Just for the record, I, a member of this list, am the producer of that
film. I stumbled on Ted Hall's story in 2017 when I was writing a
commentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I've done on most of those grim
anniversaries for decades. Hoping come up with a new angle, I googled
"Soviet atomic spies," curious to see what some of their motives were.
What I got when I searched was a rogues' gallery of photos of mostly
middle-aged guys, but there was one obvious teenager with bad acne, named
Theoodore Hall. Curious about him, google searched him specifically
and founnd out that he was a major spy in '44-45 at Los Alamos at 18-19
years of age, and that he'd never been prosecuted. By then fascinated, I
knocked off a piece in for my site, ThisCantBeHappening.net (now
ThisCantBeHappening.substack.com) saying he an Klaus Fuchs deserved
posthumous Nobel Peace Prizes for acting, separately but simultaneously, to
successfully prevent the US from emerging from WWII with a monopoly on
nuclear weapons, by significantly hastening the Soviets; acquisition of
their own bomb, a carbon copy of the US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb dropped on
Nagasaki, preventing a planned US atomic blitz on the USSR set for the mid
'50s..
Two weeks later I got an email from Cambridge, UK saying, "Dear Dave,
I'm reading your article about Ted Hall with tears in my eyes. I'm Ted's
widow and you're the first journalist who got him. We need to talk."
I struck up an email friendship with the then 89-year old Joan Hall,
and went over to see her with my wife in early 2018 when my daughter was
graduating with her DPhil in Oxford. Joan is an amazing person. The
friendship developed into my wanting to do a book on Ted, which she didn't
want, fearing a new assault by the Brit tabloid press which she and Ted
endured in 1995 when the Venona files of Soviet Wartime cables were
released by the NSA, but later she agreed to the idea of a documentary
film. I decided to try the idea, and was able to interest noted
documentarian Steve James. His usual producer, Mitten, fronted the cost of
the three of us and my videographer son to fly to Cambridge for a
three-day shoot of joan and her two surviving adult daughters, Ruth and
Sara, because Steve said with Ted and Savvy Sax dead, the film would only
fly if Joan was a compelling person. She turned out, when we interviewed
her on camera, to be, a veritable Katherine Hepburn, in fact! So Steve and
Mark agreed after viewing the rushes, to be editor, and made me co-producer
with Mark. The film got funded by Participant Films, was in the 2022 Venice
Film Festival and the Telluride Festival for its world and US premieres.
After a theater run in major US cities and college towns, the film is now
streaming in the US on Amazon, Vudu, Hulu, Apple TV, Google Films and on
aircraft entertainment offferings. It's also being shown in theaters and
for streaming around the world.
While doing research for the film, locating interview subjects
and historical records in my producer role, I also did a deeper dive into
the story, eventually obtaining Ted's, Sax's and Ted's brother Edward
Hall's FBI files (though these arrived too late to make it into the ffilm),
and have published a book, 'Spy for No Country" (Prometheus Books, 2024).
Ed Hall, whose 130-page file the FBI initially denied having), rather
amazingly, I discovered on finally getting most of it, had been the Air
Force's top rocket scientist at a top-secret lab located on
Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton at the time Hoover was informed in early
January 1951 by the precursor of the NSA that Soviet spy cables that
identified his brother Ted conclusively as a consequential spy at Los
Alamos. Ed headed up development of powerful rocket motors for the Thor,
Atlas and Titan missiles. He went on to conceive and convince the Air Force
and an initially dubious President Eisenhower to adopt the whole concept
of hundreds of silo-based, ready-to-launch solid-fuel ICBMs and actually
invented the Minuteman ICBM. The Air Force realized that if Ted were
arrested during the Red Scare McCarthyite hysteria, they'd lose their top
rocket scientist. So powerful was the Air Force that despite Hoover's
record as a serial leaker of information boosting his reputation, and his
evident eagerness to bust both Hall brothers, the explosive information
about Ted Hall and about his close relationship to his brother, was never
leaked to the media or to anyone in Congress by Hoover and only came out
when the NSA finally released the first decrypted Soviet spy cables in
1995.
By the way, if anyone would like to review the book, let me know and I'll
send a copy. It appears to be getting deliberately ignored by all the
corporate mainstream media, likely because, like the film, but with
footnotes and the benefit of all the FBI files and documents from the
National Archives, which I got after the film was locked up, it shreds the
whole mythology of the US as the primary winner of the war in Europe, of
the nuking of two Japanese cities as "necessary" and of the US as benign
and well-meaning force for good in the post-World War II era. Even the
Nation magazine, for which I've written since 1983, isn't reviewing it!
Here's the podcast of a really great interview journalist Robert Scheer did
of me about the book on his "Scheer Intelligence" program on Los Angeles
NPR affiliate KCRW:
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/26/the-un-oppenheimer-the-story-of-a-teenager-who-sought-to-save-the-world/
Dave
On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 12:28 AM Glenn Kissack via groups.io <gkissack=
[email protected]> wrote:
> The film is available to rent for $1.99 at Prime Video:
>
> [image:
> 48c99ba9d6ea28c86e76da299096d08149a115963e79f55e2cf8ff17f649f81f.jpeg]
>
> A Compassionate Spy
> <https://www.amazon.com/Compassionate-Spy-Ted-Hall/dp/B0C946MT26>
> amazon.com
> <https://www.amazon.com/Compassionate-Spy-Ted-Hall/dp/B0C946MT26>
> <https://www.amazon.com/Compassionate-Spy-Ted-Hall/dp/B0C946MT26>
>
> I watched the documentary recently and it’s fascinating!
>
> Glenn
>
> Attachments:
>
> - 48c99ba9d6ea28c86e76da299096d08149a115963e79f55e2cf8ff17f649f81f.jpeg
> <https://groups.io/g/marxmail/attachment/29398/0>
>
>
>
>
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