It is dispiriting to learn, in later years, that a friend has betrayed one's self and country. It is much more devastating when that person is a parent. Such it was for the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Such it was for Boria Sax, whose father, Saville ("Savy") was revealed as an atomic spy, along with Theodore Alvin Hall. Their damage to US security was much more severe than was the Rosenberg's. Although I did not know Savy, Ted Hall was a friend. Thus, I felt empathy for Boria, whose perceptive memoirs about his father also illuminate the mind of a spy who was one of my colleagues in the wartime Los Alamos atomic bomb project.
As Harvard students, Savy and Ted fell under the spell of Marxist mysticism, which, they came to believe held a mission for them. They believed that atomic secrets, which in themselves were regarded with a certain mysticism, should be shared with the Soviet "Utopia." When I visited Hall in exile at Cambridge University not long before his death in 1999, he was still captive to the myth and unrepentant for his actions. Savy also struggled, but his fate held different consequences. Perhaps it is no accident that Savvy's son, Boria, was drawn to the study of mythology, in which he has become a recognized author and authority. How a son coped with the realization that his father had been captive to a dangerous myth is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand spies' Motivations and the disastrous emotional "fallout" upon families.
Arnold Kramish
February 2004
From a PBS Television Special
Author's Comment from Stealing Fire
