[Kryptonite]

That was an outstanding program. It concluded that Ted Hall and Claus Fuchs should be regarded as the two most destructive spies to our secret nuclear weapons program. Hall gave away secrets from the Los Alamos program, including the formulas for processing uranium, and Fuchs provided, among other secrets, diagrams for the core activator. The concept of implosion had been so foreign to the Russians they didn't even have a word for it.

The program also revealed that FDR's administrative assistant himself showed up on Russian spy code messages, and flatly stated that every major government agency had been infiltrated with Russian spies. The US broke the Russian code because of a mistake -- the Russians used code panels for more than one message. While less than 1% of the messages were actually decoded, there were hundreds of spies that had been given cover names by the Russians. But alas, NOVA concluded that perhaps less than 5 people identified by McCarthy as communist spies were discovered on Venona Project code messages.

Definitely worth watching IMO.

[edwin hubble]

Great re-cap, Kryptonite.

The spy within the U.S. codebreaking unit (Weidman?) was described in the program as the single most destructive spy in the history of U.S. counter-espionage.

Further, the implication was made by the program that if the public had been told what was known by the FBI at the time, that the country would not have been so torn in two by the events of the McCarthy hearings. Much of the acrimony that this country went through in the 1950's might have been avoided.

It would have meant letting the Russians know that we had broken their code, but their mole had already tipped them off.