‘A Compassionate Spy’: The Teenage Atomic Spy ‘Oppenheimer’ Left Out

Jul 05, 2023

By Chris Vognar

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a fair amount is made of Klaus Fuchs, the German theoretical physicist who passed secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviet Union. But nowhere in this substantive blockbuster do we hear about Theodore Hall. A wunderkind physicist from Far Rockaway, New York City, recruited to the Manhattan Project as an 18-year-old Harvard senior, Hall, too, shared atomic secrets with the Soviets, for what he later claimed were purely moral reasons: He thought the possibility of the U.S. — or any country — having a monopoly on nuclear weapons would be dangerous for the world.

Hall, who died in 1999, gets his moment in the spotlight with A Compassionate Spy, the latest documentary from Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself). This is a paradoxically gentle film about treason — contemplative, philosophical, forgiving, and sure to rile up those like neutron bomb designer Sam Cohen, shown in an archival interview frothing that Hall should have been “court-martialed and summarily executed.” Instead, he moved to Cambridge, England, with his wife, Joan, where they raised three daughters and lived a relatively peaceful life. Hall’s crimes, framed here as a duty of conscience, weren’t even widely known until the publication of the 1997 book Bombshell, whose authors, Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, are interviewed extensively in the film. As Albright tells James, “The Rosenbergs were small fish compared to Ted Hall.”

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment. The star is Joan Hall, who Ted met and fell in love with at the University of Chicago post-Los Alamos. Speaking with James and in archival interviews, Joan emerges as an unrepentant, unreconstructed true believer in left-wing causes, who fondly recalls having the time to read Marx after she moved to Cambridge. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust,” Joan explains. Like Oppenheimer, Ted also had great misgivings about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the euphoric public response in the U.S. As he says in an old interview, “Two-hundred thousand people had been incinerated, and nobody seemed to care much.” A thin, handsome, soft-spoken young man with fervent beliefs, he did what he firmly felt was the right thing, knowing that few would agree, and that he would be severely punished if caught.

James has been doing this for a long time, and he has become one of the most resourceful and quietly imaginative documentarians in the field. The re-creations in A Compassionate Spy are particularly worthy of note. These aren’t reenactments; they are lightly scripted domestic scenes, focusing on Ted and Joan as young adults, as well as their friend Saville Sax, Ted’s Harvard roommate who helped him connect with the Soviets. Shot in the style of a realistic narrative feature, utilizing actors who know what they’re doing (J. Michael Wright is quite convincing as the uncrackable young Ted), these sequences are seamlessly folded into the rest of the film; rather than distract, they make the story more human, a crucial task for a documentary about a man who, on the surface, might be difficult to embrace. James also makes fine use of black-and-white stills, some framed in the usual documentary style, others gently laid by a visible hand on a surface, tangible representation of a tricky story.

Not all of the Halls’ intimates are onboard with Ted’s supposedly altruistic betrayal. Boria Sax, Saville’s son, admits that he was devastated when he discovered his father’s role in the leak, arguing that the depths of Stalin’s murderous deeds should have precluded any assistance to the Soviets. Joan insists neither her nor Ted were fully aware of what the Soviet dictator was up to. But she remains unbowed. Nowhere is there any indication that she regrets her husband’s decision, nor that, in hindsight, she would have persuaded him to do otherwise. If there was any fission in the Halls’ partnership, it isn’t apparent here.

In ceding the floor to Joan, and tracing Ted’s path without a hint of rancor, James has made a bold artistic and moral choice. There is no overt narrative voice here, but it’s not hard to presume James is sympathetic to Hall’s notion of treason as a means of peace. A closing onscreen note tells us that “This film is dedicated to all those who have risked their lives for peace.” Asked in an archival interview why he did it, Hall, a gaunt and ill man in old age, pauses and replies with conviction: “The major factor would be compassion.” To Hall, this elusive quality far outstripped nationalism.