The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (review)

In the vast literature on the Cold War, some topics garner more attention than others. Over the past decade, Soviet espionage during the Cold War, particularly that related to the development of the nuclear bomb, has been the subject of numerous monographs, including John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Giles Whittell, Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War (New York: Broadway Books, 2010); Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999) and Walter Schneir with Miriam Schneir, Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case (New York: Melville Books, 2010). Some works, such as Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, provide first-hand accounts. The list goes on and on, but the subject has not yet been exhausted. Throwing his hat into the ring, Allen M. Hornblum has now published The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb, a book that refutes the claims made by Walter and Miriam Schneir in their Invitation to an Inquest: A New Look at the Rosenberg-Sobell Case, which concluded that Harry Gold was a liar and that the Rosenbergs were innocent.

A journalist by trade, Hornblum has published several books, including Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). For his project on Harry Gold, he conducted extensive research in several U.S. archives, court records, congressional hearings, and secondary sources. In addition, Hornblum interviewed dozens of people who were in some way connected to Gold, who died in 1972. The culmination of Hornblum’s efforts is an exhaustive analysis of Gold, his life, and his actions—his background, what kind of person he was, what motivated him, and his relationships with various people, including his family, his colleagues, his fellow spies, his fellow inmates, and his attorneys, who by all indications genuinely liked him.

Originally named Heinrich Golodnitsky, Harry Gold, the son of Russian immigrants, gained notoriety after his arrest, for working as a Soviet courier and helping to provide the Soviet Union with information about the nuclear bomb, and for subsequently testifying against several Soviet spies—Julius and Ethel Rosenberg among others. Once he was apprehended, Gold cooperated fully with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and provided a wealth of information about his work for the Soviet Union and about various people, both Americans and foreigners, who were also in their employ and who were engaged in providing scientific intelligence to an enemy of the United States.

Born in Switzerland in 1910, Gold emigrated with his parents four years later to the United States, where he received a new “Americanized” name. After briefly living in Chicago and Norfolk, Virginia, the Gold family settled in Philadelphia. Hornblum does a great job of describing Gold’s early life—the difficulties that his father faced as he tried to earn enough money to support the family, how his mother added to the family’s income, the impact of the Great Depression on them, and Harry’s own efforts to help support his family while at the same time pursuing his dream of becoming a chemist—all factors, Hornblum argues, that contributed to Gold’s decision to become first a spy and then a courier for Soviet intelligence services.

Using Gold’s own words, as well as those of his attorneys, coworkers, and employers, Hornblum paints a sympathetic picture of an intelligent man who had few social skills or friends, was shy, and was manipulated into working for Moscow. Hornblum returns time and again to Gold’s assertions that he had not meant to hurt the United States, that...