From Kirkus Reviews
Two Moscow-based correspondents for the Cox Newspaper chain build a 50-year-old case against respected scientist Theodore Hall for having passed secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. A Harvard physics prodigy, Hall was just 18 when he was recruited in January 1944 to join hundreds of scientists at work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert. Even though Hall's left-wing leanings and sympathies for the Soviet Union were obvious, he had no trouble passing a security check. Hall was soon privy to the innermost secrets of America's frenzied rush to develop atomic weaponry. Albright and Kunstel allege that Hall passed some of these secrets to the Soviets, and that his information was more revealing of the bomb's design than that allegedly channeled through Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies in 1953. The journalists base their case largely on recently declassified documents from Russian and American intelligence archives, but also on interviews with Hall and his wife, Joan. Ted Hall, a researcher at Cambridge University for the last 30 years, never directly confesses, but he does admit that he was deeply concerned about the threat to humankind if America were to have a monopoly on atomic weapons, and that he was naive about Stalin's Soviet Union. The authors waver between exploring this rationale and exposing Hall as a spy as the book's central theme, and their focus is further diluted by myriad details about the atomic bomb project and Hall's alleged co-conspirators, and suggestions that there were yet other, even more important spies at Los Alamos. Though the context sometimes overwhelms the message, this largely sympathetic portrayal of a man who, like the Rosenbergs, would likely have been executed for his alleged crimes if he had been caught, is a revealing story about the times in which the Bomb was born. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
... a narrative that compares with the best espionage thrillers.... If there is a flaw in Mr. Albright and Ms. Kunstel's book, it is that they present this story too much from Hall's point of view. Rarely pausing to challenge him, they portray Hall, at times, almost as a tragic hero--a man who betrayed his country for the higher good of preventing atomic war. Hall believed that a nuclear monopoly would have enabled the U.S., lamentably, to use the bomb on China to block Mao's 1949 revolution. He still thinks that Soviet possession of the bomb may have stopped a military takeover of the U.S. government during the Cold War. -- The Wall Street Journal, Ronald Radosh
The authors skillfully use both a number of VENONA documents and a wide range of written material, agent memoirs and interviews collected in post-Communist Russia, where both have worked as journalists.... Bombshell's fluid narrative weaves the basically distinct threads of Hall's life with the Cohens' in an absorbing previously untold spy story.... Albright and Kunstel do an excellent job of clarifying the complex processes involved in making the atomic bomb, pausing even to explain various false starts and unworkable procedures that often preceded the program's periodic breakthroughs. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Allen Weinstein From the Publisher
"Bombshellcombines outstanding research and compelling narrative. It's amazing and fascinating--the best report we shall ever have on the American physicist spy at Los Alamos who stole the plans for the atomic bomb and gave them to the Russians."
--Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun"Albright and Kunstel do an excellent job of clarifying the complex processes involved in making the atomic bomb, pausing even to explain various false starts and unworkable procedures that often preceded the program's periodic breakthroughs".
--Allen Weinstein, Los Angeles Times Book Review
About the Author
Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel are former Moscow reporters for the Cox Newspaper chain. The recipients of numerous journalism awards for their investigative reporting, they currently live in Washington.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
Babes in the Woods
It was a steamy June day in 1950 when Yuri Sokolov set out on a short, risk-riddled trip. He was going only the few blocks from his office at the Soviet United Nations mission to an apartment on East Seventy-first Street, but he was entering hazardous terrain for a spy. He had to make a face-to-face, unplanned visit to the home of two principal agents, and to do that he would violate some cardinal rules of espionage: Never go unannounced. Never meet in homes. Make contacts in public places. That was basic spycraft.
But the FBI was closing in. Sokolov had to deliver a message from Moscow Centre that was calculated to save its spy network from even deeper collapse. Just months after the Soviets aroused a worldwide shudder by exploding their first atomic bomb, the FBI and British MI-5 began bearing down on the intelligence agents who helped make it happen. Spy rings had been penetrated, people arrested. Klaus Fuchs was the first to crack. The German Quaker, a naturalized British citizen who had helped create the American bomb in Los Alamos, admitted in January that he had divulged its details to the Soviets. New York headlines said Fuchs had fingered scores of agents. As it turned out, he helped identify only one other person, his courier Harry Gold, but Gold would prove to be a critical link to others.
Authorities had not been able to prevent the secret of the century from seeping through what they had thought was a sound wall of security around Los Alamos, the desert laboratory in New Mexico where America clandestinely built the world's most devastating weapon. Now they were intent on uncovering the people who had betrayed its existence and its workings to Soviet intelligence.
The rezidentura in New York, the Soviets' spy headquarters, saw it coming. The atom network the rezidentura had assembled strand by strand was jeopardized when Fuchs broke. The couple Sokolov was en route to visit--Morris Cohen and his wife and spymate, Lona--already had been ordered to sever contact with their most recent controller, Colonel Rudolf Abel. The Soviets had begun to fear that discovery of any more of its agents might lead American spy-catchers to the entire ring. In fact, the FBI was about to get a lead on Lona Cohen from Gold, whom they had arrested in May. He would tell them later that summer about a key spy courier, a young woman he had heard about but never met, who lived in Manhattan somewhere around Sixty-eighth and Lexington. But Moscow had acted too fast for the FBI to track Lona. Moscow had not simply ordered its troops into low profile; it had shut them down.
Now the clandestine cadres needed even more protection. That was Sokolov's task when he left his UN office and his cover as chief of the Soviet mission's press operation. It was chancy. If the Cohens already were under surveillance, how could he explain why a Soviet diplomat had come calling in the middle of a torrid summer day? His cover would be blown. Furthermore, if he was being watched, his visit would reveal that Morris and Lona were more than merely a likable grade school teacher and his scrappy wife. But Sokolov had no choice.
When he walked out of the Soviet mission, the elegant old Percy Pyne mansion sitting across from Hunter College at Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, Sokolov did not head for the Cohens' apartment, just a ten-minute stroll away. First he traveled around the city, then meandered up and down East Side streets to check for a tail. It wasn't hard for Sokolov to blend into the mélange of New York, although his pronounced accent made it clear he wasn't native-born. He was a vigorous man of thirty but seemed younger. This was no Soviet thug. With curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses he looked like a European intellectual. As he walked his unplanned maze, Sokolov glanced at reflections in shop windows, doubled back on his route, and finally ended up at 178 East Seventy-first Street.
When Sokolov knocked on the door of apartment 3B in the homely brownstone, he surprised Morris and Lona Cohen relaxing in shorts. Morris, thirty-nine, was tall and lean, an athlete who had lost his beefy build when he was wounded fighting as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He was the thinker of the pair, a history teacher prone to philosophical discourse on anything from baseball to American education. His leftist ideology had been grounded in reading and long contemplation before he put it into action. Lona, an irreverent bundle of verve at thirty-seven, always had been the doer. She lived, then figured out what it meant.
Luckily for the Cohens no friends had stopped by that day. Despite being alone, they were professional enough not to ask questions when the Soviet agent they knew as "George" appeared at their door. Sokolov had been their controller and still considered himself their friend, so it was easy to make innocuous, affable conversation with them as a cover, just in case authorities were onto the couple and had wired their third-floor walk-up. Soon Sokolov dropped the chitchat. He pulled out a notepad and started writing--another precautionary bit of "over-insurance" in those tense times, he said.
"We knew the situation in general, that there was a witch-hunt and so on. And we didn't know exactly their position. How safe they are," Sokolov recalled. They would converse silently with paper and pen. Moscow Centre had decided that the Cohens knew too much, especially about how Soviet intelligence had ferreted atomic bomb secrets out of Los Alamos. Lona had been the courier to Mlad, the special young scientist known to no more than half a handful of officers in the Soviet intelligence hierarchy. Morris and Lona had been in contact with Mlad even after the war; evidently that was reason enough for the Cohens to flee. "I said, the situation has changed. And it's better for you both to leave the country," Sokolov recalled. "They said, 'Why?' "I said, 'Well, you know the situation. You know that some people are arrested, that probably the FBI will know about yourselves. So it is better not to wait until it happens.'
"I emphasized that it might be dangerous. It wasn't my aim to frighten them. I tried to be delicate," Sokolov recounted in describing their conversation-by-notepad.
Morris wrote in reply, strongly supported by Lona: "If it only MIGHT be dangerous, we have a possibility to work yet." Not possible, Sokolov had to insist."Why is it necessary? We're fighters. We'll become illegals and fight on," Morris wrote. "I had different orders," remembered Sokolov. "I was very slow in answering his proposal, and he guessed that probably I have some serious reasons.
"And he asked me, 'But you tell me. Is it an order?' Eto prikaz? 'Or an advice?' Ili sovyet? "I told him, prikaz. 'An order . . .' "He wrote, 'Well, that's that then.'"
When Sokolov looked up from the notepad, he saw smoke billowing out of the bathroom. Lona had taken away each page as the Soviet and her husband finished writing and was burning them over the sink. The tension broke as Sokolov laughed at Lona's disaster. The younger man had always looked at the Cohens as strong, experienced agents, forgetting they had almost no training in spycraft.
"I said, 'You don't know how to burn paper.' So I showed her how you do it." The method is to roll the sheet of paper into a cylinder, then light it at the top so it burns downward, he later recalled. "You light it up here. Then there is no smoke, and all that is left is a little white ash." Conversation ended there, with a pile of white ash and an admonition to flee their country.
Nine months later a frightened young couple in Chicago tried to reach the Cohens. There had been a sudden knock on another door, this time the FBI showing up at a University of Chicago laboratory in the early spring of 1951. Agents were in pursuit of Mlad, the very young scientist the Soviets had been so intent on shielding.
He was Theodore Alvin Hall.
