In Oppenheimer Red Hunt, FBI Missed Real Atomic Spies
Author Kai Bird discusses controversy around towering nuclear scientist in latest SpyTalk podcast
Of the many ironies in the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the FBI searched for reds under the beds of virtually every suspected communist in the famed nuclear scientist’s circles, only to fail to catch the real atomic spies stealing A-bomb secrets for the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer himself, who sympathized with many communist causes, such as racial integration and support for leftists in the Spanish Civil War, was under close watch by Army counterintelligence agents and the FBI throughout his stewardship of the Manhattan Project, the super secret program in the New Mexico desert that produced the first nuclear bomb.
“Despite all this surveillance and intelligence, they were completely unaware of Ted Hall, Klaus Fuchs and any of the other spies,” Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told me in a SpyTalk podcast interview. “And there were at least three or four of them at Los Alamos. And so, it was an intelligence failure as usual in this business.”
Bird’s book, co-authored with Martin Sherwin, an expert on the nuclear age who died in 2021, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 and provided the template for director Christopher Nolan’s phenomenally successful film, “Oppenheimer.” Bird is also the author of several other highly praised biographies, including Outlier, on Jimmy Carter, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a biography of CIA officer Robert Ames.
Oppenheimer was not only never a security risk, he rejected a pitch from a communist friend to spy for the Soviets, Bird recounted during the podcast. “Oppenheimer's response was immediate,” he said. “It was, ‘Well, that would be treason.’”
You can listen to the full interview here, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jeff:
Yes, the movie glossed over the spy story, no matter how much Cillian Murphy raved over the script (https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571381319-oppenheimer/).
The movie also failed to update long-term effects of nuclear radiation on near-by, uncompensated residents (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear-bomb-cancer.html).
Some moments, too, seemed to pander to Hollywood executives, e.g., the one-off reading in Sanskrit from the Bhagavad Gita – during sex. You can almost imagine how that came about: executive to director, "Nolan, you gotta spice up that foreign-language quote! Just having Oppie intone 'Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds'... it's is boring! Get it: intoning = boring?"...
Overall, this biopic really told us little if anything about Oppenheimer himself.
That is, its amazing opticals (and even more powerful silences) did not overcome the lack of dialogue in which Oppenheimer might have explained, for example, how Oppenheimer's interests in Physics co-existed with interests like Communism. Aside from his earlier dream of doing science in New Mexico, did he later have any regrets about nuking the hell out of that beloved countryside – or had he changed over the years and sold out his ranch in a boondoggle (or did he not care, because his land was safely distant, or already sold)?... How could such a European-focused, intellectual, rather stiff scientist tolerate a nickname like "Oppie": don't you think he must have bristled, then perhaps come to accept it?...
The movie does manage to cram an amazing amount of events and information into what seemed a short 3 hours – but largely with one-liner dialogue that mostly checked boxes in the timeline and moved the story along. Its length is the a giveaway: either make a 90-minute movie or switch to limited series. (For this story, I would have preferred a limited 2-3-4-part series.)
Bottom line, the movie left me with no more insight into what drove Oppenheimer than before I saw it.
Nor does this movie's reassertions of Kai Bird's assertions about Oppenheimer's innocence convince me any more than Bird's assertions that VENONA's ALES was Wilder Foote and not Alger Hiss, as the late Eduard Mark countered (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26923052). (NOTE - this last comment comes from a descendant of Whittaker Chambers.)
Maybe the trick to a great biopic movie is to give bigger, clearer helpings of compelling insight – and then leave judgement more to viewers. "No man is an island" is the quote I now associate with this movie.
David Chambers
Excellent interview with Kai Bird, adding depth and context to the fil—which was outstanding.