We live in an era where the press regularly rejoices in printing “national security secrets,” via leaks, as an evidence of its “watchdog” status. This isn’t exactly a new thing, of course. Press leaks and investigations have been around for quite a long time, and ever since the example of Woodward and Bernstein, this has become the ultimate symbol of journalistic power and access. But it does feel like it has accelerated somewhat in the last decade, both in terms of frequency and magnitude of such “antagonistic leaks” (as opposed to, say, “official leaks” — the kind that are secretly sanctioned for whatever reason). I’ve sometimes heard people suggest that were the press like this during World War II, things like the secret of the atomic bomb could never have been kept as well as they were. And while there is something to that, in the sense that American journalists were far more cooperative and acquiescent during the 1940s, it also projects a rosier picture backwards than ever truly existed. Even during the Manhattan Project, there were copious leaks. Some small, some huge.
Saturday Evening Post, November 1945 — one of the postwar articles lauding the Manhattan Project as the “best-kept secret,” or, in this case, “the big hush-hush.”
During World War II, the United States had a program of voluntary press censorship, coordinated by the Office of Censorship. It was, as stated, voluntary: there were no fines or threats attached to it, just stern official rebuke. It lacked “teeth.” It worked primarily by the Office of Censorship publicly releasing long lists of prohibited topics, and occasionally trying to squelch violating stories before they were syndicated. As such, it was a little clunky, something that usually went into effect after the fact.
The worst violation came in March 1944. John Raper, a reporter for the Cleveland Press, while on vacation in New Mexico, somehow stumbled upon one of the biggest, most secret stories of the day. Below I reprint the entirety of the article — it nearly speaks for itself, both in its security violations and its strange rambling nature. Some commentary follows; minor comments are in the footnotes. The images have been ordered to correspond with the text, not necessarily how they were laid out on the page.1
THE CLEVELAND PRESS – MONDAY, MARCH 13, 1944
Forbidden City
Uncle Sam’s Mystery Town Directed by “2nd Einstein”
Jack Raper, Press columnist, has returned to Cleveland following a vacation in New Mexico, where he found the following story.
By JOHN W. RAPER
SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico has a mystery city, one with an area from eight to 20 square miles, according to guesses. It has a population of between 5000 and 6000 persons, not more than probably half a dozen of whom can step outside of the city except by special permission of the city boss. He grants permission only in the most exceptional circumstances and under the most rigid conditions. And it is even more difficult for a non-resident to enter than for a resident to leave.2
Commonly known as Los Alamos, the place is a thoroughly modern city. It has fine streets, an electric light plant and waterworks with capacity for a city twice as large as Los Alamos, a service department that really services, public library, high, grade, and nursery schools; recreation centers, hospital, apartment houses, cottages, dance hall, an enormous grocery, refrigeration plant, factories and jail.
If you like mysteries and have a keen desire to solve one, here is your opportunity to do a little sleuthing, and if you succeed in learning anything and then making it public you will satisfy the hot curiosity of several hundred thousand New Mexicans.
But you might as well be informed that you will fail and the chances are thousands to one that you will be caught and will be thrown into the hoosegow or suffer a worse fate.3
A Free Country, But —
Of course, this is a free country and you can go where you please — if you are willing to sleep in the smoking car aisle or breathe the exhalations of your fellow sardines packed in a bus. But forget all about that sort of nonsense.
If you have any idea that you can employ a battery of eminent constitutional lawyers and go into court and that eventually the Supreme Court of the United States will decide the case in your favor if the lower courts decide against you, forget about that, too. you would be wasting your time and burning up any money you paid to the lawyer, for the man who owns this city has too much money and too much power in such a legal action.
This city’s site, or at least part of it, at once time was occupied by a private school for boys,4 and is not far from the village of Los Alamos, which is 53 miles almost due east from Santa Fe, the state capital.5 It is in one of the most interesting sections of New Mexico. It has scenery enough for a whole state — peaks and peaks and more peaks, and cliffs and colors that dim the rainbow.
Not far away are the Indian villages occupied by the finest kind of Indians, intelligent, industrious, friendly, skilled in the production of art objects, many of them graduates of Indian schools.
Cliff Dwelling Remnants
Within a short distance are the remnants of cliff dwellings, excavated ruins of pueblos centuries old, so old that men who have made scientific studies of them will say, when talking of their ages, “They may be,” “Probably,” “Estimates vary,” “We are pretty certain, but—.”
Shortly after the man who thinks he is going to the mystery city of Los Alamos reaches the level on which it is built, he will see, if he looks into the windshield mirror, a man following him on a motorcycle not many feet behind the car and he will be in the same position when the gate is reached. The instant the car stops there is a man directly in front of it and a man on each side. The three men are in military uniform and each has a rifle.
Then you realize that the owner of this strange city is Uncle Sam and you make no kind of protest and answer questions politely. If you have gone through all of the preliminary red tape previously and have been notified that you will be admitted, the men at the gate will know all about you and there will be little delay after you show the necessary papers.
Escorted by 2 Jeeps
You will be escorted to the office of the man whom you are to meet, escorted by two jeeps, one in front and one behind your car, men in each jeep armed with rifles. En route you will notice that the city is fenced in and that mounted soldiers patrol it and you will see scores of buildings.
When you transact your business you will be carefully escorted out of the city, taking the same route as when you entered. If you are a New Mexican and on your return to your home town it becomes known that you were in Los alamos everybody will ask, “What did you see?” The answer will be, “Nothing.” And if anyone asks, “Did you learn what is going on there?” the answer will be, “I don’t know a bit more about it than I did before I went.” Both answers will be true.
Uncle Sam has placed this in charge of two men. The man who commands the soldiers, who sees that the garbage and rubbish are collected, the streets kept up, the electric light plan and the waterworks functioning and all other metropolitan work operating smoothly is a Col. Somebody.6 I don’t know his name, but it isn’t so important because the Mr. Big of the city is a college professor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, called “the Second Einstein” by the newspapers of the west coast.7
Residents Must Stay
Dr. Oppenheimer is a Harvard graduate, attended Cambridge a year, received a Ph.D. from Gottingen University, Germany; is professor of physics at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology, and is a “fellow” of too many organizations to enumerate.8
It is the work of Prof. Oppenheimer and the hundreds of men and women in his laboratories and shops that makes Los Alamos such a carefully guarded city. All the residents will be oblige to remain there for the duration and for six months thereafter and it seems quite probable that many of them don’t know much more about what is being done than you do.9
It is gossip that no one mechanic is permitted to finish a piece of work. He starts to make something and it is passed at a certain point in its production to another, who goes a little further with the work and passes it to another and so on until the article is finished.10
One of the public’s guesses is that nothing but research is done.
Thousands believe the professor is directing the development of chemical warfare, so that if Hitler tries poison gas Uncle Sam will be ready with a more terrifying one.11
Tell of Huge Explosions
Another widespread belief is that he is developing ordnance and explosives. Supporters of this guess argue that it accounts for the number of mechanics working on the production of a single device and there are others who will tell you tremendous explosions have been heard.12
The most interesting story is that Prof. Oppenheimer is working on a beam that will cause the motors to stop so that German planes will drop from the skies as though they were paving blocks.13
In support of this there are stories of the experiences of automobile drivers in the vicinity of Los Alamos. According to these their radios and motors stopped suddenly at the same instant and after 15 or 20 minutes suddenly began to operate as usual.14
Names of the drivers are frequently given, but when I asked “Did any of them tell you, or did you get it secondhand?” the answer invariably was, “Well, he didn’t tell me. A friend of mine told me about it.”
And if you say, “Did you ask your friend if the driver who had the experience told him?” The answer is generally, “Well, I didn’t ask that question.”
One of these days Prof. Oppenheimer may tell the newspapers about what he has done at Los Alamos, there may be another now-it-can-be-told book or the secretary of war may hand out the report made to him. And who knows but that the eminent physicist may deliver an address at the Cleveland City Club or the Rotary Club?
If you’d rather see it in the original spread, uploaded here is my copy of it from the archives. Note the original is a photostat and has black/white reversed, which is why it is a bit washed out after photographing (shop talk: it is very hard to photograph old photostats because they are on glossy paper and thus reflective, so you have to take pictures of them under shadows).
Why do I consider this the worst? Not because it says, in any straight terms, that atomic bombs are being made. But look at the suggestions it is giving to potential spies:
It identifies (with some geographical error) the name and location of an obviously classified scientific/military facility
It gives an approximate and plausible size of the facility, which gives some hint of its importance
It emphasizes the amount of compartmentalization going on at the facility, which again hints at its importance
It correctly identifies the scientific director, which to an observed eye would narrow it down to something relating to theoretical physics
It reports local accounts of explosive testing on site
If I were a spy thinking about nuclear weapons, I would find that a pretty interesting combination of things, and worth following up on. Of course, it also has a healthy dose of confusion, nonsense, and just plain silliness mixed into it. But even a ray gun that stopped airplanes, or a chemical weapons plant, might be of interest to enemy spies. (Much less Allies who you don’t want snooping around, like the Soviets.) The article has just enough ring of authenticity to it to suggest that something serious was going on at Los Alamos — which makes it much more dangerous than something that was wilder yet potentially closer to the truth.
General Groves — not amused.
The Manhattan Project security apparatus was not amused. Col. Ashbridge, the military head of Los Alamos, sent a copy to Groves a few days after it was published, noting that he had heard that Groves was already aware of it and that it had been shown to Oppenheimer. Ashbridge wrote:15
We are naturally much perturbed about it and Major [Peer] de Silva [Los Alamos security head] is preparing a memorandum to Lt Col [John] Lansdale [Manhattan Project security head] as to the source of the data collected by the reporter while vacationing in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. There are many rumors around town about this project since thousands of construction workers from this vicinity have been employed at Los Alamos, many of our personnel go into town for shopping and weekends, and Dr. Oppenheimer’s name is fairly well known in Santa Fe.
In discussing this with Major de Silva, he indicated that he felt the “leak” was not something we could have prevented, but that the reporter had doubtless picked up some local gossip, and put it together with information on Dr Oppenheimer in “Who’s Who.”
The late A.J. Connell [director of the Los Alamos Ranch School] informed me several months ago that everyone in Santa Fe knew some sort of scientific project was underway at Los Alamos, but that curiosity had died down when no one found out anything more after several months, and they just accepted us without trying to guess what was done.
The action of the newspaper in printing such an article shows a complete lack of responsibility, compliance with national censorship code and cooperation with the Government in keeping an important project secret. It is hoped that some steps can be taken to deny the paper certain privileges as a result of their disclosure of this project in such an article.
So what did Groves end up doing? First he made sure that it wouldn’t spread further — he put the kibosh on any follow-up stories or further syndication. Time magazine was going to write a follow-up regarding West Coast atom smashing work, but the Office of Censorship stopped them. Then he had the reporter investigated and interviewed. For awhile he thought about getting Raper drafted to the Pacific Theatre — a rather bloodthirsty approach to the problem. He relented on this when, as it turned out, Raper was in his sixties. Not exactly Army grunt material.16
Did the Axis powers notice this? If they did, they don’t seem to have done much with it. Which highlights an important aspect of Manhattan Project secrecy, in a way: how lucky it was. There were a tremendous number of puzzle pieces out there for an enemy power to notice and put together regarding the bomb effort. It was not quite so perfectly secret as we often talk of it as being. We know it was possible to put some of the pieces together, because the Soviets did it, and even a few others did it. (I’m in the process of writing an article about some of the successful efforts, so more on that later.) Groves wanted a hegemonic, all-encompassing, all-controlling secrecy regime. Understandably, he couldn’t accomplish that — but he pulled off just enough that, with a bit of luck, the project stayed more or less below the water line.
Notes
Source: John W. Raper, “Forbidden City,” (13 March 1944) The Cleveland Press. Photostat copy in Manhattan Engineer District records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, Record Group 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 99, “Investigation Files.”
While entry to Los Alamos was heavily restricted, many more than “half a dozen” people were allowed to leave.
This guy is impressively flip, eh?
The Los Alamos Ranch School.
Los Alamos is 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
Probably a reference to Col. Whitney Ashbridge, the post commander of the Los Alamos site. Ashbridge had replaced the original military head, Col. John Harman, because the latter had difficulty getting along with the scientists. Ashbridge himself was replaced by Col. Gerard Tyler in late 1944, after Ashbridge’s health began to fail because of the strain brought on by the job. See Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (US Government Printing Office, 1985), 486, 497-498.
Something of an exaggeration, of course — Oppenheimer’s purely scientific achievements never rivaled Einstein’s. Still, there is some irony in the fact that Oppenheimer would in the postwar take a position as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, in the Princeton, New Jersey, and as such effectively become Einstein’s boss. For more on Einstein and Oppenheimer, see S.S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Manhattan Project security speculated that this information came from Oppenheimer’s Who’s Who entry. No comment on whether this “fellow” was a “fellow traveler” or not…
Again, I don’t really know where he gets this “sealed in” argument from. It is not correct. But it is true that most of the residents were not aware of the final goal of the project.
This is an exaggeration of the compartmentalization policy, but not so off the mark. Henry Smyth once joked to the New Yorker that because he ran two different divisions in the project, he was not allowed by rules to talk to himself.
Not entirely off the mark, either in actual purpose or analogy. The first Los Alamos-like installation that I have heard of dates from World War I, the so-called “Mousetrap” factory in Cleveland, where Lewisite (an arsenic-based chemical weapon) was produced. James B. Conant worked on that project.
Very, very close to the mark. The explosives heard may be related to the implosion studies, which had begun in the summer of 1943.
The idea of motor-stopping beams is one that pops up in numerous places during speculation about enemy science during World War II. I have even read stories that have said the technology was obvious, though I have no idea what it might have been.
No, not an electromagnetic pulse. Aside from the fact that no nuclear weapons had been set off by March 1944, the nuclear EMP at ground level is a very short-range effect compared to the blast effects, and if your car was really damaged by an EMP it would not start back up again in 15 minutes.
Whitney Ashbridge to Leslie R. Groves (18 March 1944), Manhattan Engineer District records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, Record Group 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 99, “Investigation Files.”
Patrick S. Washburn, “The Office of Censorship’s Attempt to Control Press Coverage of the Atomic Bomb During World War II,” Journalism Monographs 120 (1990), 1-43, on 11-12, and 37 fn. 43. See also Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, The Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (Steerforth Press, 2002), 275-276.