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