Michael,
Joan and Ted had no hard knowledge that the Air Force had blocked Hoover
from pursuing a case against Ted. One reason a doubt what would surely be
a painfully ironic theory that the Air Force's blocking of an arrest of Ted
Hall may have been the reason for the false charge of atomic spying leveled
against your parents, and the elevation of Greenglass's trivial testimony
about having provided information about the plutonium bomb. That is that
Ted and Saville Sax were both picked up by FBI agents and brought to the
Chicago FBI office on March 16, 1951 after a year's Bureau-wide closely
held investigation of the two young men's activities, movements, and family
and associates, and were interrogated for thre and two hours
respectively. That was exactly during your parent's New York Trial, so the
block on Hoover had not happened yet by the time the case went to a jury.
It was March 27 when a letter in Ed's file shows that he wrote to his
former FBI office protege, Joseph Carroll (whom Hoover had recommended to
Defense Secy. Stuart Symington to become the Air Force's director of it's
new Office of Special Investigations, asking for the second time permission
to interview then Major Edward Hall. In that letter that he had thanked
then Gen. Carroll for his reply to a Jan. 6 letter from the FBI director
alerting him that his Maj. Hall, working in a top-secret rocket lab at
Wright-Paterson AFB, was the "brother of a known atomic cpy" and asking for
permission to interview Ed Hall, and noting that Carroll had said his OSI
office would conduct the investigation into Ed's loyalty. A obviously
frustrated Hoover in that March 27 letter said that his agents had just
interrogated Hall and Sax and that their investigation into their spying
activity was speeding up, and he urgently wanted to question Ted's brother
Ed.
I don't yet have the letters Carrol sent back to his old boss J Edgar,
likely because they were among the whited out pages, and the Air Force FOIA
office told me they were "probably destroyed in a routing records purge"
but I'm still trying to get them on appeal. I only know about the Jan. 14
reply letter from Gen. Carroll to Hoover becauase Hoover refers to it in
the March letter. What I do know is that three months later Hoover's
agents in Cincinnati did interview Ed Hall in Dayton at the air base
(with two local OSI officers present, probably to monitor a limitation put
on Hoover's questioning of him, which were limited to only his knowledge
about his brother's action, which Ed totally denied having), and two weeks
after that interview, in what had to be a thumb in Hoover's eye, Ed Hall
was promoted to Lt. Colonel and made director of the Rocket Motor
Development project.
The FBI finally halted its active pursuit of Hall and Sax in August
of 1951, when their files contain the news in an FBI cable to relevant
bureau offices that both men were being removed from the Security Index,
meaning they were no longer being monitored on a daily basis or being
subject to mail covers or phone taps. Only in 1963, after Ed Hall had
retired from the Air Force and from an assignment organized by the Air
Force to help France develop its independent nuclear force IRBM, the
Diamant rocket, did the FBI attempt a couple of half-hearted attempts to
reactive it's Hall case by asking MI-5 to question Ted during his
application to renew his work visa for a position at Cambridge University
where he had moved with his family in 1962.
The main point here is that the FBI was aggressively pursuing Hall and Sax
right up to the end of the Rosenberg trial.
On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 11:11 AM Michael Meeropol <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Am SO GLAD Dave weighed in on the site. As an avid reader of his book and
> viewer of his film --- and a "somewhat interested party" (that's a somewhat
> weak attempt at gallows humor) given that my parents were killed for what
> Fuchs and Ted did I was privileged to meet Ted and Joan (and their daughter
> RUthie) in 1996, a couple of years before Ted died. Ted told me the story
> that showed up in Dave's book of a neighbor who, when publicity hit the fan
> in 1995 and Ted was "outed" was asked by Ted if he (the neighbor) still
> wanted to be friends --- the reply: "Maybe you're the reason I'm alive!"
>
> ["you can't make this stuff up" FACTOID --- when I was at Cambridge
> University in 1965-66, Annie and I lived around the corner from Ted, Joan
> and their family --- neither of us knew of the other's presence and Ted and
> Joan said if they had known, their Soviet contacts would have certainly
> discouraged them from reaching out to us...]
>
> At the time of Annie's and my visit with Ted my brother and I were
> wondering WHY the FBI pulled back from Ted (taking the local agent off the
> case) --- We had no idea (and neither Ted nor Joan hinted at the role of
> Ted's brother --- DAVE, did they REALIZE that was why Hoover backed off??)
> --
>
> Now we wonder (though the timing might be wrong) that once Hoover was told
> to back off by the Air Force, if the government "HAD" to promote my father
> and David Greenglass as the sources of the Soviet Atom Bomb (see Judge
> Kaufman's sentencing speech which merely echoed the prosecution's charges
> and which President Eisenhower mimicked when denying clemency) or there
> would have been no "retribution" for the Soviet's successful atomic
> espionage given that Fuchs was in jail in Britain.
>
> in other words my father (and mother who was taken as a hostage) were
> "collateral damage" of the US government's "damage control" because of
> Fuchs and Hall's successes ---
>
> (I also think, the ability to link the fact that my parents were
> communists to their alleged ATOMIC espionage (--- my father was an
> industrial-military spy, we know that now --- and the death sentence was
> mostly an effort to get him to roll on his confederates --- perversely, the
> fake atomic espionage change was designed to justify the death sentence
> ....All of that is in two of my recent articles and I won't bore folks with
> details here) --- the link of communism to atomic espionage was very useful
> as part of the anti-communist political playbook which succeeded remarkably
> in marginalizing the communist and fellow-travelling left so completely
> that (ironically) there was no "need" for fascism in the US after 1953 ,,,,)
>
> One very important contribution Dave makes in the book is to highlight the
> " ... planned US atomic blitz on the USSR set for the mid '50s.. " I
> think Dan Ellsberg first revealed this plan --- the grotesque nature of it
> is unbelievable (wonder if it would have produced "nuclear winter":!)
>
> SOOOO -- this is a long thank you to DAVE for some wonderful work and an
> effort to urge all comrades on this list to check out both the movie and
> the book.
>
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 10:47 AM Dave Lindorff <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Just for the record, I, a member of this list, am the producer of that
>> film.
>>
>
> ROBERT SHEER and DAVE here
>
>>
>>
>>
>> https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/26/the-un-oppenheimer-the-story-of-a-teenager-who-sought-to-save-the-world/
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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