SPY FOR NO COUNTRY

Biography of a physicist who spied for the Soviet Union and was never arrested.

Ted Hall (1925-1999) was a prodigy, admitted to Harvard to study physics at 16 and recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1944 at 18. Investigative journalist Lindorff reminds readers that at this time, the Soviets and Americans were allies. American media extolled the heroics of the Red Army, which suffered enormously and fought stubbornly during the Nazi invasion, and portrayed Stalin as a benign leader. Although never a communist, writes the author, Hall believed “that the United States, with a monopoly on the atomic bomb, would pose a dire threat to the other nations of the world. His fear that the United States would use its devastating power to dominate the globe unless prevented by another nation with a similar weapon was not misplaced.” As a spy, historians agree, Hall delivered technical plans for a bomb identical to the one the Soviets tested in 1949. A suspicious FBI investigated him for years but stopped, Lindorff theorizes, on orders from the Air Force because revealing Hall’s espionage would force it to fire his brother, the “director of the entire USAF ballistic missile development program.” Hall’s espionage did not become public knowledge until 1995. Lindorff concludes the book with highly unflattering views of postwar America, including the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. He maintains that the U.S. planned a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union before it could develop its own bomb, but was foiled when the Soviets succeeded with their project so quickly. “It’s likely,” he writes, “that Ted Hall’s spying effort did prevent the nightmare of a U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and a genocidal nuclear attack against the Soviet people in the early 1950s.”

A carefully documented life story, though Lindorff’s contention that Hall “saved the world” may strike readers as overstated.