Top secret: how an American handed over nuclear secrets to the USSR and did not pay for it

On August 29, 1949, the USSR officially became the world's second "nuclear power" after testing the RDS-1 plutonium bomb.

Фото: Depositphotos

These tests took the West by surprise: as follows from CIA documents, American intelligence officers believed that the Soviet Union could create its own atomic bomb no earlier than 1953.

But the most striking thing was that the American scientist Theodor Hall, who secretly forwarded the necessary information to Soviet comrades, helped Moscow realize its atomic ambitions.

Yes, Theodore Hall was not the only American who transmitted atomic secrets to the enemy. But, perhaps, only he got away with it.

How did a nuclear specialist born in New York and trained at Harvard become an enemy spy?

It is not surprising that the RDS-1 product strongly resembled the American plutonium bomb “Fat Man”, which was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Extensive information about the design of the bomb came to the USSR directly from the Manhattan Project, a top-secret nuclear weapons program launched by the Americans with the participation of Great Britain and Canada.

Top secret

Maintaining secrecy was the most important condition of the project. As Life magazine wrote in 1945, “Probably no more than a few dozen people in the entire country were fully aware of the Manhattan Project.”

One of these initiates was Theodore Hall.

Theodore was born 20 October 1925 year in the family of a housewife and entrepreneur. His childhood fell on the years of the Great Depression, when ordinary Americans lived very hard.

However, this did not prevent Hall from achieving tremendous success in mathematics and physics. He was rightly considered a genius.

In 16 years, he was admitted to the prestigious Harvard University, which he graduated in 1944 year.

His brilliant academic success did not pass by the authorities, who were looking for talented scientists to work in a new nuclear project.

In 1943, while still a student, Theodore Hall was interviewed for work in a top-secret laboratory in Los Alamos.

Communist Neighbor

However, the officials conducting the interview did not know that the young physicist had already passed a different selection.

Hall was a Harvard student Marxist circle, and Savile Sachs, a convinced communist, the son of immigrants from Russia, was his roommate.

It was Saks, who received the code name Star in the NKVD, who offered Hall to work for Soviet intelligence, and then more than once served as a courier, forwarding classified information.

Theodore Hall. A photo: wikipedia.org

In December 1944, a young scientist, with the help of a former hostel neighbor, transmitted the first secret information from Los Alamos regarding the latest developments on the plutonium bomb.

“In 1944, I was greatly concerned about the American monopoly on atomic weapons in case a post-war depression broke out,” Theodore Hall wrote in the New York Times in 1997, two years before he died of kidney cancer.

Mlad

Hall believed that the Soviet Union, possessing nuclear weapons, would equalize the odds of the parties on the world stage and serve as a deterrent.

“At that time, the Soviet Union was not an enemy, but an ally,” Hall said, “the Soviet people fought heroically against the Nazis, they made a huge human sacrifice, which in many ways helped save the Western allies from defeat.”

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Hall, who was given the call sign Mlad in the USSR, continued to supply Moscow with important technical information, primarily related to “implosion” - the new principle of inward explosion on which plutonium bombs operated.

It was the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, while Hiroshima was hit by a less powerful uranium bomb.

Encrypted Messages

Although the United States and the USSR fought a common enemy during World War II, this did not stop Moscow and Washington from spying on each other.

Back in February 1943, the Americans launched a major counterintelligence operation, Venona, against the Soviet Union.

In December 1946, the Americans managed to decrypt the codes used by the NKVD.

From the contents of the intercepted messages, it became clear that the USSR had access to secret information from the Manhattan Project.

FBI agents came to Theodore Hall in only 1950, when he was preparing to defend his doctorate at the University of Chicago.

He was identified as an agent of Moscow, mentioned in the encryption.

A year earlier, another spy from Los Alamos, German physicist Klaus Fuchs, had been arrested, who admitted to passing nuclear secrets to the enemy.

However, neither from Theodore Hall, nor from Savile Sachs, whom they also interrogated, the FBI agents could not get confessions.

Trip to the UK

None of the other captured spies pointed to Hall. External surveillance also did not produce any results: after the Manhattan Project, Hall practically did not engage in espionage.

Of course, there were also encryption from Moscow, which could be used as evidence of the scientist's guilt. But US intelligence did not want to use this evidence in court, since it would immediately make it clear that the Americans were able to decipher the Soviet code.

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As a result, Hall escaped punishment, unlike other spies who received prison sentences, and some were even executed for treason.

Still, Hall and his wife feared for their safety. Hall left a prestigious research position in Chicago and took up insignificant research work at a New York hospital. And in 1962, he completely moved with his wife to the UK, accepting an offer from Cambridge University.

In 1984, Theodore Hall retired and was going to live the rest of his life quietly and quietly.

In 1996, the past reminded itself of itself when the secrecy stamp was removed from encrypted messages from Moscow in which contacts with agent Mlad were mentioned.

However, by then all the witnesses to his espionage activities, including Savile Sachs, were already dead.

Course of history

“They even said that I changed the course of history,” Hall admitted to reporters from the New York Times shortly before his death. “But, perhaps, if the course of this very history had not changed, this would have led to an atomic war, for example, in 1949 or in the early 50s an atomic bomb would have been dropped on China. So if I prevented it, then I accept the charges.”

In fact, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 74 years ago, nuclear weapons were no longer used, so Hall before death could be sure that he had a hand in this.

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