After leaving the hospital, we returned to the bone lab. We’d just started reconstructing the cranium of the North Knoxville skeleton when Chip Thornton came knocking on the door. “Wow,” he said. “Skeleton in a kit. Looks like fun.”
Miranda made a face at him. “You came to help?”
“Yes,” he said. “Okay, no, that’s a lie. I was in the neighborhood and figured it was just as easy to relay this in person as on the phone.” That’s a lie, too, I thought. You figured you’d stop and flirt with Miranda. “We’ve had some people digging out old security files,” he said, “and they found an interesting note in Dr. Novak’s. Apparently there was some suspicion at the time that Novak was a homosexual. Army intelligence recommended that he be removed from the project as a security risk, but General Groves himself nixed it — he wrote that Novak could consort with farm animals as long as he produced sufficient plutonium in the reactors in Oak Ridge and Hanford.” Miranda looked appalled. My guess was that her disgust had less to do with the notion of interspecies love than with Groves’s readiness to ridicule the scientist at the same time he was depending on him.
“Poor Novak,” she said, confirming my thinking. “What on earth was he doing in the boonies of Tennessee?”
“It’s where the project was,” said Thornton. For such a smart guy, he had an unfortunate tendency to take things too literally at times. “Groves picked Oak Ridge as the main site for the Manhattan Project for a bunch of reasons,” he said. “Far enough inland that the Germans and Japanese couldn’t possibly attack it. Isolated enough to stay below the radar screen. Good access to rail lines and cooling water and hydroelectric power and a civilian workforce.” I nodded; I’d read this in several of the history books I’d hauled back from the Oak Ridge library in the past week. “I don’t know if this was another factor in the selection,” he went on, “or just something that Groves came to appreciate as the project progressed, but folks in Appalachia tend to be pretty tight-lipped.”
Miranda pursed her lips, then said, “Yup.” Thornton and I laughed.
“Conservative, too,” he said. “Oak Ridge was practically the polar opposite of Los Alamos. Los Alamos was filled with loose-lipped liberals, from the top down. Hell, up until Groves put him in charge of Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer gave money to Communist causes. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, was a member of the Communist Party. So was his younger brother, Frank. So was Oppenheimer’s girlfriend, until she committed suicide.”
“Wait, wait,” said Miranda. “Girlfriend as in ‘before he married Kitty’? Or girlfriend as in ‘running around on Kitty’?”
“Maybe both,” said Thornton. “He was engaged to a woman named Jean Tatlock before he married Kitty, and he stayed in touch with her occasionally afterward. One of the creepier things in Oppenheimer’s file is a report by an army intelligence agent, Boris Pash, who followed Oppenheimer from Los Alamos to Berkeley in June of 1943. Pash watched Oppy go inside Tatlock’s apartment, wrote down what time the lights went out, and then wrote down what time they came out of the building the next morning.”
“Yuck,” said Miranda.
“It might seem intrusive,” conceded Thornton, “but these guys were working on a life-and-death, fate-of-the-nation project. Oppenheimer was in the most sensitive position of all the scientists. And Berkeley, where he and a bunch of other Los Alamos scientists came from, was a hotbed of communism. You think Berkeley was leftist in the 1960s and 1970s, you should’ve seen it in the thirties and early forties.”
“If the choice is between peeping Toms and left-wing liberals,” said Miranda, “I’ll take the Berkeley crowd any day.”
“Swell place,” said Thornton, “if you like Marx and Lenin.” I heard a faint warning bell begin to ring in the back of my mind, but I shrugged it off. “Oppenheimer and the people he brought to Los Alamos were brilliant, no doubt about it,” the agent continued. “They were the ones who put the pieces of the bomb together. But Los Alamos leaked like a sieve. Oppenheimer ran Los Alamos sort of like a university physics department. He held seminars where people talked openly about the bomb. He gave folks a mimeographed handout—The Los Alamos Primer, it was called — that summed up everything they knew about how to build an atomic bomb.”
“Probably helped speed things along,” said Miranda. “Synergy, cross-fertilization of ideas, intellectual critical mass — all that stuff we liberal ivory-tower types believe in, you know?”
Thornton frowned at her slightly; he didn’t seem to approve of the handout, and he didn’t seem to like the edgy comment, either. “It might have helped speed the Manhattan Project, but it also helped speed the Soviets,” he said. “One of the Los Alamos physicists, Klaus Fuchs, gave a copy of the primer, or the key details from it, to a Soviet intelligence agent in June of 1945. It was like handing over a set of blueprints for the bomb. The guy betrayed us for five hundred bucks.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Five hundred dollars? The Soviets got America’s atomic secrets for five hundred dollars?”
He nodded. “I like Oak Ridge,” he said. “Oak Ridge was way bigger than Los Alamos, but a lot tighter-lipped. A lot more compartmentalized, too. Most people didn’t know what they were working on. They tended not to talk about it or speculate about it. And if they did, they got escorted out the gate, because anybody they talked to could have been a snitch.”
“A snitch?” Miranda sounded offended by the word. “What makes you say snitch?”
“Only word for it,” he said. “Security was a huge priority in Oak Ridge. There were hundreds of military intelligence officers in Oak Ridge. Some in uniform, some not. Some had cover jobs — they went around testing batteries and changing lightbulbs, menial work that let them watch and listen to workers all over the place. But the serious snitching was the Acme Credit Corporation.”
Miranda snorted. “Acme? How corny is that? Sounds like something from a Road Runner cartoon.”
Thornton smiled slightly. “It does sound corny these days, doesn’t it? It might not have sounded so corny back then — back before Road Runner. Back in the middle of a struggle for world domination.”
Miranda flushed slightly. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get all cynical and ironic on you. What was the Acme Credit Corporation?”
“A bogus name and a post-office box in Knoxville,” said Thornton. “If the military intelligence people decided you were trustworthy — from your background check or their eavesdropping or whatever — they’d ask you to keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything that seemed suspicious. If you agreed, they’d give you these preaddressed ACME CREDIT CORPORATION envelopes and blank cards, and if you thought something or somebody seemed fishy, all you had to do was jot down their name and what they said or did on the card, then drop it in the mail. If you didn’t see anything, you sent in a blank card. Every tip got investigated.”
Miranda leaned back in her chair and bit her lower lip slightly. In my experience, anytime she did that, an argument was about to ensue. “What kind of fishiness? ‘So-and-so is making bombs in his basement’ fishiness? Or ‘so-and-so likes to wear his wife’s underwear’ fishiness?”
“Probably some of each,” he said. “One episode I heard about involved a fellow who was spouting off at lunch one day about the Soviet system of government being better than the American system. A day or two later, Acme got a note, and the guy was gone — given his walking papers and told not to come back.”