Harry Gold was a laboratory chemist and spy for a number of Soviet spy rings operating in the United States during the Manhattan Project.
Background
Gold was born Heinrich Golodnostskiy on December 11, 1910, in Bern, Switzerland, to Russian Jewish parents. His father was Sam Gold, a cabinetmaker. Harry was their only child. The family came to the United States in 1913, and Harry grew up in Philadelphia.
Education
Gold attended the Drexel Institute of Technology, where he obtained a diploma in chemical engineering in 1936, and later received a B. S. from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Career
During World War II, Gold placed his knowledge and technical skills in the service of a nation he had never visited. The espionage career of Harry Gold came to light during the investigations and trials of Soviet agents who passed sensitive and secret information about the American atomic bomb project to the Soviet Union during World War II. Harry Gold was named as a participant in the spy ring of Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized British subject trained in nuclear physics. Gold was sympathetic to socialist and Communist ideologies even in high school. Though raised in a Jewish home, he expressed not religious convictions but rather a faith in the political creeds for which he diligently worked. After his arrest in 1950, Gold willingly described his involvement with military espionage. His motives, he claimed, were highminded. He believed his industrial and military spying would assist the Soviet Union, an American ally, to catch up with more advanced capitalist nations; he also believed his activities would not only redress the prejudicial policies of the American government toward the Soviets but hasten the defeat of the Nazis as well. At first, Gold's activities were relatively harmless. He provided his Soviet contacts with formulas for blending motor oils, solvents for synthetic detergents, and other industrial engineering data. In 1943, however, at the height of the war in Europe, Gold was told by his Soviet superiors in the espionage ring that he would be working with American scientists who were doing important war research. Curiously, throughout the war years Gold never faced any serious threat of exposure. On May 22, 1950, Gold was apprehended by the FBI and he admitted that he was the American conduit for Fuchs. Another suspect came to light, a United States Army technician stationed in Los Alamos named David Greenglass, who was arrested in June 1950. The spy network collapsed. During Gold's trial, Fuchs gave damning testimony against Gold, who received a thirty-year prison sentence. Gold appeared as a government witness in the subsequent sensational trials of Greenglass, the Rosenbergs, and Morton Sobell. Harry Gold was referred to in the press as the government's star witness and the necessary link in the case against the Rosenbergs and Sobell. What lent authority and plausibility to his testimony was the fact that Gold apparently had nothing to gain by cooperating with the government. His performance in court may have contributed to the government's successful prosecutions. He matter-of-factly and quite dispassionately spelled out the connection between the defendants and Soviet agents operating in the United States. According to Gold, in the spring of 1945 his chief Soviet contact, Anatoly Yakovlev, told him to pick up information in New Mexico. This information that Gold obtained and transmitted to the Soviets included sketches and diagrams of high-explosive lens molds being used in the atom bomb. All those named, accused and indicted on Gold's evidence were convicted. During his sixteen years in prison Harry Gold adapted very well to the rigors of incarceration. He worked in the prison's medical research laboratory, studied mathematics, and maintained a positive outlook on the future. Apart from a later trial in which his evidence was treated with suspicion, the record indicates that he never said anything on the witness stand that contradicted his initial statements to the FBI in 1960. Gold died six years after he was released in 1966 from the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, leaving behind a somewhat convoluted rebuttal of his numerous critics and detractors. In 1972, Gold died in Philadelphia, age 62; he was interred in Har Nebo Cemetery in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.
Personality
Gold was a man of average height and weight who seemed in appearance more like a businessman than a spy; his precise, professorial diction and emotional detachment made a tremendous impression on jurors and spectators alike.