Atomic Souvenirs

Both men were carefully checked before the Army assigned them to the Los Alamos atom-bomb plant in 1944. Heavy-set Alexander von der Luft, 23, had been born in Wilmington. His father was an official of the American Cyanamid and Chemical Corp. at Bridgeville, Pa. Von der Luft had interrupted his study of chemical engineering at Princeton University to enlist. He was quiet and studious. Earnest Wallis had been born in Indianapolis in 1913. He had left school to go into commercial photography in Cleveland. His father was a railroad auditor of modest means.

At Los Alamos, the two men never knew each other. But when they were demobilized as sergeants in February and March 1946, they were moved by a common impulse to take along some of the material they had worked with.

Not until a year later, after the civilian Atomic Energy Commission had taken the plant over from the Army, did anyone notice that the material was missing. On April 30, AEC notified the FBI.

The FBI traced von der Luft to Princeton, where he had returned to finish his engineering studies. In his room, they found over 200 pages of handwritten notes and documents on atomic processes, other data in the family safe in his home in Mount Lebanon, Pa. Wallis was run down in Chicago late in May. Carelessly thrown in a drawer in his studio were over 200 photographs and negatives pertaining to atomic bomb tests and machinery.

"Unknown Agents." The FBI questioned the two closely, decided that they had had no foreign or subversive connections. The material was returned to AEC, the affair was reported to the Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee on June 17. The boys were kept under surveillance while the Justice Department and AEC debated whether there was any way to hold a trial without revealing atomic secrets. Publicly, no one said a word.

But last week the New York Sun stumbled across something. In three-bank headlines, it announced that "unknown agents" had stolen atom-bomb secrets from the Oak Ridge plant. The quick-to-panic became panicky. Cried New Jersey's J. Parnell Thomas: "We must take drastic steps." In the Senate, Iowa's Bourke B. Hickenlooper rose to say that, as chairman of AEC, he had "no reason to believe" that anything had been stolen from Oak Ridge. But, said he, there was something he should mention. He revealed the Los Alamos theft.

Nothing Missing. Everybody looked furiously around, consulted, denounced and denied. The New York Sun brushed aside the Los Alamos episode and stuck to its Oak Ridge story. Oak Ridge authorities checked every paper and piece of machinery and declared that nothing of importance was missing.

At week's end, two months after the suspects had been found, the FBI arrested von der Luft and Wallis. They were charged with stealing Government property.

In Pittsburgh, bespectacled von der Luft explained: "I just picked them up as souvenirs."

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