NM NM - Harvey 'Gene' Whitacre, 20, Albuquerque, 30 June 1947

[Quoththeraven]

Ft Gordon! I went to high school in Augusta.

So, you were an MP? Maybe you know the answer to this in regards to the paper passes in the 40s - it seems like I once read that it was a regular thing for MPs to prowl through the local town rounding up sailors/soldiers and checking their passes, but I can’t find a link. Does that sound familiar? ( I realize the 70s are not the 40s, so maybe it was a thing of the past by then.)

Nope, never went around rounding up anybody. Never checked for passes, either. I did go through some drug dens (bars loaded with druggies) in Ludwigsburg with the German police (joint liason patrols) (as a show of authority), but never rounded anybody up.

 

[Ciriii57]

I don’t think it was stated that it was ‘found’, was it? Just mailed back.

No it wasn't, you're right, but unless Eugene or the people who took him/he went off with mailed it back then doesn't that mean someone found it and popped it in the mail? How else might it have got there do you think?

Speaking of the clothes being found 2 days later by a beat cop - that makes me wonder if they were newly placed there, rather than the night of the incident. (I’m thinking if they’d been there the whole time, the officer would have discovered them before 2 days later.)

Is it definitely known that this area had been searched previously?

 

[cenazoic]

Is it definitely known that this area had been searched previously?

Not that I’ve seen - my assumption was that if they were found by a ‘beat cop’, then this area was part of his normal beat, and therefore he would have (likely?) found them before, had the clothes been there all along. (Pure speculation.)

 

[alb1on]

Koval, although a private, is rather a special case. He trained as a chemical engineer in the USSR, then as an electrical engineer in the US.

I also don’t think Whitacre was killed/abducted for any secrets.

There are two reasons:

1) I was in the USAF in the ‘90s, and my MOS required a Top Secret/SCI clearance. This doesn’t mean you have access to everything classified as such; generally only what you have a need to know (for your specific job.)

But more importantly, 2) Klaus Fuchs had already given everything we knew about the atomic bomb to the Soviets in 1945:

“Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, was arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. While stationed at U.S. atomic development headquarters during World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the U.S. atomic program, including a blueprint of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb later dropped on Japan, and everything the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb.” (Ref)

So certainly, a low-level enlisted person (as Whitacre, and I was) can have access to TS information, but it isn’t generally worth killing them over, IMO.

The simplest explanation is that someone (lots of people, by the sound of it) knew he was carrying around a lot of cash, and the usual thing occurred.

Also, in re: his 24-hour pass. This generally just permission to be off base. Even in the 90s, it wasn’t automatic that you could just wander into town or whatever. We also had to let our supervisor know where we were and how we could be contacted; for example, when I was in Monterey, CA, spending a weekend in San Francisco entailed filling out a form with the dates, address and phone number where we could be located. When we returned, we’d often get a debrief from OSI about anyone we’d been in contact with, no matter how seemingly casually.

We didn’t get paper passes, but here’s what they looked like in 1947:




View attachment 488019

I thought I had been clear that I also doubt the espionage theory regarding Whitacre and believe it was a probable robbery. However I must disagree with the rest of your case. Koval was an educated man but his role had nothing to do with that and he simply took advantage of his access in a low level role. And he was not the only one. David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, was a sergeant and machinist at Oak Ridge rather than a scientist but was an important source of information relayed through the Rosenbergs. The Venona Project of the SIS uncovered numerous Soviet sources across most US government departments and especially the atomic bomb programme - and they ranged from secretaries to senior scientists. This included many operating in the aftermath of WW2.

The main reason why I doubt the espionage theory is simple. I am pretty sure that he would have surfaced or been exposed by now if that were the explanation. The emergence of the likes of Koval, Theodore Hall and Oscar Seborer as agents many years after the event demonstrated that identities rarely stay hidden for ever.

 

[cenazoic]

Sure, I don’t disagree with any of that, @alb1on . Just adding on to the multitude of reasons why espionage seems to be the least likely answer.

There are several cases from the 40s-50s involving young men disappearing where it’s become a predominant theory (with no evidence other than ‘he could have been a spy’) and it drives me a little batty. (Eg; Whitacre, Ronald Tammen, Richard Cox come immediately to mind.)