Treason still shadows J.R. Oppenheimer; …Oppenheimer, operating in a group of known Communists, emerges as a secret member of the party. But how did he respond to those Soviet solicitations to pass atomic secrets?

Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002 by Nigel West

Vladimir Putin's attendance at a reunion of KGB veterans at the notorious Lubyanka prison, and his embrace of Vladimir Kryuchkov--the former KGB chief who led the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev--has coincided with yet more disclosures about the successes achieved by Soviet spies during the Cold War.

Undoubtedly the Moscow spymasters had much to celebrate, even if some embarrassing defections in recent years have caused them discomfort. It was an as yet unidentified Russian intelligence officer who tipped off the FBI to the duplicity of bureau counterintelligence turncoat Robert Hanssen in return for resettlement in the United States. Similarly, the disappearance of the elderly KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992, and his subsequent emergence in London with thousands of copies of official files, gravely undermined confidence in Moscow. Even worse for the old Soviet spooks, the release of the "Venona" files in 1995 exposed dozens of espionage networks across the globe.

But one man's security lapse is another's espionage triumph. While the Venona and Mitrokhin files conclusively proved the guilt of well-known traitors such as Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, neither source shed much light on one of the last remaining mysteries of the era--the role played by nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in providing the Soviets with details about the atom bomb. However, Mitrokhin revealed the existence of numerous other Soviet moles inside the Manhattan Project, and the Venona texts identified some of the individual code names for high-level Soviet operatives and agents among scientists in the United States, including "Erie," "Pers," "Huron" and "Quantum." But who were these remarkable traitors?

British and U.S. counterintelligence analysts have spent decades poring over the clues to put real names to the Venona cryptonyms, and for a while it looked as though loose lips in Moscow might provide some answers. In 1994 Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov collaborated with Washington-based writers Jerrold and Leona Schecter to produce a sensational book, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness--A Soviet Spymaster, in which such scientific icons as Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard were named as having conspired with Oppenheimer to pass atomic secrets to their Soviet contacts, Vasili Zubilin and Grigori Kheiffets, both NKVD professionals working in New York City and San Francisco respectively under diplomatic cover. [The NKVD, Russian acronym for People's Commisariat of Internal Affairs, had been formed as early as 1918. Its mission included homeland security, as well as intelligence and counterintelligence abroad. Later it became KGB].

The publication of Sudoplatov's memoirs caused a sensation, partly because of the gravity of the allegations made against named physicists of international reputation, but also because of his assertion that apart from the well-known espionage cases of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and Allan Nunn May, there were numerous other undiscovered spies who had stolen atomic secrets and escaped undetected. When the Venona texts were released the following year the Harvard-educated Theodore Hall was exposed as "Mlad" (youngster), a valued source of Soviet information from Los Alamos in 1944. Shortly before his death in 1999 in Cambridge, England, where he had moved in 1964, Hall confessed and confirmed that in his youth he had shared his knowledge with the Soviets.

Hall's guilt had little direct impact on the Oppenheimer conundrum. Certainly "Oppie," as he was called, had lost his security clearance in March 1954 following a humiliating public examination of his loyalties. His wife Kitty, brother Frank and mistress Jean Tatlock had all been card-carrying members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), as were many of his friends, and he acknowledged having joined several CPUSA front organizations and to having held party meetings in his home in Berkeley, Calif.

But did that make him a spy? He admitted having been cultivated by an academic friend, Haakon Chevalier, who was a Communist activist, and to having been invited to spy for the USSR by another acquaintance, George Eltenton, who worked for the Shell group of petrochemical companies as a research chemist after having lived in Russia.

Until Sudoplatov alleged Oppie had been an active spy who helped place others inside the U.S. secret wartime Manhattan Project that produced the atom bomb, the controversy had lapsed into speculation. But had Sudoplatov engaged in mischiefmaking, or perhaps been encouraged to embroider his recollections? As the debate continued, respected historian Allen Weinstein turned up a document in Moscow that looked like a smoking gun and included it in The Haunted Wood, his account of Soviet espionage in the United States. The memorandum, dated February 1944 and addressed to Josef Stalin's intelligence chief, Vselovod Merkulov, identified Oppenheimer by the code name "Chester" and explained that he had been a secret member of the CPUSA who had been cultivated by the Soviet military-intelligence service (GRU) since June 1942.