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Chevalier is now well known to all security agencies as the man who, in the early days of the A-bomb project, tried to get Oppenheimer to give him details of the atomic program. Chevalier made this effort as a conscious agent of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Oppenheimer sternly refused Chevalier's request, but he did not report this significant attempt at Soviet espionage to Army intelligence for at least six months. It was another four months before he would admit to Army intelligence that Chevalier was involved.
What bothered the Gray board was that Oppenheimer has since been seeing Chevalier. Last December the Oppenheimers dined in Paris with Chevalier. Wrote the majority: "It is not important to determine that Dr. Oppenheimer discussed with Chevalier matters of concern to the security of the U.S. What is important is that Chevalier's Communist background and activities were known to Dr. Oppenheimer. While he says he believes Chevalier is not now a Communist, his association with him, on what could not be considered a casual basis, is not the kind of thing that our security system permits on the part of one who customarily has access to information of the highest classification."
Sense of Outrage. The finding of "susceptibility to influence" revolved around Oppenheimer's contacts with Dr. Edward U. Condon. Condon is the former chief of the National Bureau of Standards (now director of research and development for Corning Glass Works), who got into a headline row in 1948 with a House investigating subcommittee after the subcommittee called him "one of the weakest links" in the U.S. security chain. Early in the atomic program, Oppenheimer got a job at the University of California Radiation Laboratory for a young physicist with a known Communist background, one Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz. In 1943 the Army notified Lomanitz that he was to be drafted. Dr. Condon wrote Oppenheimer about this, as Oppenheimer put it, "in a great sense of outrage." Oppenheimer protested Lomanitz draft call (to no avail), and later tried to get Lomanitz released from the Army to return to his job.
As late as 1949, just before Lomanitz and another Oppenheimer friend, David Bohm, were to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Oppenheimer met them on a sidewalk in Princeton, N.J., (by chance, he testified), and discussed what they would say to the committee. Oppenheimer says he told them to tell the truth, but on the stand both refused to say whether they had been Communists on the usual constitutional grounds that their answers might tend to incriminate them.