In a seminar at The Wilson Center in 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union, though Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him. Further, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union. For their part, Jerrold and Leona Schecter conclude that based on The Merkulov Letter, Oppenheimer must have been only a "facilitator", not a spy in the strict sense (although he would fall under that legal category in the U.S.).