The Wall Street Journal Monday, October 20, 1997 BOOKSHELF "Bombshell" By Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel Treason's Hidden Accomplice By Ronald Radosh We have known for a few decades -- since Klaus Fuchs's confession in 1950 -- that the Soviet Union obtained the atomic bomb from espionage sources within the Manhattan Project. Recently Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post, digging through formerly classified Soviet cables, broke the story that in fact there was another major spy at Los Alamos -- a young scientist named Theodore Alvin Hall. Now, with "Bombshell" (Times Books, 399 pages, $25), Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel tell the whole story. Basing their account on Soviet sources, U.S. government files and, most important, personal conversations with Hall himself (now 71 and living in London), the authors have written a narrative that compares with the best espionage thrillers. Here is an all too true story of how lax security and political naivete combined to give the Soviets access to our nation's top-secret military project. Hall, a prodigy, entered Harvard as a junior at the ripe age of 16. His brilliant work led his teachers to recommend him for the physics staff at the Manhattan Project. He already belonged to a Communist front group, while his Harvard roommate, Saville Sax, was a party member. The two friends quickly approached the Soviets with the news that Hall was in a position to hand over valuable information. While visiting his friend in Albuquerque, Sax received from Hall the first notes on the "implosion" principle -- the actual method used for creating the first atomic bomb. At the time, the Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov, who headed Stalin's bomb program, had never even heard of the concept. When Klaus Fuchs resumed contact with Moscow -- he had been out of touch for a while -- his data filled in some holes and confirmed the accuracy of what the Soviets had learned from Hall. Thus did "Mlad" ("youngster"), as the Soviets called him, first give the Russians what they needed. Sax would soon be replaced as Hall's courier by Lona Cohen -- a 32-year-old radical and party member who was arrested a few years later in Britain, with her husband, Morris, for transmitting British military secrets to Moscow. Lona Cohen was so good at her job that she managed to take data from Hall at Los Alamos at a time when security was at its most tight, right under the nose of scores of FBI agents. Weaving the Cohens' story together with that of Ted Hall, the authors manage to present in gripping detail a hitherto unknown spy drama. After leaving the Manhattan Project, Hall campaigned for Henry Wallace in 1948, formally joined the American Communist Party -- and soon renewed his espionage activity. By 1952, he had recruited two new scientists as spies, the still unknown agents named "Anta" and "Aden" by their Moscow control. Did Hall feel a pang of conscience when he learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, lesser players in Moscow's spy drama, were to be executed for the crime that he had actually committed? Hall says he went to his Soviet control and offered to give himself up, since "I was more responsible than they were." His control officer, not surprisingly, "Felt it wasn't a good idea." Hall's wife, aware of Hall's activity but not herself a spy, says now that if she and her husband had been arrested, they would have claimed "innocence just as [the Rosenbergs] did." If there is a flaw in Mr. Albright and Ms. Kunstel's book, it is that they present this story too much from Hall's point of view. Rarely pausing to challenge him, they portray Hall, at times, almost as a tragic hero -- a man who betrayed his country for the higher good of preventing atomic war. Hall believed that a nuclear monompoly would haave enabled the U.S., lamentably, to use the bomb on China to block Mao's 1949 revolution. He still thinks that Soviet possession of the bomb may have stopped a military takeover of the U.S. government during the Cold War. The authors argue that the Cohens were real revolutionaries. Ted Hall, by contrast, was better than that -- a humanist who argued that "the breaking of the atomic monopoly was in the best interest of Americans, even if it meant breaking American law." It is worth asking whether Stalin would have given Kim Il Sung the green light to invade South Korea in 1950 if he had not possessed atomic weapons. Certainly the tens of thousands of deaths that resulted from that war do not figure in Hall's equation. Ted Hall has no regrets. He now acknowledges Stalin's teror, but he still believes the West was on the wrong side of the Cold War, and he has the gall to denounce the McCarthyite "witch-hunt." By giving Hall the last word, the authors do a disservice to their important work. In reality, Hall, the Cohens and hundreds of others betrayed their country and served a murderous totalitarian state. The authors argue that Hall was neither a "viper in our bosom" nor an "unsung hero of the nuclear age." But others will conclude that the first of these labels -- Rebecca West's stinging phrase for those who ommitted treason -- fits him perfectly. (Mr. Radosh is the author, with Joyce Milton, of "The Rosenberg File." Copyright 1997, Wall Street Journal)