Theodore Hall

Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 – November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence.

Early life

Theodore Alvin Holtzberg was born in Far Rockaway, New York City, to a devout Jewish couple, Barnett Holtzberg and Rose Moskowitz. His father was a furrier who had emigrated to America to escape antisemitic pogroms in the Russian Empire. His mother was the American-born daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She died while Theodore was a teenager and a student at Harvard University. The Great Depression hurt Barnett's business significantly; when it was no longer able to support the household, the family moved to Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.

Manhattan Project

thumb|left|Modern-day [[Los Alamos National Laboratory|Los Alamos aerial view]]

thumb|right|Basic design of an [[Nuclear weapon design#Implosion-type weapon|implosion-type atomic bomb]]

At the age of 18, on the recommendation of Prof. John Van Vleck, Hall was hired as the youngest physicist to be recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Hall was assigned to conduct experiments on and tests of the implosion system ("Fat Man"). He was eventually, while still a teen, put in charge of a team working on that difficult task.

Hall later claimed that as it became clear in the summer of 1944 that Germany was losing the war and would not ever manage to develop an atomic bomb, he became concerned about the consequences of an American monopoly on atomic weapons once the war ended. He was especially worried about the possibility of the emergence of a fascist government in the United States, should it have such a nuclear monopoly and want to keep it that way. He was not alone. It was widely known inside the confines of Los Alamos, that Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, had revealed to a group of top physicists there at a dinner that the real target of the US atom bomb was the Soviet Union, a shocking statement that led one top physicist, Josef Rotblat, to resign from the Project, and others like Niels Bohr and Leo Szilard to vainly petition first Roosevelt, and later Truman to halt it, not use it on people in Japan, or to inform the Soviets about it.

On the pretext of returning to his home in New York City for his 19th birthday in October 1944, Ted Hall visited the headquarters of Amtorg, the Soviet Union trading company located in a loft building on 24th Street in Midtown Manhattan. There an American worker for Amtorg gave him the name and address of Sergey Kurnakov, a military writer for Soviet Russia Today and Russky Golos—the same contact that was also recommended to his Harvard friend, roommate and eventually initial spy courier Saville Sax, by the head of a Soviet Cultural center in New York, Artkino. Unaware initially that Kurnakov was an NKVD agent, Hall handed him a report on the scientists who worked at Los Alamos, the conditions at Los Alamos, and the basic science behind the bomb. Saville Sax subsequently delivered the same report to the Soviet Consulate, which he visited under the guise of inquiring about relatives still in the Soviet Union. The two eventually met with Anatoly Yatskov, the New York station chief operating under the cover of being a Consular clerk, who two weeks later transmitted the information about both young men to NKVD headquarters in Moscow using a one-time pad cipher.

Unbeknownst to Hall, Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos colleague, and others still unidentified, were also spying for the Soviet Union; none seems to have known of the others. Sax acted as Hall's courier until spring of 1945 when, because he was returning to full-time student status at Harvard, he was replaced by Lona Cohen. Igor Kurchatov, a scientist and the head of the Soviet atomic bomb effort, probably used information provided by Klaus Fuchs to confirm corresponding information provided earlier by Hall. Despite other scientists giving information to the Soviet Union, Hall was the only known scientist to give details on the design of an atomic bomb until recent revelations of the role of Oscar Seborer.

In Chicago, as a graduate student research assistant he pioneered important techniques in X-ray microanalysis. In 1952, he left the University of Chicago's Institute for Radiobiology and Biophysics to take a research position in biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City. At Cambridge he created the Hall Method of continuum normalization, developed for the specific purpose of analyzing thin sections of biological tissue.

Hall later became active in obtaining signatures for the Stockholm Peace Pledge.

FBI investigation

The US Army's Signal Intelligence Service Venona project, decrypted some Soviet messages and in January 1950 uncovered one cable identifying Hall and Sax by name as Soviet spies (albeit misspelled as Teodor Kholl and Savil Sachs), but until the document's public release along with many other pages of Soviet wartime spy cables in July 1995, nearly all of the espionage regarding the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was attributed to Klaus Fuchs. Hall was questioned by the FBI in March 1951 but was not charged. The FBI and Justice Department claimed this was because their only evidence was the Venona document and that the US did not want to let the Soviets know they had broken their elaborate and supposedly "unbreakable" code. Alan H. Belmont, the number-three man in the FBI, claims he decided at that time that information coming out of the Venona project would be inadmissible in court as hearsay evidence, so its value in the case was not worth compromising the program. In 2023, Lindorff wrote the book Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.

Statements in 1990s

thumb|right|200px|Report on recruiting of Theodore Hall from the [[Venona project]]

The Venona project became public knowledge in July 1995.

In a written statement published in 1997, Hall came very close to admitting that the Soviet spy cable identifying him as a Soviet asset was accurate, although obliquely, saying that in the immediate postwar years, he felt strongly that "an American monopoly" on nuclear weapons "was dangerous and should be avoided":

A year before his death, he gave a more direct confession in an interview for the TV-series Cold War on CNN in 1998, saying:

List of publications

Dow, Julian, Gupta, Brij, & Hall, Theodore (1981). Microprobe analysis of Na, K, Cl, P, S, Ca, Mg and H<sub>2</sub>O in frozen-hydrated sections of anterior caeca of the locust, Schistocerca gregaria. Journal of Insect Physiology, 27(9), 629-639. doi: 10.1016/0022-1910(81)90111-6

References

External links

"The Boy Who Gave Away The Bomb", The New York Times Magazine (September 14, 1997)
FBI: Memo Prosecution: Disadvantages (February 1, 1956)
(by Joan Hall, wife)
Los Alamos National Laboratory: History: Spies
Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues: Annotated bibliography for Theodore Hall
"Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies", PBS Transcript, Airdate: February 5, 2002
"A Compassionate Spy", Documentary, Release date: August 4, 2023