for Cherbourg. Harry Gold seems to have believed his unwitting revelation forced Yatzkov's departure. In fact, the Soviet vice-consul was scheduled to leave to take up new duties at the Soviet Embassy in Paris and was traveling with his family. Meeting with Gold was part of closing out his work in North America. Gold's linkage with Abe Brothman was still an evident disaster.
Yet nothing came of it, at least not in the short run. When two FBI agents questioned Brothman for the federal grand jury on May 29, 1947, after Elizabeth Bentley's damaging revelations, Brothman concocted a story of legitimate dealings through the woman he knew as Helen but implicated Gold as a party to his Soviet contacts after “Helen” bowed out. After the agents had left Brothman at his offices in Long Island City, Gold happened to drop by from the Brothman laboratory in Elmhurst where he worked. He found his boss nearly hysterical:
Brothman was in a state of great excitement; he immediately [came] forward to meet me. The first thing Brothman said was, “The FBI were here — they know everything — they know all about us — they know you were a courier — they have a photograph of you and me together in a restaurant! Look, we don't have much time. Look, Harry, you've got to get this straight. You have got to tell the same story I told of how we met.”
The story Brothman had told required Gold to have known Bentley's deceased lover Jacob Golos — Gold had never met him — and depicted both men as innocent experts who had merely evaluated chemical processes for Golos and solicited legitimate business, in the course of which they made blueprints available. Ever accommodating, Gold memorized Brothman's description of Golos and agreed to make up a story to explain how he knew the Soviet agent. “[In] about the middle of this limited conversation,” Gold notes wryly, “Brothman said to me, ‘Someone has ratted — it must be that bitch Helen!’” Brothman warned Gold that FBI agents were on their way to the Elmhurst laboratory to talk to him. “I promised them I would not talk to you,” Brothman cautioned, “so don't let on that we've talked about this. You've got to cover me up and tell them the same story that I told you.” Gold did not want to leave until he had thought the problem through; he had just realized “the full import of it… ” Brothman insisted he get going. On the subway, Gold quickly invented a plausible story: that an acquaintance had introduced him to Golos at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia in 1940. The acquaintance was a man Gold knew would not talk; he was dead and buried.
At the Elmhurst laboratory, the FBI team questioned Gold from five in the afternoon until nine at night. Brothman and his secretary, Miriam Moskowitz, picked up the shaken chemist at nine-thirty and the three conspirators went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Queens. “Harry,” Brothman asked Gold guiltily over dinner, “you don't blame me for having brought your name into this, do you?” Brothman rationalized that he expected the FBI to identify Gold sooner or later and that it was better to bring him in at the beginning. Back at the laboratory, where Harry still had work to do, Moskowitz went for coffee while Gold and Brothman finished conflating their stories. Brothman was evidently worried about the extent of Gold's involvement. He knew Gold had been awarded a Red Star — more than the Soviets had done for him. “I [have] got to know all about you,” he told the Philadelphia chemist. “What can they find out that I don't know?” Considering the extent of Gold's courier work, his response was either disingenuous or self-absorbed: “I then told Brothman that in reality I had never been married, and further, that my brother was still alive and had not been killed in the Pacific, and that I lived with my family in Philadelphia… Brothman made many recriminations for my having told these falsehoods, but he said that he did not think these points would be serious.” Brothman tried once more, expressing “concern… that I might have had other dealings in my association with the Soviets with which he was not familiar.” Gold said not a word.
FBI agents visited Gold's home over the Memorial Day weekend at his invitation. He had hurried to Philadelphia ahead of them and had destroyed several incriminating documents, including the sheet of onionskin Yatzkov had given him at their last meeting. He told the agents that he had found no blueprints and they seemed to accept the story.
Gold and Brothman met several more times before they testified individually before the grand jury. Brothman nursed a grudge against Gold that grew with each meeting. He blamed Gold for involving him with Tom Black's activities, challenged Gold to tell him “everything” and worried that he might be “caught short while testifying.” When Brothman's summons arrived, he threatened to “tell the grand jury the true story of his work for the Soviet Union… ” Gold, Moskowitz and Brothman's attorney succeeded in dissuading the volatile chemist. After Brothman testified, he bragged over dinner that he had “neither cringed, flinched, or begged.” The grand jury, he warned Harry, had been “stuffed to the gills with stories of spying.”
Then it was Gold's turn. He was nervous, perhaps frightened. He and Brothman drove around aimlessly for most of the night before his grand jury appearance on July 31, 1947. Gold wanted to review Brothman's testimony. “Abe kept brushing me off and went into a great dissertation on political theory and the declining state of capitalism.” They stopped to eat watermelon “and other time-killing incidents.” It was four in the morning by the time they arrived at Brothman's parking garage — Harry was staying with Brothman while Abe's wife summered in Peekskill. An attendant took the car and the two men wandered the neighborhood on foot. Gold came close to telling his boss and nominal business partner about his other courier work, mentioning “trips by railroad and plane” that had created records the FBI might locate. He “did not come out and say that these trips were in connection with my Soviet espionage activity, [but] it was certainly understood…” Brothman told him not to worry and coached him on how to play to the grand jury. Gold got two hours’ sleep. He looked in on Brothman before he left to testify. Brothman's parting words were, “Look, Harry, you don't hold it against me for having brought your name into this, do you?” After Gold appeared before the grand jury, he told Brothman “that I thought that I had succeeded in putting across… the fact that I was a blunderer [rather than a spy]… ” Far from blundering, Gold's skillful evasions had thrown off the grand jury and Brothman as well.
None of Bentley's charges stuck. Lacking corroborating evidence, the grand jury returned a no bill. Gold now had a file at the FBI that identified him as a possible Soviet espionage courier and included his physical description, his background and profession and his affiliation with Brothman. But there were no charges pending against him on the American side. Since Yatzkov had fled him as if he were a leper he had heard no more from the Soviets. As of September 1947, Harry Gold was a free man, to the extent that he could ever be. A loss marked that unshackling. On September 27, his mother died. Everyone attended the funeral: Tom Black, Abe Brothman, Miriam Moskowitz, his friends from Pennsylvania Sugar. They met no redheaded Gimbel's-model wife or twin children, only Harry, overweight and thirty-six years old, his forbearing father and his brother Yosef, the brother who he told Moskowitz had died a paratrooper in the Pacific War. Celia Gold had dominated her husband and her sons. Her death and the suspension of his espionage work would open Harry's life to the possibility of change. What he called his “repressed longing for a family” would finally emerge to expression. So would guilt. “I had the leisure to reflect at length,” he writes, “and to evaluate the damage I had done, the full implications involved in this spying, and inevitably, [I came] to the horrible and sickening realization that it had all been… a tragic and irremediable mistake.”
Donald Maclean, for whom espionage was lavatory-attendant duty, approached the very Augean stables of atomic policy information in February 1947 when he was appointed British co-secretary of the Combined Policy Committee in Washington. By then he had already had access to Tube Alloys files at the British Embassy for more than a year. He also had a pass to the Pentagon and would soon receive a coveted unescorted pass to the offices of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
British and American ambitions had just come into open conflict. The wartime Quebec Agreement that Winston Churchill had arranged with Franklin Roosevelt in August 1943, still in force, provided that their two countries would never use the bomb against each other but also “that we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent” — effectively giving the British a veto over US sovereignty in the matter of atomic war (dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been only a US decision; the CPC with its British and Canadian representatives had met formally in furtherance of the Quebec Agreement and approved the use of atomic bombs against Japan). In September 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt had enlarged their previous agreement to include “full collaboration… in developing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes… after the defeat of Japan… ” Truman, Clement Attlee and Mackenzie King had reaffirmed “full and effective cooperation” in November 1945. During the war, all production of Belgian Congo uranium ore, the richest source in the world, had flowed directly to the United States, although the British had paid for half. Attlee had properly demanded dividing the annual production now that the war was won; Truman had agreed even though half the Congo supply plus supplies from sources in the US and Canada were not even sufficient to support the plutonium production reactors at Hanford, one problem the new AEC commissioners mentioned in the shocking report they asked Truman to read on
