corners in strange towns where I had no business to be and the killing of time in cheap movies… — all this became quite ingrained in me. It was drudgery, and I hated it; anyone who had an idea this work was glamorous and exciting was very wrong indeed — nothing could have been more dreary. But here is one curious fact:
[After the war] when… my activity ceased, after a while I actually began to miss it… Once, I discussed this with Black and he said that it was really a mistake that I had gotten into espionage work… “But you know, Tom,” I said, “in some funny manner I still long for that life which now seems dead… ” And Black replied, “It is peculiar, I do too, even though it has caused me so much grief and disaster in the last 14 years.”
For most of 1935, Black served as Gold's contact. Harry was supposed to steal chemical processes from his boss at Pennsylvania Sugar, but neither he nor Black could afford the cost of photographing the documents. In those early years Gold struggled to find funds to pay for his espionage. Considering what they got in return, the Soviets were surprisingly stingy. Eventually Black convinced Amtorg to handle photocopying. All Harry had to do was to deliver the material to New York and return it. “Best of all, the man who was providing all of this service, a Russian engineer from Amtorg, was very anxious to meet me.” In November 1935, young Harry Gold met “Paul.”
Harry was twenty-five years old and evidently dazzled by his entrance into the underworld of international espionage, but he was nothing if not independent, and from the beginning he had doubts. The doubt that bothered him most of all was professional:
It had to do with the Soviets’ seeming lack of initiative in chemical engineering research, and [their] utter horror of any pioneering efforts in that field.
From the very first, in 1935, Paul instructed me that what was wanted were processes already in successful operation in the United States; and Paul, and the others who followed him, continually said that they not only preferred, but absolutely insisted upon, only having the details of a plant already in successful and proven operation in America as compared to another which, though it might promise to be very superior, still was only in the experimental stage. On several occasions, when I made efforts to submit material which represented work not yet in full-scale production, I would have my knuckles smartly rapped. So, I desisted; but I wondered.
When there is added to this their absolute veneration of American technological skill, I wondered again… But I was told that the Soviet Union was so desperately in need of chemical processes that they could afford to take no chances on one which might not work…
Soviet agents wanted only conservative, reliable, tested technology from America. Their bosses were managers, not engineers or scientists, and had no way to evaluate untried ideas. The agents knew the penalty for taking risks when mistakes counted as heinous crimes.
Gold worked with Paul, who had silver-blond hair and might have been Danish; with a huge man “with a heavyweight boxer's build”; with “a small, dark man with a mustache [who] was a fanatical martinet” and whom Harry hated. Amtorg found Harry reliable and soon shifted him to more responsible duty as a courier — a cut-out, a go-between whose knowledge of the chain of espionage agents was limited to his information sources on the one side and his immediate Soviet superior on the other, reducing the network's exposure. To increase his competence the Soviets paid his way to Xavier College in Cincinnati, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry in 1940. They kept Gold on a short leash, however; he had to earn his Amtorg scholarship by trying to bribe and then to blackmail a Wright Field aeronautical engineer named Ben Smilg, but Smilg successfully resisted both attempts.
In 1940, Gold registered for the draft. The draft examiner found him at twenty-nine years of age to have brown hair, hazel eyes and a “brown complexion.” He was short and broad: five feet, six inches tall and 180 pounds. He had developed what he called “a fabulous appetite” as a child at camp. It had “stayed with me yet,” he would write proudly, quoting a friend of his who once said, “Harry will eat anything which will stand still long enough [and which] won't eat him first.” He had a broad, Slavic face, heavily jowled; he looked older than his years, and he turned out to be hypertensive; his draft board classified him 4-F and exempted him from military service. People who worked with him found him pleasant — “a hard worker,” a fellow chemist said, “conscientious, and a sincere individual.” One woman at work remembered him as “nervous,” around women at least. “When he talked,” she would testify, “especially to a woman, his face would become flushed… He was a quiet individual who would sometimes converse a bit with a man, but would only talk to a woman when he had a job for them to do.”
Gold got a new control in the fall of 1940, his favorite, Semen N. Semenov, an MIT graduate engineer, a man he would know only as “Sam.” Sam, Gold says, “had a swarthy complexion, almost Mexican-like in texture, black dancing eyes, and a really warm and friendly smile.” Sam was the only Soviet whom Gold ever met who might have passed for an American because of the way he spoke, dressed and acted, “and especially in the way in which he wore his hat. For some reason foreigners never wear their hats as Americans do… ” The MIT engineer was contemptuous of paid agents; Harry never gave offense in that regard, asking for no reward, but beginning with Sam the Soviets fully reimbursed Gold's travel expenses, so that across his years of devoted espionage he at least broke even.
Sam sent Gold off abruptly to Buffalo to rendezvous with a man named Al Slack, who worked for Eastman Kodak and was passing Amtorg information on Kodachrome film manufacture. The work was routine and not especially productive; in the spring of 1941 Sam told Harry “I was not needed anymore.”
But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union that June, Amtorg's priorities changed. In autumn 1941, “Sam called me up, I met him, and he told me that we had to begin an intensive campaign for obtaining information for the Soviet Union.” Gold made a series of runs up to Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, collecting more material from Al Slack and three other men.
With Gold's next assignment, routine espionage descended to soap opera. An exasperated Soviet operative named Jacob Golos had turned over to Sam a difficult, mercurial chemist named Abraham Brothman, a Columbia University graduate with a penchant for missing meetings and making promises he failed to keep. Brothman's previous contact had been Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, Golos's mistress, a Vassar graduate whose contacts expanded during the war years under Golos's direction to include Communists in Canada, in the US government in Washington and in the ranks of industrial espionage. Bentley was a specialist in Italian literature, not chemistry, and the Soviets had decided Brothman needed a contact with a technical background.
Sam told Harry that Brothman was “an important government official, an engineer.” After several postponements, the two chemists connected. Gold slipped into Brothman's car in the Manhattan garment district on a Monday night in September 1941. While Gold was identifying himself, the Joe Louis-Lou Nova fight came on Brothman's car radio and they listened to it together in silence for the two or three rounds Louis needed to knock Nova out. In the car and later that night in a Bickford restaurant they talked for three hours.
Then began Gold's Sisyphean labor of trying to coax useful information out of Brothman, who was not a government official but worked for private industry under government contracts. The Columbia chemist seems to have been manipulating the Soviets in the hope that they would eventually set him up in business, Gold thought:
Starting in early 1942…. Brothman, on many occasions, I would say at least six, openly and directly asked me if I could obtain legitimate backing from the Soviet Union so that he could set up an enterprise and do work on chemical processes for the Soviets. When I first mentioned this to Sam, he laughed hilariously and said that he had never heard of such damned fool nonsense in his life… By legitimate backing, Brothman meant sums ranging from $25,000 to $50,000.
In the meantime Brothman gave the Soviets only enough information to string them along, and Gold bore the brunt of Sam's frustration. When Harry finally confronted Brothman, the man counterattacked and called the Soviets “a bunch of fools.” He told Harry he had already given them, in Gold's words, “a drawing of a turbine type of engine for aircraft, and also information on one of the earliest jeep models which had been designed by him.” He promised to deliver the complete design of an explosives plant.
Brothman soon reneged on the explosives-plant design, but promised something far more desirable. “He told me he was in possession of complete information on the manufacture of Buna-S, a synthetic rubber. He also told me that not only was he in possession of complete information, but that he had the complete design material [for a synthetic rubber plant]… When I told Sam about this, he was highly elated.” Buna-S was one of the items on
