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Christopher Nolan’s captivating biopic “Oppenheimer,” based on the life and work of theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, came away with 13 Academy Award nominations this week, on top of an already successful box office and culturally impactful performance.
There exists, however, the story of another physicist involved at Los Alamos who may have had an equal, if not more important, role in securing the stability of geopolitical affairs in the world. Journalist and filmmaker David Lindorff explores the story of Ted Hall, who, at the age of 18 years old, leaked the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in an attempt to secure a balance in the world’s most dangerous arms race.
His book, “Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World,” makes the case that due to the courageous work of Hall and fellow Los Alamos scientist Klaus Fuchs, the idea of mutually assured destruction was born and the U.S. lost its monopoly on the deadliest weapon ever made.
“There was no compunction in the US about that level of destruction and what they were doing, that they would have preemptively destroyed the Soviet Union to prevent it from getting a bomb, is not only totally comprehensible to me, knowing the people that were involved and the fact that we did use [the bomb] twice for no good reason except intimidating the Soviet Union.”
Lindorff makes clear the brevity in which Hall makes the decision to deliver the bomb’s secret to the Soviets, seeing that the Germans were already defeated and would not be able to produce their own bomb—the initial motivation for the entire Manhattan Project.
Lindorff said, “[Hall] reached the decision at the tender age of 18, right before his 19th birthday, that the only thing that would work to prevent what he saw as a terrifying catastrophe of the U.S. having a monopoly on the bomb after the war would be for another country to have the bomb that could stop the U.S. from using it.”
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Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence and the intelligence, of course, I have to say, comes to my guest. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be wasting the listener’s time and the guest’s time. And I do want to learn from you, David Lindorff, a long time journalist and he worked on a movie that I did a podcast on. It’s sort of an addendum or an alternative to “Oppenheimer,” a movie being much honored, which also did very well at the box office. And their movie is called “A Compassionate Spy.” And we went through the whole making of that movie, and it’s about a guy named Ted Hall who at the age, I think, 18, was a Harvard student and was a genius in physics. And he was recruited to work on the secret atomic bomb project at Los Alamos. He was the youngest member of the staff, but his brilliance was recognized by people who went on to win Nobel Prizes. And I think 1 or 2 had already… well their work had already been done to earn that prize. The movie was called “The Compassionate Spy,” this book, which let me hold up for people who have it on video, is called, “A Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.” Now, that’s a mouthful. To expect an audience to think that a spy saved the world in World War II, I mean God, and he gave these secrets to a Soviet agent and so forth calls into question a lot of things.
And in your book, you actually say that this is what Oppenheimer should have done. I don’t know if that’s your editorializing, but why don’t we begin with that? Because there’s two things about the Oppenheimer movie, I think it’s a very important movie. And I’m glad it has a mass audience because we should think about the creation of this weapon that haunts us maybe more now than ever. Because there’s so many nations that have it, and we have a really fraught relation with the inheritors to the Soviet Union arsenal: Putin’s Russia. Even though he’s deliberately an anti-communist, we still have the rhetoric of the Cold War going. And Donald Trump was even accused of being, maybe himself a spy or an agent or too sympathetic, to the Russians under Putin. Nonetheless, I want to we want to get into this because what is it that Oppenheimer didn’t do that you think Ted Hall did that’s admirable? Let’s just start with the most controversial point. Welcome.
David Lindorff Yeah, well, you know, people…
Scheer Welcome with an easy softball question, go ahead.
Lindorff Yeah, right. Thanks a lot. No, I’ve thought about that a bit, that people are thinking that they know Oppenheimer from the movie. It does him some justice and some injustice. But the thing about Oppenheimer is that he was accused, very seriously, of being a Soviet spy, that his brother was a communist, his wife was a communist, former communist before she married him. He had leftist leanings and had attended meetings of organizations that were sort of, front groups of the Communist Party and he traveled in those circles. And, so there was a great deal of suspicion that he was a spy. We now know from released transcripts of the investigations that were done into him in lifting his security clearance. He couldn’t do any research on nuclear issues after the end of the war because his security clearance was lifted and he died pretty much a broken man because he couldn’t even do the work that he had pioneered. And so he wasn’t a spy and I said that he knew so much about the bomb, he tried to stop it later. He sort of half heartedly then full out tried to stop it being used. But he should have done what Ted did because he had all the knowledge.
Ted, just so that people get the story at the setup is that he, after six months of being at Los Alamos working on the plutonium bomb’s implosion device, saw that the Germans, were losing the war and were being bombed to smithereens at that point by US and British bombers day and night, every day, taking out all their infrastructure. And so the scientists realized, and Ted realized, that the Germans were not going to get the bomb by September of 1944. And, some of them were trying to prevail on Roosevelt to bring the Soviets in on the project at that point, they were our allies. And then Ted looked at that, saw that it was not going to work. And so he reached the decision at the tender age of 18, right before his 19th birthday, that the only thing that would work to prevent what he saw as a terrifying catastrophe of the U.S. having a monopoly on the bomb after the war would be for another country to have the bomb that could stop the U.S. from using it and so that’s what he did. He decided to be a spy and he did it. And he gave the information, really, everything about the plutonium bomb to the Soviet Union. So they wound up making a copy of the Nagasaki bomb and blowing it off in August of 1949.
Scheer So we should be clear, because people don’t have much of a developed sense of history. And going back to World War II, and I’m ten years older than you, so I was born in ’36, and everybody forgets that the relations with the Soviet Union were quite complex and with Western Europe and so forth. There were plenty of people who thought that Hitler could come to reason. There was a significant view in the United States that it wasn’t our business, anyway, even though France came to be conquered. And the fact is, with a lot of support for the United States, material support, Lend-Lease or what have you, it was the Soviet Union, on this side that really was, of course, been attacked by Hitler and was doing the main fighting. And one could even argue that they had turned back, the German forces, in fact, really stopped the international threat of German Army at that point. When the United States got involved, we were very late to opening the second front, as it was called. So there was a lot of sentiment. First of all, the Communist Party in the United States, was intimately associated with labor organizing in response to the Great Depression, and, steel, automobile, coal mining and so forth. Big industries, longshore out here on the West Coast. And they were involved in the early civil rights movement.
Everybody forgets the US military was racially segregated at the time of World War II. So they were the center of a certain idealism and, it was not unusual, Oppenheimer was at Berkeley at that time that there was sentiment not only there, but at Harvard and elsewhere, that we should get along. And, of course, that was Roosevelt’s position. They were our ally. And it seems to me that this movie Oppenheimer, there’s two things left out. One, whether building the bomb was necessary at that point or using it, and it’s briefly treated, we have Oppenheimer and others appealing to Truman not to drop it on human beings. And what one could argue is an enormous act of terrorism, if by terrorism, we mean, targeting civilians. These were in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, two targets that were clearly primarily civilian targets. They had no serious military significance, and nor was Japan a threat to us anyway, Germany was finished, as it had surrendered. And, Japan was all in arguing about could they keep their emperor or not? But it really, was not, existential threat to the United States or anything when we dropped the bomb. So why don’t you revisit, since you’ve done a lot of research, your book is very detailed on what these folks were thinking, what the conversation might have been like among these scientists. I’d like to go a little bit further about why they didn’t want to use it. A good number of them did. Now, Edward Teller, of course, wanted to immediately proceed to an even, more frightening bomb, the hydrogen bomb, but still, that this was not an implausible position that we’ve created this monster weapon, and we ought to at least alert, which we never did, except in the vaguest ways, our ally, that we had it and maybe we should share it. I’d like to visit that argument a little and your book does.
Lindorff Yeah. Okay. Well, you have to go back to 1939. When actually, it was Leo Szilard who was a student of [Albert] Einstein, and was one of the leading figures of the bomb’s development at, Los Alamos. In 1939, he went to Einstein and said I need to have you sign a letter. I’ll write it. You can amend it as you want, but, I want you to sign it because I’m nobody and you’re really important, to Roosevelt and say we need to have a crash program to develop the atomic bomb because the Germans have the knowledge to do it. And there’s evidence that they’re starting to look into it. And this was in 1939, before the US was even in the war. And Einstein agreed to do it, and it was sent, to a banker friend of his who was an advisor to, Roosevelt. And it got to him fairly quickly. And he did it. He established the beginnings of a research into the idea of an atomic bomb. Now, they really knew how to make the atomic bomb out of uranium. What they didn’t know how to do was to isolate the U-235 out of the raw uranium in order to make a simple bomb, because a U-235 bomb, you can just slam two pieces together in a closed kind of cannon with two pieces hitting each other at high speed, and then you get the explosion, nothing complicated. A high schooler could do it if they could get the U-235.
The other bomb, the plutonium bomb, that Ted worked on, much more complicated. But in the end a substance that was much easier to obtain because it was a waste product of, any nuclear reactor, and you isolate it chemically. So they were working on two strands. The Germans had, the evidence was that they had ceased exporting any uranium from the uranium mines in Silesia, that they had gained control of. And the only reason they would have done that, it was argued, was because they were going to use it themselves in their research and in developing a bomb. So that was the start. And then they made this massive project, nothing had ever been done like it before. It ended up being tens of thousands of scientists working on it. What amounted to maybe $100 billion in current dollars spent on that project. They built Oak Ridge, they built Hanford, they built the assembly project at Los Alamos. They were in Columbia University with a reactor there. It was all over the country taking this top secret project, and they kept it secret from the Russians. And, they eventually brought the British in and brought scientists who were working on a secret project too, to Los Alamos to speed it up and get the bomb. So that was the start. And then the reason, of course, was to get it before the Germans did.
But as I mentioned, by the end of 1944 or even the fall of 1944, Germany was being bombed to smithereens. The firebombing of Bremen and of Hamburg. Industrial centers were being taken out completely. Their railroads were destroyed, there’s no way a country under that circumstance was going to be able to build the bomb. And they didn’t have it. So everybody was saying, we can’t do it. At that point, several things happened. One was that Leslie Groves, the general who was in charge of the whole Manhattan Project, was heard at a dinner hosted for him by the British scientists in the project at the home of one of their top scientists. And, during dessert, they were talking about how the Germans weren’t going to get the bomb, and maybe they should not go ahead and make it. And so Leslie Groves stood up and he said that the bomb needs to be built and he said it was not built for the Germans. You should know that it was built to control the Russians. Now, that went all around the Los Alamos camp because in Los Alamos, one of the things Oppenheimer insisted on was that for this to work, it was top secret, everything that went in or out was subject to inspection. People were followed to make sure they weren’t spies. Briefcases were opened. They were allowed to go to Albuquerque and to Santa Fe, but they had to say where they were going and phones were tapped. There were only two phones at Los Alamos, at all. And those were closely monitored but he said inside the camp, anybody can talk about anything. That’s the only way we’re going to get this done. This has to be an open campus, like a university where you can really share ideas and come up with ideas. So this went around really quickly and a lot of people were upset.
Joseph Rotblat, who was one of the senior scientists, actually quit in, I think, either late October or in November. He quit. And the reason he quit was he said he didn’t want to be a part of a project that was developing the bomb for use against the Russians, and he was Pol. And the Pols aren’t particularly fond of Russians historically, but he felt that that was wrong. And for that, all his papers, everything he’d been working on were taken from him and he wasn’t allowed to leave the country even though he wanted to get back to his wife in Poland. Niels Bohr, who was the sort of, senior figure at the project, already a Nobel physicist of huge stature right up there with Einstein appealed to Roosevelt directly and said, you’ve got to tell the Russians about this. And we’ve got to bring them in on this and for that, Roosevelt had him investigated by the FBI. And he had a hard time going back to his native Denmark because of that. He was kept in the US for a while. They were afraid he was going to go to the Russians. So this was the kind of setting… Szilard also, wrote a letter and he got himself in trouble. So, that was the situation that Ted was looking at, and that’s why he thought this is not going to work. That the idea of appealing to Roosevelt or later appealing to Truman, even worse, is not going to work. There was this story of, in the movie they had it and it’s true, that Oppenheimer went to Roosevelt, to say that something had to be done about the bomb. This was after it was used. And he wanted something to be done to put an end to it. And he said, all those babies, all those people killed, I’ve got blood on my hands. And Truman got mad at him, yelled at him. You’ve got blood on your hands, I did it. Don’t talk to me you crybaby. He really was angry. So that wasn’t working. Ted already realized that, before it even happened, he realized that the appeals that were being made were hopeless. And so he decided who should I give it to? And he actually had a discussion with his courier and Harvard roommate Saville Sax, who’s an interesting character. And they talked about that and Sax said, well, you can’t give it to the French or the British, they’re not going to stop the US from using it after the war if they have a monopoly. You have to give it to the Russians, they’re the only ones that could stop the U.S.. And Ted agreed with that.
Scheer This is such an interesting part of the history, because it goes to show the basic, question of, the second half of the last century and actually, right up to now, was the Cold War necessary? Was it deliberately brought on? And clearly, the nuclear arms race in the Cold War is what gave it its existential quality and title, fear and concern, because otherwise, after the war, Russia would have plenty of its own troubles trying to rebuild its economy and work. And by the way, again, it’s the history that people don’t go through but I mean, there was a lively history about what Europe would look like after. And there’s a lot of argument. What did Churchill agree with Stalin about what would happen to Eastern Europe and so forth? And that all fit in, because much of that was kept from us, what really was discussed at Yalta, in Potsdam and so forth. So the Russians are moving now through Eastern Europe and so forth, but that was all understood. That it was going to happen and that there were territorial interests both for Western Europe and for the United States as well as Russia. All of that sort of was kept away and we had this Cold War. And I remember one of the individuals that shows up in both your movie and the Oppenheimer movie and everything is Hans-Peter and Hans-Peter also won a Nobel Prize, I forget exactly what he wanted, but for his research he did in the 30s, and he’s somebody I got to know, as an elder person. He spoke actually at UC Irvine, I had a program there where he spoke and, he was a really brilliant fellow, and he was full of incredible angst and concern about what he had wrought. I think he was in charge of theoretical work at Los Alamos, theoretical physics. And in the end, last years, he was all upset with Edward Teller, who was one of the people who didn’t have any remorse and the irony is that Teller was a refugee from Hungary, which, after all, had collaborated as a nation with Hitler, as opposed to Poland.
It was supposed to be occupied according to the wartime agreements. But the irony in all this is that it just comes out of nowhere. And in fact, in the Oppenheimer movie, the serious failure or mission of that movie is to ignore the victims. I mean, why are you dropping this bomb on human beings, breaking what these scientists thought would be a code that you wouldn’t use it unless you absolutely had to use it. Right? And, otherwise, it’s inherently a weapon of terrorism. But I would like you to go a little bit more into that mood, that Hall was in, because now after all his seniors, including up through outside physicists like Einstein, are very concerned about the implications of this weapon. He is in the position, he’s an undergraduate and so is his roommate. And they are saying these are adults are out of control, and they’re unleashing this incredible weapon, and they’re not going to be able to stop it, because the actual politicians, beginning with Roosevelt and Truman, and certainly Leslie Grove, the general who was a representative that, we’re spending money and we’re building a weapon, and we have to justify it. And so what he did, which now would seem very extreme, he said, well, I can stop that. And so I want to get at your… In the movie you call him “the compassionate spy,” in your book you say, “the spy for no country.” Now some people would say, wait a minute, he was a spy for the Soviet Union. What do you mean, “a spy for no country?”
Lindorff Well, I wrote that title because I realized, Ted says this in the movie, he says that he was doing it with in mind the saving the people of the Soviet Union and the people of the world, that his concern was that this bomb was going to be used by the U.S. If you have it, you use it. And he was correct. I mean, one of the things that I document in the book was that, and this is not known widely by anybody in the United States, is that before they even finished and, tested the bomb successfully, they had already begun researching how to mass produce the atomic bomb that they knew they were going to have. They knew they were going to have the uranium bomb. They didn’t know until they tested the Trinity bomb, whether they had it down for the plutonium one. But they were going to have the bomb. But they were handmade. By the time of after those two bombs were dropped, they had no more. And the the next one wasn’t built, completed until December of 1945. And then they made a few after that. I think they had six bombs by the end of 1946. It was a very slow process, but they did figure out how to mass produce them so that by 1948 they were making 100 a year. And, and you have to ask yourself, they thought, they still at that time, did not know that the Soviets had penetrated at Los Alamos.
It wasn’t really until 1949 that the first inkling that there were spies in Los Alamos came out to the FBI from the work of the precursor to the National Security Agency, NSA. So, it was called the Signal Intelligence Service of the Army, originally. And they had all these coded cables they had copied coming out of the Soviet consulate, but they didn’t know what they said. It was a very complicated code and took years to crack. So all that time they thought that the Soviets were going to take ten years at least to get the bomb. And so why, if that was the case, were they spending, in peace time with no threats from anybody, the US having won the war hands down, the Soviet Union being destroyed totally by the war that it had just fought on its own territory against the Germans. Why did they continue to spend even vaster amounts of money to mass produce 400 bombs by 1950? And the reason is they had plans to preemptively destroy the Soviet Union with what the Pentagon said would require 400 bombs, so that it would no longer be an industrial society. And I mean that’s enormous evidence that they had that plan. They even had a terminology for “A Day,” which was the day that the Soviets would get the bomb on their own and have enough made that the US could not realistically say they could attack them without the possibility of a, retaliatory strike from the Soviet Union, like smuggling a bomb into New York Harbor and destroying New York so they were acutely aware that they had to stop them before they got too many bombs and they didn’t think that would happen until like the mid ’50s.
Scheer And when did it happen?
Lindorff Well, it happened in August 29th, 1949, when they exploded a carbon copy of the Nagasaki bomb, courtesy of Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs.
Scheer I mean, I just want to point this out. Let me show you the cover of the book and describe it for people on the radio. It’s called, “The Spy for No Country. The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.” Now, again, this is a controversial notion, but the importance of this book, and I want to get to that, is you have spent what? How many years have you been on this? You got to know his wife now, who’s now no longer with us, his widow. You really got into this; describe the research that went into this.
Lindorff My work on this dates back to really 2018. In 2017, I wrote an article in commemoration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which I had done periodically through my life as a journalist; every few years I would write, it’s a very profound thing that happened. And I really, as a Vietnam anti-war activist and war resister, I had really strong feelings about what had happened to Japan at the end of the war. And so I would write these articles, but I tried to come up with a different angle and something new to say each time and I was running out. So that year, in 2017, it dawned on me, I wonder who these spies were who actually gave the Russians the plans to the bomb and made it a two sided weapon. So I looked on Google and one of the things I saw was a row of pictures of all the atomic spies, the Soviet atomic spies, and they were like eight of them. And most of them were balding and older and at least middle aged. And then there was this one pimply faced kid and I thought, who the hell is that? And so I looked at him and I mean, here’s a picture of him. It’s a movie poster, from the festivals. I mean, look at him. If you look at it carefully, you can see pimples all over his face, he had a serious case of acne. That’s a high school kid.
Scheer By the way, next to it, you have the Izzy Award?
Lindorff Yeah, that’s my Izzy Award.
Scheer I see that, full disclosure, I also won one of those, but, I.F. Stone was one of the great American journalists and was very independent and challenging the origin of the Cold War and nowadays he’s honored even at Harvard and elsewhere. But at the time he he took a lot of heat, but go ahead.
Lindorff So anyway, I looked up Ted and there was information about him because there was this book, “Bombshell,” which is a masterful book done by two Cox News reporters, Joseph Albright, who is from the Patterson family, newspaper family and multi-generational journalist, and Marcia Kunstel, who he eventually was married to, and they wrote this book in 1997, two years after Ted was exposed as a spy in the one of the first cables successfully translated, of the Soviet cables, actually named Ted. They got it spelled wrong. They called him Kholl, but they figured it out because it said that he was the son of a furrier and was a student at Harvard and stuff. So they then identified him and it was pretty quick. And, so anyway, he was exposed in 1995 and these guys went straight to England and tried to get an interview with them. And he was reticent at first, but finally they decided that, after being visited by somebody from the Reader’s Digest and they decided they’d go with these guys because they were seemed pretty straightforward and sympathetic with what he had done. So they did the book and it was a great book. What it lacked was that they couldn’t get the FBI files because Ted was dead and the FBI had done something weird. Their file was on Ted and Saville Sax, and they were merged. And so even though Sax had died in 1980, you couldn’t get his file because they would have had to segregate out Ted Hall in 1980 because Ted was still alive. And, so they just weren’t available until after Ted died in 1999.
Scheer You should mention that the under the Freedom of Information Act, you can get these files without the permission of the person if they’re dead.
Lindorff Any dead person, you can get their files.
Scheer And by the way, just in that connection, you should mention because your book goes into it in detail and the movie does also, Ted Hall’s brother…
Lindorff Yeah. That’s an amazing story. That’s mind boggling.
Scheer Why don’t you describe his brother? And that was one reason why the government initially didn’t move against him. Right?
Lindorff For a long time, they didn’t. Yeah.
Scheer So tell that story.
Lindorff Well…
Scheer He helped develop the missile, right.
Lindorff He invented the Minuteman. And in fact, he invented the whole concept of having a solid fuel ICBMs buried in, by the hundreds, in silos and able to be launched just by pushing a button because they were already fueled and ready to go. That was his idea.
Scheer So these are two brothers who… And also Ted Hall, you didn’t mention, but he was actually critical for figuring out the trigger mechanism for exploding the bomb, wasn’t he?
Lindorff He didn’t figure it out, but he was in charge of the testing to refine it. So it worked very complicated. It’s 32 segments that had to fit together perfectly in an explosion from every direction, and it had to be timed exactly to the millisecond or it would, spread it apart instead of making it blow up. And so, I mean, it was mind blowing engineering feat, really, to get all those pieces together and to trigger at exactly the right time. And that was what he was working on. He was blowing it off. They were using a chemical called lanthanum and measuring the gamma burst from exploding that from every side. And what they were trying to do was get it so that it would have an equal spray of gamma rays in every direction. And then when they would do it actually with the plutonium test, which they did in July 16th of 1945 at the Trinity test that, they only got one shot to experiment with because those experiments make a huge explosion. So they were looking for an equal spray of neutrons to make the chain reaction to fission all the uranium, the plutonium that was assembled around a little initiator. So, that was his job. He was testing, testing, testing, testing. And he finally got it in February of 1945. And he was credited by Oppenheimer himself for his engineering work in putting this all together and making it work. So he was known to Oppenheimer.
Scheer This was after he was a spy.
Lindorff Yes, he was doing it and he was hoping the Soviets were doing it, too. And they were.
Scheer I mean, I want to nail that point down. Despite the fact that he was spying for the Soviets, he was also helping playing a decisive role in helping the United States get a workable weapon.
Lindorff That’s also true of Klaus Fuchs. Klaus Fuchs was a German communist who fled, just ahead of the Gestapo, they were trying to arrest him after the burning of the Reichstag. Because he was a known communist activist in Kiel. And he fled just ahead of them. They went to his family house, and that morning he had hopped on a train to Berlin. And later he got out into France. Then he fled to England, and then he inherited the graduate assistantship that Hans-Peter had at I think it was University of Bristol. So he was put on the British Tube Alloys project because Klaus Fuchs was also a super brilliant guy, about ten years older than Ted and he wound up being one of the top brains on the British project. And then when they all moved to help speed up, they were invited to come over to the US to speed up the development of the bomb which was, with the war coming towards an end, they needed more scientists. Klaus Fuchs was brought over and he was put on the theoretical division, working on the uranium bomb, mostly. But also, he knew everything about the plutonium bomb, too. And the weird thing about Fuchs is that after the war, he wasn’t suspected. He went back with the other Brits, back to England. And England had been frozen out by Truman of the nuclear project at that point. He didn’t trust them to keep it secret. So they had to work on their own in England and guess who got put in charge of the British atomic bombs project, including the hydrogen bomb. Klaus Fuchs! He was the head of it. And so at the time he was caught because of a Venona cable, he was the head of the program. That’s totally amazing.
Now, here’s the thing about that we really need to mention, and that is that the Soviets had gotten some information from Klaus Fuchs. They didn’t trust it. They wondered, how could a guy who came over and was known to be a communist when he came to England as a refugee from the Nazis, how could he have become such an important figure in the British nuclear project? And how could he have possibly been allowed by the US into the Los Alamos project? Because they checked everybody. So they thought he must have turned so they thought the information they were getting about the plutonium bomb was probably disinformation like the U.S. tried to do to the Iranians, giving them a bomb steer and throwing them off on their research. And it made sense. You’d say that doesn’t make sense, that he could have gotten through MI5 and MI6 and become the head, so important. Not before he was head of but he did that to, but just being invited to Los Alamos and not being suspected and not allowed into the country.
And Ted was actually a walk in, he just walked in to a guy that he was told to see who might be able to get his information to the right people at the consulate to alert the Soviets. The person he was told to go see, unknown to him, was the recruiter for the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. So he literally was a walk in-the-door spy saying, I have this information, I’m a scientist at this secret site in New Mexico, I know about a superweapon that’s being built that the Soviets need to know about. And the guy questioned him and asked him well, why should I believe you? Why would anyone believe that you want to betray your country? And Ted said, because, and he told him, he said, I think it’s going to be dangerous for the US to to have this weapon after the war all by itself. And he made a very articulate statement on that. And he ultimately was accepted as a spy. They trusted him. But more importantly and and I have this in the book that, Igor Kurchatov, who was the Oppenheimer for the Soviet project, which was very small at the time, saw Ted’s stuff, realized that Klaus Fuchs stuff, which they were skeptical about, was real. And because Ted was saying the same thing and they knew that Ted didn’t know Klaus Fuchs, and vice versa. It gave him the confidence to go to Stalin, who’s not somebody that you want to make a mistake with and tell him, look, comrade, what do they call him? Comrade Stalin? We need to focus on making the plutonium bomb. We have the plans. We can make it. We can get the plutonium. We can copy these plans, and we can do it. But we have to stop trying to make the uranium bomb, because we’re never going to get enough U-235 in order to get it done in time to protect us. And Stalin bought it and he said, okay, and whatever you need, you get. And that was the big deal that allowed them to go all out and make the plutonium bomb. He said, we can make the uranium bomb later, but we can’t do it on a crash basis.
Scheer So first of all, we dropped the brother. But it’s interesting, because Ted Hall, here’s this guy, and you can question, obviously we’re going to get to that, his motives, his wisdom in doing this and the need for sharing it and so forth. But there he’s got his brother who’s playing an absolutely major role in US defenses precisely against the possibility of the Russians having a bomb, right?
Lindorff Yeah. Well, the evolution of this is interesting. Ed was 11 years older than Ted. When Ted was four years old. It was evident to Ed, who was a brilliant engineering student at CCNY and, graduated with a masters in electrical engineering and chemical engineering. And, he told his parents, Ted is a brilliant child. He can’t just go to school. He needs special instruction. He needs to be challenged. And he said, I’m going to take charge of his education. This is a 15 year old kid. He said, I’m going to take charge of his education. And his parents, his mother was an American born Russian Jewish family’s child, and the father had emigrated from Russia, a Jewish furrier, fleeing the pogroms in Russia and had never gone to college. I don’t think the mother had gone to college either. And they looked on their son saying, I’m going to take charge of his education as, yeah, that makes sense. And so they allowed him to do that. And and he was doing algebra, I think six years old, seven years old. He just ate all of it up, and he really got interested in physics at an early age. And, so he got really steered and at 14, he went to Queens College, and he got really bored there. And he wrote to his brother…
Scheer What year did he go to Queens College?
Lindorff What?
Scheer Do you know what year that was anyway?
Lindorff That would have been in ’36. I’m sorry. I said 1939. He was born in 1925, and he was 14.
Scheer I only bring that up because I happened to go to Queens College in engineering and then transfer to City College, so I know that trajectory. The Queen’s College was really quite small then.
Lindorff Yeah, it was a good school but he was bored at it, and so…
Scheer There had been a reformatory of some kind and then evolved into a college, but go ahead. So minor footnote here.
Lindorff Two years into that, he well, actually, he went to, what was the high school he went to? I’m drawing a blank. I’ll come back to it.
Scheer What are the specialty schools? Bronx Science or Stuyvesant?
Lindorff Townsend Harris. Which is at Queens.
Scheer It was. Yeah. I mean, physically, yes. Townsend Harris. Right.
Lindorff Well, that was sort of under their wing.
Scheer Yeah.
Lindorff It still is.
Scheer But Diego Ramos, who’s going to write the introduction of this is a graduate of Townsend Harris. And he’s very interesting. Yeah, Diego Ramos, who’s on the staff of publication ScheerPost, writes the intro to these podcasts and he graduated from Townsend Harris, it’s a very important public, high school in New York.
Lindorff I looked at their website and he was listed as one of their notable graduates. It said Ted Hall, Los Alamos physicist and Soviet spy. I thought, wow, that’s amazing. But they took that down. I can’t find that anymore, that he’s listed as Soviet spy and alum, a notable alum. But there’s a lot of notable alums from there. Anyway, so he went there first and he graduated from there at 14 and went on to, Queens and then at Queens he wrote his brother, who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as an engineer and was repairing bombers returning from Germany so they could get back into the fight. And he got awards, distinguished service awards, for inventing a way to do it much faster without taking the plane apart. So he that’s what he was doing at the time. He gets a letter from his brother saying, I’m bored here. And he says, well, you should apply to Harvard. The application period was over, but Ted wrote them anyway and applied, and he sent in his grades and his recommendations, and they took him. And he was accepted as a junior physics major at 16 when this happened at Harvard and was studying, with an advisor, John Van Fleck, who’s a super famous astrophysicist and that’s who recommended him to the guy that Oppenheimer sent to scour up some more scientists to come help them speed up the project.
But, Ed went on, when he came back, he got a master’s degree in aircraft… What do you call it? Aviation engineering and aeronautical engineering. And then, he was still in the service. He got up to the rank of major, and then he was put on to a secret, rocket engine lab based at Wright-Patterson Air Base. Top secret project. And they were developing motors for rockets that could be ICBMs. So he helped design the Thor, which was an IRBM. Then he, took a failed project, which was the Atlas. It was just not working and they were basically trying to upscale the V2 engine and Ed came in and took over that project and basically redesigned the Atlas missile, which is still in use today. I mean, he did a fantastic job making a powerful rocket that was the first real ICBM and went on from that to do the Titan, which he always felt was a lousy missile and didn’t make sense. And then he started thinking solid fuel, and he came up with the idea of, solid fuel rocket that you could just put in the ground and push a button and launch it. And considered that to be the best, preventive, war thing ever imagined. And he tried to sell it to the Air Force, and he wasn’t having success. So he went to, of all people, Curtis LeMay thought it was a great idea. And and he convinced, Stimson, who was… no it wasn’t Stimson who was then…
Scheer Curtis LeMay, the Doctor Strangelove.
Lindorff He convinced the secretary of defense, and they sold it to Eisenhower. So ultimately they went with the Minuteman concept that and he’s an honored finger at the Air Force’s museum of missiles and aerospace in Colorado, I think Colorado Springs, as a pioneer of rockets.
Scheer Did he cover for his brother? I mean, he remained close to him.
Lindorff They were really, really tight.
Scheer Because it’s a question why didn’t the intelligence agencies, why didn’t the government go after Ted Hall more vigorously?
Lindorff Well, this was what I discovered from going into their files, because first of all, I wanted to know about Ed Hall, because I knew that he did make the Minuteman missile. I thought, that is really strange and so I wrote to the FBI a FOIA application for Ed’s file and I got back that we don’t have any file on Ed at all. We have Ted Hall and you have that, but we don’t have any file on Ed and I said, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m appealing, so I appealed. I said, look, this is a guy who was the brother of an atomic spy. There certainly were security checks done of him, and that would have been a file they had to have one. He was making the Atlas missile motor, he was doing all this stuff, there has to be a file on him. And then they said, oh, yeah, we found it so they sent me 103 pages on him, and he was actually, they identified him within days of starting… In 1950, they got word, late in 1950, that Ted was a known spy. They saw the cables and, so they started a, nationwide search first to…
Scheer You should be clear about that. They discovered that because the code had been cracked.
Lindorff And they named Saville Sax. So they started a dragnet search to find out where both of them were. It turned out they were both in Chicago because Ted had gone to University of Chicago to get a PhD. So, they found him pretty quickly and they also found very quickly that his brother was in the Air Force and was working at the Wright-Patterson Air Base on a secret project, developing rocket motors. And so they, in January 6th of 1951, Hoover fired off a personal letter to the head of the OSI, who was a guy who had been his top aide, General Joseph Carroll, who was made the head of the new Office of Special Investigations for the Air Force. Every branch has its own OSI to look for spies and criminals in the military. So he contacts him and it was, he actually said, Dear Joseph, I mean, the guy was like one of his favorite people. And he said, I’m writing to inform you that your major, Major Edward Nathaniel Hall is the brother of a known atomic spy, and we thought you’d want to know that. And we would like to, question Ed Hall about this. And so then there’s another letter. There’s no response from General Carroll, but there’s another letter that’s dated March 27th. I’m sorry. Which happens to be 11 days after Ted and Saville Sax had been called into the FBI, brought in to the FBI and questioned, grilled for three hours about their spying. And 11 days after, Hoover writes another letter. And he says, Dear General Carroll, thank you for your response to my January 6th letter that you sent on January 14th, explaining that your office would be handling the investigation into the loyalty of Edward Hall. We, however, our investigation has advanced into Ted Hall, and we urgently want to question Ed Hall.
So he’s saying I want to question him, even though you are saying you’re going to do it. And he says he urgently wants to question Ed Hall. And what happens is he’s put off for 12 weeks, and it isn’t until June 12th that he finally gets to interview Ed Hall. And so then then you have the the FBI report on the interview, which was two hours long, done at Wright-Patterson Air Base. And it notes that two OSI officers are present for the questioning. So they’re monitoring, he was told that he could only ask about Ted. He couldn’t ask questions about himself. And 12 days after that report, Ed gets promoted to from major to lieutenant colonel. So clearly the Air Force was saying, screw you, we trust him. He’s now being made director of the rocket motor program, and he’s promoted to lieutenant colonel. And shortly after that, the FBI dropped Ted and Savvy Sax from the security index, the one where they monitor people 24 hours a day, recovered their mail and tapped their phones. They were removed from that index, and that was after they’d been questioned for three hours and lied repeatedly that they knew that they’d never been spying and didn’t know anything about spying and, and had committed enough acts of perjury so that they could have been indicted, for things that the FBI could have proven were lies. So something happened at that point, and I don’t have the other part because they have refused to give me any more of the 40 pages in Ed’s file that they withheld totally blank. And, so I have an appeal pending, but, I think I’m going to have to do that with a lawyer and I didn’t have time to do it, but. So basically you have, the FBI shut down by the Air Force.
Scheer And of course, they’re both dead.
Lindorff Yeah, so people understand the reason that that had to be done by the Air Force is that this was the middle, at the height of the McCarthy period, and he was saying that the army was infested with 300 communists. And then if Ted had been exposed by an arrest, right. Or even just an arrest and an indictment, Ed would not have been kept secret. The journalists would have had a heyday with that. Brother of known atomic spy is head of U.S. ICBM program. I mean, it never would have flown. He would have lost his security clearance. The Air Force would have lost their top rocket scientist. And that was a time when the Russians were said to be way in advance of us, missiles. And so Ed was like their ace in the hole, they didn’t want to lose him.
Scheer So this is an amazing story because and, in your telling it, we got to remember it’s Ted and Ed. Ed is the older brother who’s in the missile program. Ted was in the development of the first atomic bomb, but they remained close, right?
Lindorff Yeah.
Scheer Yeah and the interesting thing is that neither of them were very political. And they went on to do their work, their science, and, including Ted, he led a normal life. He was not…
Lindorff He went into he went into biophysics. He changed his major midstream at Chicago after basically that stuff happened. He had his security clearance lifted. That happened for a different reason, but he wasn’t able to, even though he was sharing an office with Teller, which had the FBI really, in a tizzy. But Teller was hardly ever there.
Scheer Where was he sharing an office with Teller?
Lindorff University of Chicago.
Scheer Oh, I didn’t know that.
Lindorff Yeah. Teller was gracious enough to let him have a desk space but he was basically, what I’m told, is that he was very. He had an appointment at Chicago after the war, but he was basically spending most of his time on the hydrogen bomb project elsewhere in Berkeley and stuff.
Scheer With Teller?
Lindorff No, Teller was doing that.
Scheer Yeah. Yeah.
Lindorff He was full out on the hydrogen bomb. So of course the FBI was thinking, oh, so he’s giving him that information. The truth is that the Soviets did not need a lot of information about the hydrogen bomb. They had Sakharov, who had it down. It was not, oddly enough, that the hydrogen bomb concept was not as complicated as the fission bomb concept.
Scheer For people not familiar with all this. Yes, the hydrogen bomb is what really created mass power havoc.
Lindorff A thousand times more powerful.
Scheer Yeah, a thousand times but you are saying the science of it coming in at that point was not as complicated. And anyway, Teller is considered the father of the hydrogen bomb, but as you’re pointing out, Sakharov, the Soviet scientist, and others were also on to it, right?
Lindorff Yeah, I mean it was Teller. Teller came up with the idea in 1942, and right at the beginning of the Manhattan Project and said, why don’t you just make this? It’s much better and Oppenheimer said, no, it’s not. And he was right about that, because how do you get it to work? You need to have, an atomic explosion to get it hot enough so that you can do fission. So you really needed to have an atomic fission bomb before you could get a hydrogen bomb. They still haven’t figured out how to make a hydrogen bomb without an atomic bomb. So Teller was wrong, but he had the concept down, and so that it’s not that the the Russians didn’t really need to do a spying number to get a hydrogen bomb, and they did get one very fast after the U.S. did. I think they blew their first one off a year later. And it was a different design that Sakharov first came up with that was a totally different concept than the bomb that the U.S. Made.
Scheer And Sakharov himself was an independent person, and rebelled somewhat in the Soviet system and got in trouble.
Lindorff And he had the Order of Lenin or something. I mean, he did. He was really a hero at first.
Scheer Yeah, but then they moved against him. And the interesting thing is you’re writing about really some of the most interesting people that have ever been alive, at least, in Western world, that’s not only Western society. And yet the problem is, and they were given to philosophical questioning, deep thought, challenging and, they came to different conclusions. And amazingly, the guy who gives us these missiles and everything, he himself probably was somewhat sympathetic to his brother’s thinking or capable of some thoughts of his own. But nonetheless, both he and Ted Hall continued to work.
Lindorff Joan told me that she she asked him once…
Scheer That’s his wife, Ted Hall’s wife.
Lindorff Joan Hall was Ted’s wife, who he married in 1947, right after the war. He met her at Chicago and and fell in love. And you see in the movie, her telling about it. He proposed to her on the floor of Teller’s office.
Scheer We should mention what the movie is in case people want to get it and how they get it because you worked on it.
Lindorff I was a producer of it.
Scheer Yeah, it was made by a terrific filmmaker, right?
Lindorff Yeah, Steve James. I went to Steve with the idea because I knew him from having participated in a film that he made earlier, the Abacus movie.
Scheer Give the name of the film, the one we’re talking about.
Lindorff Oh, Abacus?
Scheer No, the one about Ted Hall that you…
Lindorff Oh, “A Compassionate Spy.” Yeah.
Scheer And so people could get that right? It’s out.
Lindorff And yeah, it’s had a theater run. And now it’s, I don’t think it’s playing in a lot of places, but you can get it by if you know someone in a place that could order it, you can get it from Magnolia Films, they’re the distributor. And, it’s now available for streaming at Amazon, Apple TV, Hulu, which is Magnolia, Vudu and Google Films. You can go to any of those and some of them it’s pretty cheap like $2.99 and stuff. Some of them it’s $6.99.
Scheer Right and he’s a great filmmaker. We have a podcast that I did with the two of you that I’ll link, to this, that we also did as a KCRW podcast and he’s an award winning filmmaker. And so you said you went to him with the idea?
Lindorff Yeah, I brought him the idea because we sort of jumped from something. I was explaining how I had written that first article saying that Ted and Klaus Fuchs should get posthumous Nobel Peace Prize is a controversial thing to say, which I meant to stir things up. And instead I got a letter from Joan saying, Dear Dave, I’m reading your article in CounterPunch, with tears in my eyes, I’m Ted’s widow, and you’re the first journalist who got him. And she said, we need to talk. So, when my daughter was graduating the next year, from Oxford with her doctorate, my wife and I went over there to see the graduation, it’s a real pageantry thing from 1500s, the graduations they do there. And so we went over and I told her we were going to be there, and she said then you and your wife both have to come and see me. And not just for lunch or dinner, you have to come over and spend the night and we really need to talk. So we went there, we became fast friends.
And I said, this is an amazing story about your husband and you and I think that the “Bombshell” book is terrific. I had read it by then, and I said, but the thing is that when they wrote that, they didn’t know that the US really had planned serious plans to destroy the Soviet Union, before it got the bomb. And your husband was right to do what he did because he prevented that. He made that. So that couldn’t happen. That’s incredible. So you really need to have another book. And she said, oh, no, I couldn’t do that. She said, when Ted got exposed, we were put through hell. For weeks, we had media scrum outside the house, people jumping out of the bushes with cameras and taking our pictures if we went for a walk. She said it was a nightmare, and I wouldn’t want to go through that again with a book that is an exposé of everything else about the story. It. And I said, okay, I understand that. And then she said, well, anyway, there’s a British film group that’s making a dramatic movie about Ted, and, I’m consulting with them. They’re asking me questions for that, for that and I’m happy with that. A drama, that’s not going to have the same results. And, I said, that’s great. And so I just shelved it and went away and because she was essential to that story, I mean, if you didn’t have her cooperation, you couldn’t do a book, you couldn’t do anything and so, I just wrote it off.
Scheer And we should be clear, she, as opposed to Oppenheimer’s wife and all that, she did not know Ted during that period of…
Lindorff She met him in ’47.
Scheer And then when he revealed it to her, which was when?
Lindorff When he proposed. He proposed to her, and then, he said, Will you marry me, I’m in love with you. She said, yes, yes. And then she says he got really serious. And he said, but before you say yes, I need to tell you something. And then he told her and he said, I was working at Los Alamos and I helped to make the atomic bomb and then I decided that it was really dangerous of them to have it. And so I gave it to the Russians and she said, well, now this wasn’t in the movie. The way told it to me, she said, now I really want to marry you. She thought it was heroic, which I think it was. I mean, it was very dangerous to do that. So that was 1947 and they got married and, fairly soon after had a daughter, and they were terrified because of the Rosenbergs and seeing them get condemned to death. So they just laid low, especially after he was interrogated.
Scheer Let’s put down to the context here. The Roosevelts, really, I mean, the Rosenbergs, this is like a sideshow to the real issue of how the Russian Soviets got this information.
Lindorff The Rosenbergs were not atomic spies, and in fact, they weren’t convicted of being atomic spies. They were charged with it, but they weren’t convicted of it because it was so…
Scheer You should give a little setting because most people don’t know much about this. And, yes, this is the famous atomic spy case, and they died for it. And, and Ethel Rosenberg clearly had nothing or very little to do with it. But anyway, introduce the idea. We’ve gone on this long, if you’re willing to stick with me, because I just think this is a fabulous retelling of the story. And by the way, I want to pay a compliment to you. Really, this is a great story about journalism that you pursued all of these things that you do it with obvious intelligence and you’re not afraid of the science, and you dig deeply, and then you use available tools like getting these documents with FOIA and all that. And so I think this is really a great case study, really, of how journalism can be so effective. And then we’re going to get to the downside at the end: why you can’t get anybody to review your book. But let’s go through the Rosenbergs first.
Lindorff Yeah. Well, the Rosenbergs were…
Scheer Rosenbergs.
Lindorff Julius Rosenberg was a spy, there was no question. I mean, I’ve talked with with both his sons, Robert and Michael, and they know that, too. They’ve agreed that he was a spy. They don’t agree that he was an atomic spy. And I think that they’re correct because what he did was his main actually, the biggest thing he gave the Soviets was the proximity fuse that the U.S. had invented, which allows a shell or a bomb or a rocket to explode before it hits the target so that it sprays out sort of like a shotgun instead of a rifle. And that was a very difficult thing to do the thing’s going a thousand miles an hour, and you want it to blow up before it hits, right? So, that proximity fuse they succeeded in making and he gave those plants to the Soviets. He was running a bunch of spies. So he was responsible for them. I think this is total luck and there’s a lot of things in this whole story that are total luck. David Greenglass, who was married to Ethel’s sister. So he was the brother in law of Julius and Ethel. He ratted out his sister, and claimed that she had typed the report that he gave them from Los Alamos. And so that was used to make her an accomplice. And he later admitted after he got out of jail and years later that he had made that up or he had been fed that by the FBI and it wasn’t in his grand jury testimony either. And it was it was a fabrication by the prosecution that, she was culpable. Now, whether or not she knew her husband was a spy, who knows? I mean, knowing that they were so close, I find it hard to believe that she didn’t know what what he was doing, even if she didn’t participate.
Scheer You’re talking about Ethel Rosenberg.
Lindorff Yeah. That’s right. I think that she was charged because, it was used as an extortion to get a Julius to confess, which was what they really wanted to happen. I don’t think they really needed them to name names. I think they wanted him to confess that he was a spy and that maybe they wanted him to tell who his other spies were. I don’t think it was a matter of naming other communists or anything like that, who cares? But that was a setup and actually, Peter Kuznick, when I told him about this story and he wrote a nice blurb for the book.
Scheer He’s an American University historian, and he did the book on the Cold War with Oliver Stone. Yeah.
Lindorff Yeah, he he runs the nuclear history project at that school. I forget the name of it, but it’s…
Scheer American University, I think isn’t it?
Lindorff Yeah, but he runs a center there for the study of atomic history and he knows it backwards.
Scheer Well, he’s a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.
Lindorff That’s right.
Scheer I’m reading this off the jacket of your book. Well, let’s not forget the book. You’ve done a lot of work on this. It’s not being noticed by the New York Times or the others. So here it is and it’s available. So, check it out. But go ahead.
Lindorff Thank you. It’s a commercial break. So he said he thought that Ted… people said the FBI excuse argument is that they didn’t go after Ted because they couldn’t get a conviction. They would have been told that they couldn’t use the Venona transcripts because they had obtained them without a search warrant and stuff like that. I think that’s complete B.S., that they’re embarrassed as hell, that they weren’t able to arrest him and that they had to cave in to the Air Force, and they just wanted this story to go away and…
Scheer But just so I’m clear here, you’re saying they didn’t go after Ted Hall because the Air Force was protecting his brother?
Lindorff Yeah, I’m saying that’s why, but they say that, their own historian says that they didn’t arrest him because they couldn’t have gotten a conviction because of the way they had the evidence. That the only evidence they had against him really was those Venona transcripts saying that.
Scheer For Ted Hall, they didn’t have any on Ed Hall.
Lindorff Nothing on Ed because it wasn’t a spy and the thing about Ed was that he was the reason that the Air Force said to to the FBI that they couldn’t they couldn’t arrested. And the proof of that is that even when they stopped investigating him, there were never any leaks about Ted. It never got to a journalist, never got to anybody in the McCarthy hearings. It never got to anybody at HUAC. I mean Hoover was a notorious leaker for his own interest, and he never leaked. So even though he was probably really ticked off at the Air Force, he never leaked about Ted, which is amazing. And he did try to go after him later. After Ed was out of the Air Force and retired and just doing consulting work for NASA, they moved in 1962 to get away from the environment in the US that, he was afraid that the investigation would pick up. So he got a job at Cambridge, in England. And so they moved there with the family. And, the daughters have English accents. I mean they went when they were pretty young and when he had to renew his work visa, he didn’t get blocked from leaving the country. But when he got to England, he had his work papers already, and he went to work, and I guess 1 or 2 years later, he had to renew his work visa, and it should have been an automatic thing, you sending your passport, it comes back with your visa, and it didn’t come. It didn’t come. And he called and asked, and they said, you need to come in in person. So he and Joan walked over, from their house in Newnham to the campus. And they and they got to the office that they needed to go to. And a guy from the MI5 met him who said, listen, Ted, we know what you did. But we’d like you to just tell us about it, we’re not the FBI. Why don’t you just come clean and explain what you did?
And so Ted left, and he was walking back home with Joan, and he said it really would be good to just clear the air and I don’t like living in in secret like this. And maybe I should just tell what I did, I mean, it’s years later. And Joan stopped dead in her tracks and she turned to him and she said, don’t you dare do that. You can’t trust them. You’ll end up getting arrested and maybe I’ll get arrested, too. And our kids will end up in orphans. Just don’t tell them anything, you did nothing and you don’t know anything. And so he said, you think? And she said, yes, I think. And she stopped him from doing it. But you asked once about Ed, and his relationship with Ted. Joan told me that, Ted was diagnosed in, I think it was mid 1980s with, terminal kidney cancer, maybe early, early 90s with terminal kidney cancer from the work he did, he was blowing up lanthanum, which is extremely, extremely radioactive. And, was just getting the dust, they were just hiding they wooden shed when they’d blow these things up, over and over and so he was dying of cancer. And so, when the word went to his brother that he was dying of cancer the family flew over to see him. And Joan was walking down the sidewalk with Ed, and he collapsed on the street and passed out, and they called an ambulance, and he wound up in the hospital, and he was diagnosed with a massive bleeding ulcer that he’d had for some time, obviously. And his daughter told me that, Sheila Hall, who is a TV producer in L.A., she was a young girl then, and she said, Dad, how could you have flown on an airplane with that and not told us you had it? Because they said that he could have died on the plane, and he said, that kid is dying, and I’m going to be here for him. And that’s that was his relationship.
Scheer Go through that again.
Lindorff She said, how could you have gotten on a plane to come here knowing that you had a bleeding ulcer? Because he did know.
Scheer Oh, this is Ed Hall.
Lindorff This was Ed, yeah. He flew there in a highly critical condition of bleeding out his rectum because he wanted to be with his brother. He said that kid is dying… that’s how we viewed him. He was my kid brother. He also told her later, after all of this came out and I visited again. She said Ed, I really want to thank you. They were alone together and she said I really want to thank you for how you handled this all the way through because it threatened your career and all of that. And he said, how could I do anything else? He’s my brother, if he thought that, he said if he thought he was doing the right thing, he was doing the right thing. That’s how he put it.
Scheer Wow. So let’s end this with what you’ve said a few times now, which most people listening to this will think will not be able to accept or will find it absurd, which is that maybe this made it a safer world. This is a very, very controversial statement, right?
Lindorff Yes, yes.
Scheer And so why don’t we focus on that because, it’s not going to be very obvious. We have a view of Stalin’s Russia and then even what happened after and most Americans, whether they like the existence of the bomb or not, feel it’s good that the US has it, and so defend yourself.
Lindorff Well, there’s a couple things I want to read from the book that I think are the best answers to that. The first is a bubble quote I put on the epilogue of the book by Frank Close, who’s a professor emeritus of physics at Oxford and knows this stuff and wrote a brilliant book in 2019 and really exciting read on the whole pursuit of Klaus Fuchs. And I mean he’s a great writer. It’s called, “Trinity.” And you should definitely read that book by Frank Close. He said, seven decades later, this was a quote from his book, seven decades later, the survival of life on Earth in the atomic age, let me put my glasses on and read it since we’re doing a recording. It says seven decades later, the survival of life on Earth in the atomic age may be due to the mutually assured destruction that Fuchs and Ted Hall helped to mature. That was it.
And the other thing is right when I finished the book, I had already edited the manuscript. I read a review of the film, actually, by a guy who works with the Association of Atomic Scientists, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and in it he recounts something, really amazing. I decided to make it the end of my book because it was so good. So I called my editor and said, I got to add this to the epilogue. He says Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and public policy, that’s the guy, at the University of British Columbia writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, recalls how in the mid-nineties he met with a nuclear weapons designer. This is after after Glasnost started, who had witnessed the first test in August 1949 of the Soviet atomic bomb that he and Ted Hall helped to create. He writes, “In what was admittedly an in artfully phrased question, I asked him, how did you feel when you realized you’d given Stalin the bomb? He looked at me steadily from under craggy eyebrows as the question was translated, and then said evenly. I felt at last I could sleep again after four years. Finally we were safe from the Americans.”
Scheer Yes. What does that mean?
Lindorff That’s heavy. These are guys who, like you said, these physicists are amazing. When my dad was an M.I.T. engineering student, he started during the war and then he got drafted, because he had to leave when his father died suddenly of colorectal cancer. And so he was in the Marines during the war. And when he went back, he was on the GI Bill, and he said that there was a petition going around to stop the bomb, and he said he was taking it around. And he discovered that every time he showed it to an engineer, they would say, well, I mean, all great progress in humanity has been because of research done during wartime. It’s an engine of development and you can’t get rid of it and it has a useful purpose, things like that. When he would go to the physicists, they would all sign it. They’d just say, oh, yeah, we got to start this. Physicists are different. There are some who weren’t as places like, say, guys like Sam Cohen who invented the concept of the neutron bomb sort of the “realtor’s bomb,” it doesn’t destroy the buildings, but it kills all the people. But physicists, for the most part, are humanists.
Scheer But let me end this by putting this other question to you, because the assumption that you made was that if the Soviets had not developed the bomb, that the United States was going to use its nuclear arsenal to destroy them. You’re not saying that’s a possibility, you’re saying this was a likelihood, a plausible consideration, or is this some theoretical discussion at a conference or what?
Lindorff No. This was a massive project to build 400 and more. I mean, after the 400 bombs were not able to be used because the Russians had exploded a bomb and were going to have more before they didn’t have enough bombers yet. The other thing they did is they ramped up production of the B-29 after the war. Why? Because they needed more to carry the bombs. And they were also repairing all the ones that came back from the war damaged so that they could have them. And they developed, they worked to develop the B-36, which was able to carry the hydrogen bomb. And all of those things were done in the ’40s. So why were they doing that if they weren’t, it was an enormous amount of money they were spending if they weren’t going to use it. And I also think that I look at how the U.S., how many wars we’ve been in and how many people we’ve killed, millions of people have died in American wars of choice since World War II. 3 million in Vietnam because in, Korea, mostly North Korea, because of the carpet bombings that were done of that country by the U.S. and we had no hesitation to do nuclear sized destruction of Korea and of Vietnam without the atomic bomb, which we couldn’t use because the Russians had the bomb.
But there was no compunction in the US about that level of destruction and what they were doing, that they would have preemptively destroyed the Soviet Union to prevent it from getting a bomb is not only totally comprehensible to me, knowing the people that were involved and the fact that we did use it twice for no good reason except intimidating the Soviet Union. The war was over, I go into that at depth. I mean, it’s very clear that that didn’t have to happen except as a demonstration. So, I mean, it was not just war games, these were actual, and it’s supported, too, by the work that Daniel Ellsberg did in that amazing book, “The Doomsday Machine,” where he talked about the research he did for the Rand Corp. into, the war plans and and strategy that the US had all through the ’50s and into the ’60s.
Scheer Yeah. I mean, look, this is, a reality check in a way. And it’s interesting because most people accept a far more benign view of U.S. intentions. And I think this is really left out of the Oppenheimer movie. And you say that the Oppenheimer did insist on keeping a campus atmosphere at Los Alamos and having interviewed people like Peter myself and others who were in that program, they had a view of the American military industrial complex that was quite realistic. They worked for General Groves. They were under the restraints of the military. They tried to plead with the president. So you can’t just say these physicists were naive, they didn’t do what Ted Hall did, but they certainly had great reservations about what they had unleashed. And the difficulty of controlling it. And so there’s a real cognitive dissonance here. There’s a disconnect that’s very difficult to get through an understanding of our history. If you start off the assumption that the American government is a benign, if sometimes, somewhat irrational force or so forth maybe, under the goadingSenator McCarthy, but what you’re saying is the scientists, it’s a good way to end this, they looked at power up close.
They were not in some lab somewhere. They were not just in an ivory tower. They were dealing with government power and the military industrial complex at a gut level. They were, you know, their movement was monitored. Their paycheck came from it. There they were screened and followed. And they were having these discussions with their government counterparts about what’s going on and what are we going to do here, how are we going to use it? And a project that started when it looked like Nazi Germany might dominate the world ends up being a project to control the postwar politics. That’s a different kettle of fish. And this is why I want to end on this, we’ve taken time, you’ve taken the time. We’ve done an hour and 40 minutes or so, I want to understand why your book is not treated as a center of an important discussion that needs to take place. There’s all this interest in the Oppenheimer movie. You guys made a good film about this subject, and now you’ve issued a book, and the movie didn’t get the attention that I thought it would. I thought, at least with the interest in the Oppenheimer movie, there would be and people should definitely watch the movie, “The Compassionate Spy” and the book “The Story of Ted Hall,” what is the response? Why isn’t it being reviewed and discussed? Has anybody found fault with it or some glaring error or something?
Lindorff No, nobody’s found fault with it. And I think that what the problem is that the book has is that it really questions a fundamental mythology of the United States postwar history, which is that we are all about promoting democracy around the world, and that’s why we do what we do. And, that our motives are sterling when we do that. We don’t have self-interest, we’re generous. We do things to help the world, and we don’t do things out of crass self-interest and desire to control and that’s just demonstrably untrue. I mean, if everything from the coup in Chile, I mean, in my life and I’m 74, I’m an early baby boomer, in 1949, I was born. And, all through my life, there’s been wars that the United States has been in. I spent, when I was 15, I was in a gymnasium in Darmstadt, which was one of the cities, they used it as a test of fire bombing to create a firestorm because it was a wooden city with no military interest at all, no factories, nothing.
It was a cultural capital of Hesse. And, on the way into the city, getting a ride from Frankfurt, train form Frankfurt airport, to the Darmstadt Technical school, where my father was going to have a sabbatical. I saw these two conic mountains, you know, in the middle of the Rhine River, flood plain. And I said to the driver, what are those mountains? Are those volcanoes? And he said, no, that’s Darmstadt ruins that were trucked out there after they bulldozed the rubble of the city from the bombing. And he said, that’s, that’s got everything in it. Burned bones of people that were that were burned, the old city is there in those two mountains. And the shocking thing for me in 1965, I never heard about that. And it was like what happened to Dresden, but on a smaller scale. We did terrible things and we did terrible things in Vietnam. When I was a war resister, just appalling things. And we almost used nukes there twice. Once in offering a bomb to the French, which was wisely turned down by Eisenhower. When they were trapped at Dien Bien Phu and then once at Cameron, at Caisson when the Marines were trapped and the bombs were actually shipped to Vietnam, but, they weren’t used because of two reasons. One is that the Marines managed to break out of that encirclement, and the other was that, the president at that time, Johnson, said what? The generals had brought the bombs over there, and he was really upset. So it didn’t happen, but these people are nuts.
Scheer I mentioned earlier and we looked at that picture over there. If you could go into that I.F. Stone award that you won. People on the radio won’t be able to see it.
Lindorff I always thought this would have been a perfect story for I.F. Stone to have done.
Scheer Well, it’s good that you mentioned. Let’s see Ted Hall first of all, for people who have video or watching this, and you see how young it was, and then next to it swing over to Izzy. Izzy was this grizzled reporter and you won the Izzy Award. And I just want to maybe end this by paying tribute to that. We can go back to you now for a minute if you want and, I’ll conclude this, but Izzy was a very respectable journalist, columnist in New York. And then when the Korean War happened, and after he dared to write a book called “The Hidden History of the Korean War.” I was just a young kid and I read this and when I raised it with some of my teachers in school, they thought, no, that’s nuts. And he argued that the Korean War was a preemptive war and was unnecessary, and that it basically was a response to the wrong people had won in China, the Communist revolution, Mao, defeated Chiang Kai shek and they had taken over China, a year before. And this was really a way of putting pressure on China. And after all, in defense of and Korea was divided by the war was itself but and the leveling of North Korea and all of Korea really, just about every building there, was really an attempt. The Chinese intervened, but instead of the Chinese, collapsing and being defeated, they actually took over Korea and then pulled back. So the whole question of the Yalu River and crossing it, and he wrote a book called “The Hidden History of the Korean War.” And he was destroyed as a journalist for a while, he sort of bounced back and I just remember when my own journalism career, Izzy has always been one of my really great heroes.
And it’s just that he, as a kid, I would read his column in the the New York Post or PM magazine or something while I was going to school and wondered, who is this guy? And now he’s honored, there’s a program at Harvard and at Berkeley and so forth honoring him. But really, what we’re talking about is the entire narrative of the Cold War and of global politics and the US rise to preeminence. The whole issue now still dividing us with China. It turned out, the Chinese communists turn out to be very strong capitalists and very good at it. And we don’t like Russia even when it’s run by an anti-communist now, Putin, who defeated the Communist Party. But there’s this whole narrative and it’s interesting, your example of this Ted Hall and the climate that existed there and the questioning of the essential motivation of the Cold War is so critical to where we are now. And again we’re like cruising now for a kind of confrontation with China. And how did that happen? We knew they were competitive as far as making phones and things and lots of t-shirts and all that. But now, I mean, really, we’re gearing up for what may be the end of humanity. And we certainly have not settled things with Russia there. And actually, ironically, paying tribute to I.F. Stone, he was one of the first who went in when Israel was created, and he was quite supportive of that effort. And yet we see now a source of tension that kind of got into a Cold War drama, and dragging the Mideast into it. So it’s a rambling way to end, but I just think it’s appalling that a really important book like yours, well documented and knowledgeable, you have all the resources, that what remains of what’s the traditional media that they don’t have to cover it? I just think it’s a scandal. Let me hold the book up again for the people can see on the video. It’s “The Story of Ted Hall: The Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.” It’s still a big question, whether he did the right thing or not, still a question people should debate. Spying for no country. That can be debated. But what cannot be debated is the complexity and information in this book suggesting that the bomb didn’t have to be developed is certainly enough to be expanded in a way, and it did not have to fuel the Cold War in the way that it did. I want to end on that note.
I want to thank you for being incredibly generous with your time. And, I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and, Christopher Ho at KCRW, who posts these shows, a very good public radio station. I want to thank our executive producer, Joshua Scheer, who gets me to do these things. Oh, I want to thank, a special shout out to Diego Ramos, who will be writing the introduction, who is a graduate of Townsend Harris High School that we discussed. And, Max Jones, who does the video where people can actually see the book. And I want to thank the J.K.W Foundation for consistently supporting this show and our ability to keep producing it. And in memory of Jean Stein, a strongly independent, fiercely independent, public intellectual and journalist and, writer and on that note, see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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