Semenov's wish list. Gold arranged to meet with Brothman on New Year's Day 1942 to pick up the Buna-S plans. Brothman came downstairs from his office two hours late, empty-handed. “I remember this occasion very clearly and distinctly,” Gold testified bitterly, “because it was a cold morning and I waited outside the Exchange Bar, which unfortunately was closed, on New Year's morning.”
Once during this ongoing negotiation Sam exploded at Brothman's callous disregard of Gold's misery:
He said, “Look here, you fool, this scoundrel will not have the information on Sunday. He won't have it next Sunday or the Sunday after that. I bet you that it will be a month or two months before you will get it; then I doubt that it will be complete. He doesn't have it complete now; he doesn't have half of it complete; maybe it isn't even started on yet.”…
Then [Sam] became so enraged, actually not at me but at Brothman, that he was almost beside himself and actually stopped talking from the force of his anger. After he cooled down, he said, “Look, we are going to have a couple of double Scotches, and you are going to have something to eat. We will sit there and will talk of music and we will talk of opera, and we will not talk of that son-of-a-bitch Brothman.”
But eventually Brothman came through. On a rainy evening in March 1942, he passed to Harry Gold a complete report on the manufacture of Buna-S synthetic rubber, including blueprints for a plant — several hundred single-spaced typewritten pages and a dozen blueprints. In April, Sam told Gold to congratulate and praise Brothman “because… the information he had turned over… had been received in the Soviet Union and had been hailed as a remarkable, extremely valuable piece of work… The Soviets were immediately beginning to set up a plant for the manufacture of Buna-S.”
Al Slack came through as well, though not before an accumulation of disappointments nearly led Gold to quit:
Once, in the fall of 1942, I did waver. Things were going very badly. I had lost contact with Al Slack… and things were going very poorly with Brothman… and the whole business seemed futile. Also, at this time my increased absences from home had depressed my mother very much, and I was greatly concerned. To top it off, on that very evening in New York, the usually ebullient [Sam] had been very subdued regarding some failures of his own, and so, after I left him and went to Penn Station I came to the determination to be through with this work once and for all; I felt that I had done enough. I had some fifteen minutes for my train to Philadelphia and sat down in the smoking room of the station. Thereupon, I was approached by a swaying drunk who proceeded to vilify me as a “kike,” a “sheeny bastard” and a “yellow draft dodger and money grabber” plus a series of far more horrible epithets.
Gold walked away. “But as I did so, so went my resolution to quit espionage work. It seemed all the more necessary to work with the utmost vigor, to fight any discouragement and to do everything possible to strengthen the Soviet Union, so that such incidents could not occur. To fight anti-Semitism here seemed so hopeless.”
Gold reconnected with Slack by going to Kingsport, Tennessee, where Slack had moved, and looking him up in the phone book. Slack delivered information that autumn 1942 on the superior new high explosive RDX, including two one-pound rubber containers of the material itself in what Slack assured Gold was a nonexplosive form. Gold hoped so; “just before I turned the RDX over to [Sam], I had been narrowly missed by a speeding cab while crossing Sixth Avenue in New York, near the Gimbel liquor store.” Subsequently Slack was transferred to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Kodak subsidiary Tennessee Eastman had contracted to operate the electromagnetic isotope separation plant that the Army was building there to process uranium for the atomic bomb; at that point the Soviets severed him from Gold, telling Harry to forget about him.
At the end of 1942, Sam directed Gold to set up an elaborate charade for Abe Brothman's benefit. “The purpose of this meeting had been carefully discussed with Sam before I suggested it to Brothman, and was essentially to be in the nature of a pep talk… I was to represent Sam as a visiting Soviet dignitary… The whole idea of the meeting was to ‘butter up’ Brothman so that he would work on processes in which we were interested… Brothman readily agreed to this meeting.”
The conspirators assembled around nine o'clock one midwinter evening in a room Gold had rented at the Lincoln Hotel in Manhattan. “Sam was extremely genial and expansive during this meeting… He called up and had some wine and some sandwiches sent up. We then proceeded to talk until one, possibly two o'clock in the morning.” Sam praised Brothman at length. He also brought up a subject that Gold had not heard him mention before:
A good deal of conversation [concerned] mathematics and the application of mathematics to practical problems of engineering… Sam very gently and extremely diplomatically hinted to Brothman… that Brothman should try to get work in fields… relating to military endeavor, or military equipment… I believe… that here may have come the first hint… of the interest of the Soviets in Atomic Energy[10]… and also there may have been some conversation relating to Brothman's acquaintance with Dr. Harold Urey at Columbia University. I believe that here Brothman stated to Sam that he was a former pupil of Dr. Urey's… I am emphasizing this because at this time, I had no idea that anything was going on in regard to Atomic Energy in the United States.
Harold Urey was a specialist in isotope separation who won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for first isolating deuterium. At the end of 1942 he was a member of the government S-l Committee that oversaw the Manhattan Project and was directing research at Columbia on gaseous diffusion. The Columbia team had just developed a workable barrier material made of compressed nickel powder.
Then it was Harry Gold's turn to be buttered up. Harry met with Sam on schedule in Manhattan in November 1943 and Sam told him they would conduct no business that evening; instead they were going to celebrate. The two men went to the bar in the Park Central Hotel. They took a table, as they always did in bars.
From time to time in the years of their relationship Sam had fretted that Harry's demanding courier work made it impossible for him to lead an ordinary life. “His greatest concern seemed to be over the fact that I had no wife and family of my own,” Gold would write. “I realize that it is because of this work,’ he said. ‘But it's not natural or good. You are not ascetic and you have normal instincts and desires. We must find some solution to this problem. Obviously you cannot take on the responsibilities of marriage and still do this work (and do not think that our people fail to realize the sacrifice you are making).’” But the only solution Sam could propose was a fantasy:
And, Sam would continue: “The obtaining of information in this underhanded way will not always be necessary. You'll see. After the war is over there will come a great period of cooperation between all nations and people will be able to travel freely… You will openly come to Moscow and will meet all of your old friends again — They will be so glad to see you — and we'll have a wonderful party and I'll show you all around the town. Oh, we'll have a great time.”
Gold thought Sam was sincere, but he was never sure. “I am puzzled,” he wrote in 1951, “even now, as to whether this was all part of a gigantic confidence scheme… I just don't know.” He knew that evening in the Park Central bar that there were “ulterior motives involved” in what Sam did next, that it was “carefully planned and staged,” but he also thought it contained “the element of a genuine reward for work well done…”
When they were comfortable together at their table, Sam announced that because of his outstanding work, Harry had been awarded the Order of the Red Star. The Soviet agent showed Harry the citation, “an affair in a rather gaudy red color,” Harry recalled later, “and with a large seal.” Sam apologized that he could not actually present Harry with the citation or the medal; security considerations obviously made that impossible. He told Harry about the privileges that came with the award. The privilege that amused Harry and stuck in his mind was “free trolley rides in the city of Moscow.” But Gold was proud of the honor; he even told Tom Black and Abe Brothman about it.[11]
Gold soon learned why he had been singled out for special honor. At a meeting a month or two later, in December 1943 or January 1944, “I was told by Sam that there was an extremely important mission coming up for me and that before he could tell me about [it] he wanted to know, would I undertake it. I unhesitatingly agreed.” It
