The Compassionate Spy

True Spies, Episode 175 - The Compassionate Spy

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Daisy Ridley, and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios. The Compassionate Spy.

STEVE JAMES: While the US and European press were horrified at the prospect of the Soviet Union now having the bomb, Ted and Joan were very privately proud of the role that Ted had played in helping them get the bomb. And in a sense, it was ‘mission accomplished’.

NARRATOR: It’s October of 1944. The Second World War is still raging. Bombs continue to drop. Machine guns continue to fire. And people are still dying every day. But on this autumn afternoon, two young men are enjoying what seems like a moment of quiet and tranquility. They’ve taken a rowboat onto the lake at Central Park in New York City. One of the men, Ted, is celebrating his 19th birthday. He’s joined by his best friend, Savvy. From the outside, it must look like a very ordinary scene. Two friends together, enjoying one another’s company. But something else is happening inside this boat. Something that will change Ted and Savvy’s lives forever. And the course of history. 

STEVE JAMES: He decided that the US - having this awful bomb they were building all to itself - would destabilize the post-war world. 

NARRATOR: Ted Hall is a brilliant scientist. And he has a front-row seat in the development of a devastating weapon: the atomic bomb. But Ted is about to go from scientist to spy. And he wants to share what he knows about building an atomic super-weapon with the Soviet Union.

STEVE JAMES: Ted said that he was ready now to take that step and share the secrets with the Soviets. And so, these guys hatched a plan about how they would do that.

NARRATOR: This is Steve James.

STEVE JAMES: I'm Steve James. I'm mostly a documentary filmmaker who's been doing this for several decades. You know, my first film was a film called Hoop Dreams.

NARRATOR: Steve’s going to be guiding us through the story of Ted Hall - A Compassionate Spy.

STEVE JAMES: Ted grew up in New York and he came from a family of Russian immigrants. 

NARRATOR: Ted Hall was a brilliant child. He excelled in mathematics and physics and he shared his enthusiasm for science with his elder brother, Ed. Ed was also an incredibly gifted scientist, and he’ll figure in our story later. Ted graduated high school when he was just 14 and then went to Harvard, one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. And it was here, in 1942, that Ted met his best friend Saville Sax, aka Savvy.

STEVE JAMES: And in some ways, they couldn't be more different. Savvy was a much more creative guy. He was interested in theater. He was also not a very good student. He was not very committed to his education. But one of the things that they shared very closely was a very similar belief about politics. They were both leftists so they bonded over that. And so they were kindred spirits in a lot of ways.

NARRATOR: Savvy and Ted’s time at Harvard played out against the distant backdrop of World War II. As they continued their studies, the war rumbled on, thousands of miles away but ultimately, it would come for them too, separating them at the peak of their friendship. Because, after graduating from Harvard at just 18, Ted was recruited by the US Army to go to the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and become a part of the infamous Manhattan Project.

STEVE JAMES: At Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project was a project begun by the US government, allegedly spurred by the concern that the Germans were attempting to develop this superweapon. And so they set out to gather together the greatest minds of physics and engineering and chemistry and have them go to this facility out in New Mexico, Los Alamos, a base there, and to develop this superweapon.

NARRATOR: That superweapon was, of course, the atomic bomb.

And a teenager, Ted Hall was among the great minds in physics, engineering, and chemistry working on the development of the first bomb.

STEVE JAMES: I mean, can you imagine? It's like he was in the big leagues and so he was excited by that. And there was an aspect of this endeavor that was thrilling to him - and I think thrilling to most of the scientists who were there, which they looked at as this incredible challenge. I think what made them feel perfectly or if not perfectly, emboldened to take on this challenge was the genuine fear that the Germans were working on this and that we could not let them beat us to this. So I think that that gave a lot of people, including Ted, the feeling that they were doing the right thing in working on this project, that they were trying to save the world, literally.

NARRATOR: A shy teenager saving the world? It sounds like fiction, but that was the reality of Ted’s life during the war. Initially, Ted was a junior scientist. He was the young graduate, helping support the men in charge. Men like Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, and the subject of a recent Hollywood blockbuster. But over time, Ted’s responsibility grew. 

STEVE JAMES: He may have started in a fairly lowly capacity, but it wasn't long before they put him on the project developing fission, the fission process, which is part of the process that ignites this huge explosion in the bomb. So he was working in a very important area of research and he impressed his superiors. And so they gave him more and more responsibility. And that, of course, led to him having more and more access to what was going on there.

NARRATOR: Ted may have been initially excited about this bold scientific endeavor and the notion of saving the world. But over time, he began to grow concerned with the implications of the Manhattan Project. A big part of that concern was rooted in the fact that, despite being the US’s supposed wartime ally, the Soviet Union was not involved in the building of the bomb. They were being kept in the dark. Long before the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, there was a wall of silence. Ted was worried about the real possibility that the US would have a monopoly on atomic weapons and what that meant for the future of the world. What would things be like if one nation could wipe out any other at the push of a button? Ted had genuine fears that the US could, itself, become a fascist government and bully the world with its arsenal of superweapons. 

STEVE JAMES: And so Ted worried that in the postwar world that if a reactionary government came to power, a president came to power in the United States and had this awful weapon all to themselves, that they might not hesitate to use it and to bomb the Soviet Union without cause.

NARRATOR: And so teenage Ted decided to do something about it. He decided to start passing information to the Soviet Union to help them have the information to build their own bombs. And that brings us back to 1944 and the rowboat in Central Park, and Ted’s best friend, Savvy Sax. Like Ted, Savvy is concerned about a US monopoly on nuclear weapons. Savvy is also the child of Russian immigrants and sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In fact, when Ted first told Savvy he was going to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project his reaction was: “You have to tell the Soviets.” At that time, Ted wasn’t convinced but all of that had changed. Now he was ready to go from scientist to spy.

STEVE JAMES: And so these guys hatched a plan about how they would do that. And Savvy's idea, which was fairly brilliant, was that he would go to the Russian Embassy, purportedly to find out what had happened to his grandparents during a massacre back in Russia. And that would be the ruse with which he would go to the embassy.

NARRATOR: Take a step back, and consider that Ted and Savvy are practically children. Ted is still a teenager. And here he is, planning to pass secrets to the Soviets. Secrets that will help another powerful nation build bombs with a capacity for unprecedented destruction. The implications of what they were doing were huge for them and for the world. Ultimately, Ted and Savvy go ahead with the plan and make contact with the Soviets. But, initially, there’s a hitch.

STEVE JAMES: At first, the Soviets were skeptical. First of all, they thought they were crazy to see these young guys. What could they possibly know? And then the next thought was that this could be some kind of double agent thing going on, that they were going to come in there and they really were working for the US, for the CIA.

NARRATOR: But the Soviets soon began to pay attention when Ted supplied them with the names of the key scientists working on the atomic bomb. Soon, Savvy and Ted developed their own system to pass information back and forth to the Soviets. Essentially, Savvy would act as a courier, taking messages from Ted and passing them along to the Russians. 

STEVE JAMES: They worked out this code using Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a way of communicating. They were engaged in all of this spycraft. They had no idea what they were doing, but they were just winging it to make this all work. And it somehow did.

NARRATOR: In the mid-1940s, Ted Hall lived two lives. In the first, he was at Los Alamos working feverishly to develop the first nuclear weapon and assure the United States’ supremacy against all opponents. But at the same time, he was a spy doing his best to sabotage that very outcome, determined to prevent a future nuclear dictatorship. Savvy and Ted’s Soviet handlers assigned them codenames - Ted was Mlad, a Slavic word meaning ‘young’, and Savvy was Star, which meant old. In one report, a Soviet spy wrote the following description of Ted: “Rather tall, slender, brown-haired, pale and a bit pimply-faced, dressed carelessly, boots appear not cleaned for a long time, slipped socks. His hair is parted and often falls on his forehead. His English is highly cultured and rich. He answers quickly and very fluently, especially to scientific questions. Perhaps because of premature mental development, he is witty and somewhat sarcastic but without a shadow of undue familiarity and cynicism. His main trait - a highly sensitive brain and quick responsiveness. In conversation, he is sharp and flexible as a sword.” Clearly, Ted and Savvy were not the kind of spies you see in the movies. For instance, when spies rendezvous, they are taught to scan the area for any surveillance before risking an encounter. On one occasion, when Ted and Savvy met to exchange information, they bumped into each other on the street before reaching their meeting point and then proceeded to walk there together. Not exactly inconspicuous. Still, the pair did succeed in passing vital information along. We already know that Ted passed along the names of some of the key scientists at Los Alamos but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Because Ted Hall would ultimately hand the Soviets material that would greatly accelerate their own push to build a nuclear weapon. 

STEVE JAMES: The key information that Ted passed along to the Soviets had to do with the fission process that he had been working on, which, again, was an incredibly vital part of the bomb-making process.

NARRATOR: In layman’s terms, the fission process is what makes the bomb explode and unleash its devastating power. And the more Ted understood that power, the more worried he was. But it turns out that Ted wasn’t the only one who had misgivings about the US hoarding nuclear weapons and their devastating potential. In fact, Ted Hall was not the only spy at Los Alamos.

STEVE JAMES: There was another scientist who was working with the Soviet Union, unbeknown to Ted, named Karl Fuchs, and Karl Fuchs had come to the same conclusion that Ted did independently and he started working with the Soviets. And he also passed along similar information. But the Soviets, when they got the information from Karl Fuchs, they didn't necessarily believe that he was giving them real information. And why was that? Because Karl Fuchs was German. Right. And so when Ted passed along his information, it also confirmed what Karl Fuchs had passed along. And between the two of them, they knew that they had rock-solid information about fission.

NARRATOR: The Soviets now had key information on how to create a nuclear weapon. In theory, they had nuclear capability. But in reality, they were still years behind the scientists at Los Alamos. And in the mid-1940s Ted and the scientists on the Manhattan Project were getting closer and closer to making a bomb that worked. The day for a test blast finally arrived on July 16, 1945. If you haven’t seen footage of the explosion, watch it. All these years later it’s still an awesome and terrifying sight.

STEVE JAMES: The thing that's kind of amazing about it is just the sheer power of it. From a single bomb. You have to see it to believe it. But it is this awesome force of nature and technology happening at once.

NARRATOR: The blast took place in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, a vast expanse of flat land, sand, and nothingness. The bomb, nicknamed Gadget, was dropped from a 100-foot steel tower. Boom. First, there was a flash of light. A flash that was said to be brighter than 1,000 suns. And then came the shockwave and a massive mushroom cloud that was over seven miles high. Scientists watched through welders’ goggles so they wouldn’t damage their eyes. And with that flash, and that boom, the world changed. Most of the scientists at Los Alamos celebrated. They’d done it! They’d built the bomb. But not Ted.

STEVE JAMES: Well, I think it confirmed for him all of his worst fears about what was possible. And I'm sure on some level there was some measure of pride in that while he did it - you know, that pure scientific pride and in the success of it all - but the overwhelming emotion and feeling for Ted was horror. And so there was a lot of celebrating going on at Los Alamos, and people were toasting and drinking and very proud of what they had done. Ted completely avoided the celebration. He went back to the barracks where he was staying. He put on some of his favorite classical music and he just thought about the awfulness of what they had just done. And I think that says a lot about him and the kind of man he was. I think if anything, it only further spurred him to feel like he had done, been doing, the right thing and passing these secrets to the Soviets. 

NARRATOR: After the successful test, others started to become alarmed at just how powerful the bomb was. Seventy scientists from Los Alamos wrote a letter to President Truman pleading with him not to use the bomb. Here’s an extract: If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation… The added material strength which this lead gives to the United States brings with it the obligation of restraint and if we were to violate this obligation our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. Ted Hall was not deemed to be important enough at the time to sign the letter, but you can imagine he agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed. The letter, though, fell on deaf ears. And on August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was followed three days later by another in Nagasaki. Both cities were decimated. The scale of devastation was too great to be easily calculated. But it’s estimated that over 200,000 people died as a result of the blasts. Japan, brought to its knees by the bombs, surrendered. The war was over and so was Ted’s career as a spy. 

STEVE JAMES: Once he left Los Alamos, once the war ended, and Ted then went to the University of Chicago to get his Ph.D. in physics, he was no longer passing secrets to the Soviets. In fact, they wanted him to stay on and be a source. But he said that he was done. He, number one, didn't think he would have anything to offer. And number two, he wasn't interested in being a career spy for the Soviet Union. He had done the thing that he felt compelled and that he needed to do - and he wanted to be done with that part of his life and move on with his life.

NARRATOR: And for a while that was possible. At the University of Chicago, Ted was reunited with his old friend Savvy. And he fell in love with a woman named Joan. Joan was well aware of what Ted had done during the war. After she’d accepted his proposal, he confessed to her that he had been a spy and gave her the opportunity to back out of the wedding. Joan stayed true to Ted and they were married. Savvy also got married, and both young couples had children and lived like regular post-graduate students happily absorbed in their studies and family life. And Ted and Savvy might have thought that their involvement with spy games was over. But that wasn’t to be. To understand what happens next it’s important to contextualize the US’s relationship with Russia and how that has changed over the years. During the war, Russia and the US were allies. They were fighting on the same team. There had long been tension between the two powers, but a lot of American media representations of the Soviets were favorable during the war. Everyone was united against the same enemies. But things started to change towards the end of the war. Relations between the US and Russia deteriorated. And a ‘Red Scare’ swept across the US. And all of the fears and paranoia surrounding the Soviet Union only intensified when, in 1949, Russia successfully detonated its first nuclear bomb. Many Americans were terrified when the news broke. By now the devastating power of these weapons was well known. What might happen now that, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, equally powerful bombs were available? But things were very different inside the Hall household. 

STEVE JAMES: So when the Soviets tested their first bomb successfully it was a huge, huge story internationally. While the US and European press were horrified at the prospect of the Soviet Union now having the bomb, Ted and Joan were very privately proud of the role that Ted had played in helping them get the bomb. And in a sense, it was ‘mission accomplished’ that Ted had played a role in helping the Soviets even the playing field.

NARRATOR: At this time, it would have been crazy for Ted to publicly rejoice in what he saw as a great accomplishment. And, to a contemporary audience, it might seem odd that Ted would celebrate the Soviets having a bomb. But remember, this was before the brutality of Josef Stalin’s regime was widely known and before we understood the amount of people who perished under his rule. And before Ted could really understand who he was passing secrets to. At the time, the main thing Ted knew was that he had succeeded in creating the circumstances for Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD - the idea being that two sides having weapons creates a stand-off. Because who’s going to fire a nuclear weapon when you know that someone else is going to fire one back? By giving Russia the information to help build their bomb, Ted ensured that no nuclear bomb would ever be used. He’d turned the world MAD.

STEVE JAMES: Whatever its problems, and there are significant problems, [it] has succeeded in one sense in that not since the United States dropped two bombs on Japan has any country dropped a nuclear bomb in the 80 years since. 

NARRATOR: No matter the pride they may have felt, the need for Ted and Savvy to keep quiet about their activities during the war was made clear in the early 1950s when Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were arrested.

STEVE JAMES: Well. Julius Rosenberg was - and with some help from his wife, Ethel - part of a ring of spies that had been passing secrets to the Soviets. Now, Julius Rosenberg was mostly a carrier of secrets. He was not a scientist. He did not have particular access himself to the kinds of secrets that Ted had passed along. But when they were arrested, it was a firestorm and it was a huge deal because it was as if Julius Rosenberg was responsible for the Soviet Union's getting the bomb.

NARRATOR: The Rosenbergs trial made headlines across the world. In truth, they were small fish and the information they had passed along to the Soviets was nowhere near as valuable as the intel that Ted had provided. But they were still portrayed as being responsible for helping the Soviets build nuclear weapons. The Rosenbergs were, in a sense, taking the blame for information that Ted, Savvy, and others had passed along. On March 29, 1951, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage and they were both sentenced to death. 

STEVE JAMES: Ted was so horrified at the prospect that the Rosenbergs were going to be executed for what he had done. He said to Joan that he wanted to turn himself in with the hopes of sparing them because he knew that what he had done had far more significance than what they had done. And Joan, wisely and forcefully said to Ted, “You will do no such thing because that will not save the Rosenbergs. It will just get us both probably executed.” And so, he did not do that. But that's what was at stake here for Ted if he had confessed and then been put on trial.

NARRATOR: It was now crystal clear. This was a life-or-death situation. Ted and Savvy had to keep their secrets or face the same fate as the Rosenbergs. Perhaps they understood implicitly that their time would come too, though it’s doubtful they could have known just how soon their own lives would hang in the balance because, around the time of the Rosenberg case, an old, encrypted Soviet intelligence cable was finally cracked. And it pointed directly at Ted Hall.

STEVE JAMES: It didn't take them that long once they broke the code to figure out there was this young scientist at Los Alamos who had been passing secrets to the Soviets. And the sort of code name they gave Ted was not far removed from his actual name. So it didn't take, it didn't take a rocket scientist, as they say, to figure out that this was Ted Hall. 

NARRATOR: It looked like Ted was caught red-handed and that he would be exposed - become the next spy to face the flashbulbs of the world’s press and the real possibility of a death sentence. But it wasn’t quite that simple because the US didn’t want the Russians to know that they had broken their codes. Nothing in the encrypted intelligence cables could be used as evidence against Ted. As a result, FBI investigators would have to force Ted and Savvy to confess. They would have to break them down. And make them admit to everything they had done.

STEVE JAMES: And so the FBI in 1951, out of the Chicago office, hauled Ted in and Savvy in for questioning. 

NARRATOR: The interrogation process was about to begin.

STEVE JAMES: So they bring Ted in. It's in the wake of this Julius Rosenberg thing. It's all going on. And they try to tell him that they've got the goods on him and they explain everything that they have found out about him and they try to get him to admit to what he'd done. And Ted completely stonewalls them and doesn't admit to anything. And at the same time, next door, they have brought in Savvy. They excused themselves from interrogating Ted. They go next door and they are interrogating Savvy very loudly. And Savvy is getting incredibly emotional because Savvy wasn't nearly as steely-spined as Ted, but Savvy was also an actor. So I think it's a little bit unclear as to what degree Savvy is acting and or to what degree Savvy is truly afraid. But I think he's quite afraid. But lo and behold, he doesn't break either. So between the two of them, the FBI is stonewalled. This is a Friday.

NARRATOR: The FBI released Ted and Savvy for the weekend. They’ve gone through the wringer but stood firm. Still, the pair begin to wonder: How long can they keep this up? Should they come clean? Confess? Maybe try to make a deal?

STEVE JAMES: Savvy and his wife, and Joan and Ted, each have a kid. They go for a walk in the park with the kids in the stroller to talk about what has happened and strategize about what they should do. And Ted is very firm: “We should do nothing. And we should not cooperate.” 

NARRATOR: Ted Hall stood firm under all the pressure that the FBI could summon. He wasn’t going to bend. He wasn’t going to break. And he would not confess.

STEVE JAMES: When they bring him in for this interrogation, they tell him he needs to come back Monday. And when he came back on Monday, he said, “I no longer want to speak to you. And so unless you're going to arrest me, I'm going to leave.” And so he gets up and he walks out.

NARRATOR: It’s reported that before leaving the FBI office, he buttoned up his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck before walking outside. The FBI agents who had been interrogating Ted followed him to the elevator. Once the doors closed, it looked like Ted and Savvy were free. But not so fast. The FBI had another tactic to try to catch Ted Hall - his brother, Ed Hall. 

STEVE JAMES: Ed Hall, Ted's brother, was 11 years older. Ed was a brilliant engineer. He went to Caltech [California Institute of Technology]. He was in the Air Force. And when he was not flying fighter planes, he was designing rockets. And he was designing rockets that would eventually be the ICBMs that would eventually carry nuclear warheads.

NARRATOR: Initially, the FBI was worried that Ed was a spy too. Imagine that? A pair of prestigious and decorated brothers both turn out to be Soviet agents. The truth was that Ed knew nothing about what Ted had done. He only found out about everything when he went to visit his brother but it turns out he wasn’t the only one calling on the Hall household that day.

STEVE JAMES: Ed made a secret visit to Ted in Chicago. He showed up at Ted's door unannounced, unplanned. And they went for a walk. And what's interesting is, that particular day that Ed showed up, a phone repairman had shown up unannounced as well to say there were some problems with the line and that he needed to do some work on their phone. Joan didn't necessarily think it was crazy or suspicious, at least initially. So this guy comes in. He's taking their phone apart. He's working on their phone lines. Ed shows up. He sees this phone repairman doing stuff on the phone. And he says to Ted, basically, “Let's go for a walk.” And so they go for a walk in the neighborhood. And basically, Ed says, “Tell me what this is about. Is there something going on here?” And Ted confesses to Ed what he had done. And when they return, Ed checks out the phone and determines very quickly that, yes, this phone has been bugged.

NARRATOR: Over the years, the FBI made more efforts to catch Ted but he continued to evade them, to hold on to his secrets. He and his wife Joan toyed with the idea of moving to Russia but in the 1960s the Halls settled in England and Ted used his brilliant mind to develop new groundbreaking techniques for examining biological tissue. Perhaps he thought his secrets would never be told but in the mid-1990s something happened that finally exposed Ted. The National Security Agency declassified the decrypted cables that identified Ted and Savvy as Soviet spies. It wasn’t long before journalists came knocking on his door. Initially, Ted continued to hold onto his secrets. But finally, in 1997, 50 years after he’d helped the Soviets build an atomic bomb, Ted Hall confessed.

STEVE JAMES: The thing you have to understand is, at the time all this was happening, Ted had cancer and Parkinson's, and his health was in serious decline. And so I think there was this feeling that, yeah, if he wants to have his version of what he did out there for posterity this was the time to do it.

NARRATOR: In the years before his death in 1999, Ted talked to a number of journalists about what he did during the war and how he became a spy. And he also talked about how he sometimes wondered whether he had done the right thing. Remember, as much as Ted was sympathetic to leftist ideology, he had no idea what Stalin would do to Russia in the post-war years. He gave them the bomb to stabilize the world - not because he wanted to empower a dictator. And, during his later years, that troubled him.

STEVE JAMES: Ted had regrets about what he had done. Because what became clearer and clearer about what was going on in the Soviet Union between the purging, the military, between genocide in Ukraine, between the gulags, and what happened under Stalinist Soviet Union. It became clearer and clearer that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship and that for all of America's problems, the Soviet Union arguably had it much worse. 

NARRATOR: In one interview, Ted was asked why he did what he did. And he gives a surprisingly simple answer. He doesn’t talk about Mutually Assured Destruction. He doesn’t talk about halting a US monopoly on nuclear weapons. And he doesn’t talk about any of his worst nightmares about what the US could possibly turn into if it was the only nation to wield so much power. He explained that he did it out of compassion.

STEVE JAMES: On his reasons - that he could still stand behind what he had done - was because he had done what he had done out of compassion for the Soviet people and in a worry that if the US had done preemptive strikes. And they would have killed a lot of Soviet citizens, including people, his own relatives, really, because his people had immigrated from the Soviet Union. So there was that personal aspect and connection as well that I think you can't forget.

NARRATOR:  It was this care for others that inspired Steve James to make a documentary film about Ted. He called it A Compassionate Spy. 

STEVE JAMES: And so I think that's where the compassion came in for him that he worried more than anything about. The death and destruction of civilians. He didn't do it to support the political aims of the Soviet Union. He did it out of compassion. For the people. 

NARRATOR: When Ted Hall died in 1999 he left behind a complicated legacy. There are some who say that he did the wrong thing. That he betrayed his country and empowered a new evil empire. But at the same time, his supporters say that he helped stabilize the world. That he risked his own life, to save others. And that, above all, he was a compassionate spy. I’m Daisy Ridley. Join us next week for more crucial contact with True Spies.