The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress (2015)
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
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.
Had a lawyer on 2 occasions request various pieces of information regarding traffic, denied.
And it was traffic, not state secrets...
There are ways of increasing odds, including researching multiple questions or agencies, among others.
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.
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.
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.
The thing about many of these people is that they were very complex - they were very effective servants during the war, but would've gladly handed orders of battle to the KGB or GRU after the war. The case of Anthony Blunt is particularly interesting: If you read Peter Wright's account of his interrogation, Blunt was no longer the KGB man he once was but his allegiances remained with his friends (i.e. other double agents).
Although most of these men were sharp, Philby in particular knew exactly what he was doing (e.g. in betraying potentially hundreds of soon-to-be victims of the KGB bullet), however they nearly all possessed a deranged view of a grand communist society awaiting them upon defection - this is ignoring the obvious naivete of (I believe Blunt) either believing or choosing not to question his handler's word that those who he betrayed would not be shot. Of those who did defect, they all lived out their days surveilled and unhappy - Philby died an alcoholic who missed the cricket greatly, for example. George Blake actually only died recently, although it's hard to be sure given that he was wheeled out when convenient, but he apparently converted to Putinism.
There is probably a parallel with political extremism in these spies - beneath the ideologue (unlike Aldrich Ames, for example, these men were not doing it for the money although it is potentially worth considering the economic environment they were i.e. a rich life did not solely mean money unlike during the 80s) there is often a more complicated individual, dining on deceit.
As for little ladies, Melita Norwood comes to mind. On the opposite side, although not a lady, Vasili Mitrokhin had a fairly dull and tightly managed job - luckily he was very brave and we have a lot of information because of him.
Because spies are rare you get too many false positives.
Things which are far less rare than spies but still provoke suspicious behavior: divorces, mistresses, being homosexual, gambling debts, etc. Basically--human existence.
You don't have the resource to chase everything, so the spies slip through.
And that's before you start thinking about the fact that the spies are likely better at covering their tracks so you're even more likely to focus on the wrong stuff.
Soviet spies were obviously more successful, but then they were operating in an allied country that had an active program of technology and material exchange with, so its not really surprising that they were able to infiltrate a project as massive and widespread as the A-bomb effort.
Funnily it seems it was not! My source is a book titled "Restricted Data" by Alex Wellerstein which chronicles the history of nuclear secrecy in the USA.
It really seems that at least initially the biggest worry for those tasked to maintain the security were leaks to Congress/Senate. It seems there was a worry that if the wrong politicians get wind of the project they will shut it down. After all they spent a lot of money on something which sounded like a bad scifi at the time.
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.