Did Russia ever get any U.S. atomic secrets during the war? This week the House Un-American Activities Committee issued a report which strongly implied that it probably did.
The committee's report leaned heavily on the secret testimony given three weeks ago by Lieut. General Leslie Groves, wartime chief of atomic development. General Groves was sure that Russia "and its misguided and traitorous domestic sympathizers or stooges" had tried hard to get vital atomic information. Had Russia been successful? Said General Groves: "I imagine that it was successful to a certain degree. You never know what the other fellow finds out."
"Cold Feet." Robert Stripling, the committee's chief investigator, had developed two cases. The first centered around one Arthur Alexandrovich Adams, who shuttled between the U.S. and Moscow before the war, and had been connected with Russian commercial missions in the U.S. Adams, long suspected of espionage for Russia, slipped out from under FBI surveillance in 1945, is now believed to be in the U.S.S.R. The committee linked Adams with two U.S. scientists who had worked on secret atomic projects. One was Clarence Francis Hiskey, 36, now a chemistry professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The other was slender John H. Chapin, 35, now a brewery chemist.
The committee's story was that in 1944, when Chapin was at work on a secret atomic process at the University of Chicago, Hiskey arranged for him to meet Adams. Hiskey had described Adams as a Russian agent. The meeting took place but Chapin got cold feet. He told the committee under oath that he passed no secrets.
U.S. military intelligence had become suspicious of Hiskey, found that he held a reserve commission in the Army, had him called up and sent to duty on the Canol project in the Yukon, where "he counted underwear." The committee recommended that Hiskey, his exwife, Marcia, Chapin, and the missing Adams be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit espionage.
Hot Formula. The committee's other case centered on Yugoslav-born Steve Nelson, a Communist Party stalwart, onetime chairman of its San Francisco chapter. The committee, with rare restraint, did not identify Nelson's contact, an atomic researcher at the University of
California. It reported that "Scientist X" had gone to Nelson's home one night in March 1943, had read to Nelson a "complicated formula" which Nelson copied down. Several days later, Nelson got in touch with the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, met Vice Consul Peter Ivanov on the grounds of St. Francis Hospital. There, said the report, "Nelson transferred something to Ivanov ... If the matter transferred included the formula that Scientist X had given Nelson—and the inference is irresistible that it did—it was a formula of importance in the development of the atom bomb."
A few days later, the report said, a Soviet Embassy official went to Nelson's home, gave him "ten bills of unknown denominations." The committee recommended that Nelson be prosecuted for espionage and cited for contempt of Congress. It said that the testimony of "Scientist X," who swore that he had never known Nelson, would be turned over to the Attorney General.