Posted on 06/27/2003 9:05:38 AM PDT by walford
...rather than have Oppenheimer supply classified documents to agents, his Soviet spy masters might have preferred that he "appoint other Communists to key positions who would in turn hand over the information." Crouch then identified a number of scientists with Party affiliations appointed by Oppenheimer to key positions in the Manhattan Project. Nearly fifty years later, the Schecters would uncover a letter in the Soviet spy archives written by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief spy and then head of his nuclear program. Beria refers to Oppenheimer as an "unlisted agent" of the CPUSA and praises Oppenheimer’s role in providing Soviet spies access to U.S. atomic secrets...
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
At KGB headquarters, Yuri Andropov watched the election results with particular interest. As the [1976] election campagin had heated up, the KGB had managed to recruit a Democratic Party activist with direct access to senior levels of the Carter camp. The new agent, who passed political intelligence along to the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, had a wide circle of influential contacts, including Senators Alan Cranston, Eugene McCarthy, Edward Kennedy, Abraham Ribicoff, and J. William Fulbright.
It was the best source the KGB has ever been known to tape inside a presidential campaign. The agent provided valuable inside information on the campaign strategy and offered a detailed profile of Carter himself. On one occasion the agent apparently spent three hours with Carter, Governor Brown of California, and Senator Cranston discussing the election in the candidate's room at the Pacific Hotel in California. According to the KGN report sent to the Politburo, the agent had "direct and prolonged conversations" with Carter. After Carter won in November, KGB chief Andropov forwarded his reports to all the members of the Politburo.
Any guesses on who that highly-placed Democratic Party activist may have been? Robert Strauss? Gray Davis?
You think this man - and others like him - didn't work for a living? You think his high opinion of himself wasn't deserved?
As for stealing secrets I find it much more likely that others stole his secrets rather than the reverse.
If it is true, as the documents from Russia attest, that Oppenheimer was a Commie, then what more evidence is needed?
That Joe was a heavy drinker, there is no doubt about that. It brought about his death for sure. I still contend that most of the copy written about him is heavily tainted by liberal media accounts. There are still liberal socialists/commies in the government and most, like Hitlery, are of the generation that sat through the 60's demeaning and attacking America and they are still doing it. They admire the commies everywhere, do their best to install socialist ideals and policies and are generally against anyone and any party that opposes them.
Clinton sells missle guidence technology to the Chinese.
One may have been an idealist but it is clear the other was in it for the cash.
In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, professor Oppenheimer (unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder) informed us about the beginning of work.
At the request of Comrade Kheifetz, confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to the research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder.
I don't know why you would say this. I wasn't referring just to Szilard - I say "...and others like him..." - and I offered Feyman as an example. There were many others.
Also, not all the work was done at Los Alamos;
One of the most interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Toman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In those discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it. So, everybody disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead." It was such a shock to me that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", pages 108-109. Sound like whiney, temperamental primadonnas who don't work for a living? I don't think you know what you're talking about.
They should not have sided with the Nazis, but not because the Nazis were "worse" than the Soviets. The Germans attacked the Western democracies first, so they had to respond, just as the Finns had to respond to Soviet aggression first.
Ideally, I would like if we had supported whichever side was losing on the Eastern Front, switching our loyalties whenever the balance of power changed. Then, after both the Soviet and Nazi regimes had been sufficiently weakened, the West could have rolled through both Berlin and Moscow.
The strategy of getting the Russians and Germans to destroy each other was one favored, more or less openly, by the Western democracies. It led directly to the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Grading murderous tyrannies as to better or worse is no easy business. But the Nazis were truly horrible.
What Sudoplatov said was that these great scientists had naive political views which could be manipulated to further Soviet interests. Beria concurred.
Szilard more of less discovered the possibility of atomic weapons, tried to preserve the secret to the advantage of Western democracies, and made sure the U.S. obtained the weapon when he felt the secret could not be kept.
That you would believe men like Sudoplatov and Beria over Szilard tells me you've got a screw loose somewhere.
Elizabeth [Zarubin] used a trusted source, a refugee from Poland, to establish contact with Leo Szilard, the famed émigré physicist who had been one of the first to suggest to President Roosevelt that the United States begin research on an atomic weapon. Elizabeth sent Szilard a message: his cousin Karl was working in a secret Soviet laboratory, from which he hoped to return to Hungary when it was liberated from the Germans. It was a veiled threat to his cousin's freedom. Once the contact with Szilard was made, Elizabeth used it to exploit the idea of sharing nuclear secrets with the international scientific community. Szilard strongly promoted this idea, for which he drew the ire of General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Groves kept Szilard from working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb.
The Schechters cite as their authority for this paragraph "Russian Intelligence Archives."
The basic "secret" was no secret at all. That's why Szilard was so worried that the Nazis might be working on - and succeed in making - the bomb first, why he approached Einstein and Roosevelt with such urgency.
It's also why he - and most other world-class scientists - felt the secret could not be kept. Why all countries with decent scientists and reasonable resources could and would eventually make a bomb on their own, sooner rather than later since spying could never be entirely suppressed.
The Scheters conclusion that Szilard arrived at his political position because he was coerced is stupid and outrageous. It makes Szilard a coward and a fool. F**k them. Also, his position was that of most of the scientific community. All cowards, fools, and weaklings who were coerced? I don't think so.
The scientific community knew the secret couldn't be kept, knew there'd be an arms race, and knew that Stalin was a tyrannt and the Soviet Union a tyranny. What I don't understand is why they thought sharing atomic secrets would improve the situation.
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