SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT AND OTHER INTERNAL SECURITY LAWS 85270 TO THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE EIGHTY-FOURTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION FOR THE YEAR 1956 SECTION IV DECEMBER 31, 1956 Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON: 1957 COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY JAMES O. EASTLAND, Mississippi, Chairman ESTES KEFAUVER, Tennessee JOSEPH C. O'MAHONEY, Wyoming ALEXANDER WILEY, Wisconsin JOHN MARSHALL BUTLER, Maryland SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT AND OTHER INTERNAL SECURITY LAWS JAMES O. EASTLAND, Mississippi, Chairman OLIN D. JOHNSTON, South Carolina JOHN L. MCCLELLAN, Arkansas THOMAS C. HENNINGS, JR., Missouri PRICE DANIEL, Texas WILLIAM E. JENNER, Indiana ARTHUR V. WATKINS, Utah HERMAN WELKER, Idaho JOHN MARSHALL BUTLER, Maryland ROBERT MORRIS, Chief Counsel SECTION IV SOVIET ATOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE Behind the bars of the Federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., two quiet, rather studious men are serving long prison terms. One of them, working in the prison hospital, has served 6 years of his 30year sentence; the other, whose engineering abilities are utilized at a drafting board, has completed 5 years of the 15 to which he was sentenced. Their names are Harry Gold and David Greenglass, and each played a major role in the greatest espionage triumph ever achieved by the secret agents of the Soviet Union in this country. Both men have had plenty of time to review their lives and repent their actions. Both now realize the enormity of the crime they committed, and are anxious to do whatever can be done at this late date to redeem themselves and erase, or at least live down, their past. On April 26 and 27, 1956, through the cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, these two men appeared before the Internal Security Subcommittee in Washington. Both testified freely, and with every appearance of complete candor. Between them they gave the subcommittee one of the most detailed and complete pictures of the actual dayto-day workings of a Soviet spy ring that has ever been made public. It is understandably difficult for the average man or woman to credit the melodramatic details of an espionage conspiracy-the code names, the secret rendezvous spots, the recognition signals, and all the rest of the complex apparatus of a delicate intelligence operation. Even former Communists, who did not themselves happen to be involved in espionage activities, often find it hard, after breaking with the party, to believe that such activities are not at least mildly exaggerated. The great value of the testimony of a Harry Gold or a David Greenglass is that it helps even the most incredulous to understand at last the true nature and techniques of the enemy we face. Judging by the correspondence received by the subcommittee, few witnesses before it this year so shocked public opinion as these two mild-mannered men. And that was as it should be; for in their stories we can see clearly how mere intellectual arrogance, carefully cultivated and dedicated (at first) to relatively benign objects, may bring a man at last to acts which may encompass the deaths of millions of his fellow human beings. THE STORY OF HARRY GOLD Harry Gold was born in Bern, Switzerland, on December 12, 1902. He came to the United States with his parents at the age of 12, and was naturalized on his father's papers in or about 1922. The family settled in Philadelphia, where Harry attended the public schools, graduating from high school in 1928. He was a bright youth, with a pronounced scientific bent, and after working for 2 years he entered the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in chemistry and chemical engineering. But the boy ran out of funds after 2 years and in March 1932 had to discontinue his studies for the time being. (He subsequently obtained his diploma from the Drexel Institute of Technology, in Philadelphia, and still later obtained the degree of bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Xavier University, in Cincinnati.) It was now the very bottom of the depression, and the Pennsylvania Sugar Co., where Gold had obtained employment, laid him off. By the end of that year (1932) the plight of Gold's parents and brother, to whom he was very much attached, was desperate. Through a fellow employee of the Pennsylvania Sugar Co., by the name of Ferdinand (Fred) Heller, Gold was introduced to a certain Thomas L. (Tasso) Black. Black, who had been working for the Holbrook Manufacturing Co., in Jersey City, N. J., had just obtained a better job, and he arranged for Gold to succeed him in his old position with Holbrook. Harry Gold's good fortune, however, was also the beginning of the great tragedy of his life, for as he testified before the subcommittee: The very first thing that Black told me that morning-I got there about 1 o'clock in the morning-the very first thing he told me, he said, "You are a Socialist." He said, "Fred Heller has told me that." He said, "I am a Communist, and I am going to make a Communist out of you" (p. 1011). However, Black never succeeded in making a Communist out of Harry Gold. Ironically, one of the Soviet Union's most effective American espionage agents never joined the Communist Party and, in fact, never wanted to. In Gold's own words: These people appeared so unreliable, so completely foreign to me. I came from a poor neighborhood, but the people there were respectable. We could hold our heads up. These were a pretty seedy, shabby, and frowzy lot of characters. I had no respect for them, and I didn't want to be associatedfrankly, I would have been ashamed of being seen with people like that. That was my reaction. So I didn't join the Communist Party (p. 1012). But the Communists were by no means through with Harry Gold. In September 1933 his old job at Pennsylvania Sugar became available again, and he returned to it. But he continued to see Black, and Black's friend at Pennsylvania Sugar, Fred Heller, and to attend get-togethers with these two in the Greenwich Village apartment of a girl named Vera Kane, who worked for a Wall Street law firm. About April 1934, the Communists played their second card: Black came to me in Philadelphia and he said very frankly; he said, "Harry," he said, "you have been stalling me." He said, "You have been trying to get out of joining the Communist Party." He said, "And possibly I don't blame you." He said, "You know, we are scientific men, and maybe we don't belong in. But," he said, "there is something you can do. There is something that would be very helpful to the Soviet Union and something in which you can take pride." He said, "You can-the Pennsylvania Sugar Co. has proc- He said, "If you will obtain as many of them as you can in And that is how I began it (p. 1013). Gold now embarked upon a deliberate program of industrial espionage. In the furor over Gold's activities as an atomic spy during the mid-1940's, this earlier aspect of his career has been almost entirely overlooked. Gold's efforts in the atomic field did not begin until the latter part of 1943; but for the better part of 10 years prior to that time he had been busily engaged in ferreting out American industry's secret processes, formulas, and industrial techniques— whatever might be of potential interest to the Soviet Union. As Gold pointed out in the course of his testimony, his own personal road to hell was thus paved with good intentions. He began by passing along to the representatives of the Worker's Paradise the Pennsylvania Sugar Co.'s formulas for such commonplace products as butyl alcohol; and he ended by delivering to the Soviet Union vital secrets involved in the manufacture of atomic bombs. Gold's thefts from the Pennsylvania Sugar Co. soon reached such proportions that the problem of copying stolen blueprints in sufficient quantities became serious. According to Gold, Vera Kane knew of a blueprinting firm which could do the job, but the little circle of friends could not afford to pay for its services. Finally, Black reported that he had arranged with a friend, who worked for the Soviet-controlled Amtorg Trading Corp., to have the blueprints copied. Black thereupon introduced Gold to his friend, whom Gold knew only by the pseudonym "Paul Smith." Smith seems to have been a Russian-the first Gold had met in his espionage work-and the details of their introduction are the stuff of which spy thrillers are made: Mr. MORRIS. All right. Now, how did Black fit into this Mr. GOLD. The very night that I met Paul Smith, the fol- man. Mr. MORRIS. The Russian? Mr. GOLD. The Russian; blond, and he had rather oval features and a nose that flared somewhat at the bottom. We walked along together without anything being said, and then the man motioned very peremptorily to Blackhe just sort of shoved him off with his hand and said something to the effect that Black could leave now, and Black did leave. That left the two of us alone (p. 1016). |