Bombshell : the secret story of America's unknown atomic spy conspiracy

In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalist Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America's top atomic secrets to Stalin. At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, a fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades. Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother's radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the hydrogen bomb. We meet Hall's partners in espionage; his Harvard roommate Saville Sax, who received Hall's messages in a code based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Morris and Lona Cohen, New York Communists who formed the core of the atomic espionage conspiracy; Yuri Sokolov, officially the Soviet Union's U.N. Mission press chief, unofficially a spy handler for Moscow Centre; Colonel Rudolf Abel, to his friends an artist-photographer, to his agents their "illegal" controller; and Anta and Aden, two as-yet-unidentified American atomic scientists brought into the Soviet network by Hall. Bombshell also tells the story of the U.S. Army code breakers and FBI sleuths who, in a thrilling game of cat and mouse, race to catch the unknown spy before it is too late. Drawing on previously classified documents, undercover sources, and years of research in Russia, England, and the United States, Bombshell reads like a classic spy novel, full of secret meetings, coded messages, and daring escapes. But it is much more than a terrifically exciting tale of conspiracy and subterfuge; Bombshell is a piece of historical detective work, revealing a spy network in detail.