Feynman's willingness to think more objectively than most about the world and share his thoughts likely resulted in a long list of enemies, people that desired to control him, etc.

Most obvious person to report it was the head of security at Los Alamos; Feynman told them about his exploits and actively tested the security.

"Never pen test without permission."

Been there. Done that. Suffered the consequences.

Don't leave us hanging! What happened ?

... unless you have a Nobel and a diagram named after you.

I believe those came well after his Los Alamos days. When he was cracking safes, he was essentially going out on a limb. The leaders of the establishment knew of his oddities and usefulness, so he was tolerated.

Someone willing to change their mind, on any subject, should their own reasoning give them cause to, would clearly be a worry from a national security point of view. Such a person might, after all, at any time conclude that the government that demands their loyalty isn't actually who they should be serving!

Never have I been so sad to agree with someone.

It's only logical that it is this way, but it's also very sad that learning more and adapting your world view to your growth is orthogonally opposite requirements for intelligence work. It also shifts an incredible amount of weight on who leads all the blindly trusting agents of state.

It isn't surprising at all the FBI interviewed him. For example, page 352 of his file talks about his association with <redacted> who I would suspect was Klaus Fuchs[1] who gave the soviets information that let them build their own atomic bomb[2]. Feynman was also in frequent communication with the Soviet Embassy and was planning a trip to the Soviet Union.

The FBI can be over the top, but I imagine that's probably worth having a conversation about.

Edit: the letter (from Bell?) starts on page 110 of the file... It's pretty extreme!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs#Value_of_Fuchs.27s...

>> There is speculation that it was his ex-wife, Louise Bell

She made him sound like a James Bond evil genius type:

In matters of intrigue Richard Feynman is, I believe immensely clever—indeed a genius—and he is, I further believe, completely ruthless, unhampered by morals, ethics, or religion—and will stop at absolutely nothing to achieve his ends.

Making the atomic bomb scores pretty high on the evil-genius scale.

Fun fact, Feynman didn't work directly on the bomb. His role was managing high school students who performed computations, fixing adding machines, and did some safety work at the uranium isotope plant in Tennessee.

[1] https://robertlovespi.net/2014/09/07/how-richard-feynman-sav...

More fun facts: almost nobody worked directly on the bomb. Thousands of people worked on manufacturing equipment and components and had no idea what they were supposed to be building. They split the project up into very granular pieces so that nobody really had full insight into what was going on except for the core group of scientists. (Source for this I believe is Feynman himself in Surely You're Joking)

They have several examples of this on the Wikipedia page, but this one struck me when I saw it some years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#/media/File:...

Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, did not know what she had been involved with until seeing this photo in a public tour of the facility fifty years later.

Feynman is one of the coolest guys in my books, but do note that "didn't work directly on the holocaust...was just counting beans to facilitate" was not a defense that saved necks, they were hanged. No moral judgement implied here, just the fact that history is written by winners.

Remember kids, don't forget your wedding anniversary.