American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

A tail was put on Lomanitz, and one day in June 1943 he was observed standing just outside U.C. Berkeley’s Sather Gate with several friends. They were posing, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, for a photographer who routinely sold his services to students on campus. After the photo was taken and Lomanitz and his friends walked away, a government agent walked up to the photographer and bought the negative. Lomanitz’ friends were quickly identified as Joe Weinberg, David Bohm and Max Friedman—all of them Oppie’s students. From that moment on, these young men were marked as subversives. Lieutenant Colonel Pash testified that his investigators “determined in the first place that these four men I mentioned were very frequently together.” Without divulging “investigative techniques or operational procedures,” Pash explained that “we had an unidentified man and we had this photograph. As a result of our study we determined and were sure that Joe was Joseph Weinberg.” He also claimed that he had “sufficient information” to name both Weinberg and Bohm as Communist Party members. Pash was convinced that he had stumbled upon a sophisticated ring of wily Soviet agents, and he felt that any means necessary should be used to break the suspects. In July 1943, the FBI field office in San Francisco reported that Pash wanted to kidnap Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, take them out to sea in a boat and interrogate them “after the Russian manner.” The FBI noted that an...