What makes a traitor?

I just watched a fascinating edition of NOVA on PBS: Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies. It is about the Venona transcripts and the Soviet espionage involved in gathering atomic secrets.

What really struck me was the naivete and denial of Joan Hall wife of one of the key figures Ted Hall. Ted passed intelligence information about the activities going on at the Los Alamos laboratories as the US sought to build a nuclear weapon. Check out these quotes from Joan, who insists Ted did nothing wrong and was a great man.
On the joining the communist party:

Before we joined, it obviously represented for us the people who were fighting against what was happening in the United States. It represented people who were defending labor unions, who were defending black people against discrimination, who were defending civil liberties, and so on. Once we got in, it continued to be all those things. We got to know a few people in the local group that we belonged to. They were nice people. They were good people. We liked them. And I believe now that they were good people, absolutely. But it wasn't very long before we began to feel that the Party apparatus was dogmatic, rigid, bureaucratic, undemocratic, and full of phraseology that became meaningless because it was used in such an automatic way.

On Ted being a communist agent:

For one thing, I didn't see it as being an agent, somebody who works for them and carries messages for them or does whatever. What Ted had done, he wasn't a spy, he wasn't an agent. He was a scientist with a conscience who shared knowledge with the Soviets that he felt needed to be shared with them. That was how he saw it, and that was how I saw him.

On whether Ted was a traitor:

What was Ted Hall's country? Was it the American government, which was scheming the whole while to use the atomic bomb as a threat to hold over the heads of the rest of the world? The American government, which dropped the atomic bomb on Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people for no good reason? (Like many people, I don't believe that this was necessary to end the war, because it was ending anyway.) Is his country the American government, or is his country the American people?
He certainly broke the law. He certainly broke his security oath. He certainly acted against the interest of the American government at the time. But he did not betray his country. He didn't betray the people. Everything that he did was done because of his concern for the people of the United States as much as the people of any other part of the world. It was a humanitarian act. His motive was a humanitarian motive.

The blindness and misplaced idealism is staggering in this woman's interview. Her husband sought out agents of a foreign power and handed them classified material relating to the most important military secret the United States had at the time. He was involved in an orchestrated attempt to shift the balance of power away from the US and to the Soviet Union. He broke his military oath, certainly violated the law, and thwarted the intentions and goals of the US government at a crucial time in history. And yet his wife can calmly state that he was a humanitarian who simply followed his conscience. This despite the fact that following his conscience involved lying to FBI, communicating with communist agents, and destroying documents. As I said, a staggering case of liberal idealism run amok.

Article Author: Kevin Holtsberry

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