After nearly a decade of helping West-ern governments harness the power of nuclear energy-as a member of the Manhattan Project and Britain's nuclear-reactor programme-Bruno Pontecorvo was due for a holiday. So in the summer of 1950 he took his wife and three children to Italy, his birthplace, where they camped, fished and swam in the Mediterranean. Then they vanished behind the Iron Curtain, raising fears that all along the brilliant physicist was helping the Soviets, too. Pontecorvo was a committed communist, but was he "the second-deadliest spy in history", as the American government once claimed? If so, he was quite good. There is no hard evidence of his espionage, nor is there any official suggestion of what secrets he may have stolen. When the Soviets allowed him to speak, he claimed to have fled Western persecution. But in an engrossing new book, "Half-Life", Frank Close makes the case against Pontecorvo.
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