by Howard Blum
Bob completed the theory: Which would mean that Hall, now Mlad, had become an active Soviet agent during the war. And maybe he was still spying, still using Sax as a cutout. Young and old—a team of spies.
But before Bob could take that disquieting thought any further, Meredith rolled out his third, and final, exhibit. He read a November 1944 cable:
“Wasp has agreed to cooperate with us in drawing in Bumblebee (henceforth Kalibre) . . . with a view to Enormoz. On summons from Kalibre she is leaving on 22 November for the Camp-2 area. Kalibre will have a week’s leave. Before Wasp’s departure Liberal will carry out two briefing meetings.”
But even as Bob began to process this new information, Meredith offered more. It was a cable sent from the New York rezidentura to the Center on January 8, 1945:
“Kalibre has arrived in Tyre on leave. He has confirmed the agreement to help us. . . .”
Bob needed a few moments to gather his thoughts. When he was done, the findings left him stunned. One: there was a female (courier? sweetheart? wife?) code-named Wasp who had gone to Los Alamos in 1944 for a week. Two: she was part of Liberal’s network. And three: there was another Soviet spy at Los Alamos—code-named Kalibre. And Kalibre (a soldier? a scientist assigned to the facility?) had gone on leave in January 1945, coming to New York.
All of which confirmed, Bob believed with increasing alarm, that there were three Soviet spies at Los Alamos—Rest, Mlad, and Kalibre.
But Meredith wasn’t so sure. He suggested another theory, a very tentative one, he conceded. What if, he threw out, Kalibre was Hall’s new code name? Had the Soviets, as part of their frequent security housekeeping, rechristened Mlad as Kalibre?
Bob did his best to follow Meredith’s rambling logic, a path that took him down a maze of code names and possibilities. But in the end, with a lawman’s fondness for facts, he decided to focus simply on the operational intelligence: there was a Soviet spy code-named Kalibre who had a furlough in January 1945. And just two months earlier, Kalibre’s female friend had spent a week with him in the Los Alamos area. These were solid clues he could exploit.
In the weeks that followed Bob’s meeting with Meredith, the FBI field agents pursuing “unsub Kalibre” had scrutinized the leave records of more than 2,600 soldiers and civilian scientists stationed in Los Alamos. When they were done, Bob received a list of sixty-two names, all men, whose furloughs roughly coincided with Kalibre’s.
One of the sixty-two names, Bob was convinced, was a Soviet spy. It was only a matter of finding the right one.
The Albuquerque field office attacked this list, and before long had winnowed it down to a series of candidates. One possibility was William Spindel, a young soldier from Brooklyn working in the Army’s Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos, whose furloughs seemed to match Kalibre’s. But since the Russians were after classified research about the bomb, the field agents grew convinced that Kalibre was a scientist. They paid some attention to Stanislaw Ulam and Victor Weisskopf, scientists whose leaves, if the dates on their records were stretched enough, occurred around the time Kalibre returned to New York. But the “most logical suspect for the Soviet agent,” according to Percy Wyly, the head of the Albuquerque office, was Edward Teller, who had returned to Los Alamos with the title of assistant director of weapons development to work on the hydrogen bomb. Not only did Teller have relatives in Communist Hungary, but he had traveled to New York in January 1945—same as Kalibre. No less damning, according to the cocksure Wyly, Teller “made frequent trips away from the Los Alamos Project and could have furnished information to the Russians on a regular basis.”
But Bob wasn’t so sure. He had genuine reservations about the Albuquerque office’s deductions; and, to his relief, Teller was soon cleared. And then, as was often the case when the fifth floor became involved, the identification of Kalibre became overwhelmed by a rush of new priorities. First there was the search for Rest, and then the all-out quest for Raymond. Next, Bob was off in London, and the hunt for Kalibre, for another spy at Los Alamos, had been put on the back burner.
BACK IN THE PRESENT, RECALLING these events from his desk at headquarters in the summer of 1950, with the transcript of Gold’s latest interrogation in front of him, Bob saw things from a fresh perspective. He focused on Gold’s description of the young soldier who had passed him information about the atomic project, and now the spy’s identity became apparent. The agent Gold had met in Albuquerque was Kalibre. And Kalibre, as Meredith had suspected, was Hall.
A memo signed by Mickey Ladd, who as the chief of domestic intelligence communicated directly to the fifth floor, informed the director that the identity of Gold’s contact was close to being solved. “Theodore Hall, subject to an espionage case, who was at one time in Los Alamos, might be identical with this individual.”
33
THE BUREAU’S WATCHERS CALLED IT a “hatbox operation”: you box the target in and then follow his every move with a posse of lurking G-men in fedoras. The surveillance on Ted Hall and Saville Sax had been, on Bob’s orders, hatbox all the way, four teams of three, men in cars and on the street maintaining morning-to-night coverage of each of the targets. And for good measure, the post office ran “mail covers”—all incoming and outgoing mail was inventoried, the information passed on to the Bureau.
The two men had been tracked in the spring of 1950 to Chicago, and when Bob had sent out his request for surveillance two months later he’d tagged it “Espionage R.” The teams knew they would be trying to catch a pair of Russian spies in the act. But Bob had not confided all he knew; the watchers weren’t cleared for Venona material. He couldn’t share with them that Hall and Sax had been identified as Mlad and Star. Or how Hall fit into the burgeoning investigation to find “unsub Kalibre.”
Nevertheless, the watchers had been told enough to know they needed to be diligent. Hall, his wife, Joan, and their newborn daughter lived in a ramshackle three-room apartment on East Fifty-Sixth; it was just a coincidence that their home was a short walk from Stagg Field, where the first artificial nuclear reactor had been built, though that had given the Bureau something to think about at first. Hall was studying for his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago, and they clocked him going to classes, returning home for lunch, working in the lab, spending long evenings in the library. The surveillance teams could find nothing out of the ordinary in his daily patterns, in his walks around campus or the college neighborhood. If graduate school was cover for his espionage activities, then, the exasperated watchers complained, he sure was living it. Or maybe he just was what he seemed to be—a grad student. And Hall’s political memberships also had them scratching their heads. Both husband and wife were active in two do-gooder liberal groups—the Progressive Party and the Chicago Tenants Action Council. Yet standard KGB tradecraft insisted that all political affiliations were prohibited. Spies don’t attract attention by joining organizations that could, in the enemy’s narrow minds, be categorized as Communist fronts.
The Bureau’s coverage of Sax was also drawing blanks. He was, at least according to the watchers’ sneering talk, a weird sort—a Harvard dropout who ran a mimeograph business out of his apartment on Minerva Avenue, when he wasn’t sending off lofty essays about beauty and truth to magazines that returned them promptly with terse rejection notes. But if he was still a Soviet courier, they couldn’t find the evidence, or even a hint of a suspicious rendezvous. He did subscribe to The Worker, the Communist Party paper, but that, too, only reinforced their assessment that Sax was clean. Covert KGB agents made sure to keep their distance from anything that could point to their secret lives.
After keeping close tabs on the two men for several weeks, the Chicago field office decided that Washington’s suspicions were unfounded. The report that wound up on Bob’s desk concluded: “it appears likely that neither Hall nor Sax is presently engaged in surreptitious espionage work.”
As things would turn out, “presently” was the operative word. The Burea
u had shown up too late.
THE MEET HAD BEEN ARRANGED via a simple book code. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was the key; a reference in a letter to a line and verse number in a poem would reveal the month and date for the face-to-face.
In the fall of 1944, Ted Hall, assigned to the Experimental Physics Division at Los Alamos, sent Saville Sax, his former Harvard roommate, a longish letter. He wrote about how he’d enjoyed the time they’d spent together in New York during his October furlough, and, in passing, he shared how moved he’d been when recently reading one of Whitman’s verses. The letter had to pass through the scrutiny of the Los Alamos censors; Hall, a genuine wunderkind, worked with the teams designing both the uranium and plutonium bombs. The censors found no cause for concern.
Before Christmas, Sax left New York on a bus to New Mexico. In case anyone asked, he had a cover story ready. He was on his way to Albuquerque to visit the University of New Mexico; he was considering enrolling in the university’s field anthropology program. And in his shoe he had a thin sheet of carefully folded paper. It was a list of questions for his friend that had been typed by a Soviet intelligence operative.
Sax checked into an Albuquerque hotel. Hall already had a room in a hotel near the train station. When the time for the meet grew near, both men went on foot to the prearranged spot. They were an odd pair of spies. Hall had barely started shaving. Sax had a habit of talking to himself, often gesturing emphatically with his hands as he conducted these conversations with unseen entities. And their tradecraft was atrocious. They approached from the same direction and then pretended, in case anyone was watching, their bumping into each other was pure coincidence.
But their meet went undetected. Hall answered the technical questions on Sax’s typewritten list. Then he passed on to his friend a handwritten page or two. It contained the key principles necessary for the creation of the plutonium bomb.
The two men spent the evening together, walking about the town, having dinner, before returning to their separate hotels. In the morning, Hall headed north to Los Alamos. And his courier began the trip back to his Soviet control in New York, the plans for the plutonium bomb folded between the layers of clothes in his suitcase.
BOB HAD NO PRECISE KNOWLEDGE of how the meet between Mlad and Star had gone down. All he had driving his suspicions were Meredith’s decrypts. The story the cables told was short on details, but the intel left no doubt in his mind. And so when the evaluation came in from the Chicago office clearing the two men, he decided he wouldn’t accept it. Maybe Hall was no longer active, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t passed secrets to Gold. Hall was the “unknown soldier.” Hall, Bob was certain, was Kalibre. Bob wired Chicago asking for their surveillance photos of Hall and Sax.
THE INMATE WINGS OF PHILADELPHIA’S Holmesburg Prison radiate out from the warden’s office like the vertices in a star. One late June morning in 1950, Harry Gold was led from his cell down the long cellblock corridor to the interrogation room adjacent to the warden’s office. The FBI had been pumping him day after day for all sorts of information—“squeezing the lemon,” as Scotty Miller had said—but that day the interrogators had only a single question.
Gold took his seat, and on the table a line of photos was placed in front of him. They were shots of two men, both with thinning dark hair, both young, one boyishly thin, the other more fleshy. The photographs had been taken from a distance, nothing posed, all apparently taken without the subjects’ knowledge. By now Gold recognized surveillance photos when he saw them.
Do you know either of these men? he was asked.
Gold took his time. He studied the photograph of the rail-thin man. Then he turned his attention to the shot of the darker, heavier one.
“I’ve never seen either of them,” he answered truthfully.
While Gold was being led back down the corridor to his cell in the Philadelphia prison, an agent placed a call to Supervisor Lamphere in Washington.
Bob didn’t want to believe the news. But he knew it must be true. Gold had no reason to protect either Hall or Sax; with his trial scheduled, he was eager to cooperate. But if Hall wasn’t Kalibre, then who was? Trying his best to shake off the deep sense of defeat that had suddenly enveloped him, Bob could only wonder if he would ever find him.
34
AS IT HAPPENED, THE BUREAU had already found Kalibre, only neither Bob nor anyone else had realized it.
It was on a morning nearly five months earlier—the unusually warm last week of January 1950, a balmy seventy degrees in the middle of a New York winter—when Kalibre had received the call at his apartment on Rivington Street. Special Agent Lawrence Spillane wanted to come by that afternoon to talk. Kalibre listened and felt suddenly sick, and he knew it was fear. He had been dreading this day, and now it had finally, inevitably, come. He had to be at work at four, he tried. But Spillane would not be put off. I’ll be there at two. It won’t take long, he promised.
Just long enough to snap a pair of handcuffs on a Soviet spy, Kalibre thought as he hung up the phone. Then he quickly threw on his clothes and hurried off to inform his handler.
It was a short walk across Lower Manhattan to Pitt Machine Products, where he found Liberal. Liberal listened, and when he finally responded, it was with the sort of reasonable good sense doctors use to reassure anxious patients as they’re wheeled into surgery. There’s nothing to worry about, he said. There’s no way they could have anything on you. Kalibre had difficulty believing him.
When Spillane arrived punctually at two, Kalibre, along with his pregnant wife—the woman code-named Wasp—sat with him at the kitchen table. If this was the end, the young couple wanted to confront it together.
The agent had come to discuss Kalibre’s time at Los Alamos during the war, but, to their surprise, his concern was thievery, not espionage. Some of the engineers at the tube alloy machine shop, Spillane explained, had walked off with souvenirs. Those hollowed-out golf balls of uranium-238 that had been lying about after the scientists had finished cutting them up, well, you soldiers got the clever idea to use them as ashtrays. You might’ve thought you were bringing home a conversation piece, but what you were doing was stealing government property. The government wants its property back, Spillane concluded with force.
Kalibre had stolen a detonator cap and a Lucite disk that were integral components of the bomb and had passed them on to Liberal, but the only thing the vaunted FBI had come to hound him about was an ashtray. He couldn’t believe his luck. Or the government’s stupidity. A sense of order returned to his world for the first time since he’d picked up the phone that morning.
Afraid I can’t help you, he told Spillane. I never took anything.
The next morning, Kalibre found the khaki army sock in the bottom of his bedroom closet that held the uranium-238 souvenir ashtray. He shoved it into his pocket and then walked the six short blocks to the East River. When he hurled the sock into the swift moving water, he felt as if he were casting off all his secrets, sinking them to the bottom of a deep gray sea.
But precisely a week later, David Greenglass was jolted from his sleep by a persistent knocking. He rose from his bed, abruptly aware that good news was never delivered at daybreak by someone drumming on the front door. An all too familiar sickening feeling swiftly rose from his stomach. He opened the door to find his control—his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.
It wasn’t tradecraft that led to their decision to talk outdoors. They had no reason to suspect the apartment was bugged. It was just that neither of them wanted Ruth, David’s wife and Liberal’s sister-in-law, to overhear their conversation.
They headed up Sheriff Street toward Hamilton Fish Park. Rosenberg asked if his agent had seen the story in yesterday’s newspaper about the arrest in London of Klaus Fuchs.
Kalibre nodded, but he remained puzzled. The enemy’s success was a loss for the cause, but how did this specifically affect his world? Why the early-morning urgency?
“This guy Fuchs,” Rosenberg
explained, all his usual steadiness gone, “is the man who was contacted in this country by Dave.”
Now Greenglass understood. Dave was the code name the courier, Harry Gold, had used when he had made the pickup from him in Albuquerque. Greenglass’s equilibrium started to teeter. He could see his future unfolding: Fuchs leading the FBI to Gold, and Gold leading the agents straight to him.
“Now you will have to leave,” Liberal ordered.
FROM THE SOLITUDE OF HIS lonely desk in the British Section in the Center, Sasha knew it was time not just for Kalibre to run, but for the entire network to escape. He wanted to reach out to them, to send the message that they must save themselves, but he no longer had the authority. A professional, he remained bound by the inflexible hierarchy of his trade. All he could do was hope his American agents, the network he had run, understood there would be no shame in their flight, just as he had not been dishonored by his own departure from London. For those who had crossed into the secret world, survival meant always staying one shrewd step ahead of the opposition.
But what a network it had been, he recalled with a proprietary flush of pride. Even his boss in New York, the severe Kvasnikov, had been unable to conceal his excitement, literally jumping to his feet, after Sasha had announced that Liberal had a soldier brother-in-law who had been deployed to Los Alamos. It was the sort of stroke of luck, he had said, that confirmed the rightness of all they were doing in America. Unless it was, Kvasnikov worried with his next breath, too good to be true.
But Liberal had vouched for this new recruit. “I’ll give my right hand to be chopped off if he lets us down,” he’d vowed. And his imprimatur carried the confirming authority of his own large operational successes. Just weeks earlier, two days before Christmas, 1944, at a Horn & Hardart cafeteria on West Thirty-Eighth Street, Liberal had brought a big carton for Sasha. “Your present,” the spy told his handler. “Careful, it’s pretty heavy.”