I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Five hundred dollars? The Soviets got America’s atomic secrets for five hundred dollars?”
He nodded. “I like Oak Ridge,” he said. “Oak Ridge was way bigger than Los Alamos, but a lot tighter-lipped. A lot more compartmentalized, too. Most people didn’t know what they were working on. They tended not to talk about it or speculate about it. And if they did, they got escorted out the gate, because anybody they talked to could have been a snitch.”
“A snitch?” Miranda sounded offended by the word. “What makes you say snitch?”
“Only word for it,” he said. “Security was a huge priority in Oak Ridge. There were hundreds of military intelligence officers in Oak Ridge. Some in uniform, some not. Some had cover jobs—they went around testing batteries and changing lightbulbs, menial work that let them watch and listen to workers all over the place. But the serious snitching was the Acme Credit Corporation.”
Miranda snorted. “Acme? How corny is that? Sounds like something from a Road Runner cartoon.”
Thornton smiled slightly. “It does sound corny these days, doesn’t it? It might not have sounded so corny back then—back before Road Runner. Back in the middle of a struggle for world domination.”
Miranda flushed slightly. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get all cynical and ironic on you. What was the Acme Credit Corporation?”
“A bogus name and a post-office box in Knoxville,” said Thornton. “If the military intelligence people decided you were trustworthy—from your background check or their eavesdropping or whatever—they’d ask you to keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything that seemed suspicious. If you agreed, they’d give you these preaddressed ACME CREDIT CORPORATION envelopes and blank cards, and if you thought something or somebody seemed fishy, all you had to do was jot down their name and what they said or did on the card, then drop it in the mail. If you didn’t see anything, you sent in a blank card. Every tip got investigated.”
Miranda leaned back in her chair and bit her lower lip slightly. In my experience, anytime she did that, an argument was about to ensue. “What kind of fishiness? ‘So-and-so is making bombs in his basement’ fishiness? Or ‘so-and-so likes to wear his wife’s underwear’ fishiness?”
“Probably some of each,” he said. “One episode I heard about involved a fellow who was spouting off at lunch one day about the Soviet system of government being better than the American system. A day or two later, Acme got a note, and the guy was gone—given his walking papers and told not to come back.”
“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” Miranda was shaking her head. “Sounds a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War, the way people ratted out their friends and neighbors to the Stasi.”
“Oh, come on,” said Thornton. “We were in the midst of a horrific war. Global, apocalyptic war. Secret codes, spies, sabotage—those were real things, legitimate concerns. A slight erosion of civil liberties in a top secret military installation seems pretty far down on the list of World War II evils, if you ask me.”
“Children, childen,” I said. “Let’s not bicker.” I heard Miranda draw a deep breath, and saw her relax, which meant Thornton and I could relax, too. “Does the army have a card that could tell us why Leonard Novak was reading books on espionage when he was killed?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ve got people combing the Venona transcripts to see if they can find anything that might connect with Novak.”
Miranda looked puzzled. “Venona was the code name for a massive counterespionage operation,” Thornton explained. “Between 1944 and 1948, the agency that’s now called the NSA—the National Security Agency—intercepted and decoded thousands of telegram cables sent to Moscow from Soviet consulates around the world. Most of them were boring, bureaucratic stuff. But some, especially the ones from New York to Moscow, were spy reports. They used code names for people and places—the messages were in code, so the names were codes within codes—but the code-breakers eventually managed to decipher most of them. Amazing feat, really, because the Soviets were using complicated codes that changed every day. Cryptanalysists have extra gears in their minds—like physicists—that help them grasp things we mere mortals can’t make sense of. Anyhow, one of the interesting intercepts was telegram 940—”
“Telegram 940? I like it,” Miranda interrupted. “It even sounds like something from a spy thriller.” She was leaning forward on the table, rapt with attention now. Thornton smiled, pleased to have won her over, or relieved that she was off her civil-liberties high horse.