What the document says
The Atomic Energy Commission Personnel Security Board met in Room 2022 of Building T-3 in Washington, D.C. on Monday, April 19, 1954, at 9:30 a.m. Gordon Gray chaired, sitting with Ward T. Evans and Thomas A. Morgan. Roger Robb served as counsel for the board and Lloyd K. Garrison led the counsel for Oppenheimer. Gray opened by putting on the record that Morgan had read the transcript of the part of Friday's session he had missed and was familiar with it.
The session was given over to playing a sound recording while both sides followed printed copies of the transcript. Robb read the covering memorandum into the record, dated San Francisco, California, August 27, 1943, which described the transcript of a conversation between Oppenheimer, Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash and Lt. Lyall Johnson held in Johnson's office at the University of California, Berkeley. On the recording Oppenheimer described indirect approaches made to people on the project, named a chemical engineer who had spent years in the Soviet Union and belonged to a CIO union, and refused to name a faculty member said to have passed the approach along.
Most of the transcript here is counsel and board members stopping the playback to fix wording. The largest change concerned a sentence about the Commander in Chief informing the Russians. The printed text read "who are working on this problem" and counsel agreed the recording said "that we were working on this problem." Garrison argued the inference drawn in the earlier cross examination of Oppenheimer should be wiped out. Robb declined to go that far, and Gray said the record should show what the language was without the board drawing conclusions at that point.
Key points
- 01The board played a sound recording of Oppenheimer's August 1943 Berkeley conversation with Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash and Lt. Lyall Johnson while both sides followed printed transcripts and noted differences.
- 02Counsel agreed the recording said the Commander in Chief informing "the Russians that we were working on this problem," not "who are working on this problem" as the printed transcript had it.
- 03On the recording Oppenheimer said the approaches were always to other people and quite indirect, and that he knew of two or three cases, with two of the men working with him at Los Alamos.
- 04Oppenheimer declined to name a member of the university faculty, saying he would not mention anyone in the same breath as a man he had said might be acting in a dangerous way.
- 05Smaller agreed fixes included "intermediary" instead of "intermediaries," "circles" instead of "aides," "leak" instead of "lead," and "essentially" instead of "subsequently."
- 06The board could not settle whether one word was "who" or "two" after repeated playbacks, and agreed to print both in the transcript with question marks.
From the original
but they were considering the step which they would have regarded as thoroughly in line with the policy of this government, and just making up for the fact that there were a couple of guys in the State Department who would block such communications.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 1159678, document number None. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.