Scientists under Surveillance consists of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files of sixteen twentieth-century scientists, ranging from Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, to Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which created a sensation in the United States when it appeared in 1948. The compilers of this collection seem to have lacked criteria to determine who should be included. The only characteristic common to all of the subjects is that they had something to do with science. Among those included are some who were not U.S. citizens.
But during the late 1940s, when the nuclear bomb became part of the U.S. arsenal, the FBI's mission became more pointed. Under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency was charged with learning what it could about the mathematicians, physicists, and engineers who had invented the bomb and finding out whether any of...