COMMUNISTS: Man on the Fringe

Sallow, pasty-faced Chemist Harry Gold of Philadelphia had lost 50 lbs. since the FBI jailed him last summer. The man who was spy Klaus Fuchs’s go-between in passing top U.S. atomic secrets to Russia had improved his hours in jail by dieting. With the shrunken look of an underprivileged cat, he slipped into the witness chair of a Manhattan federal courtroom one morning last week to testify against two of his old cronies. They were Chemical Engineer Abe Brothman, 36, and Brothman’s assistant, spirited Miriam Moskowitz, 34, both accused of obstructing the U.S. Government’s investigation of espionage.

Witness Gold perked up as he began to tell his devastating story. He had been a Communist spy from 1935 to 1946, but he had never joined the party because U.S. party members, he said contemptuously, were “a lot of wacked-up Bohemians.” In September 1941, his Russian bosses ordered him to take over the “apparatus contact” with Abe Brothman, who was then a chemical engineer for a N.Y. manufacturer. A few nights later, following instructions, he stood on a Manhattan street corner and waited until a car cruised up. He noted the license number, saw that the car was the one he was waiting for.

Regards from Helen. “I opened the door and got in,” Gold recounted. “The man inside seemed startled, but he seemed reassured when I gave him the recognition signal: ‘I bring regards from Helen,’ and asked how his wife was.” “Helen” had been Brothman’s old contact (and was, in fact, Elizabeth Bentley, then a Communist courier and now another witness against Brothman).

For the next three years, Abe Brothman fed the apparatus with blueprints and drawings of such top defense projects as high-octane gasoline manufacture, turbine-type airplane engines and chemical handling equipment. The Russians had set up such a good photographic laboratory in the offices of Arntorg, the Soviet trading agency, that Gold could have papers photographed and returned to Brothman within two hours.

There was nothing secret about most of this stuff, Gold explained. The Russians could have found many of the designs and drawings in textbooks or technical manuals, or could even have bought them from U.S. firms. But they had gone through “sad experiences” with some of the plans they had bought, said Gold. American companies had a way of “sabotaging” the blueprints by hiding defects; when the Russians started building to specification, things were always going wrong. Stolen plans worked better.

Wonderful Experience. Abe’s biggest coup, Gold went on, was delivery of a suitcase full of notes and “between 25 and 50” blueprints on the manufacture of synthetic Buna-S rubber. This, the jubilant Russians told him, was worth “two or three brigades of men.” Later, when Abe grumbled that his work for the U.S.S.R. was not appreciated, Gold introduced him to the chief Russian spy. His name: Semen Semenov. Spy Semenov’s cover-up was a job with Amtorg in New York but Gold told Brothman that the Russian had come directly from the U.S.S.R. to thank him. Abe called this “one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,” said Gold.

In mid-1947, FBI agents—”Rover boys,” the spies called them—and a grand jury began asking questions of Gold. He laughingly reported to Brothman and Miss Moskowitz that he had given the grand jury the impression of being “a small, timid, frightened man, who in some manner was involved on the fringe of espionage and who now was completely aghast at what he was on the brink of.” Brothman and Miriam were delighted.

Sitting across the courtroom from Harry Gold, Brothman heard the story last week in tight-lipped silence; Miss Moskowitz with grinning disdain. Their chance to answer it was yet to come.