JFK+50: Volume 6, No. 1791
RESEARCH CHEMIST SPY SENT TO PRISON FOR ESPIONAGEPhiladelphia, PA (JFK+50) Sixty-five years ago today, December 9, 1950, Heinrich Golodnitsky, a.k.a. Harry Gold*, was sentenced to thirty years in prison having been convicted of serving as a courier of United States government atomic secrets for Soviet spy rings.
Gold, a 39 year old research chemist at the Los Alamos Laboratory, admitted being involved in espionage since 1934 and of helping Klaus Fuchs to pass information about the Manhattan Project to agents of the Soviet Union.
According to Allen M. Hornblum...
"Harry Gold was the human tripwire that brought down a host of Americans who had spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s."
*Heinrich Golodnitsky, a.k.a. Harry Gold (1910-1972), was born in Philadelphia, PA. HG became a lab chemist for the Manhattan Project where he made a crude drawing of the atomic bomb and passed it along to his Soviet handlers in New York City.
HG was paroled in May 1965.
SOURCES
"Harry Gold: The man who testified against the Rosenbergs," by Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal, October 7, 2010, www.jewishjournal.com/
"Harry Gold sent to prison for his role in atomic espionage," This Day in History, October 9, www.history.com/
"The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atomic Bomb," by Allen M. Hornblum, Yale University Press, 2011
Harry Gold
Soviet Spy
