Theodore Hall; Gave Secrets to Soviets

Theodore Alvin Hall, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, N.M., and was unmasked decades later for passing secrets to the Soviet Union, has died. He was 74.

Hall, a native of New York City, died Nov. 1 of kidney cancer in Cambridge, England, where he had worked since 1962 in biological research.

Soviet cable fragments declassified by the U.S. National Security Agency in 1995 and 1996 identified “Teodor Kholl” and “Savil Saks” as volunteer Soviet informants--Hall and his Harvard roommate, Saville Sax, who died in 1980.

The FBI had questioned Hall and Sax in 1951, but did not press charges for lack of evidence. The interrogating FBI agent, Robert McQueen, told the Washington Post in 1996 that he “was convinced that Hall was guilty, but I could never develop enough evidence to prosecute him.”

Last year, Hall recalled for the British Broadcasting Corp. how the FBI interrogation ended: “I reached for my coat, I think, and I just got up and walked out. And step by step, waiting for the handcuffs to be put on before I walked into the elevator, expecting to be collared before I got on the elevator. But I called for the lift, and it came, and I went in, and I got in and went downstairs, and walked out onto the street. And they didn’t come.”

By the time the declassified cables pinpointed Hall, so many witnesses had died that prosecution would have been extremely difficult.

Hall’s spying was detailed in a 1997 book, “Bombshell: The Secret Story of American’s Unknown Spy Conspiracy,” by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel.

In a statement to Albright and Kunstel that year, Hall said he had been “immature, inexperienced and far too sure of myself” when he was working at Los Alamos. He added that, “I am no longer that person--but I am by no means ashamed of him.”

“During 1944,” he said, “I was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons if there should be a postwar depression. To help prevent that monopoly, I contemplated a brief encounter with a Soviet agent, just to inform them of the existence of the A-bomb project. I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be.”

Precociously intelligent, Hall entered Harvard University at age 16 and graduated at 18. He was only a year older, the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, when he went to Los Alamos.

As detailed in the PBS documentary “Red Files” last month, Hall handed papers about the innovative “implosion principle” to Lona Cohen, who fled to the Soviet Union with her husband and co-spy Morris Cohen after the arrest of better-known spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953. The Cohens were arrested in Britain and imprisoned in 1961, but freed in a prisoner exchange with the Soviets.

It was long believed that American David Greenglass and German refugee Klaus Fuchs, the only people working at Los Alamos ever convicted as Soviet agents, gave the Soviets the first information on the implosion principle. Information about that theory, a new way to ignite an atomic bomb by using pressure, enabled the Soviets to build an atomic bomb years before they otherwise could have.

Albright and Kunstel contended in their book that it was Hall who first divulged the implosion theory.

Hall, burdened by his past but unrepentant, seized the chance at a one-year appointment at Cambridge University in 1962. He stayed on, working in biological research. In 1996, he said he considered his greatest achievement to be developing electron microscopes for use in biological X-ray microanalysis.

Hall is survived by his wife, Joan; daughters Ruth and Sara, and three grandchildren.

Associated Press contributed to this story.