Original subtitles

It was supposed to be

the best kept secret on the planet.

Codename, the Manhattan Project.

(dramatic music)

Its success would ensure the United States'

dominance over its new rival.

The Soviets clearly had ambitions, global ambitions.

Yet from the start, it became

the target of the greatest industrial

spy operation of the 20th century.

(typewriter clacks)

The Soviets put in place, espionage networks

that were unimaginable to the United States.

No secret was safe.

No one could be trusted.

They were willing to die for their cause,

which they did.

Here is the declassified story

of the atomic spies who set the world on edge.

(dramatic music)

Arlington Hall, the home of the future

National Security Agency.

After the end of World War II,

these men and women have a special mission.

To decipher the coded messages

sent by one of their war time allies,

the Soviet Union. (phone rings)

Of course, the United States

and the Soviet Union are allies,

but there's a great deal of mistrust

on both sides, the United States government

knew that the Soviet Union was spying

on the United States, the FBI had begun

several investigations during World War II

of Soviet espionage in America

so the relationship was, on the surface,

friendly, but there was a very strong

layer of suspicion right below it.

The task is enormous.

Agents intercept thousands of undecipherable

telegrams that pass between Moscow

and the Soviet embassies, or consulates,

on American soil.

But in 1946, thanks to a new, brilliant

cryptanalyst named Meredith Gardner,

the team manages to crack a crucial message

that dates back to December 2nd, 1944.

(dramatic music)

The text cites 24 names, names that no one

would imagine appearing in Soviet documents.

What was significant about this list of names

is they were probably the most secret names

in the world at that time, 'cause all the names

were nuclear physicists who were

engaged in the Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project,

supposedly the United States best kept secret.

The program to build the first nuclear bomb.

In Arlington Hall, the discovery

hits the team like a shock wave.

How could the Russians have known

about this top secret program,

eight months before the US dropped

the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

(dramatic music)

After decrypting this telegram,

American counter-intelligence services

launch a large scale investigation

to discover how deeply the Manhattan Project

has been compromised.

And most of all, to flush out the moles who did it.

(crowd cheers and applauds)

(upbeat music)

May 8th, 1945, the end of the Second World War

left Europe exhausted and traumatized

after six years of conflict.

In July, 1945, representatives

of the United States, the United Kingdom

and Soviet Union meet in Potsdam,

to decide the fate of the defeated nations.

Churchill, Truman and Stalin appear

to stand together to rebuild Europe.

But behind closed doors, the seeds

of discord have already begun to sprout.

In global strategic terms, the principal

concern about the Soviet Union was

that the Soviets clearly had ambitions

not only to extend their sphere of influence

from Central and Eastern Europe,

but they had global ambitions.

At an impasse, they divide

the world into two parts, the Soviet block

controlled by the USSR, and the Western block

led by the United States, between them

an impossible iron curtain.

I think the Potsdam conference

was the first major manifestation of the Cold War.

In this delicate and contentious

new arrangement, the Americans,

for the moment, are one step ahead.

Just a few years earlier, in 1938,

the world learned that a German physicist had

discovered nuclear fission and it's tremendous

potential for producing an ultra-powerful bomb.

(bomb rumbles) (dramatic music)

Several countries launched atomic bomb

research programs, but none approached

the scale of the American one.

Codename, the Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project is the project

where the goal is not to do research

on can you make an atomic bomb,

how would you do it, no, the goal

is to make atomic bombs and that requires

hundreds of thousands of people,

billions of dollars, creating essentially

an entirely new industry from scratch.

(explosion rumbles)

More than 30 sites across the USA

and Canada join this colossal endeavor.

Among them, Oak Ridge, on the banks

of the Tennessee River, dedicated

to obtaining Uranium-235.

Hanford, Washington State, assigned

to produce Plutonium-239.

Developing and building the sensitive bomb mechanism

happens in a once-sleepy town called Los Alamos.

(upbeat music)

It was very isolated, but once

the government came and decided this is where

they wanted to have their top secret

scientific research laboratory, it did not appear

on any maps, suddenly it was not allowed

to speak the word Los Alamos, it didn't exist.

There were military police on horseback

who would patrol the perimeter,

there were many restrictions at this time

and perhaps for all time, it was

the greatest secret in America.

In this high security boom town,

dozens of Western scientists gather.

They're prohibited from discussing their work.

Phones are tapped, mail intercepted

and conversations monitored.

We were immediately told that our mail

was being sponsored in both directions

and I knew that I wrote letters to home,

I had to leave them unsealed so that

they could be read before they went

out of Los Alamo, the mail coming back

was unsealed and then re-sealed by the censor.

We never used the word bomb,

we didn't use the word atomic,

we didn't use the word uranium,

plutonium, we had secret code names

for all of those things and so the bomb

was called the gadget.

(cars rumble)

The laboratories are divided

into divisions, each dedicated to a specific job.

Conducting this immense orchestra,

were two men, Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project's

military director and Robert Oppenheimer,

the scientific director.

They lead a challenging mission,

not just to develop an atomic bomb

but rather, two bombs, one with uranium

and the other with plutonium.

The Soviets have a different kind

of nuclear program, they don't invest heavily

in research, but they excel at espionage.

(dramatic music)

Germany, France, the UK, Canada,

India, Argentina, during the Second World War,

the USSR set up the largest spy network

in the world, men and women on the payroll

of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB.

Infiltrate the highest posts in Western countries.

The Communist ideology, the socialist ideology,

had a particular attractiveness to a wide number

of people in the United States and the

Soviet Intelligence Service was very adept

at exploiting that and finding people

that then subsequently were in mid-level

and senior positions in government

and in the various elements of the American

war industry during the war.

The ideological recruitment of Americans

is an interesting phenomenon.

Of course you had the Great Depression,

there were many reasons, people that were

disaffected after World War One,

and Western society in and of itself

had bred people who saw society

and capitalism as having failed and Moscow

as offering another answer and maybe

a better answer, that was the fertile ground

with which the Soviets operated.

There was a belief, a false belief

as we now know that the Soviet Union

was a worker's paradise.

They believe that the United States

is this imperial power that wants

to take over the world, so for them,

putting the united States in check,

that might lead to a better world.

(dramatic music)

The American Nuclear Program

isn't immune to espionage, spies infiltrate

every research site, including Los Alamos.

Despite the drastic security measures,

the best kept secret in the United States

is no secret at all.

(solemn music)

This is Klaus Fuchs, the tennis ball

is a secret signal.

Born in Germany, son of an anti-Nazi

communist pastor, he fled at the beginning

of the war and pursued an education

in physics in England.

While he's in the UK he ends up meeting people

who are involved the Russian Army Intelligence,

the GRU, and they basically over some time,

get him to agree to give him them copies of his work

and some of this is again, even before

he's involved in the atomic bomb work

it's kind of a coincidence that

he gets pulled in on that.

Once he gets pulled in on it, they get

very excited by this, he continues to work on it

he is very good at his job, he's one

of the most brilliant people working on the project.

In 1943, a group of British scientists

comes to the United States to participate

in the Manhattan Project, and Klaus Fuchs is among them.

The Americans are not the only ones

to benefit from his research.

He comes to Great Britain, Great Britain

hosts him, gives him shelter from the Nazis,

effectively, what does he do, he starts

spying on the British.

Then he takes that espionage activity,

and moves it to North America,

and starts spying on the Americans.

The spies during the war, not always

seeing it as United States versus

the Soviet Union, I mean, the United States

and the Soviet Union are allies,

Fuchs is seeing it more like, Fuchs is helping

fight the Nazis on two fronts.

In February, 1944,

the man with the green book meeting Fuchs

is a Soviet agent named Harry Gold.

Harry Gold is a Swiss born chemist,

and he has been engaged in industrial espionage

for a long period of time for the Soviets,

stealing processes, stealing intellectual property,

systems, chemical processes.

Harry Gold's sole function in relation

to Klaus Fuchs is to act as a courier,

an intermediary, a go-between.

Klaus Fuchs is supplying information

that is collected by Harry Gold,

he doesn't know Harry Gold's true identity.

Harry Gold then passes it on to a recipient

who passes it on the NKVD.

So it's a cut out, if you like.

(typewriter clacks) Between February and June,

1944, Klaus Fuchs drafts dozens of notes

about his work, top secret information

directly related to the bomb design,

which he shares with Harry Gold.

The original documents provided

by the young physicist are still

classified as top secret.

But his spy work is confirmed by

this Soviet telegram, dated July 25th, 1944.

It appears under its codename, REST.

Almost half a year of contact with REST

has demonstrated the value of his work for us.

We consider it necessary to pay him

for this half year, the due reward, $500.

He fully deserves this sum.

The Soviet Intelligence Agency

does not hide its interest in Fuchs,

then suddenly, during the summer of '44,

their recruit receives an unexpected promotion.

Fuchs leaves New York to join

the Theoretical Division at the

Los Alamos Research Center.

He's not some small character, he's put in charge

of some of the hardest problems relating

to the implosion weapons, so the crushing

of the plutonium, because he's very very good

at these kinds of things, he's also put on

problems relating to how to calculate

how explosive your bomb is, some of the original

calculations and papers that are foundational

to making the atomic bomb, have his name

as an author, so he's not minor in any way.

Klaus Fuchs occupies

a strategic spot in Los Alamos research

and he is one of the few scientists to benefit

from a global perspective of the project.

Most people on the Manhattan Project

knew almost nothing about what was going on

and there was sort of once exception to that

and that is the colloquium series at Los Alamos.

These were meetings that would be held

by people who had the highest security

they would have many of these meetings

and Fuchs was allowed to go to all of them.

With these meetings, he knows about huge amounts

of work going on, problems they're having

in parts of the bomb that he's not involved with.

These help him a lot in getting a big picture.

You really can't imagine if what you're trying

to learn is how to make an atomic bomb

there's really no better spy that you would ever

get than Klaus Fuchs, he knew everything

he practically had a photographic memory,

he was involved with everything and nobody suspected him.

The spy, Klaus Fuchs,

is invaluable to the USSR intelligence services.

But in Los Alamos, he's not the only one keeping secrets.

Darling, I have been reading

a lot of books on the Soviet Union.

Dear, I can see how farsighted and intelligence

those leaders are, I've come to a stronger belief

in the principles of socialism and communism.

These words were written

by 22 years old, David Greenglass,

in a letter sent to his wife in June, 1944.

He's a mechanical engineer, and is preparing

to join the Engineering Department

at the Los Alamos labs.

A long time communist sympathizer,

he is recruited as a spy by members of his own family.

David Greenglass had a sister,

she was a married to a man named Julius Rosenberg.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

The couple has been a part of the New York

network of Soviet agents for a long time.

One of their missions is to recruit new spies

so when they find out that David

is joining the Manhattan Project,

they deem him an ideal candidate.

(dramatic music)

In the Autumn of '44, when David Greenglass

is already in Los Alamos, Ethel

and Julius Rosenberg invite his wife to dinner.

Their goal, to persuade her to convince

her husband to collaborate with the enemy.

Several weeks later, this telegram is sent to Moscow.

Enclosed, is David Greenglass' decision.

It appears under the codename, KALIBR

and his wife is renamed OSA.

OSA has returned from a trip to see KALIBR.

KALIBR expressed his readiness to help

in throwing light on the work being

carried on at Camp-2.

Camp-2 is the Soviet

codename for Los Alamos.

On December 16th, 1944, Greenglass

becomes an undercover spy in the thick

of the Manhattan Project.

He doesn't have the same expertise

as Klaus Fuchs, and has less access

to technical information.

(typewriter clacks)

KALIBR has arrived in TIRE on leave.

He has given us a handwritten plan

of the layout of Camp-2 and facts known to him

about the work and the personnel.

The basic task of the camp is to make

the mechanism, which is to serve as the detonator.

This NKVD telegram gives a glimpse

of what the young spy was sending.

A map of Los Alamos, but also,

details about the work in progress.

The classified information begins to flow,

out of sight, Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass

draft detailed reports on their work,

filling pages and pages with mathematical formulas,

copying the plans of various bomb parts

and smuggling out these ultra-sensitive documents.

(suspenseful music)

(car door clacks)

On June 2nd, 1945, Klaus Fuchs

meets in Santa Fe with Harry Gold, his liaison officer.

On this day, he provides one of the most

crucial documents, a detailed plan

of the plutonium bomb, including its dimensions.

It also reveals that the first US tests

are scheduled for as early as July.

(gate creeks)

The following day, Harry Gold rings at a door

in Albuquerque, not far from Santa Fe.

He has a meeting with David Greenglass,

while visiting his wife nearby.

The documents provided by Greenglass

confirm that Fuchs is one of the main suppliers

of top secret information to the Soviets.

There is no doubt that the information

that the Soviets received from Klaus Fuchs

and David Greenglass was absolutely essential

to avoid all the rabbit holes,

all the dead ends, all the red herrings.

They'd saved thousands of hours

and millions of dollars not having

to pursue the full research program,

so they had all the benefit of the spies

within the Manhattan Project.

The question is why do people spy

and why do they take the decision

to spy, what does it mean for them?

If somebody decides to betray their country,

of course, that's a significant event.

People that decide to do these things,

many cases, they have significant egos.

Either they believe themselves above risk

or they have some special role in the world

and this is gonna be a chance to make their mark.

As details of the American project

gradually pass into the hands of the NKVD

in July of 1945, 250 scientists and technicians

find themselves in the middle of the desert,

organizing the very first atomic bomb tests.

(dramatic music)

(explosion rumbles)

On July 16th, 1945, at 5:30 in the morning,

a powerful explosion equivalent

to 20,000 tons of TNT resounds.

The atomic mushroom is visible

within a radius of 300 kilometers.

Shortly after, the United States

sends Japan an ultimatum to surrender,

but on July 28th, the Japanese government

rejects the proposition.

(airplane rumbles)

On August 6th, 1945, the atomic bomb,

Little Boy, strikes Hiroshima.

70,000 people are killed instantly.

Just as many are injured.

Three days later, the US launches

a second bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki.

This time, 40,000 deaths.

With his back against the wall,

Japan surrenders on September 2nd, 1945.

For now, the United States has sole possession

of this new and inconceivably powerful weapon.

It assures the Americans of their dominance.

But what they are about to discover

will shake everything they know.

(dramatic music)

In 1946, just a few months after the war,

the men and women of Arlington Hall

work tirelessly to try to crack the Russian telegrams.

The Russian secret services use

a highly effective encryption method, the one-time pad.

First, it's a question of converting

the letters of the message into a series

of numbers, based on a straddling checker board

memorized by the agent.

The numbers are then gathered into groups of five.

Then, a one time pad containing random numbers is added.

Only the sender and the receiver of the message

have these matching pads.

The numbers of the same column are added

two by two, then the tenth digits are erased.

Here is the message as sent.

To decode it, the recipient will use

the same straddling checker board

and then most importantly, the same

one-time pad to reverse the operation.

Even the most powerful supercomputer

in the world, cannot break a one-time pad message

if it's done correctly, with the five important steps.

Random number, only two copies,

one with the sender, one with the receiver,

destroyed immediately after it's used.

The user adds, the receiver subtracts

and the fifth, the length of the key

needs to be equal at least to the length

of the message and with those five conditions

in place, you have an unbreakable message.

(dramatic music)

For months the cryptanalysts

at Arlington Hall struggle with these

impressive disposable pads.

But in early 1946, a new recruit

joins the Russian project team.

His name, Meredith Gardner.

This brilliant linguist manages

to unearth the elusive flaw.

Duplicates in the single use code sheets,

extremely small series of perfectly

identical numbers found in several telegrams.

Once the Soviet Union was in World War II,

the intelligence traffic ramped up enormously.

They're sending enormous numbers of messages

and thus using enormous numbers of one-time pads.

This is the pre-computer age.

Today, if you wanna generate random numbers,

a computer can do it, and it can generate

random numbers from now until the end of time.

It was a lot harder and a lot more time consuming

to generate random numbers during World War II.

And they couldn't manufacture enough.

So they decided, let's use some

of the one-time pads twice.

How likely is it that anybody will ever find out?

So they began to reproduce one-time pad pages

and slip them into new one-time pads.

Exploiting these minuscule repetitions,

Gardner cracks the Soviet intelligence exchanges

and learns that the top secret

Manhattan Project has been compromised

down to the names of project scientists.

Now the interesting point, it that the scientists

who had been employed in the Manhattan Project

worked there at Los Alamos under alias

so although some of them were very well known

Nobel Prize winners, even they operated under alias.

American intelligence people are stunned.

Here's a Russian cable naming the American scientists

that are working on the atomic bomb.

Names that were not publicly known.

So this was really the first major realization

on the part of American Intelligence

that Soviet espionage had penetrated

the atomic bomb project.

The cryptanalysts a Arlington Hall

work relentlessly to flush out Soviet spies

but decoding new telegrams takes time.

(crowd applauds)

Meanwhile, in the USSR, the nuclear

research program has grown, in total secrecy,

starting in 1945, the ranks swell

to nearly 600,000 employees and scientists.

And on August 29th, 1949 in Kazakhstan,

the Soviet Union orders its first nuclear test.

(dramatic music) (explosion rumbles)

The USSR becomes the second country with the atomic bomb.

The atomic bomb that the Soviets detonated

in August 1949, was probably an exact replica

of the Fat Man bomb that the United States

dropped on Nagasaki.

From everything we know, the Soviets

did not deviate from the plans that they

received courtesy of espionage of the American

and British work at Los Alamos.

The information gave the Soviets a clear leg up.

Realizing the extent

of the security breach, the Americans

ramp up their efforts to decipher

Soviet telegrams, remaining it the VENONA project.

Gradually, they decode more messages,

plunging the American intelligence services

into absolute and utter horror.

The original documents are still top secret,

stashed in the secure archives of the NSA,

but in recent years, copies of the translations

by Meredith Gardner and his colleagues

have been declassified.

Among these thousands of pages is this telegram

involving text that dates back to February, 1944.

On the 5th February,

a meeting took place between GUS and REST.

LIBERAL, referring to his ignorance of the problem

expresses the wish that our man should meet KALIBR

and interrogate him personally.

GUS, REST, LIBERAL, KALIBR,

ARNO, CHARLES, code names found in the deciphered

VENONA papers, all of them associated

with what the Soviets call the ENORMOUS project,

aka, the Manhattan Project.

If we talk about the impact of VENONA

was certainly monumental on American

counter-intelligence and American national security.

Before that, of course, many people

had denied or did not want to see

that the Soviet Union was not a faithful ally

that during the war they'd used that time

to target the United States.

(dramatic music)

A network of Soviet spies

has uncovered the United States

deepest military secret, US intelligence

starts a relentless hunt to flush out

the men hiding behind these pseudonyms.

FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere

leads the investigation.

He sifts through the decoded telegrams

looking for the smallest clue.

It became clear that there was one

particular source, whose code names were

first of all CHARLES and then REST, R-E-S-T.

Bob Lamphere was able to identify

one particular text which indicated

that CHARLES had traveled over Christmas 1944

to New Haven, Connecticut, and by going back

to Los Alamos and checking the furlough records

and to see who had been given leave

over that particular period, it was possible

to narrow down the number of suspects

to three individuals and then ultimately,

it was discovered that Klaus Fuchs

had a sister living in New Haven, Connecticut

and on that basis, the evidence pointed to

Klaus Fuchs and he became

the focus of the investigation.

(dramatic music)

Meanwhile, Klaus Fuchs

has returned to England, to work

on the British atomic project.

So the Crown Secret Service questions him first.

The problem for the British and American

investigators was to extract some kind

of evidence from him that would incriminate him

but that would not compromise the source

of the information because the decryption program

was still running and there was still

contemporaneous traffic that was being intercepted

and being read, albeit retrospectively.

So the key was to extract information

from Fuchs and this was done in a very causal

interrogation that was conducted by MI5 in a pub.

Over a period of three long lunches

with his interrogator, Klaus Fuchs

started to compromise himself.

(typewriter clacks)

The spy, Klaus Fuchs

is arrested and imprisoned.

During his interrogations, British and American

intelligence services discover the shocking extent

of his collaboration with the enemy.

In his confession to the British

and the follow-up confession to the FBI as well,

Fuchs tells them that he gave the Soviet Union

information on pretty much everything

to do with the design of the bomb.

He gave them all the dimensions,

he told them how it was laid out,

so we're talking about what's the size

of the plutonium at the core, what

surrounds that, how do the explosives work,

what is the principle, what is the math?

This guy gave everything he remembered,

and he remembered many things.

He was an ideological man in the guise

of being your mild-mannered scientist

but in fact, he was primarily driven by ideology.

When he's nice to people at Los Alamos

he was always thinking, these are all

nice people I wanna work with them

and all the rest but they really don't recognize

that the future of the world lies somewhere else

and that's probably how he justified it to himself.

Klaus Fuchs articulated the view

that the information that he had been

entrusted with in the Second World War

was of universal nature and should not

just have been the monopoly of the American government.

The first link in the chain

of atomic spies has broken, and thanks

to Fuchs, the hunt for other members proceeds.

(metal clinks)

(dramatic music)

The next suspect on the list is someone

called GUS, or ARNO.

The Soviets refer to him as Klaus Fuchs' liaison officer.

During interrogation, Fuchs formally

identifies the New Yorker, Harry Gold in a photo.

Arrested in May of 1950, Harry Gold

confesses quickly, and the dominoes fall one by one.

In order to save his neck, he compromised

the other person that he had serviced

as a courier who was, of course,

David Greenglass, and when David Greenglass

was interviewed, in order to save his neck,

he had a choice of really compromising

either his wife, Ruth, or his sister, Ethel

and he identified as a Soviet spy

his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg

and that, of course, drew the attention

to her husband, Julius.

(crowd chatters)

The Rosenberg trial

at the end of 1950, became one of the most

famous US trails of the 20th century.

The telegrams decrypted under the VENONA project

attests to their guilt, but at no time

are the documents presented to the court.

The VENONA material was never mentioned

in any court proceeding during this era.

The United States government did not want

to reveal that it had partially

broken into the Soviet codes.

There's an irony here because within a very short time

after the VENONA break throughs

had been achieved, the Soviets knew we had done it

because they had a spy within the VENONA project.

So the prosecution of the Rosenbergs

was based really on evidence from

the supplied by witnesses including, of course,

David Greenglass and the evidence was overwhelming.

Despite the proof, the Rosenbergs

refused to cooperate or confess to espionage.

Faced with the couples stubborn silence,

the court decides the ultimate sentence, death.

It is the first time

in peace time that such a death penalty

has been handed down, and while appeals

to the highest courts are planned,

it certainly appears that the spies

are headed along a one-way street.

To the very day of their execution,

the FBI made it clear, and the American government

made it clear that if the Rosenbergs talked

they would spared the death penalty,

but the government underestimated

their fanaticism, they were willing

to make their children orphans

and their children were small.

They were willing to die for their cause.

Which they did.

By far, the Rosenbergs

who became public face of the fight

against communist traitors,

pay the highest price in the Soviet spy hunt.

While they receive the death penalty,

Klaus Fuchs is sentenced to 14 years

in prison in the UK.

David Greenglass is sentenced to 15 years

and Harry Gold, 30.

But they only represent a fraction

of the vast spy networks woven

by the Soviet Union around the Manhattan Project.

As the months go by, other code names

appeared in the decrypted telegrams,

STAR, KALISTRAAT, MLAD, QUANTUM,

more looters of classified information

but who are they, how to crack

their secret identities?

In 1951, as the Rosenbergs are tried,

the cryptologist, Meredith Gardner

decodes the most explicit telegram yet.

Sent from New York to Moscow seven years earlier.

BECK visited Theodore Hall,

19 years old, the son of a furrier.

He is a graduate of Harvard University,

as a talented physicist, he was taken on

for government work, according to BECK's account,

Hall has an exceptionally keen mind

and a broad outlook, and is politically developed.

At the present time, Hall is in charge

of a group at CAMP-2.

H handed over to BECK a report about the camp

and named the personnel employed on ENORMOUS.

He decided to do this on the advice

of his colleague, Saville Sax,

a gymnast living in TIRE.

(dramatic music)

It's a big break for the FBI.

They identify Theodore Hall, a young

Harvard physicist, still working at Los Alamos

and presumably, still spying.

And also Saville Sax, one of his friends,

code names, STAR and MLAD.

Ted Hall is a very interesting example

of a very young spy with a political commitment

and he used Saville Sax as a courier.

It is clear from the VENONA traffic

that he was cooperating with the NKVD

and passed a lot of information to them

and was highly regarded.

With Hall, it's also a case of ego.

I mean, Hall is the youngest member

of the Manhattan Project, and it's clear

that he feels like he's pretty smart

and he's getting to be with all

these Novel Prize winners and do this cool work

but he also worked for the Soviet Union.

If you're 19, that sounds very exciting

so he's changing the world just by talking.

After identifying the two men,

the FBI faces a problem.

How to approach them without divulging

the existence of the VENONA project?

After a long period of investigation

and surveillance both are picked up

on the same day and then interrogated separately

and confronted with the allegation

that both of them have acted as Soviet spies.

Each not realizing that the other

has been arrested, goes to considerable lengths

to protest their innocence and not to implicate the others.

They figure it out, but they are unable

to get a clean case against Ted Hall

and as a result, he never goes to prison.

He dies a free man because they could not

find a way to prosecute him without

making it clear that VENONA sources were involved.

Not until the declassification

of the VENONA project telegrams in 1995,

does anyone outside the NSA or the FBI

know about Theodore Hall and his liaison officer.

The irony goes that all of the secrecy

provisions the scientists at Los Alamos had to endure

was it all in vain, I mean it was certainly

compromised to a great extent

by the actions of these individuals.

Some experts believe

that Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass

Ted Hall, and the other atomic spies

rebalanced the world powers.

Others insist they tipped the planet closer to Armageddon.

Either way, there is no going back.

When you judge Operation Enormous,

I think that you can say that this is

an extraordinary manifestation

of espionage being conducted at its highest level.

(explosion rumbles)

This provided the Soviets with an atomic weapon

in August, 1949, which dramatically

changed history, so it's hard to exaggerate

the influence, the impact of these spies.

The Manhattan Project had bene referred

at the end of the war as the best kept secret

of the war, and then you find out that

it's full of spies who were everywhere in it?

So that's one of a couple of thing that happens

about 1949, early 1950, that really

makes it seem impossible to imagine

a world in which the United States

and the Soviet Union are gonna somehow get along

in some easy way and everybody just starts

making as many weapons as they can,

so it's very profound.

The infiltration of the Manhattan Project

and the theft of the atomic bomb plans

escalated the tension between the two superpowers.

Suddenly, it was not about how to win the war

but how to avoid nuclear war.

(dramatic music) In the 21st century,

the scope of this amazing spy affair,

on both sides of the iron curtain is finally exposed.

Revealing a story that remained top secret

for so long, and which transformed the face of the world.

(dramatic music)