Theodore Hall | |
|---|---|
 Hall's ID badge photo fromLos Alamos | |
| Born | Theodore Alvin Holtzberg (1925-10-20)October 20, 1925 New York City,New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 1, 1999(1999-11-01) (aged 74) |
| Education | Queens College Harvard University (BS) University of Chicago (MS) |
| Occupation | Physicist |
| Employer | Manhattan Project |
| Known for | Atomic espionage |
| Relatives | Edward N. Hall (brother) |
Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 – November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and anatomic spy for theSoviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and secondatomic bombs duringWorld War II (theManhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifyingplutonium, toSoviet intelligence.[1]
His brother,Edward N. Hall, was a rocket scientist who led the U.S. Air Force's program to develop anintercontinental ballistic missile, personally designing the Minuteman missile and convincing the Pentagon and President Eisenhower to adopt it as a key part of the nation's strategic nuclear triad.[2]
Theodore Alvin Holtzberg was born inFar Rockaway,New York City, to a devoutJewish couple, Barnett Holtzberg and Rose Moskowitz. His father was afurrier who had emigrated to America to escapeantisemiticpogroms in theRussian Empire.[3] His mother was the American-born daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.[4] She died while Theodore was a teenager and a student at Harvard University. TheGreat Depression hurt Barnett's business significantly; when it was no longer able to support the household, the family moved toWashington Heights inUpper Manhattan.[1]
Even at a young age, Theodore showed an impressive aptitude for mathematics and science, mostly being tutored by his elder brother Edward, who was 11 years his senior. After skipping three grades at Public School 173 in Washington Heights, in the fall of 1937, Hall entered theTownsend Harris High School for gifted boys.[1] He attended the1939 New York World's Fair and was deeply impressed by the Soviet pavilion and a copy of theMayakovskaya Metro station. After graduation from high school, he was accepted intoQueens College at the age of 14 in 1940, and transferred toHarvard University in 1942 as junior physics major, where he graduated at the age of 18 in 1944.[5][6]
In the fall of 1936, despite the protests of their parents, Edward, his brother, legally changed both his and Theodore's last name to Hall in an effort to avoid antisemitic hiring practices he was experiencing that were prevalent at the time.[1][6]
At the age of 18, on the recommendation ofProf. John Van Vleck, Hall was hired as the youngest physicist to be recruited to work on theManhattan Project atLos Alamos.[5][7] At Los Alamos, after first helping to determine the critical mass of uranium used for "Little Boy",[1] 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.[8] He was not alone. It was widely known inside the confines of Los Alamos, thatLieutenant GeneralLeslie 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 theSoviet Union,[9] a shocking statement that led one top physicist,Josef Rotblat, to resign from the Project, and others likeNiels Bohr andLeo 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 ofAmtorg, 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 ofSergey Kurnakov, a military writer forSoviet Russia Today andRussky Golos—the same contact that was also recommended to his Harvard friend, roommate and eventually initial spy courierSaville Sax, by the head of a Soviet Cultural center in New York, Artkino. Unaware initially that Kurnakov was anNKVD 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.[10] 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 withAnatoly 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 aone-time padcipher.[10] After officially becoming an informant for the Soviet Union, Hall was given the code-name MLAD, aSlavic root meaning "young", and Sax, who was almost a year older than Hall, was given the code-name STAR, a Slavic root meaning "old".[citation needed]
Kurnakov reported in November 1944:
Rather tall, slender, brown-haired, pale and a bit pimply-faced, dressed carelessly, boots appear not cleaned for a long time, slipped socks. His hair is parted and often falls on his forehead. His English is highly cultured and rich. He answers quickly and very fluently, especially to scientific questions. Eyes are set closely together; evidently,neurasthenic. Perhaps because of premature mental development, he is witty and somewhat sarcastic but without a shadow of undue familiarity and cynicism. His main trait — a highly sensitive brain and quick responsiveness. In conversation, he is sharp and flexible as a sword ... He comes from a Jewish family, though doesn't look like a Jew. His father is a furrier; his mother is dead ... He is not in the army because, until now, young physicists in government jobs at a military installation were not being drafted. Now, he is to be drafted but has no doubts that he will be kept at the same place, only dressed in a military uniform and with a correspondingly lower salary.[11]
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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'scourier until spring of 1945 when, because he was returning to full-time student status at Harvard, he was replaced byLona Cohen.[6][12]Igor Kurchatov, a scientist and the head of theSoviet 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[when?] of the role ofOscar Seborer.[1]
In June 1946, Hall's security clearance was revoked by the US Army, not over suspicions of being a Soviet asset but because of discovery of a letter he had received from his British sister-in-law, his brother Edward's wife Edith, who inquired jokingly of him: "I hear you're working on something that goes up with a big bang! Can you send us one of them for Guy Fawkes Day?" as well as left-wing publications he had been receiving at Los Alamos over the prior year that overworked censors had apparently overlooked at the time. Furloughed out of the military with an honorable discharge and a citation from President Truman for the achievements of the Army's Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos, Hall headed that fall for theUniversity of Chicago, where he finished out his master's and doctoral degrees in physics, met his wife, and started a family.[1][5] After graduating he became abiophysicist.[13]
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.[3] In 1962, he became unsatisfied with his equipment and the techniques available to him. He then moved toVernon Ellis Cosslett's electron microscopy research laboratory atCambridge University in England.[14] At Cambridge he created the Hall Method of continuum normalization, developed for the specific purpose of analyzing thin sections of biological tissue.[5] He remained working at Cambridge until he retired at the age of 59 in 1984.[15]
Hall later became active in obtaining signatures for theStockholm Peace Pledge.[14]
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On November 1, 1999, Theodore Hall died at the age of 74, inCambridge, England. He was survived by his wife and three daughters. Although he had suffered fromParkinson's disease, he ultimately succumbed torenal cancer, likely acquired as a result of the experimental work he was doing with plutonium in his year working on the "Gadget" used for the Trinity test.[7][16]
The US Army's Signal Intelligence ServiceVenona 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,[17] nearly all of the espionage regarding the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was attributed to Klaus Fuchs. Hall was questioned by theFBI 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 ashearsay evidence, so its value in the case was not worth compromising the program.[18]
However, journalistDave Lindorff, writing inThe Nation on January 4, 2022, obtained through theFreedom of Information Act, Hall's FBI file in 2021. This 130-page file included communications between FBI DirectorJ. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Gen.Joseph F. Carroll, showing that Carroll had effectively blocked Hoover's intended pursuit of Hall and Sax, probably fearing that Hall's arrest would have, in the political climate of theMcCarthy Era, forced the Air Force to furlough and lose their top missile expert, Edward Hall. Carroll, a former top aide to Hoover before he became the first head of the USAF OSI, ultimately allowed Hoover's agents to question Ed Hall on June 12, 1951 (with an OSI officer monitoring the interview). Within several weeks of that session, the Air Force, which had conducted and completed its own investigation into Edward Hall's loyalty (having their own investigators question him four times), promoted him to Lt. Colonel, and later Colonel, and elevated him from assistant director to director of its missile development program. The promotions were a clear slap in the face to Hoover. Ed Hall went on to complete the development of the Minuteman missile program, and then retired. In 1999 the Air Force honored him seven years before his death, by adding him to the Air Force Aerospace Hall of Fame.[2]
Lindorff co-produced the 2022 documentary filmA Compassionate Spy based on Hall's life and spying.[19] In 2023, Lindorff wrote the bookSpy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.
The Venona project became public knowledge in July 1995.[20]
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":
To help prevent that monopoly I contemplated a brief encounter with a Soviet agent, just to inform them of the existence of the A-bomb project. I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck, it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be.[21]
A year before his death, he gave a more direct confession in an interview for the TV-seriesCold War onCNN in 1998, saying:
I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as ... Nazi Germany developed. There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do. The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly.[18]
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