Did Oppenheimer Really Help Moscow?

He carried out one murder with his own hands, planned at least one more, speaks with repellent offhandedness about still other assassinations. He is capable of warmth, though -- for his old boss, Lavrenti Beria, and for Beria's boss, Joseph Stalin; he still admires both even while acknowledging their "criminal activities." None of which by itself discredits Pavel Sudoplatov's sensational tales of Soviet espionage; in fact his closeness to Beria, Stalin's last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov's most stunning charge -- that world-renowned physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer,...