Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World

Journalist and documentarian Lindorff (Marketplace Medicine) presents a riveting portrait of Ted Hall (1925–1999), who during WWII stole crucial data from America’s Los Alamos nuclear-bomb research center and delivered it to the Soviet Union. A brilliant young physicist, Hall was plucked out of Harvard at age 18 and arrived at the Manhattan Project laboratories in New Mexico in early 1944, where he worked under scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer. Thinking that “it would be proper and important for America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, to be included” in the creation of the atomic bomb and hoping to “prevent its use after the war ended should the United States be the only nation possessing it,” Hall travelled to New York and presented himself to the Russian consulate. He then returned to Los Alamos, and for several months passed information to the consulate via his former Harvard roommate Saville Sax. After the war, Hall went back to civilian life as a graduate student and researcher, moving in 1962 to an academic post at Cambridge University in England. News did not break that he had been a Manhattan Project spy for the Soviets until five years before his death. Espionage buffs and fans of the movie Oppenheimer will savor Lindorff’s extensive scrutiny of this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale. (Oct.)