NOVA Online | Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies

Family of Spies

What is it like to live with an intelligence agent? How do family members feel about their spying husbands or fathers and what they did? What questions still linger in their minds about those actions and the sometimes hazy motivations behind them? Tug Yourgrau, producer of "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies," set out to hear it from the horse's mouth. Here, read Yourgrau's candid, heartfelt, and very readable interviews with the closest relatives of some of America's most notorious atomic spies, including:

		Joan Hall and Ruth Hall, the wife and elder daughter, respectively, of Theodore Alvin Hall, a Los Alamos physicist who passed secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviets in the 1940s but was never caught.

		Boria Sax, the son of Saville Sax, Ted Hall's best friend and former roommate at Harvard, who also slipped atomic secrets to the Russians and who also escaped prosecution.

		Robert and Michael Meeropol, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple that was put to death in 1953 for conspiring to give away atomic secrets to the Russians.

		William Weisband, Jr., the son of William Weisband, a linguist who told the Russians about Venona, the top-secret U.S. program to decode Soviet cables. Weisband served a year in prison in the 1950s for contempt of court.

For more information on atomic espionage and the Venona project, see the books listed in Resources.

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