The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

John Kennedy was always disturbed by the way his family had discarded Rosemary, and he pushed through a sweeping mental-health reform bill as president. The bill’s goal was to shutter massive state asylums in favor of smaller, community-based centers that could provide more intimate care. Alas, states did shutter many asylums, but they neglected to replace them with the community centers, probably to save money. The spread of psychiatric drugs only accelerated the emptying of asylums, and they’ve all but disappeared since.

  4 Besides the name “lobotomobile,” other false rumors about Freeman include the notions that: he lost his medical license at one point; he used gold-plated ice picks for lobotomies; and he went insane later in life. None of those things are true.

  5 One of Freeman’s favorite lecture anecdotes involved a conversation he had with a patient during brain surgery. Because the brain has no nerve endings, doctors can operate on it without the patient feeling any pain. In fact, doctors often want patients awake and talking during surgery so they can monitor them and make sure they’re not cutting into anything vital. Well, one day Freeman was chatting with a patient and asked him what was going through his mind at that moment. “A knife,” the man answered. Freeman found this hilarious.

  6 Beyond Moniz’s methods (alcohol injections, cutting with a wire loop) and Freeman’s methods (cutting tissue with a dull blade, the icepick penetration), several other surgeons developed their own flavors of lobotomies, including freezing brain tissue, burning it, blasting it with electricity or radiation, and aspirating it with a suction tube—which Freeman memorably described as similar to running a “vacuum cleaner over a tub of spaghetti.”

  9

  ESPIONAGE: THE VARIETY ACT

  The pair looked like a variety act—comic opposites. One of them was thin, prim, bespectacled, and balding. He was driving a battered blue Buick that clink-clink-clinked as it rolled along. As he pulled up to the rendezvous point in Santa Fe, his partner—short, plump, and dumpy—stepped out from the shadows near a church and hopped into the passenger seat. The car took off immediately, winding to the edge of town, then up into the mountains.

  It was a warm September night in 1945. After parking, the two men sat inside the car and chatted like old friends, watching the lights of the city below. Eventually the desert cooled, and they headed back to Santa Fe. Just before parting, the prim one handed his passenger a packet of papers. They shook hands warmly and, despite promises to visit, knew they’d probably never see each other again.

  After the car rattled off, still clinking, the tubby man schlepped to the bus station. He had a flat-footed gait and swiveled his head as he walked, scanning the faces around him. Inside the station, he sat on a bench and tried reading a book, Great Expectations. But the packet of papers, which never left his grip, kept interrupting his thoughts. He also kept popping up and eyeing the crowd around him, worried he was being followed. He had good reason for being jumpy. He was a Soviet spy, and the packet contained the blueprints for an atomic bomb.

  After a bus ride to Albuquerque, he caught a plane to Kansas City and went to the train station. There, he spotted an old woman and her grandson struggling to get their luggage onboard his train. Everyone else was brushing past them, so he stopped to load their bags and make sure they got settled. Unfortunately, this good deed cost him a chance to secure a seat for himself, and he had to sit on his suitcase the whole ride to Chicago.

  Finally, after several delays and many, many hours, he reached New York—but did so too late to meet his Soviet contact. It was a crushing blow: their backup meeting wasn’t for two weeks, which meant two more weeks of carrying the packet around, two more weeks of paranoia. But he was nothing if not disciplined. For fourteen days, he never let the papers out of his sight, even taking them grocery shopping. Indeed, there was only one place he felt safe during that fortnight—his chemistry lab.

  As soon as he got his experiments running, the stress of espionage lifted a little. He could lose himself among the crucibles and test tubes and let his guard down. When he finally handed off the atomic bomb blueprints two weeks later, he buried himself in lab work again to push the matter out of his mind. Some people drink to forget troubles; Harry Gold did chemistry.

  Today Gold is best known as a spy and a snitch. He accepted dozens of secret documents from a rogue physicist on the Manhattan Project—the thin, prim Klaus Fuchs—and delivered them to Soviet agents. Then, when the FBI finally caught Gold, his testimony helped put Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair. But if anyone had asked Gold what he considered himself, the answer would have been simple. He was a chemist.

  A devotion to science, and a series of misfortunes, first pushed Gold into espionage. He grew up in a rough neighborhood in South Philadelphia, where his family suffered discrimination for being Jewish. Gangs of toughs threw bricks through the windows of Jewish homes, and beat up the short, slight, bookish Gold on the way home from the library.

  His father, Samson, a carpenter at a phonograph factory, had it even worse. Other workers would swipe Samson’s chisels and gum up his tools with glue. His boss had a particular loathing for him, and once growled, “You son of a bitch, I’m going to make you quit.” He then removed everyone but Samson from the assembly line and forced him to sand down all the wooden cabinets by himself. Samson had to work at a frantic pace, and Gold remembered him coming home with bleeding fingertips. But the young Gold admired how his old man never complained and never quit.

  Samson was, however, laid off in 1931, which put Gold in a tough position. During his teenage years, Gold worked in a scientific lab at the local Pennsylvania Sugar Company; he’d started off washing spittoons and glassware before working his way up to lab assistant in just six months. He loved the work and started taking classes toward a chemistry degree. But when his father lost his job, Gold had to quit school and take a full-time position at Penn Sugar to keep them afloat. Unfortunately, the Great Depression kept getting worse, and when the company cut Gold loose in December 1932, the family faced the real possibility of losing their home.

  Chemist and atomic spy Harry Gold. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

  After several desperate months, his friend Tom Black found him a job at a soap factory in New Jersey for $30 a week, a good wage. Gold was deliriously grateful. But there was a catch. Black was an ardent communist, and he insisted that Gold accompany him to meetings.

  Although Gold leaned left politically, the communists he met disgusted him. They held tedious meetings that always ran until 4 a.m., in rooms decorated with drawings of fat plutocrats smoking cigars and sitting on piles of coins. Gold dismissed them as “despicable bohemians who prattled of free love… lazy bums who would never work under any economic system… polysyllabic windbags.” A few months later, when Penn Sugar rehired Gold, he left Jersey behind and refused to attend any more meetings.

  Black, though, kept hounding Gold, badgering him to join the Communist Party. Finally, to shut Black up, Gold agreed on a compromise. The Soviet Union, Black explained, needed to build up its industrial base and improve people’s standard of living. The best way to do that was through science, but American firms were stingy about licensing technology abroad. Could Gold swipe some trade secrets instead?

  Gold hesitated. Penn Sugar had been good to him—not many firms would have let a spittoon-washer become an assistant chemist. The company also had subsidiaries in several different chemical industries, meaning he could work in almost any field he fancied. Still, Black’s pleas moved him. Gold longed to be the savior of the huddled, starving Soviet masses—people like his own family. The pitch appealed to his scientific idealism as well. By liberating trade secrets, Gold told himself, he would simply be pooling data and ideas, which is crucial to scientific progress. Soviet agents also painted science as an international brotherhood, which stood above petty things like national borders and political strife. Scientists had a duty to make the world a better place, and if American firms were too
greedy to license technologies legally, then Gold had a duty to steal them.1

  Gold’s second motivation for spying was more personal: anti-Semitism. At the time, the Soviet Union was the lone country standing up to Nazi Germany, which was of course brutally anti-Semitic. From this resistance, Gold concocted the idea that the Soviet Union was the one nation on Earth where Jewish people were truly equal—not just foes of the Nazis, but friends of Jewish people everywhere. In reality, the U.S.S.R. was just as prone to anti-Jewish prejudice as anywhere; in official KGB cables, the code word for Zionists (and according to a few sources, Jews generally) was “rats.” But Gold wanted to believe otherwise. He could still remember his father’s bleeding fingertips and the bricks hurled through windows, and he burned to do something “on a much wider and effective scale than… smashing an individual anti-Semite in the face.” Supporting the great Soviet experiment was his chance to fight back.

  So Gold started spying. A bit condescendingly, the Soviets codenamed him “Goose” for his dumpy physique and waddling, flat-footed walk. But they quickly learned to respect his spycraft. He started off slowly, just riffling through file cabinets at work and liberating documents here and there. As the months went by, he grew bolder, nabbing papers with increasing frequency. He’d then spend hours after work, even full nights, copying the documents line by line. From various subsidiaries of Penn Sugar, he took papers on lacquers and varnishes, on solvents and detergents and alcohol. At the start, he’d never intended to take so much, but he was always thorough about his work, illicit or not. If he ever felt like quitting, he’d simply think of the poor Soviet masses and steel himself to steal more. Overall, he remembered, “I looted them pretty completely.”

  At first Gold just handed the pirated copies to Tom Black. Eventually he started running them up to New York himself, a task he found thrilling, since he got to meet real Soviet agents. In fact, his excitement ran so high that it energized other parts of his life as well. In addition to working full-time, he was taking evening classes at Drexel University during this period, still trying to earn that chemistry degree. His grades shot up impressively after he started spying, the B’s and C’s morphing into straight A’s.

  Still, the trips to New York got to be draining as time went on. The rendezvous often meant an overnight train ride up, not to mention hours of wandering around the city to lose potential tails. (He might sit through half a movie, for instance, before ducking out a side exit, or take the subway and dart out of his car right before the doors closed.) He’d then wait in some obscure, lonely place to meet his contact, often in snow or rain. The trips were expensive to boot—he spent more than $6,000 all told ($110,000 today)—and they decimated his health. Some weeks he barely slept, and his weight ballooned to 185 pounds.

  Worst of all, he grew disillusioned with the Soviet attitude toward science. Research chemists like Gold were always searching for innovations in chemical processes, tricks and tweaks that could boost efficiency and goose production rates. Finding these breakthroughs isn’t easy—hiccups and dead ends are inevitable—but most scientists accept these frustrations as the cost of progress. In contrast, the Soviets had zero patience for exploratory research or speculation; they were desperate to industrialize, and they always preferred steady, reliable processes, however old and inefficient, to even the most promising potential breakthroughs. “When I made efforts to submit material which represented work not yet in full-scale production,” Gold remembered, “I had my knuckles sharply rapped.” This disdain for scientific progress disappointed him, but he was submissive by nature, and his handlers bullied him into line.

  Disenchanted, and increasingly weary, Gold grew to loathe his treks to New York. “It was a dreary, monotonous drudgery,” he recalled, and the need to deceive his family troubled his conscience: “Every time I went on a mission… I must have lied to at least five or six people.” (Sensing these lies, Gold’s mother grew convinced her son was a libertine, stringing along girlfriends up and down the East Coast. The truth was the opposite: between work and school and spying, he had no time to date anyone, to his deep regret.) To keep sane, Gold learned to shut down his scientific mind on trips north, then pop it back on and resume the life of a chemist when he returned to Philadelphia. But each year got a little more hectic, and Gold was soon near collapse.

  No matter how ragged he felt, though, Gold always found time for lab work, even if it meant a twenty-hour day. One favorite research project involved thermal diffusion, a way of using temperature differences to separate mixtures; in particular, he wanted to isolate carbon dioxide from waste exhaust to make dry ice. He described himself as a methodical chemist in the lab—less a “one-shot genius” than a plodder who made “every possible error in the book until, by the tedious process of elimination, only the correct answer remained.” One afternoon he dropped a rack with twenty-two crucibles and watched a full week’s worth of labor spill onto the floor. “I did not sit down and cry; nor did I go out and get drunk, as much as I wanted to,” he recalled. He simply worked for two days and two nights straight to redo everything.

  Gold was on the verge of quitting espionage when, in 1938, the Soviets sprung a surprise on him. He’d always longed to finish his degree, and his handler suddenly offered to pay for his tuition at Xavier University in Cincinnati. This wasn’t a selfless gesture: the Soviets were developing a spy at a nearby aeronautical plant, and Gold would have to courier documents. He didn’t care. He loved every second of collegiate life, putting in long hours in the lab and cheering rabidly for the Musketeer basketball and football teams. He stayed there until 1940, and later called his time in school some of the happiest years of his life.

  The idyll ended on his return to Philadelphia, where Gold resumed spying. It’s not clear why he did so. Perhaps he felt indebted to the Soviets for paying for his education. Or perhaps he enjoyed the companionship and sense of purpose in spying. (Indeed, the Soviets exploited his loneliness by pairing him with handlers who were also scientists. In bogus shows of camaraderie, they’d clap a hand on his shoulder and sigh, It’s too bad we have to dirty ourselves with spying. We should both be working in labs—that’s what makes us happy. As he later admitted, the communists “played me very shrewdly.”) Moreover, world events compelled him to keep snooping. After Nazi Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. in 1941, the Soviets were desperate for defense help, including technical expertise. Gold hated the murderous Third Reich and resigned himself to more espionage to help the Soviet Union survive.

  Thus resolved, Gold shifted from industrial espionage to military espionage. He began accepting documents and even samples of explosives from scientists in defense labs and interviewing them for reports. Managing agents like this was delicate work, requiring both technical know-how and psychological savvy. But Gold excelled. He was what the Soviets called a “disciplined athlete”: a cool, reliable spy. So when the top scientific spy in the Soviet ranks—a German-born British physicist named Klaus Fuchs—transferred from England to New York in late 1943 to join the Manhattan Project, Gold was the obvious choice to handle him.

  On February 5, 1944, just before 4 p.m., two men converged on a vacant lot near a playground in eastern Manhattan. One was thin and prim, wearing tweeds and glasses. He was carrying a green book and, despite the winter chill, a tennis ball.

  Seeing the ball and book, a short, jowly man—wearing one pair of suede gloves and holding another in his hands—sidled up and asked for directions to Chinatown.

  “Chinatown closes at 5 o’clock,” the thin man answered, completing the recognition signal. And with that, physicist Klaus Fuchs and chemist Harry Gold began walking.

  Gold introduced himself as “Raymond” and, after a short walk, hailed a cab. A few blocks later Gold stopped the car and hustled Fuchs into the subway to lose anyone that might be trailing them. This circuitous route eventually landed the pair at a steak house on 3rd Avenue. Gold was proud of these evasive maneuvers, but Fuchs—a hardened communist from Germany, som
eone who’d battled Nazi thugs in the streets there—dismissed them as juvenile. He also scolded Gold for his habit of constantly swiveling his head as they walked, looking for tails. That only attracts attention, he said.

  Manhattan Project physicist and communist spy Klaus Fuchs. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

  Having laid down the law, Fuchs got down to business. He explained that he was working for the Manhattan Project, which aimed to build a weapon of unprecedented power—an atomic bomb. Gold had never heard the term, and as a chemist, he grasped nuclear fission only vaguely. But one aspect of the conversation must have stirred his heart. Again, the Soviets despised most exploratory research as too speculative. Atomic fission was an exception: even though no one knew whether a nuclear bomb would work, the possibility was too important to ignore. For once, then, Gold would be handling cutting-edge research.

  After this first meeting, several more followed over the next few months—in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, at movie theaters, bars, museums. Every so often Fuchs handed Gold a thick envelope as they parted. Burning with curiosity, Gold would duck into a drug store and riffle through it—a huge security breach. Inside were pages filled with diagrams and mathematical derivations in a tiny, neat script. All top-secret bomb work.

  Sometimes the two scientists chatted during their meetings, although each man remembered the conversations differently. Fuchs recalled professionalism—terse exchanges and strict discipline. Gold recalled a budding friendship. In between spy talk, they discussed their mutual interest in chess and classical music, and they developed a chummy cover story (what the Soviets called a “legend”) to explain how they met, at a Carnegie Hall symphony. Fuchs even opened up about his sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was having marital troubles. Gold in turn told Fuchs about his twin children and his wife, a redhead who once modeled for the Gimbels department store. This was a complete fabrication—the fantasy of a lonely man—but Gold let himself indulge such thoughts around his friend.