Behind The Fence

Secret History - Stealing Secrets

By limiting discussion to a few top officials, this was possible. However, Groves’ wishes were not completely followed. According to his biography, Racing for the Bomb by Robert S. Norris, Groves listed eight major objectives for secrecy:

• To keep knowledge from the Germans and the Japanese
• To keep knowledge from the Russians
• To keep as much knowledge as possible from all other nations, so that the US position after the war would be as strong as possible
• To keep knowledge from those who would interfere directly or indirectly with the progress of the work, such as Congress and various executive branch offices
• To limit discussion of the use of the bomb to a small group of officials
• To achieve military surprise when the bomb was used and thus gain the psychological effect
• To operate the program on a need-to-know basis by the use of compartmentalization.

Richard Feynman was one of the great young scientists working on the bomb at Los Alamos. Feynman took it upon himself to demonstrate the inadequacy of the security systems at Los Alamos. Because there was not much to do in the way of entertainment during down time, Feynman spent much of his free time playing practical jokes on his colleagues – breaking into offices and file cabinets and leaving notes for his friends to read. In addition, when he found holes in the fence, he made it a practice to sneak out, then walk back in through the gate until the guards realized he was only going one direction. Feynman often borrowed the car of his friend, Klaus Fuchs, so he could visit his ailing wife. Feynman would later learn that Fuchs was actually one of the employees who had been selling the secrets of Los Alamos. Fuchs, who was a German communist turned British citizen, would rendezvous with Russian spies at a meeting place in Santa Fe regularly from 1942 to 1945.

The full scope of infiltration by the Soviet Union is still not fully known, but we do know that after the war, several men and women were revealed as spies including Alan Nunn May, David Greenglass, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Klaus Fuchs.

According to Groves, a spy like Greenglass would never have learned so many of the secrets of Los Alamos with his low-level clearance if he was not told those secrets by the security violators themselves.