The initial crisis with the United States occurred over Iran. Prior to the First World War, czarist Russia and Britain had divided Iran between them, with the Russians exercising a sphere of dominance over the north and the British over the south because of the Royal Navy"s interest in the huge oil reserves there. A pro forma Iranian government continued to exist in Tehran under the enfeebled Qajar dynasty. The Iranian soldier who replaced the Qajars and declared himself shah in the interwar period, Reza Pahlevi, was a modernist and reformer in his domestic policy, but pro-German in foreign policy. In the wake of Hitler"s Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union had therefore invaded the country to establish a land line of supply to Russia, similarly dividing it north and south. Both nations were supposed to withdraw their troops by March 2, 1946, and turn the country over to a new Iranian government, but Stalin, in the hope of regaining the czarist position, gave every sign of hanging on. He sponsored a separatist regime of Iranian Azerbaijanis, the Turkic people who inhabit the north, and protected it with the Soviet occupation troops.
Oil was the prize. The Soviets a.s.sumed that, since Iranian Azerbaijan lies just below Soviet Azerbaijan with its ever-flowing fields at Baku, the Iranian region must hold plentiful resources as well. The United States also had its eye on Iranian oil concessions for American companies. Forrestal and others were worried that the United States was consuming its own reserves with sufficient rapidity that it would become dependent on imported oil in the not distant future. Truman saw Stalin"s northern Iran ploy as part of a far bigger scheme of expansion. He feared that if Soviet forces remained permanently entrenched in the north, the Soviets would soon take over the entire country and then threaten the even richer oil reserves the United States coveted in neighboring Saudi Arabia, where the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) had held the concession since 1933. The oil motive was never mentioned publicly during the crisis, however. Nor was the influence Washington"s London ally continued to exercise in southern Iran through the large, British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Instead, the administration hammered away at Soviet "aggression," and insisted on a full airing in the Security Council of the just established United Nations. The crisis became so heated on the American side that at one point Truman told Averell Harriman, who had returned from his wartime tenure as amba.s.sador in Moscow, that "this may lead to war." A resentful Stalin backed down, withdrew his troops in the spring of 1946, and the separatist regime in Iranian Azerbaijan collapsed.
The Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, were next. The lengthy pa.s.sage of the Dardanelles from the Mediterranean into the diminutive Sea of Marmara and the exit from the Marmara into the Black Sea through the short strait of the Bosporus at Istanbul had been an irritant and source of vulnerability for Russia far back into czarist times. The British and French expedition that had laid siege to and subsequently captured the Russian Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea during the Crimean War of 185356 had gained entry through the Straits. During the First World War, when Turkey had been allied with Germany, German battleships had used the Straits for raiding forays into the Black Sea. During the Second World War, Turkey had officially been neutral, but had followed its traditional anti-Russian and pro-German proclivity and again allowed the German navy to sail freely through the Straits, this time to inflict considerable damage on the Soviet Union. The issue went beyond the vulnerability of the Black Sea area. Stalin, as had the czars, wanted unhindered access to the Mediterranean for his own navy, although at the time it was just a coastal defense force with no plans for a seagoing fleet.
At Yalta in February 1945, Stalin had said it was intolerable for Turkey to have "a hand on Russia"s throat" and denounced the Montreux Convention, the international agreement of 1936 that essentially gave Turkey control over the Straits. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that a revision was in order, but Stalin failed to take advantage of the moment to bargain then and there for precisely what he wanted. Instead, he clumsily instructed Molotov in June 1945 to demand a lease from Turkey for a Soviet base in the Straits and the return of two Turkish districts, once conquered by the czars, that Lenin had ceded to Turkey in 1922 when a weak Soviet Union was seeking tranquillity on its southern borders. (The territorial claim was probably just a bargaining gambit, as Stalin later dropped it.) The Turks refused, but Stalin pressed on, apparently a.s.suming that the a.s.sent he had received from Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta still held in Washington and London. In March 1946, he ma.s.sed a few dozen tanks on the border and in August raised his demand to joint Soviet-Turkish custodianship of the Straits. He was attempting to intimidate the Turks. There is no evidence he intended to actually invade the country.
He does not seem to have understood how profoundly the att.i.tude toward the Soviet Union had changed in Washington and thus the significance of what he was inadvertently provoking-the first show of armed force by the United States against Russia. As early as the end of 1945, Truman was convinced that if Stalin was not deterred, he would invade Turkey and seize the Straits and the United States would have to go to war against the Soviet Union. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making," he told Jimmie Byrnes. As the crisis worsened into August 1946, with the Americans urging the Turks to defy Stalin, Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, convened a study group with the military leadership to recommend a course of action to the president.
The group"s report was presented to Truman in an August 15 meeting at the White House. The finding was the first statement of the domino theory that was to so govern and oversimplify and distort American thinking during the Cold War. If Stalin acquired joint control of the Straits, Soviet control of Turkey would inevitably follow. It would then "be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prevent the Soviet Union from obtaining control over Greece and over the whole Near and Middle East." The recommendation was to send a naval task force to the Dardanelles as a display of American resolve to protect Turkey. Forrestal had a.s.sembled a force of five destroyers, two cruisers, the new aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the battleship USS Missouri Missouri, on which, just one year before, the representatives of a defeated j.a.pan had signed the doc.u.ments of unconditional surrender. Dwight Eisenhower, then chief of staff of the Army, asked Acheson in a whisper if the president understood that the course they were recommending could lead to war. Acheson repeated the question to Truman. The president took a large map of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean from his desk drawer and asked those present to gather around him. Spreading out the map, he explained precisely why the falling dominoes finding of the study group was correct. The naval task force, led by the majestic Missouri Missouri with her sixteen-inch guns, was dispatched to the Dardanelles, and Stalin, still more resentful, again backed down. with her sixteen-inch guns, was dispatched to the Dardanelles, and Stalin, still more resentful, again backed down.
CONTAINING THE MENACE.
The Turkish crisis was the watershed. Having summoned up the nerve for confrontation once, it was much easier on the second occasion. The British precipitated the next crisis and a policy consensus that had been gradually taking shape in Washington. Under a tacit division of tasks, Britain was supposed to watch over its traditional sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Virtually bankrupt, the London government suddenly informed the U.S. administration on February 21, 1947, that it was withdrawing from Greece because it could no longer afford to prop up the right-wing government in Athens that was battling Communist-led guerrillas in a civil war. The British also warned that they would be unable to supply the funds Turkey needed for economic and military a.s.sistance to b.u.t.tress itself against the Soviet Union. The response of Dean Acheson, his new superior, General George C. Marshall, now secretary of state, and the president was that the United States would obviously have to step into Britain"s place. At a meeting of the congressional leadership, which Truman convened to persuade them to vote the hundreds of millions of dollars he would need, Marshall gave a rather bland presentation that failed to arouse any enthusiasm. With the permission of the general, Acheson stood up to speak.
At fifty-three years of age, Dean Gooderham Acheson, who was to exercise a commanding influence on American foreign policy in the postwar years, was a handsome, commanding figure. His broad-shouldered, six-foot, two-inch frame was elegant in the three-piece suits he favored. His intense eyes were set off by bushy brows and complemented by an equally bushy but always impeccably trimmed mustache turned up at the corners in the fashion of a British officer of the nineteenth century. He was an American statesman and he was also the Anglophile he looked. His father, the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, was of Scottish and Irish descent and had immigrated to Canada and been educated there at a time when English Canada prided itself on being part of the British Empire. His mother, of similar background, had been shipped off as a girl to be educated in England. At the age of twelve, Acheson had been sent from the family"s home in Middletown, Connecticut, to the Groton School when the place was a conscious replica of an English boys school. (Soph.o.m.ore year, for example, was not soph.o.m.ore year. It was "the fourth form.") To his credit, Acheson, an outspoken, free-spirited man, had rebelled against the rigid discipline of the school, yet more of Groton had probably rubbed off on him than he was aware. He had frittered away his four undergraduate years at Yale as a campus socialite, getting by with Cs (called "gentleman"s grades" in those years), but then the challenge of the law had turned on the engine of his quick and agile mind at Harvard Law School. He had become a protege of that superlative jurist Felix Frankfurter, then teaching at Harvard, and upon graduation Frankfurter had arranged for him to go to Washington and clerk for another extraordinary jurist with whom Frankfurter was to serve on the Supreme Court, Justice Louis Brandeis.
With the First World War and the growing importance of the federal government, Washington was slowly metamorphosing from a town into a city, and so Acheson had stayed. A highly successful career as an appellate attorney and the prosperity of early partnership in a leading Washington firm followed. Neither was enough for him. Groton had held out an ideal to its boys, public service, an ideal that also happens to attract the kind of man who is drawn by power, who will forsake money and much else for the opportunity to wield authority and take satisfaction from the accomplishments that go with it. In 1941 Acheson had, at the instigation of Franklin Roosevelt, become a.s.sistant secretary of state for economic affairs, performing adroitly in helping to create the International Monetary Fund at the Bretton Woods monetary conference of 1944, and then accepted the undersecretaryship of the State Department at the behest of Truman and Byrnes on the death of Roosevelt. His influence had increased after George Marshall had taken over from Byrnes because Marshall, in an adaption of the military line of authority, had insisted that Acheson act as his combined chief of staff and deputy.
A man of no little arrogance, Acheson considered himself highly sophisticated in foreign affairs. Others, including the congressional leaders who were his audience on this fateful day in early 1947, thought the same. This was true where Europe was concerned, but once Acheson got out of Europe, and particularly where Communism and the Soviet Union were involved, he was an intellectual primitive.
At this meeting of the congressional leadership, he was the primitive who flashed fear to these legislators, partly as the shrewd lawyer"s tactic to convince, but also because he believed what he was saying. Over the past eighteen months, he said, Soviet pressure on Iran, the Turkish Straits, and now northern Greece, where the guerrillas were strongest, had brought Moscow to the point where it might break through and penetrate three continents. If Greece fell, "like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties." Not since Rome and Carthage had the world been so polarized between two powers, Acheson said. This was not a matter of picking up England"s debts, or of being kind to Greece and Turkey. It was the fortifying of free peoples against Communist aggression and thus the safeguarding of America"s own security.
(Truman, Marshall, Acheson, the congressional leaders at the meeting, and everyone else in Washington had no way of knowing that Stalin was not backing the Communist-led guerrillas in Greece. In 1944, in a cynical agreement with Churchill dividing up Eastern Europe, he had promised Britain a free hand in Greece because he did not regard the Greek Communist cause of sufficient importance to Soviet interests to warrant the trouble with his former allies that was now, in fact, being aroused. t.i.to, the Yugoslav leader, was sustaining the Greek guerrillas in defiance of Stalin because he did not want a right-wing Greece on his southern border. He was later to change his mind and abandon them to defeat. The dispute was the first in an increasingly bitter process of estrangement between t.i.to and Stalin that led to their open break in 1948.) After a long silence that followed Acheson"s exhortation, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, told the president that if Truman spoke like this to Congress and the country, the House and Senate would vote him the money. Truman did so in a dramatic, if less hyperbolical, speech, drafted by Acheson, to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947. He asked for, and got, $300 million in military and economic aid for Greece (a military advisory mission was to be sent to reform and reequip the Greek army and direct it in a counterguerrilla campaign) and $100 million for Turkey. The president summed up his speech with a call to action that was henceforth to be known as the Truman Doctrine. "I believe," he said, "that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." There was no need for him to define who these armed minorities and outside pressures were. What was significant about the statement was its universal application. The president"s pledge was not confined to Greece and Turkey. He was declaring that the United States would come to the aid of any nation, anywhere, that was threatened by Communism.
What Truman and Acheson and others in the American leadership who thought like them were doing was laying down the moral and intellectual foundation for a new American world system. Acheson reflected their thoughts (and his ego) in the t.i.tle of his memoirs, Present at the Creation Present at the Creation, and in its dedication, "To Harry S. Truman, "The captain with the mighty heart."" The appeas.e.m.e.nt policy of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who had, with the a.s.sent of the French, delivered Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich in 1938, was always in the back of their minds. Now that it was their turn to lead, they were not, like the Europeans, going to lose the peace gained by their victory over n.a.z.i Germany and Imperial j.a.pan through similarly weak behavior toward Stalin and the forces of "International Communism."
Acheson had in his cultural heritage the stabilizing model of the British Empire when the Royal Navy had dominated the seas and "Pax Britannica" had ruled nearly a quarter of the earth"s landma.s.s and peoples. The "Pax Americana" that he and Truman and their a.s.sociates intended to create was not, however, going to be an exploitative system akin to British and European colonialism. Outright colonies were unacceptable to the American political conscience. The one formal colony the United States had possessed, the Philippines, wrested from Spain at the turn of the twentieth century, had been given its independence in 1945. What the United States sought were surrogate governments friendly to American power, free to run their internal affairs as they wished as long as they agreed with Washington in matters of foreign policy. The goal was to contain Communism worldwide by forming as many non-Communist countries as could be persuaded into a system of nations protected by American military might and nourished by American economic and technological prowess.
With a policy consensus reached, the pace quickened. The winter of 194647 was a grim season in Europe, a postwar nadir. The economies of Britain, France, and Italy were crippled by inflation, strikes, and worn-out manufacturing equipment. The German population was barely surviving on foodstuffs shipped in by Britain and the United States. To make matters worse, the winter was one of the coldest on record, consuming supplies of coal and power. George Marshall went to Moscow in March 1947 for another meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, the venue that had originally been created to negotiate a postwar settlement. The conference quickly stymied over the ever-present and never resolved issue of German reparations to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta that the Germans should be forced to pay $10 billion in reparations for the ruination they had caused in Russia. The British had always been opposed because they a.s.sumed that a bricks-and-cinders Germany would never be able to meet the burden and that it would be shifted to them to keep the Germans from starving. The American position also gradually changed to one of opposition after Truman inherited the presidency. By 1947, no matter how persistently Molotov might read off the list of devastated Russian towns and cities, no one in Washington or London wanted to do anything to strengthen the Soviet Union.
When Marshall went to see Stalin shortly before returning home, he noticed how markedly the Soviet dictator had aged-he seemed to have shrunk in his clothes. Stalin said there was no reason to give up trying to resolve such issues as reparations. Difficult matters required time and patience. The evidence indicates that Stalin meant what he was saying, that he hoped to hang on and one day obtain the reparations. Marshall, however, interpreted Stalin"s admonition for patience as a ruse. While the United States patiently temporized, conditions in Western Europe might deteriorate to the point where a miserable and disillusioned electorate would vote the local Communist parties, particularly large in France and Italy, into power. And whether or not Stalin was attempting to gull him, Marshall was probably correct in his judgment of where Western Europe was headed. On the way back to Washington, he decided that something drastic had to be done. Acheson had been thinking along the same lines.
That something was the stroke of genius and statesmanship that became known as the Marshall Plan. The United States proposed to donate billions of dollars, $13 billion in all as it turned out, to rebuild completely the economies of Europe and create an environment in which capitalism would thrive. Marshall announced the plan in a speech at the Harvard University commencement on June 5, 1947. To appear evenhanded, he invited all European nations to partic.i.p.ate, implicitly including the Soviet Union. He and others in the administration were reasonably certain that Stalin would refuse the offer, because he would reject permitting American engineers and other specialists to move freely about the Soviet Union supervising the projects to make certain the aid was being properly utilized.
Stalin reacted with extreme alarm. He saw the plan as a declaration of economic warfare to undermine his East European security corridor. The command economy he had fashioned was useless in these circ.u.mstances. There was no way he could gather sufficient resources to compete with reconstruction on an American scale. His fear for his empire was confirmed when the coalition government in Czechoslovakia, dominated by the big Communist Party under Klement Gottwald, the prime minister, decided that it would take part. The Poles under Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Party general secretary, were willing to join as well. Gomulka was attempting to navigate an independent course, a "Polish way to socialism." This would entail no collectivization of agriculture and freedom for small entrepreneurs to continue to do business. He also needed American largesse to rebuild his wrecked country. (Eighty percent of Warsaw was still in ruins in 1947 and 30,000 Jewish corpses awaited proper burial under the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto.) Gomulka quickly backed off at Stalin"s displeasure, but the Czechs had already announced that they would accept. Stalin summoned Gottwald and Jan Masaryk, the non-Communist foreign minister and son of Thomas Masaryk, the princ.i.p.al founder and first president of the Czechoslovak republic, to the Kremlin and angrily ordered them to reverse course publicly and renounce partic.i.p.ation.
The Marshall Plan was a colossal success in Western Europe, an act of generosity, if also self-interest, that was without precedent in history. Entire factories were shipped over from the United States and rea.s.sembled in place. The price was to divide Europe into two hostile blocs. The "Iron Curtain" that Winston Churchill had first denounced in his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in early 1946 was now truly rung down by Stalin all along the perimeter of Eastern Europe. As he aged, the Soviet dictator seemed to grow more paranoid. The remnants of the coalition regimes he had permitted in Eastern Europe as facades to please his former wartime allies were swept away. Beria"s secret police terrorized non-Communist politicians. Any Communist figures in Eastern Europe suspected of deviating from the Moscow line were also eliminated as Stalin"s minions arrested, tortured, shot, and hanged. Gomulka was to be purged for the sin of "national Communism," but he escaped with his life. The curtain also came down on the precarious neutrality that the non-Communist Czech political groups had been attempting to preserve because of the exposed geographical position of their country, which shared borders with the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany. Stalin encouraged the Czech Communists to take full power in February 1948. The takeover was facilitated by the Czech Party"s wide public support. The Czech people remembered how Britain and France had delivered them to Hitler at Munich and tended to look to the Soviet Union as a protector. That did not spare Czechoslovakia from Stalin"s terror. Jan Masaryk was not as fortunate as Gomulka. The story put out by the regime was that he committed suicide by leaping from a small bathroom window in his living quarters in an upper story of the Foreign Ministry. The probable truth is that he was first murdered and then thrown out the window. In 1952, Czechoslovakia was also to experience one of the worst of the show trials Stalin had a penchant for arranging, with their macabre stagecraft of preposterous accusations of spying and plotting and false confessions elicited by torture. Eleven leading Czech Communists, including the Party"s general secretary, Rudolf Slansky, were among those condemned and hanged.
NEITHER RAIN, NOR SNOW, NOR SLEET, NOR FOG.
After so many fruitless negotiating sessions over reparations, the administration was now prepared to settle the "German question" by merging the American, British, and French occupation zones into a separate West German state. (The city of Berlin, 110 miles inside the Soviet occupation zone, was separately divided into American, British, French, and Russian sectors.) This would unilaterally abrogate the agreement with the Soviet Union that postwar Germany would be governed by all the victorious powers under general policy direction set by a four-power Control Council. As early as 1946, General Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, had persuaded his British counterpart to merge the economies of their two zones into an ent.i.ty called Bizonia, but it had been difficult to proceed further toward a unified West German state. The French had been the princ.i.p.al obstacle, as memories of the n.a.z.i conquest were still so raw and fear of German revanchism rife. Other West European countries that had listened to the crunch of German jackboots had also made known their objections. The Marshall Plan helped to remove this opposition. Washington was able to persuade the French and other holdouts that the danger of German resurgence could be controlled by integrating the new German state into the larger European economy. The administration also a.s.suaged French fears by promising to keep U.S. troops in Germany indefinitely as protection against both a renewed threat of German militarism and an aggressive Soviet Union.
At the beginning of June 1948, a conference in London agreed that a German const.i.tuent a.s.sembly would convene in Bonn that September. The a.s.sembly"s task would be to write a const.i.tution for a West German state that would be composed of the American, British, and French occupation zones. To begin lifting the Germans out of their economic misery, the process was to start with a currency reform in the western zones-the subst.i.tution of a new deutsche mark for the old reichsmark, which inflation had rendered virtually worthless. Clay rebuffed or ignored inquiries and objections to this and other moves by Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, his Soviet counterpart and Moscow"s representative on the Control Council. At Clay"s direction, the new currency had already been printed and stored for distribution by the end of 1947.
On June 18, 1948, the American, British, and French authorities announced the currency reform, five days later extending it to their sectors in West Berlin. Stalin was now being confronted with the emergence of a revived German state, in his mind a precursor to the rearmed Germany that he dreaded. On June 24, 1948, the day after the extension of the currency reform to the western sectors of the city, the Soviets, citing vague technical problems, blockaded all road and rail lines into Berlin across the 110 miles of their occupation zone. Since the Luftwaffe had tried and failed to adequately supply the 270,000 men of the German Sixth Army inside the Stalingrad pocket, Stalin was convinced that, once the rigors of the German winter began, the Americans would never be able to fly in enough food and coal to keep the approximately 2 million people in the western sectors of the city from starving and freezing. Stalin believed he could use land access to Berlin as a bargaining lever to block the creation of the new West German state. Clay wanted to call what he regarded as a Soviet bluff and force open the land routes with an armed convoy. Truman forbade it for fear of precipitating a war. There had never been any written agreement on what const.i.tuted the land lines to Berlin through the Soviet zone. They had been established by custom. But there were specific written accords on the three air corridors into the city.
Clay turned to Curtis LeMay, that Cromwellian wielder of bombers who had leveled j.a.pan"s cities, now a lieutenant general commanding the U.S. Air Force in Europe, to accomplish what no air force had ever done before. LeMay had antic.i.p.ated a blockade and when the Soviets closed the land routes on June 24 was ready to begin flying eighty tons of supplies a day into Berlin with the workhorse transports of the Second World War, the C-47 Dakotas that comprised his troop carrier squadrons. Meanwhile, the Teletypes clattered out orders and the newly independent U.S. Air Force and the other services mobilized to back him. The Tactical Air Command and the Military Air Transport Service scoured the United States and Alaska and the Caribbean for more C-47s and the newer four-engine C-54s, which could carry three times as much cargo. The Air Force"s airlift specialist, Major General William H. Tunner, who had supervised the flying of supplies from India over the Himalayas to the Chinese Nationalists during the Second World War-over the Hump, as the pilots had named those forbidding mountains-was ordered to Germany to set up a special task force headquarters and conquer this new challenge. The British joined in and LeMay persuaded them to integrate their transports under Tunner, who acquired a Royal Air Force deputy.
Navy tankers ferried across the Atlantic the many additional tons of aviation gasoline required. The trucks of the Army Transportation Corps formed a relay hauling sustenance for Berlin from the ships unloading at Bremerhaven to Wiesbaden and Rhein-Main and the other airfields that were the loading points. The Army Corps of Engineers improved and maintained the runways at the two existing airfields in Berlin, Tempelhof in the American sector and Gatow in the British one, and built a third at Tegel in the French zone. To keep the planes in the air, flocks of military and civilian mechanics were mustered for around-the-clock maintenance depots in Germany and England. Because men tire before aircraft do, relief pilots and crews were dispatched to Germany so that the planes could be flown in consecutive shifts. Tunner soon had a stream of transports moving back and forth along the air corridors to Berlin twenty-four hours a day, landing, unloading, taking off to return to an airfield in the west, and then loading once more for Berlin. By December, the airlift was supplying 4,500 tons a day, 500 tons more than the city"s minimum requirement, the biggest portion bulky coal for heating, and the tonnage continued to rise despite the closing in of the German winter.
As Schriever remarked, it was Hap Arnold"s technological vision that provided the edge to defeat the blockade. The all-weather air force he had told Bennie he wanted in 1938 had finally come to pa.s.s. Arnold had encouraged advances in ground control radar during the Second World War and by the end of the conflict the system had reached near perfection. Whether in day or at night, whether in snow or sleet or rain, the controllers at the Berlin air traffic center would pick out a plane on their radar when it reached the point where it was supposed to start its descent and then talk the pilot down a glide path, giving him heading, airspeed, and rate of descent until the aircraft finally broke out over the illuminated runway. Only fog so dense that it reduced visibility to close to zero forced the cancellation of flights. Throughout that winter the controllers brought in a transport every three minutes. The pilot had one opportunity to land. If he or his co-pilot somehow m.u.f.fed the controller"s instructions and he had to climb back up again, he returned to his airfield of origin and reentered the stream of aircraft once more. Tunner permitted no interruptions. The airlift"s accident rate averaged less than half that of the Air Force as a whole, but besting the blockade nevertheless cost lives-a total of thirty pilots and crew members and one civilian in twelve crashes.
Soviet aircraft occasionally appeared in the designated corridors, but there was no serious hara.s.sment of the transports, because Stalin apparently decided this would be interpreted as an act of war. Truman reinforced that impression with a show of force by sending sixty B-29s to England in July 1948 and more B-29s and a group of the Air Force"s first operational jet fighters, the F-80, to Germany. The bombers were a bluff. Although by now the U.S. nuclear a.r.s.enal had grown to about fifty atomic bombs of the Nagasaki type, none of these B-29s was equipped to carry them.
The Berlin Airlift was high drama, an extraordinary achievement that riveted the attention of the West. There was no need to speak of the courage and dedication of the pilots and aircrews. The news films of the transports coming in over the rooftops in the falling snow, as these men held steady course for a runway they could not see, spoke for them. Then there were the grateful Berliners, men and women, unloading the sacks of coal and crates of foodstuffs alongside the American and British and French soldiers who had not long ago been their enemies, and the films of the children cheering and waving at the pilots who tossed them candy. It was heady and emotional and more powerful anti-Communist propaganda than anyone in Washington could have imagined. The blockade and the airlift turned many who were undecided among the peoples of Europe against the Soviets and propelled the nations of Western Europe and Britain and the United States toward closer cooperation. The Russians were laying siege to a city and attempting to conquer it with the weapons of starvation and cold, but the American and British airmen were defeating them by keeping the people of this beleaguered Berlin warm and well fed. As Lucius Clay observed, the blockade was "the stupidest move the Russians could make."
By the spring of 1949, Stalin understood how badly he had miscalculated and was desperate to end the blockade under terms that would not be humiliating, but the administration was in no hurry. With an airlift working this well, there was no need for ground transportation. During one twenty-four-hour period in April, the controllers set a record by bringing 1,398 flights into Berlin, about a landing a minute. The blockade was finally lifted in mid-May 1949 and the land routes reopened. The quid pro quo was an agreement to convene in Paris yet another meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. The Soviets attempted to negotiate a return to the original four-power governing system and abort the formation of the new West German state. It was fruitless. Stalin had lost. That same month, May 1949, the const.i.tution of the Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital at Bonn, was adopted.
STALIN GETS HIS BOMB.
Then Joseph Stalin got his atomic bomb, although Kurchatov and Khariton and their colleagues were not able to hold to their two-and-a-half-year timetable. Problems with the plutonium production reactor delayed the test for eighteen months. Nevertheless, they moved with a speed unexpected in Washington. At 6:00 A.M. A.M. on August 29, 1949, four years and nine days from the date Stalin had signed the order setting the postwar nuclear arms race in motion, they exploded a device identical to the Nagasaki bomb at a spot on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia northwest of the city of Semipalatinsk. The device was subsequently code-named Joe One by American intelligence. Beria, who came to observe this Soviet version of Trinity, and personally report to Stalin on the phone line to Moscow, embraced Kurchatov and Khariton and kissed them on the forehead as the mushroom cloud rose. There were indications later that Beria had been worried about his own fate if the enterprise had been a fiasco. on August 29, 1949, four years and nine days from the date Stalin had signed the order setting the postwar nuclear arms race in motion, they exploded a device identical to the Nagasaki bomb at a spot on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia northwest of the city of Semipalatinsk. The device was subsequently code-named Joe One by American intelligence. Beria, who came to observe this Soviet version of Trinity, and personally report to Stalin on the phone line to Moscow, embraced Kurchatov and Khariton and kissed them on the forehead as the mushroom cloud rose. There were indications later that Beria had been worried about his own fate if the enterprise had been a fiasco.
At the end of October, Stalin signed a secret decree, drawn up by Beria, pa.s.sing out the rewards. In deciding who received what, Beria is reported to have followed the principle that the highest awards went to those who would have been shot first in case of a fizzle. David Holloway in Stalin and the Bomb Stalin and the Bomb says that the story may have been apocryphal, but that it accurately reflected the feeling of the scientists involved. Kurchatov and Khariton received the highest honors possible, Hero of Socialist Labor and Stalin Prize Laureate of the first degree; large amounts of cash; ZIS-110 cars, the best the Soviet automotive industry was making at the time; dachas; free education for their children in any establishment; and free public transportation for themselves and their families. In an enticement of what the future could hold, Stalin had already, back in 1946 when tens of thousands of rural families were living in dugouts under the rubble of their homes, built a fancy eight-room house for Kurchatov at his laboratory near Moscow, importing Italian craftsmen to furnish it with parquet floors, marble fireplaces, and elegant wood paneling. A number of the other leading physicists, engineers, and managers were similarly rewarded with the honor of Hero of Socialist Labor and with money, cars, and sundry other privileges in lesser degrees. Khariton was eventually also to be awarded his own private railway car. says that the story may have been apocryphal, but that it accurately reflected the feeling of the scientists involved. Kurchatov and Khariton received the highest honors possible, Hero of Socialist Labor and Stalin Prize Laureate of the first degree; large amounts of cash; ZIS-110 cars, the best the Soviet automotive industry was making at the time; dachas; free education for their children in any establishment; and free public transportation for themselves and their families. In an enticement of what the future could hold, Stalin had already, back in 1946 when tens of thousands of rural families were living in dugouts under the rubble of their homes, built a fancy eight-room house for Kurchatov at his laboratory near Moscow, importing Italian craftsmen to furnish it with parquet floors, marble fireplaces, and elegant wood paneling. A number of the other leading physicists, engineers, and managers were similarly rewarded with the honor of Hero of Socialist Labor and with money, cars, and sundry other privileges in lesser degrees. Khariton was eventually also to be awarded his own private railway car.
In time, through the remaining years of Stalin and during the rule of his successors, Arzamas-16, its sister sites in the atomic industry network, and research centers for other branches of the Soviet military-industrial complex were to grow into self-contained cities, with their own schools, concert halls, hospitals, and, by Russian standards, first-cla.s.s shops for food and clothing. Although officially secret, they became known as the "white archipelago," and their privileged inhabitants, the scientists and engineers and their families, were referred to as chocolatniki chocolatniki by less fortunate Russians. Already by 1953, one of Stalin"s henchmen in the Politburo, Lazar Kaganovich, complained that the atomic cities had become like "health resorts." by less fortunate Russians. Already by 1953, one of Stalin"s henchmen in the Politburo, Lazar Kaganovich, complained that the atomic cities had become like "health resorts."
It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that these Soviet physicists lent their ingenuity to the building of the bomb because a life of privilege was held out before them if they succeeded. On the contrary, their motives were complicated. Imprisonment in a labor camp or execution were ever-present threats in Stalin"s Russia for failure to succeed or unwillingness to cooperate. On the other hand, David Holloway discovered in questioning them that they were also motivated forcefully by love of country, by the defense of their motherland. Many of them might not have liked Stalin"s system, but they could not change it. The Soviet Union was their country, the only one they had, a conviction ingrained all the more keenly by the war of survival, the Great Patriotic War, as Russians called it, that they had just emerged from with n.a.z.i Germany. The atomic bomb project was, in an emotional way, a continuation of that primeval conflict. Andrei Sakharov was to become a world-renowned figure and to win the n.o.bel Peace Prize in 1975 because of the persecution and internal exile he suffered in the cause of promoting civil liberties in the Soviet Union. In 1948, however, he was an imaginative twenty-seven-year-old physicist beginning the research that led to Russia"s hydrogen bomb. "I regarded myself as a soldier in this new scientific war," he subsequently remarked of those years. "We ... believed that our work was absolutely necessary as a means of achieving a balance in the world."
Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall did not hand Stalin"s Russia the bomb, as most of the American public thought that the Rosenbergs and David Greengla.s.s and other Soviet spies unknown and unnamed had done. Kurchatov and those with whom he chose to collaborate were notably competent physicists who, given time, would have created a bomb on their own without any intelligence input. In 1951, they detonated a much improved version of the Nagasaki bomb that weighed only half as much and yielded twice the force, forty kilotons, with a mixed core of U-235 and plutonium. The real secret of the atomic bomb was whether such a h.e.l.lish device could be devised at all. That secret was exposed in the dawn of the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with Trinity and then dramatized to the world when its monstrous power was unleashed on the inhabitants of Hiroshima.
What Fuchs and Hall did accomplish was to save the Soviet Union time, probably a year to two years, in the race to achieve strategic parity with the United States after the explosion of Trinity a bit more than four years prior to Joe One. Ironically, Stalin initially kept the achievement of his physicists secret for some unknown reason and it was Truman who announced that the Soviets had the bomb. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1946 to take charge of all things nuclear, had not been unwatchful under its first chairman, David Lilienthal, despite the illusions at the top. It had persuaded the Air Force to cooperate in the Long Range Detection Program, which involved high-alt.i.tude flights off the Soviet Union by aircraft equipped with filters to capture nuclear residue from the air. A B-29 flying at 18,000 feet over the North Pacific on September 3, 1949, collected a slightly higher count of radioactive material than would normally be found in the air. Further checks as the high-level winds continued in their stream over the United States, the Atlantic, and Europe confirmed that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb in the last few days of August.
The Soviet Union still lacked adequate means of striking the United States with atomic bombs. Even the hundreds of copies of the B-29, called Tu-4s (more than a thousand were to be built), that the Soviet aircraft industry was turning out on Stalin"s instructions lacked the range to reach most American cities and as propeller-driven aircraft were also vulnerable to the new American jet fighters in daylight bombing.
The practicalities of how the Soviet Union might drop an atomic bomb on the United States did not matter for the moment. The broken monopoly had been replaced by a balance of terror; the threat of nuclear devastation thrust into the minds and emotions of the American public and its leaders. The Berlin Blockade, while a defensive move by Stalin, had been interpreted yet again in the United States as evidence of aggressive intent. In Asia, a new Communist danger was rising as the armies of Mao Tse-tung neared their conquest of all of mainland China. Now the news that Russia had the bomb created a tangible sense of danger, a keener sense of insecurity in a nation already suffering from that malady.
The first response was to end the debate that had been going on over whether to build the hydrogen, i.e., thermonuclear, bomb. Truman reacted to his own apprehension and the clamor from the recently independent U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and their allies in Congress by issuing an order on January 31, 1950, to begin developing this weapon, thousands of times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb. It was created and detonated within less than two years, on November 1, 1952.
Niels Bohr and other idealistic physicists who had lobbied to place international controls on atomic weaponry and thereby avoid a nuclear arms race after the Second World War were, it has become clear, scholarly Don Quixotes. All the control plans put forward by the Truman administration, such as the Baruch Plan promoted by the financier Bernard Baruch on the administration"s behalf in the United Nations, preserved an American monopoly, and Stalin would never have settled for second place. To have satisfied Stalin, Truman would have had to share the atomic bomb with him, a political impossibility.
Similarly quixotic was the attempt earlier in 1949 by Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists who had been involved in the Manhattan Project to stop development of the hydrogen bomb on the grounds that it was "in a totally different category from an atomic bomb" and might become a "weapon of genocide" with "extreme dangers to mankind." (They also argued that technical problems stood in the way and higher-yield atomic weapons would serve any military needs, but it is clear that moral objections most concerned them.) As is now known, Kurchatov, undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin and Beria, had organized serious theoretical and design studies for a hydrogen bomb in 1948. By the end of that year, long before they had broken the American atomic monopoly, the Soviets had a basic design for an intermediate hydrogen weapon, Sakharov"s "Layer Cake," which combined fission (atomic) and fusion (thermonuclear) elements. ("Nuclear fission" is the term for the explosive reaction that occurs in an ordinary atomic bomb, while "nuclear fusion" is the term used to describe the vastly more powerful release of energy that occurs when a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, device detonates.) Advanced design and experimental work got under way at Arzamas-16 in 1950, along with the creation of manufacturing facilities to produce the thermonuclear fuel, lithium deuteride, and other materials. The Layer Cake device was detonated at the test site on the Kazakhstan steppes on August 12, 1953, and yielded 400 kilotons, twenty times the power of the Nagasaki bomb. A bit over two years later, on November 22, 1955, just three years after the United States had detonated its first hydrogen bomb, a full-scale Soviet hydrogen weapon was exploded at the same Kazakhstan site. Kurchatov, Sakharov, and other Soviet physicists felt none of the moral qualms of their American counterparts. They saw the development of thermonuclear weapons as a logical second step to keep pace with the United States. Years later in his memoirs, Sakharov was certain that Stalin would not have reciprocated any American restraint in creating the hydrogen bomb. He would have seen it as either a trick not to be fooled by or as stupidity of which he should take advantage.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF DELUSION.
The second response to Stalin"s acquisition of the atomic bomb was a policy rea.s.sessment that was to reinforce, like the domino theory, the oversimplification and distortion of American thinking during the Cold War. Known as NSC-68 after its designation as a National Security Council memorandum, the paper"s patron was Dean Acheson and its princ.i.p.al author was a man in the Acheson mold, Paul Nitze. An Easterner and 1928 graduate of Harvard, Nitze was a clever financier who had made a fortune as an investment banker with the tony New York firm of Dillon Read & Co. at a time when others were reaping bankruptcy. He had first been recruited for government service as a high-level economic administrator during the Second World War by James Forrestal, one of his a.s.sociates at Dillon Read. As he had no need to return to New York and make more money, he decided that he liked the life of a Washington insider and stayed. Nitze was a polished, articulate man with a knack for convincing himself and others that he had knowledge of a subject when he, in fact, had little or none. He also had a talent for sensing and projecting fear of Communism and the Soviet Union, which was to serve him well in a long and distinguished career as a senior Washington official and public figure.
By 1949, George Kennan and Acheson, who had succeeded Marshall as secretary of state, had had a falling out. Kennan had been having second thoughts about the image of a relentlessly militant Soviet Union that he had portrayed in his Long Telegram and was disturbed about the hardening of the att.i.tudes that his famous missive had sanctioned. He had come to believe that Russia did not const.i.tute a military threat to Western Europe. He thought that containment ought to rely on political and economic means rather than a larger military establishment and the increasing militarization of foreign policy that he was seeing. Acheson had in turn come to regard him as naive. "There were times when I felt like a court jester," Kennan said in his memoirs. In January 1950, Acheson replaced him as head of the department"s Policy Planning Staff with Nitze, who was of Acheson"s way of thinking. Nitze, Acheson said in his memoirs, was "a joy to work with because of his clear, incisive mind."
"The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony," Nitze"s policy paper said, "is animated by a new fanatic faith ant.i.thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Russia was "inescapably militant because it possesses and is possessed by a world-wide revolutionary movement" and thus this goal of world conquest was inherent in the "fundamental design of the Kremlin." Its "a.s.sault on free inst.i.tutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free inst.i.tutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere." The United States was being "mortally challenged." The year of maximum danger, Nitze predicted, would be 1954, when the Soviet Union could possess an a.r.s.enal of 200 atomic bombs, sufficient for a surprise attack "of such weight that the United States must have substantially increased ... air, ground and sea strength, atomic capabilities, and air and civil defenses" if it was to survive. The buildup he called for would add about $50 billion to the military budgets that Truman, relying on the U.S. monopoly of the bomb, had been holding to a minimum to keep inflation reined in, just $13 billion in fiscal 1949. Acheson admitted in his memoirs that Nitze had been encouraged to employ scary language in order to spook the administration into action, but there is no indication in his memoirs or elsewhere that he and others at the top doubted the basic positions stated in the paper. Truman signed off on it and the NSC adopted it as national policy in April 1950. The president postponed its costly military buildup, however, again out of concern for inflation and fear that a Republican-controlled Congress would not approve the additional funds.
The two figures in the administration who did not agree with Nitze"s masterwork were its two specialists on the Soviet Union, Kennan and Chip Bohlen. Both now believed that Stalin was generally guided by caution in his foreign policy calculations and was sometimes just reacting to Western moves. Their dissent was of no consequence. The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. Their ears were attuned to the skirl of a different piper.
The statesmen of the United States were permitting their exaggerated estimate of the military threat from Stalin"s Russia, their preconceived notions of falling dominoes, and a Soviet Union bent on world conquest through an international Communist movement, which it directed, to deprive them of a realistic view of the postwar world they were seeking to manage. The world they created in their minds, and enshrined in dogma through policy p.r.o.nouncements like NSC-68, was a Manichaean place divided into opposing camps of light and darkness. That world was an illusion. To comprehend the real postwar world, one had to understand that while it was bipolar in terms of the two major powers, within the Communist sphere, as within the non-Communist one, there were national leaders with their own agendas who were prepared to act on those agendas regardless of what Moscow or Washington thought. The clue that the Communist sphere was also a complicated world, a world of varying shades of gray rather than black, was the phenomenon of national Communism, which appeared as early as 1948 when t.i.to of Yugoslavia openly broke with Stalin and went his own way. He was regarded as an aberration, not as evidence that there might be other Communist leaders like him, authoritarian and socialist in their domestic politics but independent in foreign policy and thus capable of being weaned from Moscow.
The statesmen of one administration after another, from Truman down through Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, clung to this delusion that they faced an international Communist conspiracy, despite increasingly blatant evidence to the contrary. Acheson departed from the norm in only one sortie in 1949 when he thought he might be able to entice Mao Tse-tung away from Moscow because the Chinese revolutionaries had won their war entirely on their own, without any help from the Red Army. Acheson also tended to regard Mao differently because the United States had wasted so many hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid on the venal regime of the reactionary Chinese dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. The attempt was halfhearted and ended quickly, however, as the right-wing Republicans in Congress brought Acheson under ferocious attack for allegedly "losing China" and Mao turned increasingly anti-American.
Otherwise, the delusion ruled. Years later, after Mao had quarreled openly and bitterly with Stalin"s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and the Chinese and the Russians were close to hostilities in the so-called Sino-Soviet split, American statesmen continued to act as if they faced a Communist monolith. In 1961, as John Kennedy took the United States to war in Vietnam by dispatching military advisers, helicopter companies, and pilots and fighter-bombers to stiffen the regime of Washington"s man in Saigon, the South Vietnamese dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, against the Communist-led guerrillas who were threatening to overthrow him, the U.S. Army security clearance form caught the enduring perspective of American statesmen. The form referred to all the Communist nations as the "Sino-Soviet bloc."
Given these American delusions, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese national leader in Hanoi, had no chance of being recognized in Washington for what he was, an Asian version of t.i.to. Ho, in particular, held a sad belief that American statesmen were perspicacious enough to distinguish between different Communist regimes. In the fall of 1963, when American deaths in Vietnam were still well under 200, he predicted to a Polish diplomat in Hanoi that the United States was too wise and pragmatic a nation to lavish lives and treasure on a war in his country. "Neither you nor I," he said to his Polish visitor, "know the Americans well, but what we do know of them, what we have read and heard about them, suggests that they are more practical and clear-sighted than other capitalist nations. They will not pour their resources into Vietnam endlessly. One day they will take pencil in hand and begin figuring. Once they really begin to a.n.a.lyze our ideas seriously, they will come to the conclusion that it is possible and even worthwhile to live in peace with us." No American leader with the power to decide ever did take pencil in hand and begin figuring. It would finally take the disillusionment of the tragic and unnecessary war and the lives of the 58,229 whose names would be inscribed on the black granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to bring American statesmen up against reality. In retrospect, one wonders why they clung so long to their delusion.
GOOD INTENTIONS GONE AWRY.
The U.S. military code breakers and the FBI did catch up with Theodore Hall and Saville "Savy" Sax after the Soviet codes were finally broken. The Russians had been careless enough to give the real names of both men in the initial cable from the New York rezidentura rezidentura on November 12, 1944, reporting to Moscow Center that they had volunteered to conduct atomic espionage. Subsequent cables had employed code names-Mlad, taken from an old Slavonic adjective meaning "young," for Hall, and Star, an abbreviation of an adjective meaning "old," for Sax-but there were enough identifying details, even in the cables where code names were henceforth used, to pinpoint them. The FBI was alerted after the initial cable was broken in 1950. By mid-March 1951 the agents thought they had developed the case to the point where they might succeed in getting one or both men to snap during separate but simultaneous interrogations. Hall and Sax had been shrewd enough, however, to foresee that such a day might eventually arise and had rehea.r.s.ed what they would say. Over three hours of questioning on March 16, 1951, the agents could break neither. on November 12, 1944, reporting to Moscow Center that they had volunteered to conduct atomic espionage. Subsequent cables had employed code names-Mlad, taken from an old Slavonic adjective meaning "young," for Hall, and Star, an abbreviation of an adjective meaning "old," for Sax-but there were enough identifying details, even in the cables where code names were henceforth used, to pinpoint them. The FBI was alerted after the initial cable was broken in 1950. By mid-March 1951 the agents thought they had developed the case to the point where they might succeed in getting one or both men to snap during separate but simultaneous interrogations. Hall and Sax had been shrewd enough, however, to foresee that such a day might eventually arise and had rehea.r.s.ed what they would say. Over three hours of questioning on March 16, 1951, the agents could break neither.
Nonetheless, while they controlled themselves and displayed no trepidation, the interrogations were terrifying for both men and for the young women they had since married and with whom they had begun families. The nation had been at war in Korea, first with Kim Il Sung"s North Korean army and then with the forces of Communist China"s Mao Tse-tung, since June 1950. The country was in a frenzy of spy fear. Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, turned out to be a Soviet agent. He had been convicted in January 1950 of perjury for denying that he pa.s.sed diplomatic reports to Moscow. (He could not be tried for the espionage itself because the statute of limitations had run out.) In February 1951, the Wisconsin demagogue, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who was about to launch his madcap witch hunt in which innumerable careers and lives would be ruined, waved a sheet of paper during a speech to the Women"s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. He announced that it listed the names of 205 active Communist Party members in the State Department. (It would be years before anyone discovered that the sheet of paper had been blank.) That same month Klaus Fuchs confessed in England to giving the Russians the plans for the Nagasaki bomb. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were on trial for their lives in New York for transmitting a great deal less to the Soviets than Hall had through Sax and Lona Cohen. In April the Rosenbergs would be sentenced to death in the electric chair at New York State"s Sing Sing Prison. The American public was appalled by these revelations. In these years before the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, it was an article of faith for patriotic Americans that the United States was innately good in motive and deed. We had been justified in using the bomb against j.a.pan to shorten the Second World War and save lives and we would never employ it unjustly. We had been safe and humanity had been safe as long as the secret remained with us. Communists were not to be trusted with anything, least of all with the atomic bomb. Giving it to Stalin"s Russia was a monstrous act.
Hall and Sax eluded the hounds. The decoded cables could not be submitted as evidence in court, nor could the FBI agents show them or mention them to Hall or Sax in order to help break them down, because the military cryptologists did not want the Soviets to learn that their code had been compromised. (Moscow already knew. Kim Philby, the mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service, had informed them. He was so highly regarded by his superiors in MI6 that he was considered a candidate to one day become head of the service and in 1949 had been given the extremely sensitive post of liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington.) Although they had enough information for an interrogation, the FBI investigators could not reach the higher threshold of sufficient independently corroborating evidence for a grand jury indictment. And so the case was placed in bureaucratic limbo and then, as the years went by, dropped.
Ted Hall became bored with nuclear physics by the time he was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1950. He decided that biology was more interesting and worthwhile and turned to the new field of biophysics. After nine years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the cancer center in New York, he gained sufficient recognition in the highly specialized field of X-ray microa.n.a.lysis, a technique to detect and measure concentrations of chemicals in human tissue, that he was able to seek and receive an invitation to spend the academic year of 196263 at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England, which had continued to be a home of genius. (Most recently, James Watson and Francis Crick had won a n.o.bel for creating their "double helix" model, the first accurate rendition of a DNA molecule, at the Cavendish in 1953.) The one year turned into twenty-two as Hall and his wife, Joan (she was as intensely left-wing as he was and he had told her everything), and their three daughters settled in at Cambridge and he won international distinction for his work, retiring in 1984 after his research had played itself out. At the request of the FBI, a British counterintelligence officer interrogated him in 1963 in another attempt to crack him, and renewal of his labor permit was held up for a few months. Otherwise, he was left in peace. Nor did anyone ever approach his brother, Ed Hall, the U.S. Air Force rocket engine guru, who held highly secret clearances for his work with Bennie Schriever, including a super-sensitive "Q" clearance that gave Ed access to nuclear weapons designs.
The Halls remained in England after Ted"s retirement, occasionally traveling to the United States for scientific conferences, once even to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico campus where he had pa.s.sed the atomic secrets to Lona Cohen that went back to New York in her Kleenex box. He a.s.sumed that the perilous adventure of his youth would never catch up with him publicly. Then the decoded cables in the Venona doc.u.ments were published in 1995 and 1996 and brought him precisely the notoriety he had most wanted to avoid. (Savy Sax, who went on to be a teacher and psychological counselor in the Midwest, openly boasted of his role in the spying prior to his premature death from a heart attack in 1980. By that time, however, he had become something of an adult hippie, disheveled in his personal habits and given to LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Apparently, no one who heard his stories ever took them seriously enough to tip off the FBI.) In the few years until his death from cancer in November 1999, Ted Hall would never formally admit in writing to