Bombshell : The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy

In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalist Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America's top atomic secrets to Stalin. At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, a fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades. Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother's radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the hydrogen bomb. We meet Hall's partners in espionage; his Harvard roommate Saville Sax, who received Hall's messages in a code based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Morris and Lona Cohen, New York Communists who formed the core of the atomic espionage conspiracy; Yuri Sokolov, officially the Soviet Union's U.N. Mission press chief, unofficially a spy handler for Moscow Centre; Colonel Rudolf Abel, to his friends an artist-photographer, to his agents their "illegal" controller; and Anta and Aden, two as-yet-unidentified American atomic scientists brought into the Soviet network by Hall. Bombshell also tells the story of the U.S. Army code breakers and FBI sleuths who, in a thrilling game of cat and mouse, race to catch the unknown spy before it is too late. Drawing on previously classified documents, undercover sources, and years of research in Russia, England, and the United States, Bombshell reads like a classic spy novel, full of secret meetings, coded messages, and daring escapes. But it is much more than a terrifically exciting tale of conspiracy and subterfuge; Bombshell is a piece of historical detective work, revealing a spy network in detail. Ted Hall was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was asked to join the Manhattan Project when he was only eighteen years old.There, in wartime Los Alamos, working under Robert Oppenheimer and Bruno Rossi, Hall helped build the atomic bomb.To his friends and coworkers he was a brilliant young rebel with a boundless future in atomic science.To his Soviet spymasters, he was something "Mlad," their mole within Los Alamos, a most hidden and valuable asset and the men who first slipped them the secrets to the making of the atomic bomb. In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America's top atomic secrets to Stalin.At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, his fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades. Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as a brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother's radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the Hydrogen bomb. For forty years only a few Russians knew what Ted Hall really did.Now Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal the astonishing true story of the atomic spies who got away. Bombshell is history at its most explosive. Cover Contents Prologue 1. Babes in the Woods 2. Roots of Rebellion 3. A Revolutionary Young Girl 4. Illegals 5. Quirky Talents 6. Comrades 7. Harvard Egg Roast 8. Awful Magic 9. Clues to Enormoz 10. Impact of the Gadget 11. Advent of Mlad and Star 12. Mole Hunt 13. Savy's Rendezvous 14. Passing the Implosion Principle 15. An Inking About Alamogordo 16. The Grauber Incident 17. Bomb in a Kleenex Box 18. Seeds of the Super 19. Destroy This Letter 20. Paris and Back 21. Rather Good Information 22. Code Crackers 23. Espionage-R 24. A Certain Animus 25. We Have No Guns 26. Up to the Hilt 27. Lasting Contribution 28. The Perseus Myth 29. Accountings 30. Aftershock Sources and Methods Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors Journalists Albright and Kunstel reveal a Soviet spy network, led by physicist Ted Hall, that infiltrated the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos research laboratory in the 1950s and gave top atomic secrets to the Soviets Profiles Ted Hall, the American physicist who spied for the Soviets and who gave them American atomic secrets