Oppenheimer broke laws, was not investigated for any crime or formally charged with one, and yet he was subject to every type of surveillance imaginable at the time. The output of this effort ran to thousands of pages and the contents were frequently used to issue false statements as part of coordinated smear campaign implicitly designed to destroy an American icon.
Over the past few years, Republicans have expressed shock and dismay about revelations that the FBI illegally spied on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and repeatedly lied about their efforts. Last year, Special Counsel John Durham issued a report on potential malfeasance at the agency in 2016 and 2017, before and after President Trump took office. As summarized by the Associated Press, “Durham found that the FBI acted too hastily and relied on raw and unconfirmed intelligence when it opened the Trump-Russia investigation. He said at the time the probe was opened, the FBI had no information about any actual contact between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials. He also claimed that FBI investigators fell prone to ‘confirmation bias,’ repeatedly ignoring or rationalizing away information that could have undercut the premise of their investigation, and he noted that the FBI failed to corroborate a single substantive allegation from a dossier of research that it relied on during the course of the probe.” “An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes,” the report said, using the FBI’s code name for the probe. “Unfortunately, it did not.” Republicans in Congress have responded to this report and other troubling revelations by forming a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government following the precedent set by Senator Frank Church in his famous 1970s committee that supposedly reformed the Department of Justice to prevent these types of abuses. As House Majority Leader Steve Scalise described it, “We’re going to set up that Church committee to look at some of these federal agencies that are weaponizing government to go after families across this country based on their political views. That’s not what the government should be doing.” This, I believe, is a statement that everyone can easily agree with even in this polarized era, but sadly that has rarely, if ever been the case when it comes to the FBI. Despite their reputation as the world’s premiere law enforcement agency, they have pursued purely political endeavors against anyone they considered radical, however well the person in question had served the United States throughout most of their history.
Last year’s hit movie, Oppenheimer alluded to some of the tactics the FBI and others in the government deployed against the Father of the Atomic Bomb, introducing the world to at least a little of this tragic story, but Christopher Nolan barely scratched the surface of how an American hero who helped win the war, save hundreds of thousands of lives, limit Russian expansion into Asia, and usher in the nuclear age was targeted at the highest levels and colluded against for purely political reasons. The tactics deployed against him over the course of a decade are shocking to even consider, much less that they were carried out by the government against an American citizen. Oppenheimer had broken no laws, was not investigated for any specific crime or ever formally charged with one, and yet his office and home phone were wiretapped on and off for years, even long after the war. For months on end, he was assigned a surveillance team that followed his every move, tracking his movements, spying on his meetings, and monitoring his friends and colleagues – including when he traveled outside the United States. There were multiple bugs placed at his home and in his office, even his lawyer’s office, some of which recorded privileged conversations. The output of this massive effort ran to thousands upon thousands of pages – a mere summary was almost 70 pages – and the contents were frequently used to issue blatantly false statements about his activities to those inside and outside of the government, as part of coordinated smear campaign that was implicitly designed to destroy an American icon.
J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI Director, became suspicious of Oppenheimer after one of the scientists working at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, confessed to espionage after the war. Fuchs was part of a British team and Oppenheimer himself had nothing to do with his being assigned to the project, but that didn’t matter to the director. He promptly phoned Lewis Strauss, ostensibly Oppenheimer’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and colleague on the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in a reality a political foe, on February 1, 1950. Strauss, meanwhile, was also connected to a Senate staffer, William Listen Borden, and together the three would collude against Oppenheimer for the next three years. Hoover, who had access to confidential files that were never intended to be shared, made Strauss and Borden aware that Oppenheimer was approached by Communist sympathizer and close personal friend, Haakon Chevalier, in 1942 before he left for Los Alamos to build the bomb. Chevalier informed Oppenheimer at the time that he’d been contacted by a Russian asset who was willing to transmit information about the nuclear program, secretly. Oppenheimer immediately rejected the notion, calling it treason, and ultimately informed both the security team at Los Alamos and General Leslie Groves, the army officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, about the incident, but he initially refused to name his friend and suggested others were involved to protect him. Several months later, he informed Groves that it was Chevalier who approached him, and both believed the matter was settled, but years later, it would be used to insinuate Oppenheimer himself was a spy and to impugn his credibility. By the spring of 1950, Hoover himself was falsely insinuating that Oppenheimer could be charged with perjury and insisting his agents step up their investigation, resulting in two separate interviews at his office in Princeton over the course of just a couple of months. The agents universally agreed that he was “entirely cooperative,” but Oppenheimer was continually dragged into adjacent investigations based on the flimsiest of evidence. For example, an FBI informant named Paul Crouch insisted Oppenheimer hosted a party for Communists at his home in California in 1941, what his wife described as a “session of a top draw Communist group known as a special section, a group so important that its make up was kept secret from ordinary Communists.” Oppenheimer, however, wasn’t even in the state at the time and was in fact, 1,187 miles away in New Mexico. This was proven by both the records of an automobile accident and an accident with a horse that landed him in the hospital, but even after Crouch was known to be a liar, the House Un-American Activities Committee, armed with information from the FBI continued to insist the party happened and therefore, Oppenheimer was a high ranking Communist.
What was Oppenheimer’s crime to deserve such treatment? Merely that he publicly and privately disagreed with the prevailing wisdom around the development and strategic importance of nuclear weapons after World War II, urging another course of action, which of course was his right as a citizen of a supposedly free country. Chiefly, Oppenheimer had four key disagreements that began under the Truman Administration and extended into Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term as President. First, Oppenheimer believed, correctly it would be proved, that attempting to contain nuclear weapons using traditional diplomacy was a fool’s errand. He reasoned that once the existence of the technology was known, any country with a sufficiently advanced industrial base could easily and quickly develop a weapon of their own, trying to stop it was like trying to save an “ice cube” in the sun. The US government, however, was telling itself a different story. Truman himself infamously claimed to Oppenheimer during their first meeting that Russia would “never” develop an atomic bomb. The establishment decided, without evidence, as usual, that the United States could maintain nuclear superiority for the foreseeable future, a belief that was dashed once Russia developed its own bomb as early as 1949. Second, Oppenheimer believed there was no benefit to continuing to grow nuclear stockpiles and continually invest in more powerful weapons like the hydrogen bomb. In his view, once your nuclear stockpile reached a certain critical mass you had the power to destroy civilization in its entirety, and additional weapons only contributed to an unhealthy arms race that resulted in more countries capable of destroying the world, not increased security. Third, Oppenheimer questioned the wisdom of a military strategy based on launching an all out nuclear assault rather than using nuclear weapons in more tactical battlefield situations, what he referred to as “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at the risk of his own life.” He found the idea that destroying civilization itself was a key component of our strategy to be repugnant and self-defeating. Lastly, he believed the shroud of secrecy regarding nuclear programs to be counterproductive, leading to more confusion and conflict. He embraced a transparency that would reduce the potential for a disastrous misunderstanding, and that the knowledge of basic information such as the number of weapons we possessed would not hinder national security.
One can certainly debate the wisdom of these positions, and in many cases even men like President Eisenhower were inclined to side with Oppenheimer, but powerful interests in Washington weren’t interested in rational debate. They were jealous of Oppenheimer’s public appeal, influence in the scientific community, and more than willing to use the incredible power of the government to eliminate him from the public sphere, even based on innuendo and outright lies. It took several years, but the collusion finally came to a head in 1953 and 1954, after Eisenhower was in office and Strauss had been elevated to Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. That May, Strauss met with one of Hoover’s top aids, D.M. Ladd specifically to discuss how to better target Oppenheimer. Strauss told Ladd that he remained suspicious about Oppenheimer’s “contacts” with the Russians in 1942, a complete fabrication of what happened with Chevalier, and insinuated that he had further delayed work on the hydrogen bomb, another accusation that only had a tenuous connection with the truth. He asked if he could share information from the supposedly secret FBI files on Oppenheimer with Eisenhower himself, and was informed that the FBI had already shared it with the Attorney General, the Atomic Energy Commission, and “other interested government agencies.” Thus, Strauss would lead the charge to poison Oppenheimer’s reputation with Eisenhower and the public, planting articles in key publications, while the FBI continued poisoning the rest of the government. Strauss met Hoover himself early that summer to continue their plans, both concerned that Oppenheimer was not an easy man to take down given his public stature. They immediately agreed the House Un-American Activities Committee was not the right venue given his popularity. To be successful, “a great deal of preliminary spadework needed to be done,” as “this was not a case which should be prematurely gone into solely for the purpose of headlines.” As an AEC lawyer put it, “Strauss had promised Hoover that he would purge Oppenheimer” and Hoover agreed to help. That July, Hoover sent Strauss a 69 page “summary” report of the FBI’s secret Oppenheimer file. Borden, meanwhile, was working on his own report, and Strauss provided him access to Oppenheimer’s equally secret Atomic Energy Commission security file. We cannot say with certainty, but it appears obvious that Strauss gave Borden the FBI file as well to compile his own consolidated indictment across these disparate sources. Later that summer, Hoover began approving blanket surveillance measures on Oppenheimer and his wife, following his every move around Washington DC – and abroad, such as when they went to London and Paris towards the end of the year.
During this period, Borden completed his “report” and shared it with Hoover, concluding that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” This report, though it was not written by an government investigative body or even an investigator in the first place, and carried an unsubstantiated charge, made its way around Washington as planned. Hoover had shared it with Strauss, the Secretary of Defense, and President Eisenhower himself by November 27. Strauss, meanwhile, was busy mixing all of this material with his own lies claiming that “actual surveillance” had Oppenheimer attending “secret” meetings with the head of the Communist Party in California in 1940. Though Eisenhower personally doubted the charges, writing they “consist of nothing more than the receipt of a letter from a man named Borden,” he could not avoid acting on him during the Red Scare and was forced to suspend Oppenheimer’s security clearance, essentially locking him out of any government work until the matter was resolved. Incredibly, the FBI itself didn’t take the charges seriously either, at least at first. An agent noted that they were “distorted and restated in [Borden’s] own words in order to make them appear more forceful than the full facts indicated,” but Hoover acted on them anyway. The plan was to avoid an actual trial or public questioning with a rigged security clearance review, frequently shown in the film itself. The question was whether Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be renewed, but the target was Oppenheimer in general. He was given the choice to either resign before the review and remove himself from public life, or fight the charges. Albert Einstein, a colleague at Princeton, told him to simply tell the entire committee they were all fools and be done with it.
Oppenheimer ultimately chose to fight, but was unaware that the FBI was following his every move at this point, Strauss had bugged the office of his lawyer, and the entire process was a sham, rigged entirely against him. On Christmas Eve 1953, the FBI raided Oppenheimer’s office and seized his files. The same day Oppenheimer received a formal letter from the AEC about the need to determine “whether your continued employment on the Atomic Energy Commission work will endanger the common defense and national security.” The charges were a rehash of known information about his progressive leanings before the war and the Manhattan Project, items that had been investigated repeatedly for over a decade, and the charge that he hindered national security by delaying the thermonuclear bomb. Of course, none of what they claimed was criminal in any way, nor had Oppenheimer himself ever denied being associated with progressive politics before the war, but this was not an actual court of law, merely a witch hunt designed to look like one. As such, the “prosecutor” and Strauss’ handpicked lackeys that would decide Oppenheimer’s fate were given full security clearance and instant access to the FBI’s thousands of pages. Oppenheimer and the defense were given nothing, literally forced to respond to allegations read to them in real time from transcripts and other surveillance they could not access. Every detail about Oppenheimer’s life was dragged up, from his lovers to his associates, and much of it was either lied about or taken out of context. So extreme were the tactics, that when an FBI agent objected to the continued surveillance as it may “disclose attorney client relations,” Hoover didn’t care, stooping so low that agents were ordered to go through the baggage of Oppenheimer’s wife’s parents. Strauss told another agent “that the Bureau’s technical coverage of Oppenheimer…has been most helpful” to put it mildly.
Ultimately, Oppenheimer was forced to endure a public humiliation for days on end, personally testifying for five grueling days on his own, that is perhaps unique in American history for having the temerity to oppose establishment orthodoxy. Though General Groves, who probably knew him best during the war and was a diametrically opposite personality in general, insisted that Oppenheimer was loyal to America, an upright man in all his dealings, and had even initially refused to cooperate, he was personally threatened with retribution by Strauss and forced him to admit that, under the current regime, Oppenheimer would not have been granted a security clearance. More than two dozen witnesses came to Oppenheimer’s defense, including the head of security for the Manhattan Project who said the entire proceeding was a “manifestation of hysteria,” and another who told President Eisenhower “this is somewhat like inquiring into the security risk of a Newton or a Galileo,” but Oppenheimer’s clearance was summarily revoked and he was barred from advising the government on the future of his own creation. Throughout, Oppenheimer was surveilled by the FBI, the details of a supposedly secret proceeding leaked to others in the government, the end known before it even began. This, the FBI and key members of the establishment did to an American hero without regret or repercussion. There are obvious echoes of what would ultimately happen to President Trump, eerily familiar to anyone who has followed the Russian Collusion saga in the hysteria of our own times. The false accusations, the manipulated evidence, the illegal surveillance, the insinuation and innuendo, the coordination across the government in secret, and the complete lack of any criminal charges at the time are all the same. As it was back then, the purpose was never to actually charge a crime. It was to intimidate, harass, embarrass, and humiliate a person that they and they alone deemed unfit. President Trump is admittedly a controversial figure, a hero to some, a villain to others, but then again so was Oppenheimer. Whatever your personal opinion on either, if it can be done to them, there is nothing they can’t do to us.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 