Theodore Hall
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Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925-November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy who, during his work on Allied effort to develop the first atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of processes for purifying plutonium, to the Soviet Union.
Biography
Theodore Alvin Holtzberg was born in Far Rockaway, New York City, but his family soon moved to Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. While his father struggled to find work during the Great Depression, he changed both his and Theodore's last name to Hall in an effort to avoid anti-Semitic hiring practices.
Hall attended Harvard University, graduated at the age of 18, and at the age of 19 was recruited to the Manhattan Project, where he was the youngest scientist at Los Alamos. While on a vacation back to his hometown, he entered a Soviet consulate in New York City and volunteered to pass information on the bomb project to the Soviet government. His wife Joan said after his death that he had begun to adopt strong feelings current at the time against the possibility of an emerging, militarized United States with a nuclear monopoly very early in his Los Alamos work.
Unbeknownst to Hall, Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos colleague, and others still unidentified were also spying for the USSR; none seems to have known of the others. Lona Cohen acted as Hall's courier. Some of their information provided an independent and confirming source for the others.
Hall, with the help of his Harvard friend Saville Sax, who had open Communist sympathies, together visited New York, where Hall, after some searching, arranged a meeting with a Russian diplomat. He presented a detailed sketch of the "Fat Man" nuclear device to the official, who transmitted the information to the NKVD from New York using a one-time pad cipher. His code-name was MLAD, a Slavic root meaning "young".
Until recently, nearly all of the severely damaging espionage regarding the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was attributed to Klaus Fuchs. Hall was questioned by the FBI in 1951 but wasn't charged. Alan H. Belmont, the number-three man in the FBI decided that the Venona project would be inadmissible hearsay and not worth compromising the program. Despite being more damaging to U.S. security than Soviet collaborators Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and other members of the Rosenberg ring (many of whom received severe sentences), Hall was never imprisoned.
Hall and his wife Joan came under scrutiny in the early 1950s, but as with many Cold War spies, they went unpunished. This seems to have been primarily to keep secret the fact that the U.S. had been partially successful in decrypting some messages carried in a Soviet one-time pad cipher (see VENONA). The US seems to have also been more interested in securing existing projects than in any way jeopardizing several years of counter-espionage efforts.
In a written statement published in 1997, he came close to admitting the charges, 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."
Hall left Los Alamos for the University of Chicago, where he switched to biology. There he pioneered important techniques in X-ray microanalysis. He went to work at Cambridge University in England in 1962. Hall later became active in obtaining signatures for the Stockholm Peace Pledge.
In November of 1999, Theodore Hall died in Cambridge, England. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease, although it was to renal cancer that he fell victim at the age of 74.
Further reading
- Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel. Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown American Spy Conspiracy (New York: Random House/Times Books, 1997). (An account of Soviet espionage against the US during WWII, including background on Hall and his activities, and on the VENONA project.)
- FBI Memo Prosecution: Disadvantages (1 Feb. 1956)
- Washington Post Weekly, March 11, 1996
- New York Times, November 10, 1999