- 6/22/2025
In the late 1940s the FBI nabbed Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. But only recently historians have discovered that as many as 300 Americans may have spied for the Soviets during WW II. Join NOVA for a look at this period of our history.
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00:00In 1949, the Soviet Union explodes its first atom bomb.
00:18But was the design stolen from American nuclear secrets?
00:24The answer would emerge only after the Cold War ended.
00:27When archives like this one in Moscow began to open to scholars.
00:36I was nervous because here was this massive untapped resource.
00:40I was the first American as far as I knew and certainly one of the first Westerners to be in this archive.
00:47When historians Harvey Clare and John Haynes examined the top secret documents, they were startled.
00:54Unidentified codenames.
00:58Buried in the files were lists of names of U.S. government employees from World War II.
01:03I recognized many of the names that were handwritten.
01:08Charles Kramer.
01:12Victor Perlow.
01:16Judy Copland.
01:17All had been accused of being Soviet spies.
01:24The charges never stuck.
01:27But were they true?
01:31It would take three more years for Clare and Haynes to learn the answer.
01:34That's when the U.S. government opened its own secret archives.
01:43Revealing thousands of telegrams sent between Moscow and the Soviet diplomats in the 1940s and 50s.
01:52The telegrams were written in an unbreakable code.
01:55But in one of the greatest counterintelligence exploits ever, American codebreakers found a way to read the secret Soviet messages.
02:06In terms of sheer determination and sheer marshalling of machine and manpower in innovative ways, I think it was extraordinary.
02:16And it was particularly extraordinary because the odds were so stacked against any success.
02:20The decodes reveal that a massive Soviet spy network penetrated the U.S. government during World War II.
02:29Even more incredible, the government knew about these spies as early as 1948, but kept the information secret until the end of the Cold War.
02:41There is no question that the Communist Party USA, to the highest levels, was deeply involved in espionage against the United States.
02:54The decodes raise serious concerns about the government's prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
03:00They arrested a small fry spy, took his wife as a hostage, put a gun to her head and told him,
03:09talk or we'll not only kill you, we'll kill her. And when he wouldn't talk, they murdered her in cold blood.
03:16And the government knew something else. The name of a spy who did far more damage than the Rosenbergs.
03:22It was a humanitarian act. His motive was a humanitarian motive. Now if you want to call that sort of thing treason, go right ahead.
03:34The spy who stole some of America's most important nuclear secrets was never prosecuted.
03:40But the truth about Soviet espionage was kept from the American public for nearly 50 years.
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05:12In 1943, America was at war.
05:36at arlington hole outside washington dc army code breakers were trying to penetrate enemy
05:44communications one day they received a surprising order start spying on america's ally the soviet
05:57union the army general staff were concerned that stalin might cut a deal with hitler and get out
06:04of the war so we wanted to see if we could find anything any evidence of this in soviet diplomatic
06:12communications soviet diplomats communicated with moscow by regular commercial telegraph
06:19and wartime censorship allowed the u.s. army to receive copies of all international cables
06:28now the soviets knew that and they didn't mind that because their cables were in code and they
06:36thought their code was unbreakable the code breakers began sifting through tens of thousands of coded
06:43telegrams these cables are recreations based on scholarly research the original cables remain
06:53classified eventually these apparently meaningless messages would reveal shocking evidence of soviet
07:03espionage inside america's most secret location los alamos new mexico the u.s. army chose this isolated
07:14setting to build its nuclear weapons laboratory in 1942 it wanted to keep the project secret not only from
07:25america's enemies but also from its ally the soviet union when i first came los alamos there was no doubt in
07:35my mind that the security was just flew perfect it couldn't have been tired it was all barbed wired in and there were guards and gates
07:44there were guards and gates
07:48physicist sam cohen was 23 when he was drafted and sent to los alamos
07:54suddenly he was mingling with some of the world's greatest scientists and engineers
08:00i saw three people and i looked at them i did a double take they were three nobel prize winners in nuclear
08:13physics and the greatest the fantastic niels bohr sort of the father of atomic physics
08:20but building a nuclear bomb took even these scientists into uncharted territory
08:28the materials it would be made of were two highly radioactive elements uranium and plutonium
08:37from the common type of uranium u-238 they needed to extract a rare isotope u-235
08:46but this was a difficult and expensive process
08:50plutonium had a different problem it was so radioactive it had to be set off in an entirely new way
08:59this was the idea that you could make a atomic bomb by compressing a lump of plutonium
09:07very rapidly through an explosive process
09:11it was called implosion and it works like this in theory
09:17a sphere of plutonium was encased in a metal shell called a tamper
09:22then surrounded by a layer of explosives
09:26when the explosives were detonated
09:29the shock wave would travel inward compressing the plutonium into a critical mass
09:35at the center of the bomb a tiny device called the initiator would spew out neutrons
09:41and initiate a runaway chain reaction in the plutonium
09:44an atomic explosion
09:46physicist klaus fuchs
09:50the son of a minister and a refugee from hitler
09:53worked on implosion
09:54army private theodore hall
09:58was one of the scientists testing the theory
10:00hall was one of a small team that was testing out how an implosion bomb would work so he knew
10:07the actual diameters and shapes of not only the plutonium in the middle but also the explosive layers and the tampers on the outside
10:16at 18
10:18hall was the youngest physicist at los alamos
10:21that guy
10:23was so fantastically bright
10:26that he could do more in a given amount of time than 99 percent
10:31of normal mortals
10:33and so
10:36then he came
10:37and started a
10:39what i consider to be
10:41a very warm
10:43rewarding friendship
10:44the research on implosion was supposed to be secret
10:51but it was quickly smuggled out of los alamos and brought six thousand miles to the edge of moscow
10:58where russia's top nuclear scientist had his office
11:03by 1945
11:07physicist igor kurchatov
11:10had been reading reports stolen from los alamos for two years
11:13these are kurchatov's own notes
11:18about the research on implosion
11:19implosion was such a new idea that there wasn't even a word for it in russian
11:26kurchatov ordered soviet scientists to start experiments on implosion
11:33immediately
11:35four months after kurchatov read the kgb report
11:40the atom bomb was tested at alamogordo new mexico
11:44five four three two one
11:59the principle of implosion worked
12:06kurchatov
12:07kurchatov received secret reports on the test and later on the bombs dropped on japan
12:12this information would save the soviet nuclear program enormous amounts of time and money
12:20it's probably helped the soviet union build a bomb two or three years before they would
12:29otherwise have managed to do so
12:32their first atomic bomb they simply copied from the american atomic bomb and
12:36and espionage largely helped them to do that
12:38ironically
12:41evidence of soviet espionage was in the hands of american code breakers at arlington hall
12:46almost as soon as it occurred
12:48but no one knew it
12:51because they hadn't yet broken the code
12:53although they were working on it
12:56they knew that the soviets used a type of code
13:01called a one-time pad system
13:03author steven budiansky
13:07demonstrates how it works
13:09so the first thing we want to do is write out the message we want to send
13:15which might be attack at dawn
13:19and put a period at the end
13:21then we go to the code book
13:23which is really just a dictionary and next to each word is a number that stands for that word
13:29so we look up the first word which is attack
13:32and that's 0441
13:35and at which is 0412
13:41dawn
13:432123
13:45and then period
13:48is 9000
13:52then what we want to do is regroup these into five digit groups
13:59regrouping prepares the message for the next crucial step
14:03the one-time pad
14:06and then comes the part that really makes this work which is
14:10taking the one-time pad and this is just a booklet of sheets containing a bunch of random numbers in a row
14:18random numbers are ideal for code making
14:22they form no pattern
14:24so there's no way to predict what the next number will be from what the last number was
14:30we take the first of these random five digit numbers from the first page here and write it down under our first code group
14:38and then the second under the second and so on
14:42and then what we do is add them together and we do that with non-carrying addition
14:52one-seven-six-four-two and 00425
15:04the original message has now become a string of random numbers
15:10then the soviets took one more step
15:14using a chart provided by the telegraph companies
15:19they converted the numbers to letters
15:22it had nothing to do with secrecy
15:25it was to save money
15:27telegraph companies charged less to send letters than to send numbers
15:32and then when this is gone
15:46the only other person who can read the message is the guy at the other end who has
15:50the one duplicate copy of this
15:52a one-time pad system cannot be broken
16:03it's the perfect code
16:06even with today's supercomputers
16:08it cannot be broken
16:10if it is used properly
16:14so the code breakers tried to imagine what mistakes the soviets might have made
16:20the only way that it would be conceivable that you could break these messages
16:24was if the soviets had made a mistake and reused one-time pad sheets for more than one message
16:32the code breakers began to hunt through thousands of messages
16:36they were looking for pairs of messages that had matching sequences of letters in two or more places
16:43the more of these matches they found
16:45the more likely it was that the same sheets of one-time pad had been reused
16:51so they began to look for messages that had these double matches
16:56it was an incredible long shot
16:58and i think the real challenge was convincing yourself that it was worth spending any effort at all
17:04today digital computers could do the work in a few hours
17:09at the time punch cards were the fastest technology available
17:15the operator punched in each message converting it from letters back into numbers using the standard telegraph table
17:22each card held five number groups and a message identification number
17:28then the cards were sorted
17:39the results were printed in a series of catalogs which the code breakers began to comb through
17:46if they found one match between messages
17:48they would look for another match in the same messages
17:53eventually they found seven pairs of messages sharing the same number groups in the same two places
17:59this was the break they'd been looking for
18:02it suggested that sheets of one-time pad had been reused
18:06a potentially fatal error
18:09so really the whole story in a nutshell
18:13was the effort by the united states and the british
18:19to find these duplicate one-time pad pages
18:24if you could find duplicate pages and make a match
18:29you could break into that message
18:34now the code breakers had to figure out the russian word that each code group stood for
18:41and its english equivalent
18:46they were trying to reconstruct a kgb code book they'd never seen
18:53this kind of work is known as book breaking
18:57that's really linguistic and almost crossword puzzle solving sort of skill
19:02where you're using your knowledge of the language and the rules of grammar
19:05and what words are likely to appear where and in what order in a message
19:09to try to figure out which code group stands for which word
19:14one of the best book breakers was meredith gardner
19:17a linguist who'd mastered twelve languages
19:21it was easy to identify certain very common words such as prepositions
19:27and conjunctions which is what i started with
19:320669 for example stood for the russian word
19:38the which means into
19:40then in the fall of 1946
19:46using his knowledge of linguistics
19:48gardner made an important breakthrough
19:50he determined the sub code used for english letters
19:56this allowed him to spell out proper names
20:01in a message sent in 1944 he found a list of names
20:06hans baker
20:08niels bohr
20:10enrico fermi
20:12edward teller and others
20:16these were the scientists who built the atom bomb
20:20their names were top secret at the time
20:25as gardner was working on the message he was interrupted
20:30by william weissband
20:32a russian language specialist at arlington hall
20:35so he took it on himself to stroll by
20:39and look over my shoulder
20:41when i was filling out this message
20:45no one knew at the time
20:47but william weissband was a kgb spy
20:51only later would it become clear
20:54just how much damage he had done
20:58arlington hall was stunned
21:01to find evidence of atomic espionage in the telegrams
21:04it was time to call in the fbi
21:09agent robert lamphier was assigned to the case
21:12and in the fall of 1948
21:15he began to work with gardner
21:17mr gardner would give him new decrypts
21:21of russian spy messages
21:23and bob lamphier in turn would give meredith
21:27results of fbi investigations
21:30the collaboration quickly paid off
21:36with lamphier's information
21:38gardner could decipher more code groups
21:40and translate larger sections of some messages
21:43he broke into cables about a spy with the cover name
21:48rest
21:49rest had given the kgb a special report
21:52on the separation of the isotopes of uranium
21:57later under the cover name charles
21:59he passed on other atomic secrets
22:03lamphier learned from los alamos
22:06that the stolen uranium report had been written by klaus fuchs
22:09the physicists who'd help refine the theory of implosion
22:14then as lamphier continued his investigation
22:17the stakes suddenly rose enormously
22:20three
22:29in september 1949
22:31the soviet union tested an atom bomb
22:33ending america's nuclear monopoly
22:35years earlier than expected
22:39how had this happened
22:42the soviet decoding project given the meaningless cover name
22:45venona immediately took on immense importance
22:49all of a sudden
22:51what had been nice quiet operation to do
22:54identify a few low-level spies became
22:58the most important thing in the fbi
23:02klaus fuchs was arrested in england in february 1950
23:06and sentenced to 14 years in prison
23:09he admitted giving the kgb a sketch of the plutonium bomb
23:13and detailed information on implosion
23:18fuchs identified harry gold as his kgb courier
23:23gold fit the description in the soviet cables
23:26of a spy cover named gus
23:29gold identified david green glass as his other source at los alamos
23:35green glass matched the description of an atomic spy
23:38with the cover name caliber
23:42green glass named his brother-in-law julius rosenberg
23:45as the kgb spy who recruited him
23:49this was a crucial break for the fbi
23:53rosenberg matched perfectly a spy with two cover names
23:57antenna and liberal
24:01he was working so hard as a spy
24:03the kgb worried about his health
24:05he wasn't the head of an apparatus
24:08of engineers and scientists
24:11providing information on high-tech military weaponry of that period
24:15particularly electronics jet engines and avionics
24:18the telegrams provided clues to liberals identity
24:23his wife's name was ethel
24:25they both were fellow countrymen
24:28kgb jargon for communist party members
24:31liberal sister-in-law was ruth green glass
24:37she lived in lower manhattan
24:41in the summer of 1950
24:43the fbi arrested julius and ethel rosenberg
24:48the government believed that arresting ethel
24:51would put pressure on julius to confess
24:54the fbi was aware of the fact that ethel
24:57uh... was actually a fairly minor figure in the espionage
25:02and so it clearly was a tactic designed
25:05to put pressure on julius rosenberg
25:11i thought well all my work is turning into real happenings
25:16real events
25:17you know
25:19and not just um
25:21translations sent to the fbi
25:24to file a way
25:27he was having real effects
25:32the rosenbergs were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage
25:36but at their trial
25:38the prosecutor implied that they had actually stolen
25:41the secret of the atom bomb
25:43and given it to russia
25:46no mention was ever made in court of the soviet telegrams
25:52we had the greatest thing that a man could ever get from a counterintelligence point of view
25:58decrypting the kgb system
26:02to reveal that for whatever reason
26:06to me it would be a bad bad mistake
26:11while the rosenberg case was unfolding
26:14gardner broke into the most explicit kgb message he would ever read
26:18about two atomic spies
26:21the message was sent from new york to moscow in november 1944
26:29theodore hall
26:31nineteen years old
26:33a graduate of harvard
26:35a physicist
26:36handed over a report about camp two
26:39the kgb cover name for los alamos
26:43and named the key personnel working on enormous
26:46the kgb cover name for america's nuclear program
26:51hall had a friend named savill sacks
26:55the kgb considered it expedient to maintain liaison with hall through sacks
27:01the fbi contacted los alamos
27:04and learned that theodore hall had worked there until nineteen forty six
27:10they began a nationwide manhunt
27:13the two suspects turned up in chicago
27:17sacks was driving a taxicab
27:21hall had been sharing an office with edward teller
27:24the physicist designing the new hydrogen bomb
27:29the fbi's chicago office sprang into action
27:33they had undercover guys watching
27:36hall and sacks
27:38reading their mail probably tapping their phones
27:40following them around
27:42uh... trying to get as much information as they could
27:46about
27:47these two guys
27:48who they knew had done something
27:51but they really didn't know what it was
27:54but the surveillance produced no further evidence of espionage
27:59robert mcqueen
28:01the fbi agent in charge
28:03had only one option left
28:06the only practical way that we were going to get an indictment
28:09was to get a confession
28:12one or both
28:15ted was working at the lab and along came this fbi guy
28:19got permission from the
28:21head of the lab to
28:23take ted off
28:24downtown to the office
28:27he came with us without question
28:29we put him in the bureau car
28:31came back to the chicago office
28:34at 105 west adams
28:38they drove into an alley
28:40and took hold in through the back door
28:44mcqueen had planned every step
28:46for maximum intimidation
28:53hall did not know that sax had already been picked up
28:56and was in a room upstairs
28:59mcqueen put hall in another room
29:03i didn't know anything about it until about the time he normally would have got home from the lab
29:07say six o'clock
29:09when he phoned and said in a rather strained voice i've been detained
29:14and i kind of intuited right away what was going on
29:19we had advised him of his rights of course and then when we explained to him that our
29:25reason for interviewing him was espionage
29:29he agreed to answer our questions
29:33the questions were based on gardner's decodes
29:37mcqueen asked hall if he had met sax in new york in 1944
29:41and handed atomic secrets to the kgb
29:45if hall was shocked by the question
29:47he didn't show it
29:50he was very calm
29:51obviously a very bright young man
29:54he was still a young man
29:57hall denied everything
29:59but sax admitted that he might have met hall in new york
30:04sax came across as
30:06kind of a bumbling disheveled guy and said
30:09you know i'm not sure i probably did see ted at some time but
30:14you know and he denied
30:15any
30:16complicity in anything
30:18remotely resembling espionage
30:22after nearly three hours
30:24mcqueen had failed to get a confession from either man
30:28but he wasn't about to give up
30:31he told hall to return on monday for more questions
30:36sax gave us permission to search his home
30:39which we did
30:41but we found nothing there
30:44which would help us in the prosecution
30:46and hall refused to give us permission to search his place
30:52when hall got home that night he and jones sprang into action
30:57took all the left-wing stuff and packed it in boxes and put it in the car
31:01put ruthie into a snowsuit she was then just over a year
31:05put her in her car seat
31:07got in the car and we drove to the bridge that crosses over the chicago drainage canal
31:13we dumped all the stuff into the canal
31:20when hall left for the fbi office on monday morning
31:23joan worried that he'd end up in jail
31:28but mcqueen did not have enough evidence to make an arrest
31:32the interviews did not produce any information that we could take to the united states attorney
31:37to get an indictment
31:41according to the official fbi report
31:43hall refused to answer more questions
31:46and the interview ended calmly
31:48but that's not what joan hall remembers
31:51i guess it was mcqueen
31:53said
31:55we're gonna lock you up right now
31:57and at that point ted picked up his coat
32:02he said i walked out of the room
32:04into the hall they followed me
32:06i pushed the button for the elevator
32:08the elevator came
32:11i got in
32:11they didn't come in
32:13they didn't join me
32:14the elevator went down to the street
32:17i got out
32:18i walked out of the building
32:19i was on the street
32:20they didn't follow me
32:22he called me right away
32:25and he came home
32:27in spite of ted's bravado
32:31the halls were terrified
32:33with good reason
32:35ted hall
32:38was a kgb spy
32:39now
32:44for the first time on television
32:45joan hall
32:47ted's wife of more than 50 years
32:49tells their story
32:50i never thought of myself as an accomplice
32:54i suppose if anybody has suggested it to me
32:57i would have said well i suppose so
32:58hall made the decision to become a spy
33:04while working at los alamos
33:06he told me that he had done it
33:09because
33:11he was afraid that the united states
33:14might become a very reactionary power
33:16after the war
33:17those were his words
33:19and that this would
33:22give the soviet union
33:24a better chance of standing up to them
33:25in october 1944
33:30hall had gone to new york
33:32with a report on the bomb
33:33he met up with his former harvard roommate
33:38savill sacks
33:40sacks had grown up in a tight community
33:44of russian jewish immigrants
33:48they tended to be very suspicious of american society at large
33:56communism was a sort of substitute judaism for the people in that community
34:04they idealized russia
34:10hall and sacks
34:11went looking for a soviet agent
34:15they
34:16knew nothing about
34:17how to do this
34:20sacks initially
34:21made some forays to places like art kino
34:24which was the place that distributed soviet films in america
34:28went to the guy who was the head of this organization
34:31and said well you know i've got this buddy of mine who's working at a secret installation
34:36and he's got all these secrets
34:38of course this fellow must have thought
34:40give me a break
34:42but he also thought well maybe it's true
34:44you know maybe there really is somebody
34:47so he gave sacks the name of sergey kurnikov
34:51sergey kurnikov was a soviet journalist
34:55and a kgb agent
34:57hall went to visit him
34:59i guess kurnikov didn't know quite what to make of him
35:04and uh kurnikov was consuming considerable quantities of vodka at the time
35:09and he kept pressing ted to drink more
35:11hall began hinting at his secret work at los alamos
35:15finally kurnikov said well why don't you just write up your ideas or whatever you want to tell us
35:23and um and give it to me
35:26and ted said i've already done that
35:28reached into his money belt which he had
35:30put the papers on the table
35:32among the papers was a list of atomic scientists
35:38it was the same list that meredith gardner would decode two years later
35:42this was perhaps the first solid disclosure that there was this camp in new mexico
35:50where the best scientists in the world had been brought together to build this secret weapon
35:54after hall returned to los alamos from new york
35:59he continued to send atomic secrets to the kgb
36:03via savile sacks and other couriers
36:06he was the first to pass along to the russians information about how the principle of implosion
36:13worked
36:14and uh later in the summer of 1945 after the bomb was exploded
36:18he actually gave information permitting them to visualize
36:22how the various layers within an atomic bomb would be constructed
36:26whole spy methods were amateurish but effective
36:33he used milk as invisible ink to copy down classified equations on the edges of a newspaper
36:39which he mailed to savile sacks in new york who took it to the soviet consulate
36:45ted hall gave away the blueprint of the american atomic bomb
36:55which later became the blueprint of the first soviet atomic bomb
36:59then klaus fuchs came along and gave them slightly more detailed information and
37:04fuchs's information included the design of one of the key parts of the bomb called the initiator
37:10which ted hall didn't know anything about
37:13neither whole nor fuchs knew that the other was a spy
37:18and that made them even more valuable to the kgb
37:22when they had two totally independent sources
37:25fuchs and hall who didn't know each other who didn't work together
37:29but gave basically the same information
37:32they figured
37:33there's a good chance that this is right that it's accurate
37:38it's a completely wrong picture of ted to suggest that he was obeying orders from anybody
37:46this thing was entirely his own initiative
37:50he was not recruited or brought into it by anybody else
37:55when ted hall married joan crackover in chicago in 1947
38:01he promised her that his spying days were over
38:06but within a year he was back spying for the kgb
38:09even recruiting other scientists
38:16after the fbi interviewed hole in 1951
38:19they grilled his colleagues from los alamos
38:23so this agent came down to my office
38:27and he began asking questions about ted hall
38:29question after question after question and like
38:39well what kind of a guy was he
38:43well answer
38:46kind of a curious duck
38:49it didn't occur to me that ted might be a spy
38:52by early 1952 the fbi still had no evidence against hall and sachs
39:02apart from the decoded soviet telegrams
39:07the problem that the fbi faced was that although they had this evidence against ted hall and others
39:13in the form of decrypts they were unable to use that evidence in court because they felt it would
39:19give away the fact that they had managed to break the soviet code
39:24so the fbi put the hall and sachs case on hold
39:30but protecting the secrecy of the venona decodes
39:33is not the only reason they weren't used in court
39:37the venona material would have been very difficult to use in court
39:41you know how do you introduce it how do you prove that these random numbers the soviets sent in code
39:47over western union wires that 2347 is actually ted hall
39:53it would be very very difficult to prove that legally
39:59as the rosenbergs were inspiring a worldwide campaign for clemency
40:05hall came up with his own plan on how to save them
40:10he thought perhaps if he were to confess what he had done
40:15and say that he had done more than they did that it would take the pressure off them
40:20to some extent i said that's crazy it wouldn't do them any good and it would ruin us
40:34julius and ethel rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at sing sing prison
40:38on june 19th 1953
40:48the fbi's robert lamphere had supported the death penalty for julius but not for ethel
40:56i wrote the memorandum for j edgars hoover's signature
41:00in which i opposed the
41:02the execution of ethel on two grounds one that the amount of evidence that had been produced at the
41:10trial was not sufficient to require her being executed and secondly she was the mother of two small children
41:18who were signed that memorandum but it was not acted upon by the judge
41:35because the soviet cables had been kept out of court neither judge nor jury had gotten to read
41:40gardner's decode of a kgb message which indicated that ethel was not a spy like julius
41:48she knows about her husband's work it says in view of a delicate health does not work
41:58as gardner reported the word work was kgb jargon for espionage
42:06which would explain why ethel was never given a cover name
42:09they murdered her in cold blood when the united states admits that then i'll be more than willing
42:18to admit that maybe venona has identified something of my father's involvement in some kind of activity
42:28with the kgb
42:32if the venona material had been made public at the time that the rosenbergs were tried and convicted it's
42:37very unlikely they would have gotten the death penalty if the american public had known about ted hall's
42:44activities um at the time the rosenbergs were tried and convicted it's impossible to believe that the
42:52judge would have called them the central figures in the theft of the atomic bomb clearly if you're going to
42:59provide a candidate for that description uh it was probably ted hall and claus fuchs
43:07according to joan hole her husband stopped spying a few months later
43:13by 1965 when this photo was taken the family had moved to england where hall went on to a distinguished
43:19career in biophysics saville sachs ted hall's kgb courier had a far more difficult time
43:27his son remembers a strange family visit to the movies just as the movie was about to start
43:37the movie was my fair lady my father said i just had a terrible thought
43:45what if an atomic bomb were suddenly to fall on chicago right now and all these people would be locked
43:59together in this movie theater pretty soon there would be cannibals i wonder who would get eaten first
44:10and then the movie began and i looked over to him and he seemed to be lost in a kind of reverie
44:22but i'm pretty sure that a lot of it was guilt and fear about the espionage that he had done after all
44:33the bomb that he had passed to them should it be used would have been used on us
44:44saville sachs died in 1980
44:48in 1997 two years before ted hall died from cancer he defended his actions at los alamos to a visiting
44:55scholar i felt that it was important that somebody should go tell stalin as he just put it
45:02and uh that this should be done sooner rather than later and not therefore and then so that it would
45:08not be a a threat but a uh developing a pathway towards a a better more harmonious world
45:17they were traitors simply put nothing more nothing less
45:23he certainly broke the law he certainly broke his security oath but he did not betray his country he
45:32didn't betray the people everything that he did was done because of his concern for the people it was a
45:40a human humanitarian act his motive was a humanitarian motive now if you want to call that sort of thing
45:48treason go right ahead what should have been done with ted hall shot he was a military man
45:58he was a soldier in the united states army he was subject
46:04not to civil law he was subject to military law military law called for a traitor being executed
46:11and that son of a bitch should have been retrieved once we found out what he had done
46:23called back into the army court-martialed and summarily executed
46:32ted hall was not the only atomic spy to go free
46:35cover names of at least three other atomic spies appear in the cables
46:42to this day we don't know who they are but they are clearly very important sources
46:46one who had the cover name quantum provided the soviets at a very early stage the actual scientific
46:54formula for separating u-235 from u-238 which is a very key step in developing a working atomic bomb
47:02ultimately the code breakers found cover names for more than 300 americans who spied for the soviets
47:10in world war ii american counterintelligence was able to identify only about a hundred of these soviet
47:19agents but even this incomplete list is remarkable harry dexter white assistant secretary of the treasury
47:29cover name lawyer larry duggan chief of the division of american republics at the state department
47:38cover name prince and lachlan curry senior administrative assistant to president roosevelt cover name page
47:50there was not a single agency of the american government that the soviets had not infiltrated
47:57ranging from the oss the forerunner of the cia to the justice department to the treasury department
48:04to the state department to all of the wartime defense agencies
48:11venona also helps to settle the case of alger hiss the state department official accused of spying
48:17there's one venona message about an agent code named ailes and the message gives certain details about
48:28ailes and those details fit alger hiss and nobody else and the fbi believed that ailes was alger hiss
48:38and material that has emerged from russian archives in the last decade
48:44i think makes it absolutely clear that alger hiss was a soviet agent
48:52the cables also helped to uncover three kgb agents working at high levels in the british government
48:58donald mclean guy burgess
49:05and kim philby all three escaped arrest by fleeing to moscow
49:12i have in my hand document which i've never used before ironically there is no evidence that senator
49:19joseph mccarthy who smeared hundreds of innocent people as soviet spies ever heard of the venona project
49:27if he had any notion that we were reading soviet intelligence traffic he would have made it public
49:32if joseph mccarthy had learned about a code-breaking operation that named soviet spies in the morning
49:38he would have been holding a press conference announcing it that afternoon as far as we can tell
49:44of all the people that mccarthy named as possible soviet agents only a tiny tiny handful perhaps two or
49:51three are revealed in venona you would have thought that that there were so many people that if you
49:58threw a dart uh you would hit more uh real spies by chance
50:02the authenticity of the venona decodes has been corroborated recently by alexander vasilyev
50:12a former kgb agent now living in london
50:18vasilyev managed to smuggle out of russia copies of top secret reports written to moscow by kgb
50:24agents in america
50:27there were several cases when the real documents which i saw in the files and venona decodes coincided
50:33word to word
50:36according to vasilyev this is the actual text of a report to the kgb by julius rosenberg
50:42he and ethel asked ruth greenglass to convince her husband david to spy at los alamos
50:51the rosenbergs theodore hall and elcher his did spy for the soviets and i saw their real names in
50:58the documents and their code names a lot of documents about them how you judge them it's it's up to you
51:06uh to me they're heroes the venona project lasted until 1980
51:17only those messages that reuse sheets of one time pad could be read less than one percent of the total
51:26no messages sent after 1948 could be broken
51:31that's because the code breakers had been betrayed by one of their own
51:37beginning in 1948 and over a six-month period
51:42all these soviet cryptographic systems went dark
51:48and the united states no longer could read any encrypted soviet traffic
51:57we assume we know that the soviets were tipped by bill weissman
52:04william weissman was the linguist who'd watched meredith gardner break his first kgb message
52:13many of us consider this the greatest intelligence loss in u.s history
52:19weissman was questioned by the fbi in 1950 and jailed for contempt of court
52:24to protect the secrecy of venona he was never charged with espionage
52:32so the ultimate irony of venona is that the kgb knew about it almost from the start
52:37and the fbi once they'd uncovered weissman knew that the kgb knew i said to the head of the nsa
52:49who are you keeping this secret from you're not keeping a secret from from the kgb you're keeping
52:56a secret from the american public
53:02it's unfortunate that venona was not made public much earlier
53:09certainly for the last 30 years or so we've had fierce debates about mccarthyism
53:17the extent of the soviet danger i think would have been a lot clearer had venona been made public
53:23i think a lot of the bitterness and rancor in american political life might have been avoided
53:28had we known the truth
53:32beyond its revelations venona raises important questions about the value and the danger of
53:39secrecy in a democratic society but fundamentally and undeniably it was a triumph of code breaking
53:49seldom equaled or surpassed
54:00on nova's website hear from family members of americans accused of spying for the soviets
54:06including julius rosenberg and ted hall and find out what it was like to live with a loved one who led
54:10a double life on pbs.org or america online keyword pbs
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