Theodore Hall - Biography

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 US efforts to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward Hall was a leading rocket scientist who worked on ICBMs.

Biography

Early Years

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 Public School 173 in Washington Heights during the Depression and then Harvard University, from which he graduated at the age of 18.

Manhattan Project

At the age of 19, Hall was recruited to the Manhattan Project, where he was the youngest scientist at Los Alamos. Trying to balance his age and lack of experience with the great value of the information he supplied to the Soviets is difficult. It is not unlikely that he was supplying the Soviets with information provided to him by someone else, someone much more knowledgeable and much higher up in the Manhattan Project organization.

While on a vacation in his hometown, New York, he entered the Soviet consulate and volunteered to pass information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviet government. (After his death, Hall's wife Joan said that he had begun to adopt strong feelings, current at the time, against the possibility of a militarized United States having a nuclear monopoly very early in his time working at Los Alamos.)

Unbeknownst to Hall, Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos colleague, and others still unidentified were also spying for the USSR; none seem to have known of the others. Harvard friend Saville Sax and Lona Cohen acted as Hall's couriers. Igor Kurchatov, a brilliant 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. The Soviet scientist's great fear was that he was intentionally being fed false information by the Americans. His boss, Lavrenti Beria, would not have forgiven such a mistake.

Hall, with the help of Sax (who had open communist sympathies) together visited New York, where Hall, after some searching, arranged a meeting with a Soviet 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. Hall's code-name was MLAD, a Slavic root meaning "young".

FBI investigation

Until the release of the Venona decrypts in 1980, nearly all of the espionage regarding the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was attributed to Klaus Fuchs. Hall was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in March 1951 but wasn't charged. Alan H. Belmont, the number-three man in the FBI, decided that the Venona project would be inadmissible as hearsay evidence and not worth compromising the program.

Later career

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.

Statements in 1990s

The Venona project became public information, starting in 1995.

In a written statement published in 1997, Hall came close to admitting that the accusations against him were true, 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.

He repeated this near-confession in an interview for a Cold War documentary on the Cable News Network 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 ... 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.

Death

On November 1, 1999, Theodore Hall died in Cambridge, England. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease, although he died of renal cancer at the age of 74.

See also

• Klaus Fuchs
• Saville Sax
• Lona Cohen
• Manhattan Project
• Los Alamos
• J. Robert Oppenheimer

External links

• FBI: Memo Prosecution: Disadvantages (1 February 1956)
• "A Memoir of Ted Hall" (by Joan Hall, wife)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory: History: Spies
• Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues: Annotated bibliography for Theodore Hall