I am no longer that person, but I am by no means ashamed of him.Ted Hall is survived by his wife Joan, who has known of his espionage record since before their marriage 52 years ago, and by two daughters, Ruth and Sara. The word “maintained” carried with it the implication of a successful claim, and not a claim designed, perhaps, to defeat any investigation as to whether documents were held for a criminal purpose.The procedure for instructing counsel nominated by the Attorney General had apparently been instigated by HM Customs & Excise: see R v Customs & Excise Commissioners, ex p Popely (Law Report, 22 October 1999). The firm contended that the warrants failed properly to specify the nature and dates of the relevant offences under investigation; that the wording in section 20C(4) which prohibited the removal of documents in the possession of a legal adviser “with respect to which a claim to professional privilege could be maintained” meant a claim which was merely potentially valid; and that there was no legal authority for the presence of counsel to determine the issues of privilege during the search.Patrick O’Connor QC and Peter Clarke (Dibb Lupton Alsop) for Mr Tamosius; Michael Worsley QC and Timothy Cray (Solicitor of Inland Revenue) for the commissioners.Mr Justice Moses said that under the scheme of section 20C of the 1970 Act the validity of a warrant depended not upon its particularity, but upon there being reasonable ground for suspecting that an offence involving serious fraud in connection with tax was being, had been or was about to be committed; there being reasonable ground for suspecting that evidence of that offence was to be found on premises specified in the information; and the officer acting with the approval of the Board of Inland Revenue in relation to the particular case. .”The Revenue executed those warrants, and various documents were seized and were examined at the firm’s premises by counsel nominated by the Attorney General and instructed by the Revenue to act as independent counsel in relation to a search operation.The firm applied for judicial review, and the following issues arose: whether the warrants were valid; and whether the process by which the material had been sifted and seized was lawful. They obtained search warrants under section 20C of the Taxes Management Act 1970, which authorised them to enter and search the firm’s offices and, by virtue of section 20C(3), to seize and remove “any things whatsoever found there which [they had] reasonable cause to believe may be required as evidence. In August 1999 one of the firm’s clients was committed for trial on two counts of cheating the Inland Revenue by diverting commission offshore.The Revenue claimed to have reasonable grounds for suspecting that Mr Tamosius was involved in the arrangements for that diversion.
Not a conscious pun on tardy, Tardis is an acronym for time and relative distance in space Perhaps tomorrow’s BBC2 Dr Who evening will expand that. Meanwhile those blue boxes have vanished – as if somebody had uttered the dread syllables: “Ex-ter-min-ate!”. None of the warringly topical dictionaries include this word, close on 40 years old. It is also used by estate agents for a place that might look a cupboard but is an ideal venue for any amount of cat-swinging. I remarked that, so far as I knew, no lavatory is visible aboard that telephone-box – perhaps biology has made a striking advance. A third daughter, Deborah, was killed in a road accident in 1992.Theodore Alvin Holtzberg (Theodore Hall), physicist and spy: born New York 20 October 1925; married 1947 Joan Krakover (two daughters, and one daughter deceased); died Cambridge 1 November 1999.. I recognise that I could easily have been wrong in my judgement of what was necessary, and that I was indeed mistaken about some things, in particular my view of the nature of the Soviet state.
By 1950 he had already switched disciplines from nuclear physics to the emerging field of biophysics, where over the coming 20 years he was to make several important contributions to knowledge. But in essence, from the perspective of my 71 years, I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick. The world has moved on a lot since then, and certainly so have I. In a statement reproduced in Bombshell, he wrote:In 1944 I was 19 years old – immature, inexperienced and far too sure of myself. Chief among these was the work he completed at Cambridge developing what became known as the Hall Method for mapping and measuring minute concentrations of chemicals in biological specimens.The shadow of suspicion never lifted from him, if suspicion is the right word for something that is known with certainty. It may be that they were simply glad to have him off their hands.It was not until 1996, by which time he had retired and was already suffering from cancer and Parkinson’s disease, that Hall’s past caught up with him.
The Venona papers had been declassified and opened to the public and (although it took some months before anyone noticed) his espionage record was there to be seen.Exposed, eventually, in the press, he was denounced as a traitor and there were calls for him to be prosecuted, but the storm soon passed He himself was absolutely unrepentant. Why should the FBI, knowing what it did, have done Hall a favour? There is no evidence that he paid any price in terms of giving information, and he firmly denied this himself, but still it seems odd. When they moved to England, Hall told Albright and Kunstel, he was questioned by British intelligence along on the more- or-less open lines of: “We know what you have done in the past; why have you come here now?” He replied that he was a scientist who had been invited here to do scientific work, and that, it seems, was that.His move from the United States in 1962 required US government approval, and that this was forthcoming remains curious. Hall and his wife Joan, moreover, remained politically active in small ways, even becoming members of the Communist Party. (In fact Moscow knew anyway, thanks to Kim Philby, among others.) So it was that, in the expectation that they might catch other fish in future, the FBI let Theodore Hall swim free.There, in a sense, the story of Hall the spy ends, or at least is put on ice for several decades, and the story of Hall the scientist of international repute begins.
Much of the traffic related to intelligence and one of the messages in particular pointed to Hall. Dated 12 November 1944, it stated unequivocally that Theodore Hall, aged 19, a furrier’s son and Harvard graduate working at Los Alamos, had met a Soviet agent and handed over a report about the Manhattan Project.By the time the codebreakers had uncovered this gem, however, it was 1950; Hall had long since left Los Alamos, had severed his connections with Soviet agents and was working quietly in academic research in Chicago. Although FBI agents put pressure on him to confess he gave nothing away, and they could find no other evidence against him beyond the Venona documents.Since Venona was still yielding fresh secrets at that time and promised to be a counter-intelligence gold mine for many years to come, the US security authorities believed they could not afford to let Moscow know they were cracking the code. This was coded telegram traffic between Moscow and its missions abroad during the 1940s, which was intercepted by the US and later partially decoded. Indeed, at least two spies in the Manhattan Project have never been identified.We know this because of Venona.
