Dave Lindorff, a Maple Glen resident and an investigative journalist, recently published his fourth and latest book, “Spy For No Country.”

Lindorff is a former Business Week Hong Kong correspondent, Los Angeles Daily News bureau chief and the winner of a 2019 Izzy Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism. He spent three years sifting through FBI documents, firsthand journals and conducting interviews for the book, according to The Reporter.

From the book’s description on Amazon.com:

At 18 years of age, Theodore Hall was the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, hired as a junior at Harvard and put to work at Los Alamos in 1944. Assigned the job of testing and refining the complex implosion system for the plutonium bomb, Hall was described as “amazingly brilliant” by his superiors on the project, many of whom were Nobel Prize winners. But what Hall’s colleagues didn’t know was that the teenaged Hall was also the youngest spy taken on by the Soviet Union in search of secrets to the atomic bomb. Spy for No Country tells the gripping story of a brilliant scientist whose information about the plutonium bomb, including detailed drawings and measurements, proved to be integral to the Soviet’s development of nuclear capabilities.

In the dying days of World War II, defeat of the Third Reich became a matter of when, not if. Tensions between wartime allies America and the Soviet Union began to rise, and things only got hotter when the United States refused to share information on its nuclear program. This groundbreaking book paints a nuanced picture of a young man acting on what he thought was best for the world. Neither a Communist nor a Soviet sympathizer, Hall worked to ensure that America did not monopolize the science behind the atomic bomb, which he felt may have apocalyptic consequences. Instead, by providing the Soviets with the secrets of the bomb, and thereby initiating “mutual assured destruction,” Hall may have actually saved the world as we know it. But his contributions to the Soviets certainly did not go unnoticed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation into Hall, which was escalated when it was discovered that Hall’s brother Edward was a rising star of the Air Force, leading the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Featuring in-depth research from recently declassified FBI documents, first-hand journals, and personal interviews, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff uncovers the story of the atomic spy who gave secrets away, and got away with it, too.

To purchase a copy of the book, you can click here. For The Reporter’s coverage, you can click here.

Photos: Wikipedia, Amazon