- The FBI watched J. Robert Oppenheimer for months after he helped make the WWII-ending atomic bomb.
- He was then tried by Congress, and his top-level security clearance was revoked.
- Reports from the FBI show Oppenheimer was accused of Communism and spreading information to Russia.
During an inquest into the actions of J. Robert Oppenheimer by the FBI, the agency accused the “father of the atomic bomb” of a number of false crimes, including espionage and the dissemination of nuclear information to the Soviet Union.
As depicted in Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster biopic “Oppenheimer,” then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began investigating Oppenheimer in 1953, at the suggestion of his political nemesis, businessman and member of the US Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss.
Based on both Strauss’s recommendation and associations the US government found suspicious, Hoover allowed for a wiretap of Oppenheimer’s phone — which was illegal, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory — to gather evidence after Strauss accused the physicist of holding communist sympathies.
Documents from the investigation include hundreds of pages of phone records, along with interviews from his colleagues.
The then-dean of UC Berkeley’s school of chemistry, Kenneth Pitzer, said to agents in 1952 that his opinion of Oppenheimer had changed over the years — earlier, in 1947, he had said that he had “the utmost confidence in both the loyalty and the scientific ability” of Oppenheimer, according to the report.
During the investigation, though, Pitzer said he had new doubts about Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the country, due to his initial reservations about the development of the H-bomb. After Oppenheimer’s concerns were overruled, he “impeded” other scientists’ progress on the bomb, Pitzer said.
Another professor at Loyola University, Chicago, Ward Evans, said he felt Oppenheimer did not hinder the production of the H-bomb, and said he was “less of a security risk than he was in 1947” when he was cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission, according to the investigation.
The other main accusation against Oppenheimer was his alleged connections to the communist party. The allegations were made more potent by his relationships with known communists like psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, with whom Oppenheimer had a romantic relationship.
In the report, Oppenheimer is also linked to Bernard Peters, a graduate student of his who was at one time a member of the German Communist Party — these ties added to suspicions about the cause of Oppenheimer’s objections to the H-bomb, even though he was clearly not anti-war.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation does consider Oppenheimer likely to have held communist sympathies, but maintains that information in the report was exaggerated. The AHF states it was “unclear” if Oppenheimer ever formally joined the USA communist party.
At the end of the inquest, Oppenheimer’s top-level security clearances were revoked, a devastating blow to the scientist.
In 2022, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm nullified the decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, saying in a statement that Oppenheimer had a “central role” in WWII and the Department of Energy had a “responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer’s profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large.”
“As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to,” said Granholm in the statement. “While the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”
The FBI, DOE, and AHF did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
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