Did Oppenheimer Really Help Moscow?

He carried out one murder with his own hands, planned at least one more, speaks with repellent offhandedness about still other assassinations. He is capable of warmth, though — for his old boss, Lavrenti Beria, and for Beria’s boss, Joseph Stalin; he still admires both even while acknowledging their “criminal activities.” None of which by itself discredits Pavel Sudoplatov’s sensational tales of Soviet espionage; in fact his closeness to Beria, Stalin’s last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov’s most stunning charge — that world-renowned physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr and Leo Szilard knowingly funneled U.S. atom-bomb secrets to Moscow during the World War II era — has been assailed by critics right and left, scientists and historians, American and Russian. They cite enough errors, inconsistencies and implausibilities to make a troubling case.

At issue is a single chapter, excerpted in the April 25 issue of TIME, of the book Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness — A Soviet Spymaster. Though Sudoplatov and his son Anatoli are listed as the authors, the book was actually put together by American journalists Jerrold Schecter, a former Moscow bureau chief for TIME, and his wife Leona, from 20 hours of taped interviews with Sudoplatov, together with his official writings for KGB archives and other documents gathered by his son. The spymaster, however, now 86, read and signed the written Russian-language version of the disputed chapter. In it he asserts that Oppenheimer and the other physicists passed atomic secrets to people they knew to be Soviet moles, out of a desire to help the U.S.S.R., then an American ally, defeat Hitler, and because they believed widespread knowledge of the secrets of nuclear-bomb making would contribute to world peace. Sudoplatov alleges that Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard would leave secret papers available in laboratories, including the one in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was developed, knowing the moles would find and copy them.

That the Soviets did penetrate the Los Alamos laboratory and learn many valuable secrets that hastened the development of their own atom bomb is incontrovertible. But the allegation that physicists who are still idols in the world scientific community cooperated with the espionage network? “Gumshoe braggadocio,” fumes Richard Rhodes, author of a 1986 Pulitzer- prizewinning book on the making of the A-bomb. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and a fervent anticommunist, scoffs at the idea that Fermi would ever have cooperated with the Soviets, because Fermi “clearly opposed the Stalinist nightmare.”

In Moscow the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service — a successor to the agency that Beria once headed and Sudoplatov worked for — put out a rare public disclaimer. Sudoplatov’s “allegations ((about)) Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer,” it said, “do not correspond to reality.” Oleg Tsarev of the same agency, an in-house expert on atomic spying, says, “Having seen the summary file ((on nuclear espionage)), I can tell you there are no such names as Sudoplatov mentions in it.” He makes one tiny exception: “One of our sources had a discussion with someone who knew Oppenheimer in 1945.” But the report about the conversation was thirdhand and maddeningly vague, and nothing came of it.

The Schecters argue that simply presenting Sudoplatov’s account — not corroborating it — was all they set out to do. “One of the reasons we left it in the first person and let him say some outrageous things was that this is his story,” says Leona Schecter. After his boss Beria was purged and shot in 1953, Sudoplatov was accused of mass murders by the victorious Nikita Khrushchev and jailed for 15 years. He was eventually rehabilitated after addressing a 1982 plea to the Communist Party Central Committee mentioning his exploits in obtaining atomic information from Oppenheimer, Fermi and Bohr, among others. The committee, say the Schecters, could easily have checked every word.

But as for direct documentation — well, says Anatoli Sudoplatov, many of the papers that might substantiate his father’s story, including the record of atomic-espionage work in the so-called Enormous File, are missing or have been tampered with or destroyed. So, he says, the elder Sudoplatov’s report “is based on oral witnesses . . . reconstructed from memory” of what his father learned from spies he worked with.

Maybe, but those 50-year-old memories seem to have led Sudoplatov into some serious errors and inconsistencies:

In a taped interview, Sudoplatov asserts (more flatly than in the book) that “in 1944 we received from Szilard material about his work at Los Alamos. This was very important.” But Szilard did not work at Los Alamos in 1944 — or ever.

By the end of January 1943, says Sudoplatov, the Soviets received a full report on the secret experiment conducted the month before by Fermi in Chicago, in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was produced for the first time. But in a memo dated July 3, 1943, and reprinted in an appendix to the book, physicist Igor Kurchatov says he thinks the Americans might conduct such a successful experiment “in the near future”; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed the team of scientists working to produce a Soviet A-bomb.

Sudoplatov reports a conversation between Bohr and Yakov Terletsky, a Soviet physicist and intelligence agent, in Denmark in 1945. Terletsky supposedly told Bohr that a nuclear reactor built in the U.S.S.R. would not work, and Bohr gave precise advice on what went wrong and how to fix it. The conversation did occur, but Bohr’s son Aage, who was present, insists his father gave away no technical secrets. His account was backed up by Terletsky — at least according to Roald Sagdeev, a former Soviet physicist now teaching at the University of Maryland, and other scholars who have read a 30-page report Terletsky wrote before he died. Terletsky, they say, termed the meeting a failure.

Oppenheimer, says Sudoplatov, suggested that Klaus Fuchs be included in a group of British scientists sent to Los Alamos to work with Oppenheimer’s American team on developing an atom bomb. That claim was based on a report by a Soviet agent named Alexander Feklisov. But the documentary record indicates the team members were selected by British authorities. The point is of more than passing importance: Fuchs was later found to have provided the Soviets with actual drawings of the American atom bomb.

Even after the last Russian and American intelligence archives are opened, if that ever happens, it may be impossible to prove or disprove Sudoplatov’s allegations conclusively. His recounting of his career is, after all, the oral history of an old and hardly admirable man, a product of the intrigues and maneuvers of the Stalinist era. As the eminent historian Robert Conquest says in his introduction to Sudoplatov’s book: “Individual reminiscences must, indeed, be treated critically — but so must most documents. Both are simply historical evidence, none of which is perfect, and none of which is complete. Even in the spate of documentation now emerging in Russia, Sudoplatov’s evidence is vastly informative in major but (as yet, at least) undocumented areas.” Informative — and debatable, as the reaction to his attack on the reputations of America’s pioneer bomb builders clearly shows.