[HN Gopher] The curious death of Oppenheimer's mistress (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
The curious death of Oppenheimer's mistress (2015)
Author : Hooke
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-07-07 04:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
| trimbo wrote:
| > More recently, and more sensationally, there is an entire
| chapter on Tatlock's death in Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's
| biography of Oppenheimer
|
| I read American Prometheus last summer, and did not walk away
| with any inkling that the discussion of Tatlock's death was
| sensational at all. I just re-skimmed that chapter and while it
| documents the questions others brought up later, the authors do
| not seem to imply they thought it was more than a suicide. They
| conclude by saying Oppenheimer never thought it more than
| suicide.
| mywittyname wrote:
| From those snippets of interviews, it sounds like he really
| loved her. I can't imagine how I'd feel if a person I love died
| because of me. When the choices are to believe that they A)
| committed suicide, or B) were murdered for being affiliated
| with you by a powerful person who clearly has you in their
| sights, you probably try your damnedest to make yourself
| believe A.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Also interesting: https://knowledgenuts.com/atom-bomb-creator-
| tried-to-poison-...
| bjornsing wrote:
| Wow, if eating that apple would have been lethal... that's
| insane... But I somehow doubt that it would have.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| interesting, it sounds that they had quite a bit of security
| around the Manhatan project, now how did they manage to ignore
| such a big number of real spies?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Probably due to a good bit of misdirection aided by real spies.
| The obsession with "communists" always struck me as counter
| productive. What real Soviet spy would openly operate in
| communist/pro-Soviet circles? A spy who wanted to stay hidden
| would be a WASPy white supremacist who'd punch anyone that
| disrespected the flag.
|
| Intelligence operatives probably feed these communist groups
| with enough mundane operations to overwhelm the counter-
| intelligence and ensure they weren't looking under the correct
| rocks. All while the little old lady who says The Pledge to the
| flag every day before coming into the office is walking out
| with photocopies of top secret materials.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Uh, no. The actual spies were pretty much the usual suspects.
| pvg wrote:
| _What real Soviet spy would openly operate in communist /pro-
| Soviet circles?_
|
| Quite a few did since that was where ideologically-motivated
| recruits were more readily available. The obsession was
| misplaced and counterproductive not because the spies weren't
| there but because the overwhelming majority of people with
| left-leaning politics weren't any sort of spies or even
| 'disloyal' in any material sense.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Sure, but I'm arguing that they were mainly there to tie up
| counter-intelligence resources.
|
| We rarely captured the spies who actually stole damaging
| information. Of the few notable ones that were caught, most
| weren't running around rallies in Che t-shirts. They were
| milquetoast, stodgy coots who lived in suburbia.
|
| The CIA et al did eventually catch on to the personality
| traits and personal situations that make for a
| compromiseable target. But they clearly spent decades
| chasing their tail before figuring it out.
| fishtockos wrote:
| Ahh. Surely this explains Klaus Fuchs, the most important
| spy in the Manhattan Project and a long-time communist?
| pvg wrote:
| I think you're anachronistically conflating Che-t-shirt
| leftism with the political inclinations of plenty of
| educated, professional people of the period. Many atomic
| spies had political or ideological motives as did several
| of the Cambridge Five and their initial contacts with
| Soviet intelligence came about because Soviet
| intelligence specifically set out to recruit in such
| circles.
| creamynebula wrote:
| To be thinking about such things makes me smile remember how
| much as a child I wanted to be a spy or a police
| investigator!
| jessaustin wrote:
| This is probably related to the fact that Pervaia molniia was a
| carbon copy of Fat Man. Without another nuclear power, there
| would have been no reason to build so many weapons.
| kbenson wrote:
| _What becomes more suspicious is when you look a bit more at the
| person who might have been most interested in Tatlock being
| "removed from the picture": Lt. Col. Boris Pash, chief of the
| Counterintelligence Branch of the Western Defense Command (Army
| G-2 counterintelligence). A Russian immigrant to the United
| States who had fought on the losing side of the Russian Civil
| War, Pash was regarded by fellow Russian emigre George
| Kistiakowsky as "a really wild Russian, an extreme right wing,
| sort of Ku Klux Klan enthusiast."_
|
| It's interesting to me, that in the context of a story about the
| possible assassination of a U.S. citizen by its government for
| purported anti-government sympathies, that one of the main
| suspects would be an immigrant that achieved high status in the
| armed services (or came over as somewhat high status and retained
| some sort of rank in the military of a different nation?).
|
| That said, I'm not sure if that highlights how much more
| important in the past it was what you thought and how less
| important it was where you came from or if it's just really wild
| story that says less about the nation at that time and more about
| some really crazy characters that happened to be in proximity.
| [deleted]
| vzaliva wrote:
| IANAL, but wouldn't it be possible to request all documents
| pretaining to this case under FOIA, to put this question to rest?
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Requesting doesn't mean you will get anything.
|
| Had a lawyer on 2 occasions request various pieces of
| information regarding traffic, denied.
|
| And it was traffic, not state secrets...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Not asking guarantees you won't.
|
| There are ways of increasing odds, including researching
| multiple questions or agencies, among others.
| jjk166 wrote:
| And of course the record needs to exist to begin with.
| Unsanctioned assassinations of US citizens probably aren't
| well documented.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-08 23:01 UTC)