Book Nook: The Invisible Harry Gold

The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atomic Bomb by Allen M. Hornblum is a terrific read filled with loads of interesting information about the efforts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the 1940s to obtain industrial and military secrets from organizations in the United States.

The most acclaimed author of spy thrillers would be unable to effectively conjure up a character with the oddball habits, eccentricities, and general weirdness of Harry Gold. As a successful Soviet spy for many years during the 1930s and 1940s (although he refused multiple overtures to formally join the Communist Party) he eventually became an important federal witness against a number of other spies.

His testimony against Manhattan Project employees Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass (brother of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife of Julius Rosenberg), as well as a number of his Russian handlers, was instrumental in their successful prosecution by the federal government, although he ironically ended up serving more prison time than those he helped to convict. After all, he was just the courier.

The personal traits and characteristics that made Gold an ideal spy were his desperate eagerness to please other people (e.g., loaning money he could not afford, sacrificing his personal needs to help friends and coworkers), his nearly overwhelming obsessive compulsive disorder, and a strong belief that Stalinist Russia, because of its severe criticisms of Hitler’s Nazi regime and a law on the books technically making anti-Semitism a crime, was the only country willing to stand against fascism.

Recruited by a friend who was already passing industrial secrets to the Russians (Gold felt obligated and indebted because this friend had once helped him obtain employment as a chemist in the midst of the Great Depresssion), Gold began stealing information from his current employer and gleefully passing it along, apparently in the belief that these confidential chemical processes and procedures would be used by the Soviet government help the average Russian have a better life.

Of course, these first steps down a slippery slope ultimately led to his major espionage role as a courier picking up and delivering detailed blueprints of the atomic bomb from Klaus Fuchs at the recently established Los Alamos research facility and sketches of other key bomb components provided by David Greenglass, a sergeant in the U.S. Army who also worked on a crucial aspect of the atom bomb project.

Another one of Gold's oddities is that unlike many of the other spies and couriers who were providing highly classified information to the Soviet Union, Gold rarely accepted money from his handlers, and even then with great reluctance.

For example, all of his many trips over the years from his Philadelphia home to New Mexico and other places such as Boston and Chicago, were paid for out of his own pocket. He often traveled on weekends or used vacation time, while simultaneously holding down a full-time job that required significant overtime. Again, this is where his compulsive nature and pathetic need to please enhanced his effectiveness as an espionage agent.

Harry Gold’s sloppy house of cards began tumbling down on May 15, 1950. Yet even after he was picked up from his workplace by the FBI and began to take part in what turned out to be a very lengthy interrogation process that ultimately resulted in arrest, Gold took no time to clean his apartment and toss the piles of notes, maps, and ticket stubs that documented his treasonous travels, all of which were eventually seized by the government for use in his trial.

During his prison years, 1950 though 1966, Gold was by all accounts a model inmate who worked long hours in the Lewisburg, Pa., prison hospital, willingly participated in human trials of innovative drugs, and was even awarded a patent for work he did as an inmate that devised a new means of diagnosing diabetes.

Upon release, he was hired by Kennedy Hospital in Philadelphia, Pa. where he was much admired by members of the staff for his diligent work ethic and low-key personality. He died during open-heart surgery in August 1972, at the age of 61.

No obituary was published nor was a death notice released for public consumption for more than 18 months. This was perhaps fitting for a short, chubby, overachieving, and achingly insecure man who had notable ability during his lifetime to blend in with the scenery.

In summary, this is a detailed, cleanly and clearly written history of a very important chapter in American history, one with ramifications that are often misconstrued to this day. As such this tumultuous period of red herrings, loyalty oaths, pumpkin papers, and red-baiting McCarthyism still remains controversial to contemporary extremists on the far left and far right of the mainstream.

It offers valuable insights into the nearly daily casual displays of anti-Semitism of the 1930s, the lure of socialism and communism to many people of the Jewish faith, and the reasons why so many of these and other like-minded individuals, especially intellectuals, gravitated toward the potential utopian promise exhibited by the Soviet Union in the 1930s prior to the shattering news of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, although even for many years thereafter hundreds of deluded true believers kept their faith in Stalinism alive.