uranium, you cannot doich a lot with. this is 10% refined uranium. he cannot even make a reactor out of this. you need about 90% refinement of uranium to make a bomb. so, yes, he was very much -- they were very much looking to please the soviets because they were allies, but there was no transfer of uranium that made a difference at this point. yeah, right back there with the glasses. and the gentleman next to you after that. >> i have a couple questions real quick. could you say the germans were going about it the wrong way with this heavy water? was that absolutely the wrong way to go in light of the u.s. did? second question is, do you think the true that counterintelligence under leslie gross was actually investigating and spying the wrong people? >> i'll answer the second question first. yes and no. they widely identified almost every member of nelson's spy chain. he got all the low hanging fruit. the issue was that psh -- pash, by the time it mattered, by 1943, by the time the american atomic program was in full swing, he does not come over until then. all of the experience of counterintelligence, the best of the best, had a new mission. his actual mission was to go over to europe and find out what the germans were doing. he became an offensive intelligence guy. lost a lot of this institutional knowledge at this time. that's my answer to this 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 it's a water where the hydrogen atom has -- it's two protons. it's d2o. it's still hydrogen but it is heavy. it's a process that you could potentially use to create fissile material. we did it in this country and found it did not work. it was a bad way to try to of necessaryind material for creating a nuclear chain reaction. ended up using graphite in this country instead of heavy water, because graphite had a much better job in absorbing neutrons. to absorbo be able neutrons. heavy water in the german case was an easy target. there was a capture plant in norway. we said -- the british sent to missions, saboteurs of special forces, to take out this heavy water plant. gross was not happy with that. soh he bombed it. he decided he wants to make sure he was not going to tip off the germans. so he bombed several other cities just a good measure to try to hide what he was actually bombing. over 1000 planes went over. that is how we do things. what really derail the german atomic bomb program is a simple math mistake. that is one of those what ifs of history. there were trying to figure out the critical mass for building an atomic on. how much material did you need to build a bomb? the head of the program turned to one of his top scientist -- a guy who was, this the radical math was beyond any of us and said, do the math. the guy took a couple of days -- wholewas math that took a notebook. he said that we need way too much mass. instead of pounds we need tens of pounds or even hundreds of pounds of mass. that's too much. it turns out he made a simple mistake in the middle of the constellations. for us, it would be the equivalent of not carrying a one, doing something very simple. for him, it was a differential equation. but for somebody at that level, it was a simple mistake but nobody checked it. everyone assumed this was the best guy we had for math. you could've given a first-year grad student his equation inside, there was a mistake here. frontberg when called in of the german high command was asked, can this be done? know, it isodn'n't going to take a lot of resources. high command set, unless you say definitely, we're not going to do it. ild bombers, tanks, submarines. we do not have the money to do both. since you say maybe and it will take a lot of money, the plan is to deliver -- to do lab research. at the same time the americans were wrapping up the manhattan project in 1942, the germans were ending the real serious research. 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. know until the very end of 1944. we were very worried. the nazis with a bomb is the ultimate terror at this time. the general and right next to -- right next to -- the civil war, but what hit me when you mentioned at the rosenberg was the similarity between the execution of ethel rosenberg and mary surat. the evidence is that she may not have been involved but she knew about it, but what got her was the medical climate. how much of that was applied to what happened to the rosenberg? >> there is no question. i think, if you look at the spying since then. the atomic bomb is about as important as it gets. but there have been spies we have captured since then. robert hansen, john walker, aldrich ames -- who ardently had a larger impact on, the atomic bomb, had a larger impact on u.s. foreign policy and they did not get executed. we're not executing people anymore for even the most heinous of espionage crimes. not do anything. even if she did type stuff up, she type stuff up church was not stealing secrets. my opinion,ay, in to talk about this without saying that it absolutely was a bloodlust based on the political environment of the time. mccarthyism is really coming into full swing. the and idea that it looks like the united states was losing the cold war. if you look at the regression of events from 1948 on -- the china,blockade, losing the korean war, 1953, 1954, the soviets get the hydrogen bomb. it looks like we are going backwards. you gethe red scare, all of a sudden these are the guys that gave us the bomb. wasn't executed, she may have been strung up in the town square. that is how much animosity was against this. if you look at the polling from the time period, the majority of americans wanted her taking out. even they understood there were still confusion about her role. the majority people are like, fry 'em. there was not a lot of sympathy for them. go him and go here. i saw him earlier. >> was -- espionage, the hanford engineering works? >> there was an attempt. hanford was difficult because the process there was something that a lot of people do not quite understand. hanford was primarily producing plutonium, and most people at the very beginning did not know what plutonium was. an american discovers it. it was the discovery during the manhattan project. it was accidental. so hanford was a target later in the war when people said plutonium might be an issue. when hall were able to pass secrets. hanford especially from the northern californian spies. beene nelson's group had outed. we were able to keep them out of hanford. they were far more successful at oak ridge and los alamos, but these are higher-level spies we were not expecting. anford tended to be more of industrial plant. it was not a lot of innovative research. when she figured out how to do lamos,los a then it finally went to hanford. that's why you do not have a lot of scientist being sent to hanford. does that make sense? the microphone right there. >> the last one. >> the last question. make it a good one. >> getting back to the germans and the atomic bomb, in baseball lore there is a story about mo bird who was mediocre catcher but a terribly brilliant person. he knew seven languages and cannot hit in any of them. is it true he was recruited by in oss to go to a meeting switzerland? bird was to take out his revolver and shoot heisenberg. is that true? >> it is. so burg. museum at the spy yesterday, nicholas davidov. he talked about it. the 20th anniversary of that book. made him feel older. yes, it is absolutely true. heisenberg was somebody we were terrified was going to be integral in building the german atomic bomb. heisenberg takes quantum mechanics, which is the other real major physics movement of the 20th century, the relativity theory, which is einstein's movement, and quantum mechanics which was not invented by heisenberg he was the one who made it work. he made it make sense. he created the heisenberg uncertainty principle which is the most important principle of quantum theory. he is as good a scientist or perhaps better than the einsteins or often hires --oppenheimers of the world. we found out that heisenberg, during the war, was going to give a talk in switzerland. switzerland is a neutral country. 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 burg wenas sent in. he spoke very many line which is and did a very well. when he was earlier put as part of the american mission -- the germans were doing. as a member of the oss, he aalized he needs to know little about this. learned quantumhe theory. he attended the lecture. the lecture was a little bit over his head. he was on matrix mechanics. he followed along. but yet, if any time during this talk, heisenberg indicated that the germans were working on the bomb program, he was instructed to pull out his pistol and shoot heisenberg in the head. the store is better than that. he is inside this theater and waiting for the speech to begin. in front of him walked the entire german top scientists. hahn, the top guys named in the einstein letter. sit directly in front of him, in the row right in front of mo burg. not only would have been able to shoot heisenberg -- but he cou line.e gone donwn the at the talk itself, there is nothing to indicate that heisenberg is working on the bomb. burg is invited to the after party. organized top agents this. so burg is talking to all of the top german scientist, talking to heisenberg. the whole time heisenberg does not know he is dealing with an american agent. burg's german was not spectacular, but it was good enough and before drinking enough that no one knew he was an american. still got nothing. burg arranged to wear heisenberg left and burg left at the same time. the two of them walked through the streets back together to their hotel chatting. heisenberg having no idea he is in america, no idea he is jewish. no idea he has a pistol in his pocket waiting to kill him. by the time the night is over, burg is convinced they are not working on the bomb. heisenberg talks about germany has lost the war. i cannot wait to work on real science again. there is nothing here. he lets him leave. they shake hands. heisenberg does not know that he is dealing with an american agent until decades later. yes, it is very much right out of the movie, but is absolutely true. so -- by the way, before you was herence davidov yesterday, he signed a lot of copies of his book. if you are interested in a signed copy of that book, he wrote this story. he was the one that brought it out to everybody. thank you for being here, guys. i really enjoyed our time. 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