The world’s first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexican desert — a result of a highly secretive effort code-named the Manhattan Project, whose nerve center lay nearby in Los Alamos. Just 49 months later, the Soviets detonated a nearly identical device in Central Asia, and Washington’s monopoly on nuclear arms abruptly ended.
How Moscow managed to make such quick progress has long fascinated scientists, federal agents and historians. The work of three spies eventually came to light. Now atomic sleuths have found a fourth. Oscar Seborer, like the other spies, worked at wartime Los Alamos, a remote site ringed by tall fences and armed guards. Mr. Seborer nonetheless managed to pass sensitive information about the design of the American weapon to Soviet agents.
The spy fled to the Soviet Union some years later; the F.B.I. eventually learned of his defection and the espionage but kept the information secret.
Mr. Seborer was born in New York City in 1921, the youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, according to the study by Mr. Klehr and Mr. Haynes and a C.I.A. document they cited. He attended City College of New York, studied electrical engineering and worked at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946.
The Seborer brothers’ problems with getting security clearances coincided with a growing concern about espionage. Following the Soviets’ atomic bomb test in 1949, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in Great Britain in February 1950 and confessed to spying while he was at Los Alamos. Three months later Harry Gold, his courier, was arrested, and he led the FBI to David Greenglass in June. By July, Julius Rosenberg was in custody. By the time the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell went on trial in 1951, many of their friends from CCNY’s communist movement were under suspicion and one, William Perl, had been convicted of perjury. Several others, including Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, had vanished. Decades later Barr and Sarant were identified as living in the USSR under assumed names.
Stuart and Oscar Seborer also decided it would be prudent to leave the United States. Together with Miriam and her mother, Anna, they booked passage on the SS Liberte, bound for Plymouth and LeHavre, on 15 February 1951 and sailed on 3 July. The long delay between purchasing the tickets and actually leaving indicates that they were not fleeing some kind of fear of imminent danger—unlike Morris and Leona Cohen, two Soviet agents, who vanished from their New York apartment suddenly in June 1950.
The Rosenbergs had been sentenced to death in April 1951, and the hunt was on for other spies, but neither Seborer brother was in the crosshairs of any espionage investigation. They had become identified as security risks because of their association with communists, but indications of possible espionage had not surfaced in their security reviews. In fact, the first indication the FBI or any other security agency received of their involvement with Soviet espionage was Needleman’s conversation with Jack Childs in 1954.
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