Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

32. The Atomic Bomb Spy Who Got Away: Theodore Hall

243 The Atomic Bomb Spy Who Got Away Theodore Hall I was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons if there should be a postwar depression. 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. Theodore Hall’s comments to the authors of Bombshell Theodore Alvin Hall’s “brief encounter” with the Soviet intelligence services took place and evolved into an espionage relationship that lasted on and off for almost nine years. During this period Hall was “the only American scientist known to have given the Soviet Union details on the design of an atomic bomb.”1 He was the youngest of the known spies of the Soviet Golden Age of espionage in America, and he died at seventy-four years of age without having spent a day in jail for his crime. Hall shared a common background with many of his fellow spies of the era. His parents were Russian Jews who fled the homeland for the United States.Hisfather,afurrier,marriedanEasternEuropeanimmigrant’sdaughter and the newlyweds settled in the Washington Heights area of northern Manhattan.HallwasbornTheodoreHolzberg,butthefamilynamewouldbe changed at his elder brother’s urging when Ted was eleven years old. When 32 244 The Atomic Bomb Spies: Prelude to the Cold War his father’s business flourished, the family moved to their own house in the suburbs, where they lived until the Great Depression forced them to move back to Manhattan. The Halls were a typical family of the age, with one exception. Young Theodore was a child genius. Although boys his age studied the batting averages of their favorite New York Yankees, Ted Hall was more fascinated by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and other wonders of the world of physics. He skipped three grades in elementary school, whizzed through a high school for the intellectually gifted, and entered Queens College when he was merely fifteen years old. Hall was not only fascinated by science. His brother Edward, eleven years his senior, was attracted to communism while a student at the City College of New York, a hotbed of radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s.2 The younger Hall idolized Edward, and by the age of eleven years he was reading the Communist Manifesto and other socialist tracts suggested by his older brother. Two years later he would join the leftist American Student Union. Ironically, the founder of the union’s chapter at City College was Julius Rosenberg.3 The two never met, even though years later their stolen secrets would land on the same desk in NKGB headquarters. After two years at Queens College, Hall transferred to Harvard University , which was eager at the time to attract the best young scientific brains in the nation regardless of their age. Hall even dominated the whiz kids at Harvard and was immediately placed into his junior year. Although he excelled in his science studies, he also remained interested in international affairs and was troubled by the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. Hall’s interest in communism intensified after he was assigned to a dormitory known as “Moscow on the Charles” because a handful of its students vented their nonconformism in socialist activities rather than collegiate pranks. He quickly developed two paramount passions, science and communism , that would converge a few years later in espionage. For all his genius, Hall was young and impressionable. He had looked up to Ed Hall as a father figure and mentor, but his brother was away in the US Army Air Corps. Hall filled the void by befriending one of his Harvard roommates, Saville Sax, a new mentor who would play a pivotal role in both their futures. Sax and Hall came from similar roots. Sax’s parents were Russian émigrés, and his father had prospered in the upholstery 245 The Atomic Bomb Spy Who Got Away • Theodore Hall business in America. The family had embraced the communist revolution , and Sax’s mother headed the local Russian War Relief office. Hall’s accomplishments in physics at Harvard led to a job offer from the Manhattan Project. After Sax learned of the offer, he suggested to Hall that, once he was inside the project, he should pass information to the Soviets. Sax did not need to make this suggestion. Hall was already considering it.4 In January 1944, eighteen...