I GREW UP AMID BARBED WIRE, SPIES, PRIVATION AND THE BIGGEST SECRET THE NATION EVER KEPT. TO US, IT WAS PARADISE. THE SECRET SHARERS WE HAD UPROOTED OURSELVES FROM ALL OVER AMERICA TO LIVE SEALED IN PRIVACY, UNDER MILITARY DICTATORSHIP, DRIVEN BY WARTIME URGENCY - FOR A PROJECT ONLY A FRACTION OF US UNDERSTOOD.

Aug 09, 1992

By JAY SEARCY

AT NIGHT I COULD SEE the yellow glare from the secret plants where my parents worked, tucked mysteriously behind a ridge far off in the distance. The plants, surrounded by layers of great fences, were built well away from the town, and from one another, guarded and patrolled and hidden from the world in what was once remote Tennessee farm land. They were huge, windowless, silent block buildings that never shut down. Everything about them was top secret.

From our little prefabricated flattop house, which sat high on the crest of a ridge, I could stand on my bed and see much of the town through my window. It was a new town, a town of codes and rumors and secrets and aliases and lies, all in the name of security. And it was growing so fast that, sometimes when I looked out my window in the morning, a house would be standing where there was only an excavated lot the night before. At the height of construction a house went up every 30 minutes.

At one time there were more than 75,000 of us living there, and an additional work force of 40,000 was commuting from surrounding communities - soldiers and civilians, men and women - all under military rule, all protected by barbed wire and roadblocks and armed guards and patrol boats and mounted sentries. And everybody lived under the watchful eye of the FBI and military intelligence. Nobody, nobody, was allowed to talk about what he was doing. There was a war on. The enemy was listening.

Even we children were taught not to talk about things we saw, no matter how strange. And so, when I almost stepped on my elementary school teacher and a soldier making love in the picnic grounds behind a little white chapel, I never uttered a word. The Germans never found out.

One in four adults was a government informant, many of them enlisted from the workplace with orders to file weekly reports of any loose talk or security breaks. Even our future mayor was a spy. We didn't know it then, but intelligence agents hung around cafeterias and restrooms and dormitories watching and listening. They posed as bus drivers and waiters, scientists and librarians. A loose tongue could get you a trip out of town. No one ever seemed to know where.

Cameras, telescopes, binoculars and firearms had to be registered with the military. No liquor was allowed, although some got through security checkpoints hidden inside dirty diapers or between a mother's legs. Phones were tapped. Mail was inspected. Some top scientists used aliases, and names of other key project personnel weren't allowed to appear in newspapers (only first names were used in reporting the high school's first football games). Death certificates of employees accidentally killed on the

project were classified and weren't delivered to next of kin until after the war. Some plant workers, including my parents, were called in for periodic lie-detector tests.

Are you discussing your work with your spouse?

Have you heard others discuss their work?

Every worker's background was checked by the FBI before he was hired. Then he was told only what he needed to know to do his job. In a building where operators worked with secret "stuff" 24 hours a day, secret men would come and collect the secret material and cover it with black hoods so that workers couldn't see what they were making.

Everybody there knew we were on an important war mission, but nobody seemed to know what or that our project had been given top priority from the White House, above planes and tanks and ships and invasions. Were we testing weapons? Making some new super machine? Developing a miracle drug? We didn't dare ask.

NO ONE HAS EVER told the whole story of this town, and perhaps no one ever will. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction about a magic kingdom. Many of its secrets are in graves now with the men and women who helped create it, and other mysteries lie still buried in concrete vaults beneath the rolling landscape - here and there and God knows where. Those burial grounds, alas, are among the most controversial in the world, an issue that has cast a shadowy blight on the city's once heroic wartime legend.

In the beginning, this place was called Site X, the mystery city of the '40s, a unique melting pot of a frontier town with one of the greatest collections of brain power in the history of the world. It was Oak Ridge, Tenn., my home town. And it was so secret, almost nobody outside the immediate area even knew where we were or why we were there. Vice President Harry Truman didn't know. Tennessee's governor, Prentiss Cooper, didn't know he had a new town in his state until it was already sealed off and under construction. And even then he didn't know why.

Those living in surrounding communities who knew of it were told it was the Kingston Demolition Range. It was also known as the Clinton Engineer Works, the Manhattan Project or the Manhattan Engineering District. Outsiders were mystified to see trains haul in 100-boxcar loads of material almost every day, and never see anything go out. Part of what they saw go in looked like raw ore. Nothing went out for almost three years - and then it was shipped by the ounce in a specially made briefcase handcuffed to a secret courier.

Oak Ridge was never intended to last beyond its single wartime mission. We were just a government town, created from scratch out of the backwoods and farms of East Tennessee, farms once belonging to a few hundred families. We didn't know until much later that they had been banished from their land. And we just assumed that, after the war, the town would fold like a circus, and everybody would go home and the farmers would return to their fields. Half the town did leave in the six months right after the

war. But the town never folded: In fact, next month, Oak Ridge will be 50 years old. It is a town that has become economically strapped, maligned by environmentalists, shaken by recent cuts in defense spending and by hundreds, perhaps thousands of layoffs. But despite these ailments, it's gotten itself all gussied up, getting ready for the grandest celebration in its history, a 15-month birthday party that won't end until New Year's Eve 1993.

Despite its reputation, there is a lot more to Oak Ridge than meets the Geiger counter.

ONE GREAT FEAR KEPT the principals at Oak Ridge working and pushing others to work at a feverish pace: Nazi Germany.  Some of the physicists who were brought to Site X, who were working to create the secret "stuff" the city had been built for, had lived in Germany, had run from Hitler and knew that, at the outset of the war, Germany led the world in the field of physics and could be well ahead of America. If Germany got there first, we likely would live out our lives under the reign of the Nazis.

Eugene P. Wigner, a Hungarian physicist and future Nobelist who was fired from his university teaching job in Berlin because his mother was Jewish, remembered his fear as the secret U.S. project was getting under way: "I don't know the exact date in Chicago," he had said, "but we received a paper written by a friend, a German friend working on the German atomic effort, and he was sent to Switzerland to do something. He was against Hitler, and he told us, 'Hurry up. We are on the track.' "

It was September 1942, and our fighting boys were being pummeled in the Pacific. Col. Leslie Groves, named by President Roosevelt to lead the secret Manhattan Project , ordered agents from his Army Corps of Engineers to secure 56,000 acres of the remote Tennessee hill country. People whose families had lived on the land for generations were given little explanation for the government's sudden intrusion. One day they were farmers. The next day they were nomads, looking for a place to live. In a matter of weeks, more than 1,000 families in three little communities were driven out.

Crops were still in the fields, and hay was fresh in the barns when agents began swarming the countryside like ants. They pounded on doors and, citing the War Powers Act, informed owners that the government was taking their land and their buildings. They had 30 days to evacuate. The price - an average of $56 an acre - was not negotiable. If no one was home, eviction notices were hammered to doors. Some families were given only two weeks to leave, and in some cases, while the helpless farmers were still in their houses packing, demolition crews ripped off their roofs.

The land was selected for several reasons: the Tennessee Valley Authority's nearby power source, the ample water supply from the Clinch River, the location's relative seclusion (Knoxville, population 111,000, was the biggest town in more than 100 miles) - and, of course, the cheap labor and land.

In the search for manpower and brains, government recruiters worked almost nonstop, combing virtually every state and several countries. Single men and women, big families, young couples. Workers were hired from shipyards and laboratories and steel mills - electricians, welders, teachers, carpenters. Some of the craftsmen were so skilled they were like artists. Most plant workers had high school diplomas, and thousands had college degrees. The government paid to have them moved and promised to move them back home when the project was over. The recruiters raided university faculties for Ph.D.s and graduate students - from Columbia, Cal Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago. They called on industry - Union Carbide, Alcoa, DuPont, Tennessee Eastman, Monsanto, Westinghouse. At one time, there was a greater concentration of Ph.D.s at the plants than anywhere else on earth. And hardly anyone was over 40.

For the displaced farmers, the invasion brought a culture clash of gigantic proportions. Many people in those parts in the '40s rarely received more than a seventh-grade education, and many lived in houses with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Into this setting swarmed thousands of sophisticated intellectuals who had never been South, who thought they had moved to Dogpatch - and said so.

When some of the native people went to work for the project, their children went to the town's modern, federally funded schools, which had drawn a superintendent from Columbia University and teachers from 40 states. Every high school teacher had a master's degree. ("If you have students who are sons or daughters of Nobel Prize winners," they were instructed at their first orientation, "keep it to yourselves.")

Sitting in front of me in sixth grade was the refined daughter of a Ph.D.; sitting behind me was a native farm boy in overalls, whose teeth were greenish yellow because they had never been brushed.