November 10, 1999
Theodore Alvin Hall, Who at 19 Gave Soviets Atomic Secrets, Dies at 74
By ALAN COWELL
ONDON -- Theodore Alvin Hall, who was the youngest physicist to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos during World War II and was later identified as a Soviet spy, died on Nov. 1 in Cambridge, England, where he had become a leading, if diffident, pioneer in biological research. He was 74.
The cause of his death was cancer, said his wife, Joan Hall.
For 37 years, since moving to England in 1962, Hall steadfastly declined to directly confirm accusations of espionage. But fragments of cables from Soviet spies in New York and Washington during World War II were released in 1995 and 1996, giving credibility to the accusations against him.
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," the statement said. "I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be."
What Hall gave up, say Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, authors of the 1997 book "Bombshell: The Secret Story of American's Unknown Spy Conspiracy" (Times Books), was not merely knowledge of the bomb's existence, but technical information that helped the Soviet Union build a bomb years earlier than would have been possible otherwise.
Referring to assessments that his actions changed the course of history, Hall said: "Maybe the course of history, if unchanged, could have led to atomic war in the past 50 years -- for example the bomb might have been dropped on China in 1949 or the early 1950s. Well, if I helped to prevent that, I accept the charge."
In a later interview he acknowledged having had some second thoughts after disclosures of the brutality of the Soviet government. "I think my emotional revulsion against Stalin's terror would have stopped me in my tracks," he said. "Simple as that."
The only people at Los Alamos convicted as Soviet agents were the German Klaus Fuchs and the American David Greenglass, whose espionage led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
A third spy was long suspected. But the identity of the spy, code-named Mlad -- from a Slavic root meaning young -- remained opaque.
Fuchs, a refugee from Nazi Germany who was a member of the British team at the Manhattan project, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to prison in Britain.
Hall was interrogated by the FBI in the 1950s, but just before that he had left the spy network. His erratic contacts were difficult to trace, and he was never prosecuted.
His wife, a former teacher of Russian and Italian, Tuesday night described his espionage activities as "something in his youth" -- a time when he was known as a brilliant physicist who had won a Harvard degree by the time he was 18 and was the youngest of the team of young scientists recruited to the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M.
Hall was born in New York on Oct. 20, 1925, the son of a furrier, and attended P.S. 173 in Washington Heights during the Depression. So precocious was his intelligence that, by the time he was 14, he was tentatively admitted to Columbia University, according to "Bombshell."
The book chronicled Hall's rise through Harvard, where he was accepted at 16, to his first interview for a position as junior physicist at Los Alamos sometime around his 18th birthday in 1943.
Assigned to the project in January 1944, he became known as something of a rebel against military ways, frequently omitting to salute, say "sir," or to wear a regulation Army cap. He won the right from the base legal officer to wear a yarmulke although he was not religious.
According to Albright and Ms. Kunstel, Hall and a former Harvard roommate, Saville Sax, approached a Soviet trade company in New York in late 1944 and began supplying critical information about the atomic project.
Hall gave the Soviets, according to Albright and Ms. Kunstel, some of the crucial technical information that helped them build their own bomb, a near-copy of the American version, at a great saving in industrial investment.
He delivered, they say, the "implosion principle," a radical departure from previous designs for igniting a nuclear explosion. It made it possible to produce the pressure needed to set off a nuclear chain reaction using plutonium, the main bomb fuel of the day.
In the postwar era, and Mrs. Hall seized on an opportunity to leave the United States in 1962 for what was initially to be one year at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.
Hall's work there in the use of electron microscopes in biological X-ray micro-analysis led to broad acclaim. In an interview with a British newspaper in 1996, he described it as his greatest achievement.
After living a quiet life in Cambridge, his past returned to haunt him.
With the decoding and declassification of Soviet cables in the mid-1990s, naming "Teodor Kholl" and "Savil Saks" as volunteer Soviet informants, the years at Los Alamos caught up with him again, just as his own health was failing.
By that time the deaths of Sax and others who might have directly tied him to espionage, and those of Soviet spymasters, would have made a successful prosecution unlikely.
Hall had Parkinson's disease and inoperable cancer of the kidney. He never seemed to apologize and seemed to take a secret pride in his espionage activities..
In the 1997 statement to Albright and Ms. Kunstel, which he finally made after many hours of interviews with them, he said he had acted at the age of 19 as someone who was "immature, inexperienced and far too sure of myself."
"I am no longer that person -- but I am by no means ashamed of him," he said.
Tuesday night, his daughter Ruth said in a telephone interview: "He did what he did out of a real motive to save people's lives. It was an obligation. He was a principled man of enormous integrity. He did what he did at great personal risk. He had nothing to gain from it personally."
"There's no secrecy now," she said. "He did it. They can't do anything now."
But for decades, she said, his actions weighed on him and he did not share his secret with his children until his activities became public in 1995.
"He kept it secret all his life," she said. "It was a great burden on him." In addition to his wife and daughter Ruth, Hall is survived by another daughter, Sara.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company