By Ron RIDENOUR
Dave Lindorff initiated the documentary film A Compassionate Spy, following a correspondence with Ted Hall’s 87-year-old widow, Joan Hall. Lindorff had written an article in 2017 proposing Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs be granted the Nobel Peace Prize for sharing vital information about the atomic bomb development under way in Los Alamos, New Mexico—the Manhattan Project—in the mid-1940s.[1] Joan Hall wrote to Lindorff: “I’m reading your article about Ted Hall with tears in my eyes. I’m Ted’s widow, and you are the first person who ‘got’ him.”
Dave lives in Philadelphia, and Joan lived in Newnham, a village just outside Cambridge, England. They became email and phone friends until in 2018 when he and his musician wife Joyce had occasion to spend a few days with her in her home.
Dave told Joan he thought it was time for a new book on Ted’s spying as it was clear from released national security documents from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that the Truman administration had been planning a massive first strike attack on the USSR. Truman dropped the idea after the Soviets exploded their first nuke in August 1949, thanks to the spying by Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs.
Joan said she preferred that Dave could do a film. Not being a filmmaker, Dave was unwilling to embark on such a project. He reached out to film documentarian Steve James, whom he had met playing an on camera reporter role in an earlier James documentary, “Small Enough to Jail.” James liked the idea, and they put together a team with James as director and his usual producer Mark Mitten and Dave as co-producers, to create “A Compassionate Spy,” which this reviewer saw during the Cambridge film festival, November 2022.
The idea to do a book became clearer during the film-making process. Lindorff has just had his book published: Spy For No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World (Prometheus Books, October 2023).
Three hundred pages of prodigious and impeccable research later, there is no doubt that physicist Ted Hall does deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for delivering vital information to the Soviets so that the ever-marauding United States could not exclusively possess the atomic bomb. Beyond sole possession, Ted, and a handful of other spy-couriers, prevented genocidal holocausts planned by the U.S. in 1950-1.
Director Steve James, Joan Hall, and Dave Lindorff in Joan’s home. The Peace Lily is from photographer Jette Salling and me to symbolize the Nobel Peace Prize Ted should have been awarded. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jette Salling]
If Barack Obama—seven-wars-at-one-time president—could understand, as did one president, John F. Kennedy, that the U.S. has nearly always been an aggressor nation under the guise of Pax Americana, he should turn over his undeserved Peace Prize to Ted Hall’s family. (According to official data, the U.S. has conducted approximately 350 wars, not counting CIA covert actions/regime changes/assassinations of scores of national leaders.)
Spy for No Country reads like a detective mystery and a romance novel. No, Ted Hall did not spy for any country, rather for humanity, all eight billion of us. Today, this is the most important book for everyone to read, especially in the West. Then take the book to your protests before their house-of-cards governments and shut down their annihilator nuclear weapons, and stop the current proxy war against Russia. Remember that the U.S. with Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Canada and Japan invaded the new revolutionary Russia in 1918 while U.S.-Britain-France were at war against Germany. Pax Americana superiority ideology has since aimed to dominate the world.
Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs—an older experienced Manhattan Project scientist who also delivered vital information to the Soviets without either knowing the other—did so believing that two rival nations with the bomb could lead to its being banned, or at least could prevent its being used again.
Klaus Fuchs [Source: atomicarchive.com]
Unbeknownst to them, their fears were warranted even before the end of the World War II when the Soviet Union was allied with the U.S./UK. Already in July 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill planned a nuclear surprise attack (Operation Unthinkable) against several key Soviet cities, and then aimed to conquer their “ally.” President Harry Truman postponed the idea since he needed more bombs other than just the two then ready to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Elder folk may remember that the United States openly threatened to attack the USSR with nuclear bombs during the Berlin Blockade in 1948. Families built bomb shelters. Schoolchildren had to go through nuclear attack drills. Soon, millions protested against nuclear war. The Nuclear Freeze campaign began in the U.S., England, and much of Europe.
What was not public information was the U.S.’s first-nuclear-strike plans already in process.
“During 1946-1950, as President Harry Truman’s new and vastly better-funded and more powerful Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), quickly shifted the focus of U.S. intelligence activities from Germany and Japan to the Soviet Union, which became America’s new apex enemy. During those years, in secret, Truman and his team of CIA, National Security Council advisers, and Pentagon strategists, as well as arms industry lobbyists, worked on plans to use America’s new superweapon, the atomic bomb,” Lindorff writes.
“From the moment the United States had its bomb, operational plans for a first strike on the Soviet Union were drawn up with grisly names. Pincher (developed in June 1945, before World War II had even ended and at a time when the United States had, at most, nine bombs), Broiler (March 1948), Bushwhacker (1948), Frolic (May 1948), Sizzle (December 1948), Trojan (January 1949), Shakedown (October 1949), and Dropshot (1949–1959).”
Illustration from A Compassionate Spy of nuking 200 targets at 100 Soviet cities. They would have annihilated several million human beings and conquered the rest. [Source: A Compassionate Spy]
Dropshot was updated throughout the 1950s, with each revision featuring more targets and more nuclear bombs, including hydrogen bombs 500-1000 times more destructive than atomic ones.
What put a thunderous halt to the U.S.’s planned genocidal attack was the surprise on August 29, 1949, when the Soviets tested their atomic bomb, which was based on Ted Hall and Klaus Fuch’s information that they gave the Soviets. Truman, the U.S.’s intelligence apparatus, Pentagon strategists and nuclear scientists were stunned. They had not expected the Soviets to get their own bomb before 1953 or 1954.
Dave explains how this happened, based upon extensive research and interviews, including interviewing Michael Peck, author of America’s Cold-War Master Plan to Nuke Russia (2015):
“For the first time, we know which Russian cities would have been destroyed, and why. The U.S. government has finally declassified the 1950s Strategic Air Command target list…SAC [USAF Strategic Air Command] listed [in 1956] over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established….deliberately included civilian populations…including all ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw.”
Bear in mind the suffering the Soviet people endured during World War II. Russia, the major victor of the European war, lost 27 million people (13% of its population). UK lost 450,000 (1%). The U.S. lost 300,000 (1/3 of 1%).
In Ukraine, German Nazis and Ukrainian fascists murdered 1.2 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Poles and ethnic Russians. Some of the Ukrainian fascists’ descendants are a main neo-fascist military force fighting Russians today. Their World War II hero, Stepan Bandera, is also Zelensky’s hero, even though he was born a Jew.
Daniel Axelrod, co-author with Michio Kaku of To Win a Nuclear War, told Lindorff:
“Americans have been told for decades that having nuclear weapons has been entirely defensive… ‘We’ve learned much more about how Washington intended to use its nuclear monopoly and clearly that defense-only story…is just not true…To the extent that Ted Hall’s passing of information helped hasten the Soviet A-bomb, one can easily argue that his action actually helped prevent the start of a second nuclear war in the late 1940s and early 1950s.’”
Lindorff writes: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the War Department had approved a first-strike policy in dealing with the Soviet Union on July 19, 1945, just three days after the successful Trinity Test, while World War II was still on and the USSR was a key U.S. ally. This policy, JCS1496, called for ‘striking the first blow in a nuclear war.’”
U.S. Strategic Air Command in the early 1950s, which was prepared to launch a nuclear first strike. [Source: pinterest.com]
Kaku and Axelrod wrote that the chiefs of staff “informed the Pentagon that the U.S. must build 400 atomic bombs by Jan. 1, 1953…that 100 of these bombs eventually reaching their targets could implement the concept of, ‘killing a nation.’”
“The U.S. military began to forecast ‘A-Day’—the last foreseeable opportunity for the U.S. to mount an attack without risking direct retaliation, the day of reckoning between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The NSC [National Security Council] placed A-Day in 1954.
“The Soviets had their first hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953. It was probably not the result of stolen information about the U.S. bomb. The Soviet thermonuclear bomb was based upon a completely different design worked out by Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov.”
Nevertheless, the A-Day concept still exists, despite internationally acknowledged “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD). President Dwight Eisenhower complained about such expensive waste in his departing letter to the nation, stating it would be better to use funding for building schools and hospitals instead of building rockets, planes, ships, submarines, warheads and bombs.
Truman, realizing that the U.S. could not have sufficient nuclear bombs to succeed in destroying hundreds of planned targets without the deaths of “too many” U.S. Americans, stopped the plans just before leaving office in January 1953. Nevertheless, the public cannot know what first nuclear strike plans Wall Street weapons industry-Pentagon-CIA might launch in the future.
Although the current U.S./NATO/Ukraine proxy war against Russia has brought the world closer than ever to a nuclear disaster—a similar threat during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—nearly eight decades have passed, proving that a handful of humanitarian spies have so far prevented another use of atomic bombs.
Ted’s Epic Decision
Theodore Alvin Holtzberg was born on October 20, 1925, in Queens, New York, the youngest child of a Russian Jewish father, Barnett “Barney” Holtzberg, who had immigrated to the U.S. during the last years of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and a U.S.-born mother, Rose Moskowitz, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In addition to Ted, there had already been daughters Frances and Selma, followed by Edward Nathaniel, who was eleven years older than Ted.
Ed and Ted were aware of the rise of Nazism with its virulent anti-Semitism in the United States. Ed, who personally experienced how difficult it was for Jews to get a decent job, decided to legally change both his and Ted’s surname to the more Anglo-Saxon “Hall.”
Both boys were brilliant and excelled in school. Ted was also athletic and musical. Socialist ideals appealed to him as they did for many youth and unionists in the 1930s.
In 1940, at 14 Ted was already a freshman in Queens College. Brother Ed enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps that year. He earned his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering after the war. By the mid-1950s, Ed had become director of the Pentagon’s solid-fuel rocket development program and later headed the Air Force’s ballistic missile program. He was recognized as the U.S. Air Force’s top rocket engineer during that period.
Ted grew bored at Queen’s, and applied to Harvard to pursue his interest in physics. Aside from their studies, many students were active against racism, equality for all, social welfare and the New Deal, as was Ted. He and friend Saville Sax were in a John Reed club, so named after the radical journalist who supported the 1914 Mexican Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution.
In the 1943 fall term, Ted was recommended to a recruiter dispatched by Robert Oppenheimer, science director of the Manhattan Project. At age 18, he arrived at Los Alamos in January 1944. Once there, he first learned what the project was all about: Scientists would be working on one of the two concurrent programs to develop an atomic bomb.
Saville Sax died of a heart attack on September 25, 1980, at 56. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Hall already “found himself thinking, without any outside prompting, about the need for the United States to share with the Soviets whatever secret weapons the country (and he himself) might be working to create,” Lindorff writes.
When Ted told Saville about the new job, he encouraged Ted to share information with the Soviets. Beginning in October 1944 Saville helped Ted contact Soviets in New York City and was a courier for some time until Lona Cohen replaced him.
Lindorff writes: “President Harry Truman and his key advisers were anxious to put the bomb to use before Japan spoiled things by surrendering, which the country’s emissaries were reportedly desperately attempting to do.”
Truman knew Japan had not begun to build an atomic bomb. His goal was something else, as General Leslie Groves stated during a gathering with some scientists: “You realize, of course, that the whole purpose of the Project is to subdue the Russians.”
[Source: mises.org]
Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Curtis Le May, told Washington there was no need to nuke Japan as nearly all major cities and military objectives had been destroyed by conventional and firestorm bombings. After nuking Japanese civilians, Truman lied to the world that the atomic bombs were needed to save thousands of U.S. American soldiers.
Joseph Stalin had promised FDR at Yalta, February 1945, that the Soviet Union would aid the U.S. in Japan once the European war ended. Stalin declared war on Japan two days after the Hiroshima bombing.
The Big Three at Yalta Conference. [Source: iwm.org.uk]
He sent a million troops into Korea and Manchuria, crushing Japan’s Kwantung Army. Truman wanted to nuke Japan before Soviet troops could help to gain a quick victory, and to frighten the Soviet Union into submission. Soviet troops were a major cause that the Emperor surrendered within the week.
Following the Trinity Test, Robert Oppenheimer, who became known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” later quoted from a Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
[Source: knowyourmeme.com]
In fact, he was the key author of killing nearly half the 350,000 people living in Hiroshima, and around 75,000 on August 9 died in Nagasaki. About 100,000 more died after suffering months and years from radiation. Thousands more lived on in agony.
Leo Szilard, who urged his former teacher Albert Einstein to convince President Roosevelt that he should establish a project to develop the atomic bomb, wrote an impassioned appeal to Truman a day after the Trinity Test urging him not to use it on Japan. Seventy Los Alamos scientists readily signed onto it. General Groves refused to send it. Truman would have ignored it anyway. The same day Szilard sent out his appeal, the uranium was on its way for use three weeks later.
While U.S. scientists were making the most lethal weapon ever, allegedly to be used against Nazi-Fascists in Europe, elements in the U.S. ruling class had illegally and treacherously helped fuel the rise in the 1930s of Hitler, Mussolini, and Francisco Franco in Spain.
These wealthy pro-fascist plotters opposed FDR’s New Deal so much that they prepared a “regime-change” operation/coup. The conspirators, whose families still own much of many countries’ economies, included: J.P. Morgan bankers/arms industry, Rockefeller oil, Henry Ford, General Motors, DuPont, IBM, Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, AT&T, General Electric, and other large corporations. Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather and father to two presidents, was among those who even gave Hitler credit for war machinery they delivered expecting that he would win the war, and they would shape the U.S. into a fascist state ally.
All the while, 3,015 Americans fought to defend the Spanish Republic (1936-39) in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, part of the 40-60,000 serving in 15 International Brigades. Some 10,000 brigadiers were killed, 681 of them Americans. Sixteen million Americans fought Nazis and fascists.
Henry Ford received the highest medal Nazi Germany could award a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, July 30, 1938. Hitler declared: “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” [Source: history.com]
IBM founder Thomas John Watson received the Order of the German Eagle (2nd class) in June 1937. General Motors chief executive for overseas operations, James Mooney, was awarded the Order of the German Eagle (1st class) by Hitler in 1938. J.P. Morgan agent Grayson Murphy was decorated by Mussolini with the “Order of the Crown of Italy,” Commander Class, for his role in syndicating Morgan loans to fascist Italy. [See chapter 8 of Ron Ridenour The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (New York: Punto Press, 2018)]
These mass murdering traitors were “dedicated civil servants” for “American Philanthropists,” the John and Allen Dulles brothers extolled. Yet President Roosevelt wrote otherwise about them to his confidant, Colonel Edward House, on November 22, 1933: “As you and I know, this government has been owned by a financial element in the centers of power since the days of Andrew Jackson.” The New World Order: A Chronological History: – D.L. Cuddy, Ph.D – Koinonia House (khouse.org)
Spies for Humanity Getting Caught
In 1946, Ted and Saville entered Chicago University where Ted later graduated with masters and doctoral degrees. Saville had met 17-year-old student Joan Krakover. A Jules et Jim situation ensued. Ted soon proposed marriage, but first he had to tell her his spying secret. “I wanted to tell you about it now before we got married, because you might want to drop out.”
Joan said: “’I didn’t want to drop out. Nothing could have made me leave him!… I knew I would never meet anyone like that again.”
In 1949, the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS forerunner to the National Security Agency) Venona Project’s decryption of several spy cables identified Hall and Sax as collaborators, Klaus Fuchs and others as well. SIS learned that engineer Julius Rosenberg played a minor spy role, but that his wife Ethel was not a spy. For hate and revenge, the U.S. government murdered her anyway.
As the Rosenbergs’ appeals were being denied, Ted felt guilty for their suffering and thought of turning himself in if the government would not execute them. Joan spoke against that.
“Ted said he should be the one punished as whatever information the Rosenbergs had provided about the bomb was minor compared to what he had given them. I told him very forcefully that he could not do it because it would not work. The government would betray him and execute the Rosenbergs anyway, and him too, and perhaps me, and Ruthie [their first daughter] would be left an orphan like the two Rosenberg boys. Thankfully, he listened to me and gave up on his quixotic idea of sacrificing himself in a vain effort to save them.”
One of Julius and Ethel’s sons, Michael Meeropol, told Lindorff: “Joan was right. It wouldn’t have saved my parents, and it could have ended up getting him killed.”
Another time when Ted had doubts was when Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes against multitudes of Soviets. Nevertheless, Ted knew that what he did had prevented a nuclear holocaust.
The conventional reason why Hall and Sax escaped punishment—one adopted by most historians of the era, and one retroactively offered by the FBI and US Justice Department—was that the US didn’t want the Soviets to know they had access to their transmissions and that they had cracked what the Soviets long believed was a secure wartime code.
However, as Lindorff explains in his book, the Soviets were warned by a British Soviet spy working in the White House and by another Soviet spy in the Venona Project itself as early as 1943 and 1945 that the code was being cracked, and by 1950 cables warning just that had been cracked.
Furthermore, the Soviets had already taken action to protect their spies (and were ready to get Hall and Sax and their families out of the country before 1950 had they wanted to escape). The Soviets had also long since changed their code—a dead giveaway that they knew the old one was useless for keeping secrets.
As Ted stated in a 1998 videotape made “for the historical record, and aired in “A Compassionate Spy,” and as Joan said in an interview, the two of them “always suspected” that Ted was protected from arrest by his brother Ed’s importance to the Air Force’s missile program. As Lindorff writes, arresting Ted or even Sax as an atomic spy would have quickly led to public knowledge of Ted’s brother’s top secret work and led to his losing any security clearance. The Air Force could not afford to lose him.
Lindorff writes that Hoover saw in the identification of Hall and Sax as Soviet spies and opportunity to finally get the credit for busting a major spy inside the Manhattan project.
The two young men were both picked up separately on March 16, 1951 after a year’s dragnet involving FBI offices across the country, and were brought to FBI headquarters in Chicago. There they were grilled separately, without either knowing the other was there. Neither said he wanted an attorney, even knowing that Fuchs had been arrested in England a year before.
Fuchs had been maneuvered into confessing, in order to spare his Communist sister Kristel Fuchs Heineman, who was living in the United States, from being pursued by the FBI. Since SU was an ally, Fuchs was not charged with treason but pled guilty to “theft of state secrets.” He was sentenced to 14 years and released after nine years.
That prior summer, first Julius and then Ethel Rosenberg had been arrested. Indeed at the time Hall and Sax were interrogated, the Rosenbergs were standing trial in a federal courtroom in New York facing the capital charge of “conspiracy to commit espionage.” Julius and Ethel were electrocuted, June 19, 1953, rather than confess or inform on other spies.
In Britain, Fuchs had been maneuvered into confessing, in order to spare his Communist sister Kristel Fuchs Heineman, who was living in the United States, from being pursued by the FBI. Since the USSR was an ally, Fuchs was not charged with treason but pled guilty to “theft of state secrets.” He was sentenced to 14 years and released after serving nine years.
Ted and Saville both denied all accusations of spying and were not interviewed again by the Bureau. The FBI kept information about the two secret. The Bureau ceased following and tapping their phones after about two years, although Sax was checked every once in a while. The Justice Department never prosecuted either of them.
The first public awareness that Hoover even knew about Ed and Ted’s relationship came from an article Lindorff wrote in The Nation on January 4, 2022. Tenacious Dave obtained 103 pages from FBI files on Ed Hall through a Freedom of Information Act appeal after the Bureau’s FOIA office falsely claimed there were no such files on him. The file shows that Ed’s work was a key reason for not prosecuting Ted and Saville, and Edward’s career blossomed as he was promoted to colonel.
Joan told Dave, “Ed never criticized Ted for providing important atomic bomb information to the Soviets and Ted never criticized Ed for helping to design nuclear missiles.’”
In mid-1952, a Soviet contact let Ted know that, if the FBI took action against him, it would be best to get to Russia, and asked him to move to New York from where he had a better chance of escaping. Ted took a good job there as a research biophysicist.
Never feeling secure, and Joan not having much exciting to do, they moved to Cambridge in 1962. Ted worked at the renowned Cambridge Cavendish Physics Laboratory. This led to work at Cambridge University’s biology department. Joan was ecstatic about leaving the United States, and so were their children—by that time, three girls: Ruth, twelve; Deborah, eight; and Sara, four.
Once fluent in Russian and Italian, Joan became a teacher and was active in the women’s rights movement. Ted stayed clear of political activity for security reasons and made a name for himself in biophysics and electron microscopy. Their daughters became activists for peace and equality. They wondered why their father did not participate.
Public Disclosure
During 1995, the National Security Agency began declassifying and publishing hundreds of pages of decrypted Soviet cables, in which Hall, Sax and other names were revealed.
The mass media reported that Ted was a “spy traitor”—a lie since the legal definition is one who spies for a wartime enemy when the Soviet Union was an ally. This is what Ted wrote in 1995 following the public release of his name.
“During World War II, I shared the general sympathy for our allies, the Soviet Union. After they were attacked,, everybody knew that they were bearing the main load in the fight against Nazi Germany. Their propaganda was characterized by a craving for peace deeper than was apparent in the Western countries. I think that this came about partly because the Soviet Union suffered devastation far greater than anything experienced in the West.”
“[I had] seen that in a capitalist society economic depression could lead to fascism, aggression and war—as actually happened in Italy and Germany. So as I worked at Los Alamos and understood the destructive power of the atomic bomb, I asked myself what might happen if World War II was followed by a depression in the United States while [the U.S.] had an atomic monopoly?”
In 1997, Joan Hall recorded essential aspects of what Ted had done and why.
“I wasn’t acting against the intentions of the U.S. people. I felt myself to be part of a broad democratic front. These actions were undertaken at a time before the beginning of the Cold War, and I saw myself as part of the political front insisting on peaceful and harmonious relations between the peoples of these states [the U.S. and USSR].”
As Albert Einstein warned, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
A global movement to ban nuclear weapons was growing in the 1950s. Scientists from the Manhattan Project, including Ted Hall, jump-started that movement, forming the Federation of Atomic Scientists. It became the Federation of American Scientists with 28,000 members.
No U.S. president ever proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons. Wall Street’s war weapons industries would not allow such a peace proposal, nor would the Pentagon or the CIA. It was Truman, who started the ever-conspiring, assassinating, regime-change CIA, in 1947, albeit he regretted having done so before dying.
Truman also initiated NATO, in 1949, five years before the Soviets responded with its own Warsaw Pact. It was the Soviet’s last president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who proposed the elimination of all nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan rejected that idea but did sign a limitation of some missiles—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which President Donald Trump tore up in 2019. President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in June 2002, when President Vladimir Putin was assisting his war in Afghanistan. Putin’s request to join NATO was also denied, as had Gorbachev’s request in the 1980s.
Dave notes: “I’ve often been appalled that the same people who believed the Soviet people were “dominated” and oppressed by a tyrannical government were so ready to casually slaughter them by the tens of millions to destroy that government. The same mad and criminal illogic was on display two decades later in the U.S. approach to the Vietnam War, in which U.S. troops and South Vietnamese troops armed by the United States killed millions of ‘captive’ people in Indochina in a vain effort to destroy Communist ‘dictatorships’ in North Vietnam and Laos. It’s the Vietnam War line, ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it’ writ large and applied to the whole population of Russia instead of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese rural population.”
Conclusion
Two suggstions to improve Lindorff’s book: One minor concern is that there are, perhaps, too many repetitions, although many readers might appreciate being reminded; the only real flaw is the lack of photos or illustrations other than on the cover. The publisher may not have had the budget for any. I hope, however, that, once the book sells well—as it must—and a new edition is prepared, there will be funds for at least a few photos-illustrations.
Klaus Fuchs died in Dresden on January 28, 1988, of a cancer probably caused by work on the Manhattan Project. A memorial service celebrated Fuchs’s life as a German Communist and scientist. The Soviets did not send any official delegate but permitted the attendance of a 35-year-old KGB agent in Dresden named Vladimir Putin.
In 1992, Ted and Joan’s middle daughter, Deborah, 37, was fatally run over by a truck driver while riding her bicycle. Ted struggled with Parkinson’s disease, and kidney cancer (likely a result of his work with plutonium) for two years. He died on November 1, 1999, a few weeks after his 74th birthday. Joan stayed in their home near Cambridge until she died on June 14, 2023.
Ruth (l), Joan and Sara Hall by the hornbeam tree where Ted’s ashes are buried near their home. Joan’s ashes are buried there as well. [Source: Photo courtesy of Dave Lindorff]
Ted Hall, Saville Sax, Klaus Fuchs, and a handful of other spies and couriers for humanity saved the world from a nuclear disaster planned by the United States of America. Russian Navy Captain Vasily Arkhipov saved the world from a nuclear disaster by turning his U-boat with a nuclear missile back to Russia during the 1962 missile crisis. Today, once again, the USA is gearing up for a world war.
Dave Lindorff has written the truth about American Exceptionalism mania to conquer the world for immoral endless profits. Reading his book often made me cry. I cannot conceive how people in the U.S.—not only the gouging wealthy but also “ordinary folk” who support them—can be so cruel, murderous and unethical. No animal or plant, not the wind, air or waters are safe from them.
Lullaby
Little war child, where are you going?
East or west?
Where in the world do you believe you can find a friend?
Little war child, what suits you best:
A worn blanket?
A plywood coffin?
A life jacket?
Little war child, where will you die:
Where the bombs fall
Or in the open sea?
Little war child, where do you want to go?
Choose yourself
Just we Shall never see you again.
(By Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt. Author’s translation with permission.)
The film is playing in theaters across the U.S. At this writing, it has received 50+ reviews, even mainstream publications—The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Guardian. It is available for streaming, and is screening in many countries in Europe. My review and interview: Can An American Scientist Who Smuggled Critical Nuclear Secrets to the Russians After World War II Be Considered a “Good Guy”? New Film Says Yes. – CovertAction Magazine; Is History Repeating Itself? And Who Will Be Today’s Ted Hall? An Interview with the Principals of “A Compassionate Spy” – CovertAction Magazine.
