Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy [Hardcover]

Joseph Albright (Author), Marcia Kunstel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997 | ISBN-10: 0788168061 | ISBN-13: 978-0788168062 | Edition: 1St Edition

Ted Hall was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was asked to join the Manhattan Project when he was only eighteen years old.  There, in wartime Los Alamos, working under Robert Oppenheimer and Bruno Rossi, Hall helped build the atomic bomb.  To his friends and coworkers he was a brilliant young rebel with a boundless future in atomic science.  To his Soviet spymasters, he was something else: "Mlad," their mole within Los Alamos, a most hidden and valuable asset and the men who first slipped them the secrets to the making of the atomic bomb.

In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America's top atomic secrets to Stalin.  At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, his fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades.  Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as a brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother's radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the Hydrogen bomb.

For forty years only a few Russians knew what Ted Hall really did.  Now Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal the astonishing true story of the atomic spies who got away.  Bombshell is history at its most explosive.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Recruited into the super-secret Manhattan Project while still a teenager, albeit a teenager who had already passed through Harvard, Ted Hall was unquestionably brilliant. But Hall, now an elderly physicist living in England, claims he was also very naive. While working to develop the atomic bomb for the United States, Hall approached Soviet intelligence and proceeded to pass along secrets. His breaches of security, while unknown outside intelligence circles until recently, dwarf the work of better-known Cold War operatives. And what's perhaps most startling is his motivation for giving the Soviets the secrets of the American bomb. Relying on recently declassified materials and interviews with the participants in the plot, Bombshell reads like an inventive spy novel, yet it's entirely true. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Klaus Fuchs might have been the most famous Communist atomic spy from World War II, but young Theodore Alvin Hall also passed on scientific information from the Los Alamos laboratory, which helped the Russians explode their first atomic bomb in 1949. The U.S. intelligence community suspected Hall's involvement after breaking Soviet codes, but little about Hall's secret activities has been made public until now. Moscow-based journalists Albright and Kuntsel (Their Promised Land: Arab and Jew in History's Cauldron, LJ 11/1/90) base this readable account on interviews with Hall himself and others involved, supplemented by newly declassified materials in Moscow and Washington. They focus primarily on the war years and Hall's attempts to build a normal life in the 1950s. The authors do an especially good job of conveying the fear of capture that Hall and other spies experienced daily, and they provide lots of interesting details about tradecraft (how you actually commit espionage). Suitable for public and academic espionage collections.?Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Diane Pub Co; 1St Edition edition (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0788168061
• ISBN-13: 978-0788168062
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,771,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating expose of cold war origins, November 11, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Houston,Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bombshell : The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (Hardcover)

What can be said about a man who in his youth followed his conscience, albeit rashly, and betrayed to another country the most devastating secrets of military weaponry the world had ever known? This is a difficult moral question, not easily answered. This book shows the roots of Ted Hall's thought processes, his naturally rebellious nature, and the reasons why he chose to spy against his own country in a time of war. It also shows that he was far from alone in his ultimate decision to do so. There are other questions that are almost as difficult to answer. Why was security ridiculously lax at the Los Alamos facilities? How did Ted Hall and others manage to escape discovery for so long? While one cannot condone what occurred, it is easy to see why intelligent people felt compelled not to allow such potent information to remain the exclusive property of any one country. The aftermath of this information's dissemination may indeed have spared us another world war, but it also foreshadowed the inevitable consequences of the McCarthy witchhunt and an uncontrolled arms race. This is one of the more informative chapters of history at last unconvered.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The hidden Los Alamos mole at the onset of proliferation, April 25, 2003

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bombshell : The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (Hardcover)

Beyond Fuchs et al, there had always been suspicions of an extra spy. Now we know. This is the gripping account of Ted Hall,code name Mlad, a teenage whiz kid who suddenly found himself at Los Alamos, savy enough to be at the dead center of bomb calculations, and deciding for idealistic reasons, refusing all payment, to share the secret of the atomic weapon with the Russians. Soon the a virtually complete description of how to construct a weapon is in the hands of the Communists. It is interesting that the original communication was decoded in the late forties, and that he was almost caught, but simply slipped through, until the opening of the archives after 1989.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Meet the other main KGB source at Los Alamos., April 28, 1999

By 

Stephen M. St Onge "Stephen M. St. Onge" (Mpls, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bombshell : The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (Hardcover)

4/28/99: Almost all histories of the Manhattan Project mention the quiet German refugee scientist, Klaus Fuchs, code name Charlz, who gave the Soviet Union a good working blueprint of the Nagasaki bomb. But a couple of weeks before Harry Gold picked up Fuch's information, KGB courier Lona Cohen met Ted Hall, code name Mlad ('youth'), in Albuquerque, and got an equally revealing description. BOMBSHELL fills in one of the major missing pieces of the puzzle of Soviet Espionage against the Manhatten Project. Now, if we can just find out who code names Pers, Kvant and Nejtron were, and what information Oppenheimer passed... Highly Recommended.