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  • Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
  • Seymour E. Goodman (bio)
Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. By Steven T. Usdin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+329. $40.

Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant were American electrical engineers and true believers in Soviet-style communism. As such, they were effective members of the Rosenberg spy group during the 1940s, collecting and passing along large quantities of valuable information on advanced weapons–related technologies to the Soviet Union. They managed to avoid the fates of most of the Rosenberg group by escaping from the United States, first to eastern Europe and soon thereafter to the Soviet Union, where they aspired to a major role in the development of the defense-oriented Soviet electronics industry. Ultimately becoming casualties to more capable infighters within the Soviet system, they continued to work as good engineers, and true believers in Soviet-style communism, to the ends of their lives.

Ideologically committed to communism since their New York college days in the 1930s—and with the industriousness and determination often found in engineers—Barr and Sarant and their friends went on to obtain technical jobs in the U.S. Army and with defense contractors during World War II. In those days, it was easy for good engineers to obtain such positions and, remarkably, someone who lost a job after his communist past was discovered would have no trouble finding another. Barr and Sarant and the three other most industrious and productive members of their group—William Perl, Morton Sobell, and especially Julius Rosenberg—obtained more than 30,000 pages of mostly classified technical documents that were photographed and passed on to the Soviet Union. The compromised technologies included some of exceptional military importance, notably ground and airborne radar, antiaircraft control systems, and jet aircraft. Every so often, they would come up with more—e.g., Rosenberg's delivery of a purloined proximity fuse. It is not difficult to make a case that all of [End Page 676] this was of great help to the Soviet Union and did serious damage to the United States.

The spy ring's undoing came about when Soviet handlers made the elementary mistake of connecting this group with the atomic bomb spies at Los Alamos. As the FBI and the Venona code-breaking effort started to close in, the Soviets were given warning by Kim Philby, then British MI6 liaison in Washington. Barr and Sarant separately escaped with KGB, Polish, and Czech help. It is almost touching to see the concern the KGB had for productive American engineering spies. Among other things, the KGB set them up with new identities—Barr became Joseph Berg and Sarant became Philip Staros, with South African and Greek personal histories respectively. The KGB also helped them reunite and find and retain good electrical engineering positions and special privileges, first in Czechoslovakia and then Soviet Russia. Their primary KGB contact in the United States, Alexander Feklisov, was loyal to the Rosenberg group for the rest of his life, ultimately writing a sympathetic book on their relationship (The Man behind the Rosenbergs [2001]). Even after they fell from grace with their highest ambitions thwarted, the two electrical engineers from America still led relatively privileged and protected lives.

Once behind the then-recently-named iron curtain, Barr/Berg and Sarant/Staros went to work in the defense electronics sector, where their U.S.-style approach to management and their willingness to hire talented but politically and ethnically shunned natives both produced good results. Staros established himself as the dominant member of the duo, with seemingly contented acquiescence by the more easygoing Berg. Staros also became something of a visionary for the prospects of Soviet microelectronics, culminating in a dramatic 1962 meeting with Khrushchev that led to the creation of a major new center for Soviet microelectronics near Moscow.

Their own prospects quickly started to decline with Khrushchev's ouster, and much of the rest of the story follows the pair through a series of mostly disappointing encounters with, and losses to, more politically capable and better-positioned adversaries...

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