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At 18 years of age, Theodore Hall was the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, hired as a junior at Harvard and put to work at Los Alamos in 1944. Assigned the job of testing and refining the complex implosion system for the plutonium bomb, Hall was described as “amazingly brilliant” by his superiors on the project, many of whom were Nobel Prize winners. But what Hall’s colleagues didn’t know was that the teenaged Hall was also the youngest spy taken on by the Soviet Union in search of secrets to the atomic bomb. Spy With No Country tells the gripping story of a brilliant scientist whose information about the plutonium bomb, including detailed drawings and measurements, proved to be integral to the Soviet’s development of nuclear capabilities.
In the dying days of World War II, defeat of the Third Reich became a matter of when, not if. Tensions between wartime allies America and the Soviet Union began to rise, and things only got hotter when the United States refused to share information on its nuclear program. This groundbreaking book paints a nuanced picture of a young man acting on what he thought was best for the world.
Neither a Communist nor a Soviet sympathizer, Hall worked to ensure that America did not monopolize the science behind the atomic bomb, which he felt may have apocalyptic consequences. Instead, by providing the Soviets with the secrets of the bomb, and thereby initiating “mutual assured destruction,” Hall may have actually saved the world as we know it. But his contributions to the Soviets certainly did not go unnoticed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation into Hall, which was escalated when it was discovered that Hall’s brother Edward was a rising star of the Air Force, leading the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Featuring in-depth research from recently declassified FBI documents, first-hand journals, and personal interviews, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff uncovers the story of the atomic spy who gave secrets away, and got away with it, too.
Dave Lindorff is an American investigative reporter, filmmaker, a columnist for CounterPunch and a contributor to Tarbell.org, The Nation, FAIR and Salon.com.
Lindorff graduated from Wesleyan University in 1972 with a BA in Chinese language. He then received an MS in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1975. A two-time Fulbright Scholar (Shanghai, 1991–92 and Taiwan, 2004), he was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in 1978–79.
In 2019, he was a winner of an “Izzy” for “Outstanding Independent Journalism” awarded by the Park Center for Independent Media.
He is also founding editor of the collectively run journalism news site ThisCantBeHappening!, along with six other journalists: John Grant, Jess Guh, Alfredo Lopez, Ron Ridenour, and Linn Washington, Jr., political cartoonist Dave Kiphuft and resident poet Gary Lindorff. The news site, since its founding in June 2010, has won seven Project Censored awards for its coverage and was labeled a “threat” in a memo TCBH! obtained through a FOIA filing with the Department of Homeland Security,
A former bureau chief covering Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Daily News, and a reporter-producer for PBS station KCET in Los Angeles and its Emmy-winning investigative news program “28-Tonight,” Lindorff was also a founder and editor of the weekly Los Angeles Vanguard newspaper (as was TCBH member Ridenour), established in 1976, where he won the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Press Club for his reporting as well as an award for Best Article in a Weekly.
Lindorff also worked at the Minneapolis Tribune, the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and The Middletown Press in Connecticut, which was his first professional journalism job.
He is the author of five books, the most recent being Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World. His previous books include: The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, written with attorney Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
He is co-producer along with Mark Mitten of A Compassionate Spy,[a feature-length documentary film directed by two-time Academy Award-nominee Steve James, about the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, 18-year-old Theodore (Ted) Hall, hired at Los Alamos to work on the implosion system for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, and a month later on Nagasaki. This movie is available from AMAZON.