The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  This was also the trip where Gold missed his contact in New York, forcing him to spend two weeks carrying the papers around. The fortnight exhausted him, and given the expense and added stress of trips to New Mexico, he decided once more that he was through with espionage.

  Espionage, however, wasn’t through with him. In 1946, Penn Sugar laid Gold off again. He applied to the KGB for funds to open a thermal diffusion lab, and when the agency turned him down, Gold moved to New York to seek work with a fellow chemist—and fellow communist spy—named Abe Brothman. It was a huge mistake. The FBI had its eye on Brothman, and Gold’s handlers had told him to steer clear of the man. But Gold either forgot their warning or ignored it, and accepted a job anyway. (When the Soviet handler John found out that Gold was working for Brothman, he screamed at Gold, in public, “You fool! You’ve spoiled eleven years of preparation!”) Sure enough, Brothman soon ran afoul of the FBI and implicated Gold in espionage. The two were summoned to testify before a grand jury in July 1947.

  Brothman was every bit as weary of Soviet demands as Gold was, and he began threatening in private to confess his role in the Soviet spy machine and bring everyone down with him. But he pulled himself together in the witness box and denied everything. Nine days later came Gold’s turn to testify. The night before, Gold swung by Brothman’s apartment, and they went for a drive. Gold wanted to discuss his testimony, to make sure it didn’t contradict Brothman’s, but every time he brought the topic up, Brothman started ranting about the death of capitalism. Gold finally gave up, and the two stopped to eat some watermelon at 4 a.m.

  Gold needn’t have worried: he proved every bit as deft at lying under oath as Brothman had. On the stand, he made himself out as a bumbling, absentminded chemist, someone too naïve to even know what politics was. While the FBI didn’t believe either man, it couldn’t poke any real holes in their stories, and both of them walked.

  Still, thanks to Brothman, the FBI now had a file on Gold. Even worse, agents in England were about to reel in a spy who had much more incriminating material on him—none other than Klaus Fuchs.

  Brothman paid Gold erratically, if at all. (“When there was no money, I was a partner,” Gold said of his time there. “When there was money, I became an employee.”) Gold also missed his family while in New York, especially after his mother died of a brain hemorrhage in September 1947. So in mid-1948 Gold quit Brothman’s firm, moved back home, and took a job in the Heart Station at Philadelphia General Hospital. Not only was he doing good, solid chemistry—studying electrolyte levels in the blood and how potassium affected muscle function—he was helping save people’s lives. He even met the love of his life at the hospital, a biochemist named Mary Lanning. “I had never been happier,” he later said.

  Over the next year and a half, Gold proposed to Lanning twice. She twice said no—but not because she didn’t love him. Rather, she sensed that he was hiding something about his past, something big. For example, when he accidentally mentioned visiting Santa Fe once, he covered his tracks by saying Penn Sugar had sent him down to check out a Coca-Cola plant there—obvious baloney. No dummy, Lanning knew he was holding something back, but Gold simply couldn’t reveal the truth and risk her thinking less of him. The couple finally broke things off, because he feared that if they married and he was exposed, it would ruin her life.

  He was right to worry. In September 1949, four years after his last meeting with Fuchs, Gold answered the door at his home one Saturday night to find a man with a thick accent standing there. Not knowing who he was, Gold moved to shut the door. Before he could, the man—a Soviet agent—recited a code phrase, which stopped Gold short. He’d been hearing rumors about uncooperative spies being tracked down and murdered, and no matter how much he wanted to blow this man off, he felt it safest—for him and his family—to play along. After some discussion in the kitchen, Gold agreed to visit the agent in New York two weeks later. They rendezvoused during a downpour. To Gold’s shock, the agent demanded that Gold defect to Eastern Europe. He refused to explain why.

  Everything became clear a few months later. On February 2, 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in England and confessed. The United States was still reeling from the news that the Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear bomb the previous August, and the capture of an atomic spy made headlines worldwide. Seven days later, during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy waved around a piece of paper that, he claimed, listed 205 communists who’d infiltrated the State Department. He’d been itching for months to begin an anti-communist purge, and Fuchs had given him a golden opportunity. Fuchs’s arrest also convinced Harry Truman—who’d previously announced plans only to study the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb—to fully commit to building one.

  One part of Fuchs’s confession especially alarmed the public: that he had an American contact known as “Raymond.” To be frank, the Soviets probably should have liquidated Gold at this point, but for some reason they hesitated. In truth, Gold nearly did the job for them. After Fuchs confessed, Gold panicked and considered killing himself with sleeping pills. His old friend Tom Black, who’d first pushed him into espionage, had to talk him out of it.

  Meanwhile, the FBI began what one agent called a “raging monster of a quest” to find Raymond. The Bureau investigated 1,500 suspects, with a dozen agents working full-time on the case and sixty more working part-time. Based on Raymond’s background in chemistry, they requested information on 75,000 combustible material permits issued in New York in 1945. They even sent agents to bus stations across New Mexico to ask if anyone remembered a husky fellow holding an envelope five years earlier.

  The FBI finally caught a break when agents (illegally) broke into Abe Brothman’s lab in New York and found several papers Gold had written on thermal diffusion. This excited them, because Fuchs had worked on gaseous diffusion for the Manhattan Project. In truth, the two processes have little in common, but no one at the FBI grasped that. (Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart.) They cracked open Gold’s old case file and used this and other clues to link him to Raymond.

  On May 15, two agents in Philadelphia interrupted Gold at his lab around 5 p.m., and he agreed to accompany them downtown to answer some questions. They kept him there until 11 o’clock. Gold never cracked, but he returned to the lab afterward to finish his experiments—and no doubt also to calm himself.

  Feeling he had no choice, Gold submitted to more hours of interrogation that weekend. When the agents asked if he’d visited New Mexico during the war, he denied ever being west of the Mississippi. When they put a picture of Fuchs before him, he nodded and said, “That’s the English spy.” But he claimed to recognize Fuchs only from magazines. After further pressure, he finally agreed to “settle the matter” by letting the FBI search his home—but not until Monday, when his brother and father would be absent. The agents couldn’t have been happy with this; it would give Gold time to purge anything incriminating. Still, lacking a warrant, they agreed to the delay.

  Incredibly, though, Gold didn’t purge a thing. He headed to the lab instead. He had a few experiments running on ways to detect potassium in the body, and he couldn’t bear to leave them unfinished. He then had one last dinner with his brother and father on Sunday night—“to salvage a few more precious hours” of normalcy, as he put it.

  Only at 5 a.m. on Monday morning did the purge begin. Digging through his room, Gold found old train tickets, letters from Soviet agents, draft reports of interviews, and more. He scrambled to flush some items down the toilet, and buried others in the rubbish bin in the cellar.

  He’d just finished up when two FBI agents knocked around 8 a.m. Wearing pajamas, Gold led them up to his room, which they began to ransack, pawing through drawers and pulling things off his shelves. There were old schoolboy notes, lab books, chemistry and physics texts. He also had volumes of poetry and several potboiler mysteries. Gold cringed when he spotted the Thomas Mann novel sitting there, the one he’d used when tryin
g to track down a missing Fuchs. But, ever the “disciplined athlete,” Gold kept cool and chatted with them as they worked.

  Around 10 a.m., one agent pulled down a favorite book of Gold’s—a well-thumbed copy of Principles of Chemical Engineering. It must have brought a smile to his face, the old standby. But of all the books he owned, this one betrayed him. As the agent opened it, a tan street map slipped out, titled “New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.” Gold had grabbed it at the museum before his meeting with Fuchs.

  The agent picked the map up and turned to Gold. “So, you were never west of the Mississippi…”

  Gold all but collapsed onto a chair. He asked for a minute to think, then bummed a cigarette, which he normally hated. At this point, Gold probably still could have walked. The FBI had no hard evidence linking him to Fuchs. He even schemed up a plausible lie on the spot: a humorist he enjoyed often set stories in Santa Fe, and he could claim that he’d ordered the map as a reference. But after a decade and a half of espionage, he was simply too tired to continue—tired of lying, tired of running, tired of the burden. All he could think about was how to break the news to his brother and father.

  He finally turned to the agents. “I am the man to whom Fuchs gave the information.”

  After his arrest, Gold vowed that he’d never rat out any of his fellow spies. I’ll accept my punishment like a man and stay quiet, he thought. Then his brother visited him in custody. “How could you have been such a jerk?” he asked. At that moment, Gold remembered, “A good half of that mountainous mental barrier that I had erected against squealing went crashing down.”

  Handcuffed and accompanied by two U.S. marshals, the chemist and atomic spy Harry Gold (center) leaves federal court in New York on his way to jail a few months after his arrest. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

  Even more wrenching, Gold’s father came to visit later. Samson had always been so proud of Harry—his smart son, the chemist, the one who’d gotten them through the Depression. Now he was weeping, looking frail and bewildered. “This won’t affect your job at the Heart Station, will it?” he asked.

  The question broke Gold’s heart. “Down went another section of the mountain.”

  Gold soon pled guilty and spilled everything he knew. He also wrote up a 123-page document explaining his spy work in detail, then submitted to endless hours of additional questions. One agent compared interviewing Gold to “squeezing a lemon—there was always a drop or two left.” Having finally unburdened himself, he felt at peace for the first time in years. His health bounced back as well and he quickly lost dozens of pounds.3

  The FBI opened forty-nine separate espionage cases based on Gold’s testimony. But history remembers one of them above all—the Rosenberg case. Gold couldn’t recall the name of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, but did remember his wife’s name, Ruth, and the street their apartment was on in Albuquerque. Greenglass’s furlough also coincided with the time frame Gold provided for their rendezvous. When caught, Greenglass confessed everything and claimed that he’d been pushed into espionage by Ethel and her husband Julius.

  Ultimately, Greenglass was the one who doomed the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and the press savaged him for turning against his sister. But Gold’s reputation took a beating, too, from both sides of the political spectrum. Communists smeared him as a “pathological liar” and lonely “weakling” who puffed himself up by inventing fantastical tales. Meanwhile, anti-communists condemned him as a stooge who’d betrayed his country. These accusers included the prosecutors at Gold’s trial, who demanded twenty-five years in jail for him, despite his extensive cooperation. The judge, who was even more anti-communist, gave him thirty. (In contrast, Klaus Fuchs—who’d actually stolen the documents—served just nine years in prison in England, after which he was deported to East Germany.4) Even Gold’s fellow inmates at Lewisburg Penitentiary scorned him. Thieves, rapists, hitmen—they enjoyed respect at Lewisburg. But when Gold the stool pigeon strolled over to shoot some hoops one day, every last player walked off the court. And he was lucky things didn’t escalate. A few years later, a trio of prisoners at Lewisburg beat another convicted spy to death with a brick wrapped in a sock.

  Once again, chemistry proved Gold’s refuge. Lewisburg had an unusual prisoner health program that combined medical care for inmates with biomedical research. Nowadays, to prevent the abuses we’ve explored in other chapters, using inmates in medical research wouldn’t fly. But ethical rules were looser back then, and Gold, a prisoner himself, jumped at the chance to return to the lab. He studied diabetes and thyroid disease at Lewisburg and volunteered to be injected with hepatitis-laced blood to help investigate a vaccine. As his crowning achievement, Gold earned a U.S. patent in 1960, from prison, for inventing a speedy blood-sugar test using a chemical called indigo disulfonate.

  In his spare time, Gold did shifts in the sick ward adjacent to the lab and helped nurse inmates back to health. This went a long way toward rehabilitating him in their eyes. Indeed, Gold proved a model prisoner overall, and in April 1966, after serving 16 years, he earned parole. Once again, his case became national news. On the day of his release, his lawyer came to pick him up and was terrified to hear an uproar inside. It sounded like a riot. In reality, it was Gold’s fellow inmates, cheering. After his years of selfless dedication, they were giving him a roaring sendoff.

  Gold had spent the last several months of his sentence studying scientific textbooks in his cell at night, to catch up on new techniques since his arrest. Luckily for him, he found a lab director who believed in second chances and hired him at another hospital in Philadelphia. Gold settled into a quiet life there doing hematology and microbiology and mentoring young scientists, a kindly uncle figure. The only time the façade cracked was when someone mentioned the Rosenberg case. Once, during a news broadcast, a picture of David Greenglass flashed onto the screen. To his coworkers’ shock, Gold erupted and screamed at them to turn it off.

  Eventually Gold’s health declined due to a weak heart. (He had a congenital defect that was probably exacerbated by the hepatitis-laced blood he’d received in prison.) In August 1972, he underwent a risky surgery to replace a valve, and died on the operating table at age sixty-one. People in his lab cried when they heard the news.

  Gold had once hoped to make a name for himself as a scientist after prison: “Sometime in the future I shall be able to make far greater amends than I have done to date. And this restitution shall not consist in forming and giving evidence to the FBI… [but] in the field of medical research.” It was another fantasy. Gold is still vastly better known for espionage than chemistry: he simply betrayed too many secrets and too many people. But unlike most communist spies, Gold had higher ideals than politics. Deep down, he was a chemist first and foremost—a man so obsessed with science that he preferred wrapping up some experiments to purging his files and saving his own neck.

  Unfortunately, other scientists did let Cold War politics corrupt their integrity. Not all of them were communists like Fuchs and Lysenko, either: Fear of the Soviet Red Menace infected scientists on the free side of the Iron Curtain, too. In particular, a group of psychologists working with the CIA and U.S. military devised a system of abusive interrogation techniques that tortured dozens of innocent subjects and led to several untimely deaths. And from this milieu would emerge perhaps the most notorious terrorist in American history.

  Footnotes

  1 One way Gold might have justified taking information from Penn Sugar was that stealing scientific trade secrets wasn’t technically a crime in the 1930s. Rather, it was a civil offense. So in theory, if Penn Sugar had discovered Gold’s theft, it could have sued Soviet firms in court. But good luck collecting damages.

  2 A sample lyric: “Merrily play one, accordion, / With my girlfriend let me sing / Of the eternal glory of Academician Lysenko.” Perhaps it sounds better in Russian.

  3 While Gold felt a cloud of stress lift after his arrest, his family didn’t fare s
o well. His father and brother got so many harassing phone calls after his arrest—most of them punctuated with anti-Jewish slurs—that they delisted their phone number. Gold had intended to combat anti-Semitism with his spying, but his exposure actually made it worse.

  4 As one American physicist later said, “Fuchs worked very hard for us, for this country. His trouble was that he worked very hard for the Russians, too.” And it was even worse than the physicist realized. Desperate to hang onto its colonial legacy as a world power, postwar Great Britain longed to be one of the first nuclear powers in the world. So Klaus Fuchs actually stole documents from Los Alamos for the British as well. Overall, then, Fuchs played a key role in producing atomic bombs for three different nations. Physicist Hans Bethe once said of Fuchs, “He’s the only physicist I know who truly changed history.”

  Footnotes

  1 In case you’re wondering, there are methods out there for getting useful, reliable information during interrogations.

  In the rock-’em-sock-’em 1930s, cops would often coerce confessions by dunking suspects in water or dangling them out of windows. Eventually, these techniques were condemned as barbaric, and replaced by supposedly advanced psychological methods involving harsh lights, isolation, and the good cop/bad cop dynamic. Unfortunately, despite their scientific veneer, these new methods didn’t work very well and led to thousands of false confessions over the years. Equally bad, even when police officers collared the right suspect, their aggressive questioning often caused him to clam up and stop talking, which stymied investigations.