Posted on 06/15/2003 6:43:14 AM PDT by Pharmboy
At the highest levels the government made a cost-benefit analysis and decided a trial of Oppenheimer would have been counter-productive - a Pyrrhic victory.
Considerable effort had been expended to assemble a team of the world's best scientists. What value a conviction if that team were destroyed?
Read Feyman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman!" to get a feel for the quality of people involved and the atmosphere they worked in. They could not have been replaced and they would not have tolerated a repressive, suspicious environment. It's also clear that most of them were scientists to the bone - with politics a distant second, third, or last.
I also question whether the government was smart enough to catch such people if they chose to spy...and I think the government also thought seriously about that. They tried with Linus Pauling and ended up looking like fools.
At the highest levels the government made a cost-benefit analysis and decided a trial of Oppenheimer would have been counter-productive - a Pyrrhic victory.
Considerable effort had been expended to assemble a team of the world's best scientists. What value a conviction if that team were destroyed?
Read Feyman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman!" to get a feel for the quality of people involved and the atmosphere they worked in. They could not have been replaced and they would not have tolerated a repressive, suspicious environment. It's also clear that most of them were scientists to the bone - with politics a distant second, third, or last.
I also question whether the government was smart enough to catch such people if they chose to spy...and I think the government also thought seriously about that. They tried with Linus Pauling and ended up looking like fools.
It's easy to forget that Bertrand Russell was one of the first to see and write about the essential tyranny and falsehood of the Soviet system (1920), or that Einstein chose to come to this country in 1933, the moment Hitler attained power.
It's wrong to assume their criticisms of American society implied a love for Soviet Communism.
McCarthy's "Witches" by William Norman Grigg
Witchhunt? The high-profile cases cited by McCarthy Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup all ended with the senators charges being validated.
I was a representative of the Young Communist League and the Communist party of the United States [at] the meetings of the executive committee of the Communist International, Young Communist International, Moscow," pronounced Paul Crouch during his September 15, 1953 testimony before a closed session of Senator McCarthys investigative subcommittee. Crouchs testimony, contained in the 4,232 pages of recently unsealed transcripts, offered details of a resumé the witness had compiled during 17 years of diligent service to the Soviet Union.
"I was a student and lecturer at the Frunze Military Academy and an honorary officer of the Red Army," continued Crouch. "I was the head of the Communist partys National Department for Infiltration of the Armed Forces in the United States, national editorial director of the Young Communist League, member of the editorial staff of the Daily Worker, district organizer for the Communist party in Virginia, New York and South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah, member of the district bureau of the Communist party in the Alabama district and the California district, Alameda County organizer, 1941."
Predictably, Crouchs detailed account of his Communist activities received no attention in media accounts of the recently unsealed transcripts. Nor were media outlets willing to report Crouchs testimony regarding nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key figures in the U.S. governments top-secret Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. Asked by Senator McCarthy, "Is there any doubt in your mind that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist party?" Crouch replied: "No, sir, none whatever. I met him in a closed meeting of the Communist party in a house which was subsequently found to have been his residence at the time...."
Three years prior to his testimony before McCarthys subcommittee, Crouch and his wife (who had also been a member of the Communist Party) had similarly testified regarding Oppenheimer before the California Legislatures Committee on Un-American Activities. But any further inquiry about Oppenheimers activities was stymied when the scientist received a prominent endorsement from a popular young Golden State congressman with impressive anti-Communist credentials: Richard M. Nixon.
In his testimony at McCarthys closed-door hearings, Crouch described another occasion when powerful figures in the U.S. government came to Oppenhemiers aid. During Oppenheimers perjury trial, two Justice Department attorneys forbade Crouch to testify that he and his wife had attended Communist Party meetings at Oppenheimers home. As a result, Crouch related, the jury "found him not guilty due to lack of sufficient identifying witnesses who had been in closed meetings with him, that is, witnesses who could testify to that effect."
On November 7, 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter from William L. Borden, former executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, containing a litany of detailed allegations leading to Bordens "exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance, thereby becoming a "martyr" to the scourge of "McCarthyism." But like others given that exalted title, Oppenheimer was guilty as charged.
In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov, former head of the KGBs Administration for Special Tasks, published his memoirs: Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness. In that position, Sudoplatov stated, he was "responsible for sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination of our enemies beyond the countrys borders." In Special Tasks, Sudoplatov disclosed that he had headed "the Soviet espionage effort to obtain the secrets of the atomic bomb from America and Great Britain. I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us." Further confirmation of Oppenheimers role as a Soviet spy was provided with the release of the "Venona" transcripts in 1995.
Rogues Gallery
Senator McCarthy first became aware of extensive Communist penetration of the State Department in 1949, when three men brought to his office a detailed FBI report on the problem. The report had been made available to the State Department in 1947. However, the State Department, under Secretary George C. Marshall, ignored the evidence and actually accelerated efforts to dismantle its security staff. A secret memo sent to Marshall by a Senate Appropriations subcommittee protested what it described as "a condition that developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of [State Department official] Dean Acheson. It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions."
Many of these figures had been brought into the State Department when it was merged in 1945 with several wartime agencies riddled with Communists and Communist-front members. Assurances from President Harry S. Truman that efforts would be taken to cull Communists from sensitive positions proved empty.
In 1949, Acheson who had been a paid attorney for the Soviet Union prior to FDRs decision to grant the regime diplomatic recognition in 1933 became secretary of state. In that position he continued his efforts to protect Communists and Soviet agents, most notoriously his good friend, the arch-traitor Alger Hiss.
A year later, in his March 9th speech before a group of Republican Women in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator McCarthy made public his knowledge of Communist infiltration of the State Department. He subsequently discussed in public the names of nine of these people, including Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup. A Senate committee created by Democrat Senator Millard Tydings, supposedly to investigate McCarthys charges, became instead an effort to vilify and demonize McCarthy. After 31 days of hearings, the Tydings subcommittee labeled McCarthys accusations a "fraud" and a "hoax" and gave a blanket clearance to the State Department. But the facts were on McCarthys side.
The high-profile cases cited by McCarthy Lattimore, Service, and Jessup all ended with the senators charges being validated. Lattimore. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee later investigated Lattimore, declaring in 1952 that "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy." John Stewart Service, after being cleared by the State Departments Loyalty and Security Board six times, was finally ousted from the department in December 1951 after the Civil Service Loyalty Review Board found that there was "reasonable doubt" as to his loyalty. In Jessups case, the uncontested record showed that he had belonged to at least five Communist fronts, had close ties to many Communists, and was an influential member of the Institute for Pacific Relations, which the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee would describe two years later as "a vehicle used by Communists to orientate [sic] American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives."
Of the 110 names McCarthy gave to the Tydings subcommittee, 62 were at the time employed by the State Department. Though the subcommittee cleared them all, within one year a State Department Loyalty Board instigated proceedings against 49 of the 62, and by the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthys list had either resigned from their government posts or been dismissed.
(Adopted by Council -- 23 April 1994
The elected Council of the American Physical Society expresses its profound dismay at undocumented allegations in the "memoirs" of former Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov claiming that some of the most eminent scientists of this century were engaged in passing atomic secrets to agents of the Soviet Union. The charges are made by a man who has characterized himself as a master of deception and deceit. None of the scientists named are alive to refute these sensational claims; however, surviving colleagues point to serious discrepancies in the published account.
The cloud of suspicion created by these allegations is injurious to the trust that must exist between the public and the scientific community and painful to the families and colleagues of these great scientists. We therefore call on the United States government to undertake a prompt and thorough investigation to determine whether these claims have any basis in fact.
Furthermore, Sudoplatov never claims, as some of his detractors seem to believe, that these stellar physicists were actual Soviet spies. Indeed, he is careful to stress that this was not the case: Oppenheimer and the others 'were best approached as friends, not as agents.
Sudoplatov was instantly accused of inventing these stories. So first it must he said that his claims, true or false, had been presented by him to the Soviet authorities in July 1982 and were clearly what he, and Soviet intelligence, believed to be the facts; that is, they were not invented for sensationalist reasons.
As to whether they were true, and how true, we must begin by discriminating among the "sources." There are several reasons for believing that if Moscow thought Fermi was in any sense knowingly letting information reach them, they were probably wrong. They may have been misled (as I have pointed out elsewhere) by exaggerated claims on the part of their agent on the spot; or, another cause of confusion, because Fermi and Oppenheimer at one point shared the same code name in Soviet files. That Fermi may have spoken indiscreetly on some occasion to his old pupil and colleague Pontecorvo is, on the other hand, far from implausible.
As to Oppenheimer, it is impossible to understand how anyone who has read the original American investigations which led to his losing his security clearance can doubt that he maintained very close and inappropriate connections with those whose allegiance was to the USSR, and that he let unauthorized people see secret material. One's feeling is, nevertheless, not so much that he favored the Soviet Union as that he
{p. xvi} felt himself, and his decisions, to be above, and superior to, any government. That these decisions amounted to leaking the facts certainly followed.
But the argument that, in effect, good scientists cannot behave as Sudoplatov claims is absurd. Some of the scientists on the atomic project - Fuchs, Nunn, May - were certainly spies, while Pontecorvo's Stalinism is presumably undisputed. Other scientists have had awful political records. Nobel Prize physicist Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark were crude Nazis; Joseph Needham assisted the Maoist germ-warfare hoax. Nor is it perhaps irrelevant to note that when the anthropologist Mark Zborowski was arrested as a Soviet spy, the anthropological community here was loud in its - as it turned out - wholly misplaced defense of him.
But if we want to understand the period, we find first that it was one of huge pro-Soviet euphoria, and that almost all these scientists in any case held strongly, and argued to their governments, that world peace would be served by sharing the secrets with Stalin. It would hardly be surprising if, at some point, in some cases, their moral commitment to peace overcame their accepted duty to the government employing them. Thus everyone concerned acted in what they believed to be the best interests of humanity. Their fault was not moral but intellectual. They were wrong and their governments were right
No " double standard " in use by me, at all. I know what I'm talking about. If you did, even though we disagreed, it would be a valid debate. This isn't; you can to a duel unarmed and are claiming " victor's rights ". That's patently ridiculous and in spades.
You come here to learn ... then shut up and learn. Without your innane posts, this thread WOULD have been more cogent .
If " liberal " codswallop was EVER apparent, it's you last paragraph. LOL
Nobody forces you or anybody else to reply to my posts or to read more than one of them if you find my views to be worthless...a point so obvious that I would think it would force you to re-examine your high opinion of yourself.
Another tidbit ... in 1952, Edward Teller told teh FBI that Oppenheimer was a " fellow travellor ", J.Edgar Hoover got told this, in a letter by William L. Borden, former executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Hoover told Eisenhower, who had a " blank wall " erected between Oppenheimer and the AEC secrets and the AEC pulled Oppenheimer's clearance on Dec. 23,1953.Yet, in 1954, after more hearings, Oppenheimer was " cleared " of being disloyal to America ; but, his clearance was still withdrawn.
Bertrand Russel was a staunch SOCIALIST/MARXIST to his dying day.Like so many of that ilk, he thought that HE could make that system work, if only given the chance. Wanna try again ... talking about things you don't know much about ? LOL
Not only was Einstein a Jew, but the Nazis were going afyer Commies, as well as Jews and others. Anyone, with sense and opportunity, was leaving Germany, when Einstein did.
No. Openheimer recommended using the Bomb on Japan. He was head of the Scientific Panel which advised the Interim Committee to use the atomic bomb on Japan.
Pauling, Feynman, and Gell-man were among my professors during my undergraduate years. One of Feyman's best students, H.T. Yura, was my closest friend.
You really are an unbelievable idiot.
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