Appell testified to further corroboration on four out of five Jordan claims at issue in these hearings (the fifth, to be discussed, stands unconfirmed but not, by any means, ruled out). Clearly, Jordan has vaulted the initial threshold of credibility, prompting the question: What happened to this man in the historical record? What are the implications of his claims? What does it mean for the historical record that his claims, his testimony, almost without exception, have receded into, at best, anonymous limbo?

The fate of Jordan’s testimony might seem like a small thing, but it shows, in a defined and demonstrable example, how it is that waves of misinformation wash away the facts, leaving behind a false trail and debris of doubt. We went from “completely documented” atomic-related transfer in 1950 to ”disgruntled official” in 1972. By 2004, in Albert Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II, a book drawing on Russian revisionism—i.e., newly available archival material in Russia attesting to the existence of vital American Lend-Lease aid—Jordan’s evidence of atomic aid had evanesced into unverifiable myth.

In between come the obliterating layers of disinformation. It began, first, with what Jordan described in the preface to his 1952 book as the “efforts of the character assassins and the press experts to keep the implications of this story from being brought into proper focus.” I may be a sucker for italics, but this point about implications (Jordan’s word in this case, not mine) is so important to the progression of our mortal illness as a civilization—nonjudgmentalism regarding mortal threats—that I have to flag it. The effort to keep implications from coming into relevant focus is the story of our lives.

The assassination attempts on Jordan’s character—for example, spurious allegations that he was being paid by the GOP—began right after the first public airing of his story on Fulton Lewis’s radio show on December 2, 1949. This was just a couple of months after President Truman announced on September 23, 1949, that the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb. The president’s announcement, Jordan wrote, left him “shocked and stunned to the depths of my being,” and made him realize that he, personally, must have “expedited” the transfer of key parts of the Soviet atomic program. He had to do something. “There was evidence in my possession, I was convinced,” he wrote, “proving that the disaster was chargeable not only to spies but to actual members of the Federal hierarchy” (emphasis added). Soon, Jordan was able to bring his story to the attention of Senator Styles Bridges (R-NH) and Lewis, a popular national radio personality. Lewis’s staff investigated the story, after which Lewis broke it on the air. FBI investigators methodically, exhaustively vetted the same charges. This was a far cry from the dead-end apathy that greeted Jordan back in 1944 when he attempted to alert his superiors in Washington to his suspicions. A few days after the radio broadcast, Jordan would testify before the Un-American Activities Committee, returning to testify a second time in 1950.