‘What people accused Oppenheimer of doing’: the untold story of spy Ted Hall
Nearly 70 years after it rattled the New Mexico desert, the Trinity Test is top of mind for many this summer. Thanks to Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film on the leader of the Manhattan Project, millions have relived the queasy aftermath of the first nuclear bomb detonation in July 1945 – a scientific achievement of terrible power greeted with jubilation at Los Alamos. In a pivotal scene set during post-test celebrations, J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist played by Cillian Murphy, stokes the flames of triumphalism while seeing the ashes of future destruction.
At Los Alamos that day was a young physicist named Ted Hall, whose concerns outpaced Oppenheimer’s. Peeved by the celebrations and disturbed by the gleeful reaction to a weapon of mass destruction, he isolated himself in the Army barracks. Oppenheimer would go on to hold grave misgivings about the US government’s handling of atomic weapons and the expansion of its nuclear program. But Hall, at all of 19, had already acted. Unsettled by the US government’s refusal to share atomic intelligence with its allies and the prospect of a US monopoly on the bomb, Hall shared aspects of the project at Los Alamos with Soviet intelligence – a secret that went largely unknown for nearly 50 years, and is left out of the hit movie.
“What Ted did is what people accused Oppenheimer of doing,” said documentarian Steve James, whose latest film, A Compassionate Spy, explores Hall’s prescient skepticism, his fraught espionage and his loyal marriage of nearly half a century to his wife, Joan. (Nolan’s film makes a point of Oppenheimer’s later political rivals who twisted his longstanding leftist sympathies into career-ending suspicions of Soviet ties; “I like to think Christopher Nolan copied us – he heard we were doing this, and decided he wanted in on it,” James joked of the film, which has brought the heated debates of Los Alamos to the masses this summer.) It’s part love story, part espionage thriller, part re-contextualization of national PR for the atomic bomb (bullish, sanitized) and the USSR (hailed, then demonized).
Hall was not alone in his concerns over US handling of the nascent nuclear weapons program. Seventy scientists tied to the Manhattan Project signed a petition protesting the use of the bomb on Japan that was never delivered to the president, Harry S Truman (not that it likely would have made a difference). “There were a lot of scientists who began to really question what they were doing and questioning the fact that the Soviet Union was excluded from this effort, and were of course extremely worried about what we were going to do with the bomb,” said James. There were other physicists at Los Alamos who shared intelligence with the Soviet Union, including German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who merits a mention in Oppenheimer.
But Hall was the youngest to act, and to the most significant degree. “Ted is just this impetuous young 19year-old who decided he was going to do something,” said James. Not that Hall regarded his potentially life-threatening treason as dire, at least at the time. In archival interviews from the years before his death in 1999 from renal cancer (likely the result of his work with plutonium at Los Alamos), Hall recalls his mindset at 19, freshly recruited from Harvard, as one of idealism aided at least in part by youth. “I was a young person,” he said. “I saw the world, I guess you might say, through rather pinkishly colored glasses.”
“In my mind, this was a question of protecting the Soviet people, as well as all people, from attack,” he said. His fears were not unfounded; shortly after the war ended, Truman reportedly threatened to deploy a nuclear bomb on the USSR, lest they agree to remove troops from occupied Iran.
The actual transmission of information, captured in archival interviews and re-enactments, was careful, though not the work of elite subterfuge. Hall relied on Savy Sax, a close friend from Harvard and a devoted Communist, to actually make contact with Soviet representatives; the two communicated via messages encoded in books and letters and in less artfully staged secret meetings – methods Hall later remembered as more “comedy” than thriller. Nevertheless, the two managed to communicate rough plans for the implosion bomb to Soviet intelligence, which likely accelerated Soviet progress on their own weapons – they, too, had a deployable bomb by 1949 – by about five years, estimates historian Joseph Albright, co-author of a book on Hall.
The arms-driven Cold War, and the USSR’s trajectory under Stalin, never sat easily with Hall, according to Joan – the emotional heart of the film and, it’s revealed, the steel behind Hall’s convictions, silence and conscience. James first met Joan, a “dynamo” who was “brilliant in her own right,” in 2019, when she was 91. “She was a woman out of her time, in a way,” he said. An intellectual, a leftist and an activist, she was an organizer for the Communist Party until heat from the FBI on Hall’s past forced her to recede from any political work. (She and Hall eventually moved to Cambridge, England, with their three daughters.) “She had an extraordinary life in her own right, and as much as anything, I wanted to tell her story as much as Ted’s,” said James.
Translating their love story to screen marked a departure for James, a documentarian primarily known for his verité work exploring the fault lines of race and class in his home base of Chicago – the acclaimed film Hoop Dreams, as well as the excellent docuseries America to Me and City So Real. A Compassionate Spy relies on full recreations of Ted’s time at Los Alamos and Ted and Joan’s romance – tussling on the quad at the University of Chicago, revealing his secret while entwined on his office floor, barely dodging the FBI’s intimidation tactics. “I knew there would be no way to visualize [Joan’s stories] unless we did it ourselves,” James said of his decision to stage re-enactments. That, and to bring Ted and Joan’s youth at the time of their consequential decisions to the fore. “I figured it would be easy to forget that when you’re looking at a 91-yearold woman telling you stories, or Ted in the 1990s when he was in his 70s telling these stories, to forget how young they were and how brave they were in doing what they did.”
“He was for his age incredibly knowledgeable and sophisticated in terms of understanding the way the world works,” said James of Hall’s time at Los Alamos, where he was the youngest scientist. “Without having access to classified documents or the president or the decision makers, he gleaned that it [could be] dangerous for the US to have this all to themselves.”
“The film tries to make the case that whether you agree with him ultimately or not, those fears were not out to lunch,” he added. Late in the film, Joan recounts with scorn how the media did not take too kindly to the reveal of Hall’s secret late in his life, regarded by many as a betrayal of his country. A Compassionate Spy serves as a moving rebuke, both personal and sweeping. History may not judge Hall’s distrust of nuclear stewardship quite so harshly.
A Compassionate Spy is out now in US cinemas with a UK date to be announced
spot to visit. The sea water is geothermally heated with temperatures reaching 15-19C in summer. People swim in the human-made lagoon then enjoy the hot tubs and sand and steam-baths. Some locals swim here in winter, too.
As for green space, at Heiðmörk, about 15 minutes’ drive beyond Reykjavík, there’s a forest, a beautiful lake and lots of trails to explore among the lava formations.
Nightlife
Maybe because of the relative smallness of Reykjavík, we don’t have huge, standalone clubs. Instead, bars transform into clubs and people dance late into the night. I like Röngten. It does great cocktails and I’ll always bump into somebody I know there. Then at a certain time, a DJ comes on and everyone’s dancing until the early hours. There’s also a really cool wine bar called Mikki Refur – it’s a cafe by day, then at night it serves natural wines and small plates. Vínstúkan is a similar concept and serves some amazing wines.
Stay
There are fancy new hotels popping up everywhere, but I love Hotel Holt. (doubles from £290 room only). It’s expensive, but it’s been around since the 1960s and filled with beautiful artwork by big names such as Jóhannes
Sveinsson Kjarval – whose work you can also see at Reykjavík Art Museum.
Attached to our store there’s also Reykjavík Treasure B&B (doubles from £220 B&B), run by the amazing Steinunn. It’s very cosy and well located in the old town; from here you can walk in all directions to interesting places such as the Icelandic Phallological Museum. My old teacher opened it many years ago, and it’s now a very popular destination.
A cheaper option is KEX Hostel (doubles from £125), in a former biscuit factory on the waterfront. There’s a bar on the main floor, where local musicians and DJs play.
Lilja Birgisdóttir is an artist and one of the owners of Fischersund, a familyrun Reykjavík perfumerywhere visitors can experiencescent, sound and art
that had infiltrated the country and that people were less and less sanguine about having in their midst. They began to fear this idea of a secret society that didn’t seem beholden to the democratic lawmakers of the country.”
The author also sheds light on attacks on Catholics in the 19th century, driven by a prejudice among Protestants that they were beholden only to a foreign pope and could not act as fully enlightened American citizens.
“Outside Boston, a convent in 1834 was burned to the ground by people who assumed that the priests were using the confessional as some sort of half blackmail, half mind control device to imprison and sexually enslave women against their will, that there were babies being produced that were then being murdered and buried in the catacombs beneath the ground,” he says.
“It’s basically very structurally similar to the contemporary conspiracy theory around Pizzagate or the movie that just came out, Sound of Freedom [popular with QAnon followers]. This idea of the cabal of sexual abusers, which was being used against Catholics in the 1830s, with just a few of the key details changed but more or less the same narrative.”
But something important did shift in the 20th century. Until then most conspiracy theories posited foreign infiltrators trying to harm the American government. If you believed that the US has perfected democracy, it was easier to blame outside saboteurs for anything that went wrong.
“After world war two and the sixties, that gradually but irrevocably changes to the point where now most Americans take it on an article of faith that the government is out to do them harm on some level or another. Conspiracy theories are often marshalled around this idea that people in the government know more and what’s happening here is the result of government actors,” Dickey says.
“You see that with 9/11 conspiracy theories and you see it with the JFK assassination. The idea that the head of state was assassinated and yet, for a large part of the population, the only explanation was that the government itself in some form or another was responsible for this is representative of that sea change.”
There is no doubt that the internet is an important part of the story. Human rights groups blamed antiRohingya propaganda on Facebook for inciting a genocide in Myanmar. But the author resists any attempt to shift moral responsibility to social media. It exacerbates some of our latent tendencies, he argues, but those tendencies are there no matter what.
Dickey sees in QAnon both classic strains of conspiracy theory and some new mutations. “There’s this idea of the government insider who is leaking secret information, which we’ve had historically with something like Watergate and Deep Throat, but also the figure who claims that he has been shown classified information and is sharing them is something you hear in UFO conspiracies time and time again. So that felt very classical.
“What does seem new is that QAnon is this weird hybrid of a very dangerous, quite racist and homo- and transphobic conspiracy theory mixed with an online multilevel marketing scheme and also a community forum for puzzle solvers,” he says.
“It is a real blend and synthesis of a bunch of different things that all appeal to slightly different personalities. It’s spread a little wider because it’s able to bring in people who might be otherwise disparate and unconnected and yokes them all under this banner by being vague and nebulous and not attached to too many specific beliefs or practices.”
Then there is the “great replacement” theory, pushed by rightwing figures such as Tucker Carlson, which describes a supposed elite conspiracy to change the demographics of the US by replacing white people with people of colour, immigrants and Muslims. Dickey notes that such conspiracy theories tend to flare up most predictably when there is significant demographic change or previously marginalised groups push for visibility and equality.
“Both with the increased visibility of the LGBTQ community and trans men and women demanding rights and equality, alongside the racial and ethnic identity of America changing, as it always has, these things are combining to create a terror among some people who see this change as too rapid, too inexplicable, too destabilising. Rather than admit that America is constantly in flux, they are seizing upon the idea that this is in fact an artificial change brought about by secret elites who are working behind the scenes to undermine what ‘America’ actually is.”
The phrase “conspiracy theory” was coined by philosopher Karl Popper. In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he discusses the “conspiracy theory of society”: the idea that major events are the “result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups”.
Dickey explains: “The conspiracy theory of society happens when you get rid of God and ask what’s in his place. What I found in writing the book and thinking through my other research in conspiracy theories is what they do is offer an explanatory mechanism for chaos and disorder and randomness, almost to the point of a quasi-theological explanation.
“Anything that is happening today can be, if you so choose, understood to be part of the incredibly byzantine and hidden plan of the Illuminati that may seem confusing to us on the surface but you can trust as an article of faith that is part of their grand plan. They are both omniscient and omnipotent (unlike God they’re not benevolent) but they are working behind the scenes and that explains the world.
“Even though that’s a malicious and terrible view of the world, for a segment of the population that is more reassuring than a world of pure chaos and disorder. People will cling to this idea that, yes, well, at least we know that this is part of this malevolent world order, even if it’s evil and out to get us.”
What makes an enduring conspiracy theory? One element is that they start with a kernel of truth and grounds for doubt. Dickey acknowledges that scepticism is healthy and the impulse that leads to a conspiracy theory is a fine one. Citizens are not obliged to accept everything they are told at face value.
He says: “Almost any conspiracy theory starts with a legitimate question that I would agree: yeah, let’s look into that, let’s see what we can find. It’s the refusal to accept evidence when the evidence doesn’t pan out in the way that you want it to that leads to problems because then what you have to do is construct an increasingly elaborate conspiratorial framework to explain why you’re not finding the evidence you were hoping for. That’s where you get completely lost in the weeds.”
From MMR to Covid-19, vaccines have been a prime example of how initially reasonable concerns over possible side-effects can career into an insidious irrationality.
“I understand that people might be hesitant and have questions, and yet from a legitimate curiosity or understandable hesitation people then spin out to wildly improbable, indefensible and dangerous conspiracy theories. Time and time again the most virulent conspiracy theories often have some kernel of truth which is then being spun in dramatic and horrible directions,” Dickey says.
Secondly, there is humans’ notoriously short attention span. Dickey writes that conspiracy theories feed on historical amnesia and depend on the belief that what is happening now has never happened before. Many people have therefore been taken aback by former president Donald Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election and by QAnon, whose followers perceive Democrats are a cabal of Satan worshippers and sex traffickers.
Dickey says: “A lot of Americans were sort of, ‘Well, how could people possibly believe this nonsense? No one has ever thought something this absurd.’ As a result a lot of us were caught flat-footed and didn’t take these things seriously, didn’t respond fast enough until things were already out of control.
“What I wanted to do with this book is to lay out that this is almost like a playbook that gets run and that one step to defeating it is being aware that it’s used like this. When the next one comes along – because there will be a next one – maybe we’ll be able to get out ahead of it a little bit faster.”
Yet acolytes of Trump and QAnon seem impervious to reason. Facts and evidence that contradict their view are attributed to the conspiracy and seen as cause to dig in heels further. Dickey hopes readers of his book will come away with a better understanding of what causes normal, rational and educated people to embrace certain conspiracy theories – and start to think about what they can do to push back on them.
“What almost never works is barking facts and truth at them because people subscribe to these things because they fulfil an existential or emotional need,” he says. “If I was given the keys to the kingdom and asked what to do about it, I would want to start with addressing people’s emotional concerns there.
“What is the underlying existential conflict, the cognitive dissonance? What is the thing that is freaking them out, that is leading them to be susceptible to conspiracy theories, and what can we do as a culture and as a nation to address those existential concerns? You don’t debunk the theories unless you first lay the groundwork for an off-ramp for whatever that emotional need is that led them to embrace the theory in the first place.”
Under the Eye of Power is out now