Abraham Brothman

Abraham Brothman was born in 1913. Brothman was fifteen when he entered Columbia College on a full scholarship. He went on to Columbia School of Engineering and graduated as a professional engineer before his nineteenth birthday. "He took a fellowship in the Department of Mathematics for six months; he had been refused one in the School of Engineering and suspected that anti-Semitism had ruled him out. This was, after all, 1932. Despite the fact that it was the depths of the Depression, job offers came quickly. He joined a large chemical equipment manufacturer in Pittsburgh as a chemical engineer. In a matter of months he became chief engineer; he was now barely twenty-one." (1)

A chemical engineer, he worked for Hendrick Manufacturing Company, a design and equipment manufacturer in New York City in the late 1930s. (2) Later he established a small company called Republic Chemical Machinery Company (later renamed as Brothman Associates). "It would be inevitable that Abe would want to set up his own operation as a consulting engineer so that he could exercise greater control over his professional life. He was nothing if not self-confident about his ability to build such a business even without adequate capitalization. He wanted the freedom to create without the strictures of moribund corporate vision, but he had family and staff responsibilities he was not able to meet after he set up his consulting office." (3)

In October 1944 Miriam Moskowitz went to work for Brothman who ran a small company called Republic Chemical Machinery Company (later renamed as Brothman Associates). "Abe was married and the father of two young children. He was devoted to his family, but always seemed more preoccupied with his work; spending his days and most evenings at the office, or in the company of professional colleagues. Even on weekends or holidays one could invariably find him bent over his drawing board." (4)

Miriam Moskowitz gradually became romantically involved with Brothman: "Suddenly my good old friends all seemed like sandbox playmates; Abe and his universe were closing them out. Over several months our relationship took a more personal turn. I was twenty-eight, he was thirty-one; it was an uncharted course and neither of us recognized the dangers." Moskowitz later recalled: “I was very flattered... When he talked, he made such sense. He interpreted the universe... It was like getting a secondhand education without cracking the books open.” (5)

In 1946 Abraham Brothman made Miriam Moskowitz a partner in the business. "He sold rights to patents he owned to raise funds, but those funds did not last long. Eternally optimistic, he had no hesitancy to borrow money to keep the business afloat, not from banks but from individuals who believed in him. My father was one. Unquestionably, he meant to repay those debts but he never achieved the financial stability to do so. Yet he continued to go deeper into debt instead of setting limits on the scope of his operation or retrenching, or ending them altogether and becoming a salaried employee again." (6)

Abraham Brothman - Soviet Spy

Brothman, a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), became a member of a Soviet spy network run by Jacob Golos. His codename was Constructor (later Expert). According to Kathryn S. Olmsted, the author of Red Spy Queen (2002), Golos handed Brothman over to Elizabeth Bentley: "Her first assignment in her new role as courier, secret agent, and Girl Friday was to handle an irascible and annoying industrial scientist. Abe Brothman, a New York engineer, had designed a mixing machine for chemicals. He periodically met with Golos to pass along blueprints for this invention and other new industrial processes. The blueprints were Brothman's personal property, so he hardly qualified as a major spy at this point in his career. Golos's long-term plan, though, was to develop the engineer as a future source of industrial secrets. Because of his girth and waddle, Elizabeth dubbed Brothman the Penguin. Beginning in the spring of 1940, she began to meet with him regularly. They would rendezvous on the street, then proceed to dinner. In the course of the dinner, Brothman would hand her an envelope full of blueprints." (7) In 1941 Harry Gold became his main source of contact. (4) As a result of his activities Brothman's company was commissioned to do work for the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission in New York City.

At the end of the Second World War, Elizabeth Bentley confessed to the FBI she was a Soviet spy. On the 7th November 1945, she made a 107 page statement that named Abraham Brothman, Victor Perlo, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, Abraham George Silverman, Nathan Witt, Marion Bachrach, Julian Wadleigh, William Remington, Harold Glasser, Charles Kramer, Duncan Chaplin Lee, Joseph Katz, William Ludwig Ullmann, Henry Hill Collins, Frank Coe, Mary Price, Cedric Belfrage and Lauchlin Currie as Soviet spies. The following day J. Edgar Hoover, sent a message to Harry S. Truman confirming that an espionage ring was operating in the United States government. (8)

Elizabeth Bentley

When Kim Philby told the NKVD that Elizabeth Bentley had provided the names of Soviet spies, Anatoli Yatskov was ordered to break-off all contact with his agents. However, on 19th December, 1945, he did have a meeting with Harry Gold, who warned him that a member of his network, Abraham Brothman, had already been interviewed by the FBI. Gold insisted that Brothman knew him as "Frank Kessler" and did not know his address: "I said that in case (Brothman) confessed about (Gold's) existence and described... what he knew about him, the FBI would try to find him. (Gold) should know that these links to him come only from (Brothman) and must not worry, since the (FBI) knows nothing about him and his work... However, (Gold) must be on the alert and demonstrate tenfold prudence and attentiveness in everything." (9).

When the FBI interviewed Abraham Brothman he admitted knowing Elizabeth Bentley. He also mentioned that he knew Gold. As Kathryn S. Olmsted, the author of Red Spy Queen (2002), has pointed out: The name of this mysterious chemist was new to the bureau. Although the FBI's investigation of him did not turn up any evidence of espionage at the time, the bureau added Harry Gold's file to its collection of potential Soviet spies." (10) In May 1946, Gold went to work for Brothman.

Anatoli Yatskov did not see Harry Gold again until 26th December, 1946. As Allen Weinstein, the author of The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999): "Yatskov had not seen Gold for an entire year. By the time they concluded their conversations, the Soviet operative undoubtedly regretted his neglect. Gold had been fired from his job as a chemist at a sugar plant in March 1946 when the company laid off a number of employees because of business losses. He remained unemployed until May, when Abe Brothman hired him as a chief chemist in his company. In short, the NKGB's chief courier in America now worked daily for one of his own leading sources!" (11) Yatskov also discovered that Gold had become a close friend of Brothman and had told him his real name and address. Yatskov was outraged and rebuked Gold angrily for having violated all the rules of spying.

Federal Grand Jury

In May 1947, Abraham Brothman was called before a federal grand jury and shown a photo of Harry Gold and Jacob Golos. Although the prosecutor overseeing the grand jury told Brothman they knew "everything about their covert activities and urged him to confess, the engineer denied any involvement with Golos's work and claimed to have met him only once or twice. When asked who had introduced him to Golos, Brothman named Gold. Following Brothman's grand jury appearance, two FBI agents visited him, and asked him about his former employer. Gold denied that he was part of a Soviet spy network.

Gold was not called before the grand jury until 30th July, 1949. Gold testified that he and Abraham Brothman had met Golos as professional chemists seeking jobs in a new firm Golos claimed he was launching. Gold told the New York City station chief what had happened. They reported to Moscow that Gold remained a loyal agent, "devoted to us... but, taking into account everything that has happened to him lately, it is difficult to foresee how he will behave at an interrogation if the FBI undertakes further inquiry of the case." (12)

Meanwhile, another member of the Soviet network, Klaus Fuchs, had been interviewed by MI5. At first Fuchs denied any involvement in spying. Jim Skardon later recalled: "He (Klaus Fuchs) was obviously under considerable mental stress. I suggested that he should unburden his mind and clear his conscience by telling me the full story." Fuchs replied "I will never be persuaded by you to talk." The two men then went to lunch: "During the meal he seemed to be resolving the matter and to be considerably abstracted... He suggested that we should hurry back to his house. On arrival he said that he had decided it would be in his best interests to answer my questions. I then put certain questions to him and in reply he told me that he was engaged in espionage from mid 1942 until about a year ago. He said there was a continuous passing of information relating to atomic energy at irregular but frequent meetings." (13)

A few days later J. Edgar Hoover informed President Harry S. Truman that "we have just gotten word from England that we have gotten a full confession from one of the top scientists, who worked over here, that he gave the complete know-how of the atom bomb to the Russians." (14) As Christopher Andrew, the author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009) pointed out: "What Fuchs had failed to realize was that, but for his confession, there would have been no case against him, Skardon's knowledge of his espionage, which had so impressed him, derived from... Verona... and unusable in court." (15)

Arrest of Harry Gold

Klaus Fuchs was interviewed by MI5 about his Soviet contacts. It was later recorded that: "In the course of investigation, Fuchs was shown two American motion picture films of Harry Gold. In the first, Gold was shown on an American city street and impressed Fuchs as a man in a state of nervous excitement being chased.... After seeing the film... Fuchs identified Gold and gave testimony about him." (16)

The FBI arrested Harry Gold and interviewed him about Klaus Fuchs. At first he denied knowing him. However, he suddenly broke down and made a full confession. On 23rd May, 1950, Gold appeared in court and was charged with conspiring with others to obtain secret information for the Soviet Union from Klaus Fuchs. Bail was set at $100,000 and a hearing scheduled for 12th June. The following day the newspapers reported that Gold had been arrested on evidence provided by Fuchs. (17)

On 16th June, 1950, David Greenglass was arrested. The New York Tribune quoted him as saying: "I felt it was gross negligence on the part of the United States not to give Russia the information about the atom bomb because he was an ally." (18) According to the New York Times, while waiting to be arraigned, "Greenglass appeared unconcerned, laughing and joking with an FBI agent. When he appeared before Commissioner McDonald... he paid more attention to reporters' notes than to the proceedings." (19) Greenglass's attorney said that he had considered suicide after hearing of Gold's arrest. He was also held on $1000,000 bail.

The New York Daily Mirror reported on 13th July that Greenglass had decided to join Harry Gold and testify against other Soviet spies. "The possibility that alleged atomic spy David Greenglass has decided to tell what he knows about the relay of secret information to Russia was evidenced yesterday when U. S. Commissioner McDonald granted the ex-Army sergeant an adjournment of proceedings to move him to New Mexico for trial." (20)

On 17th July the FBI announced the arrest of Greenglass's brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. The New York Times reported that Rosenberg was the "fourth American held as a atom spy" (21) The New York Daily News sent a journalist to Rosenberg's machinist shop. He claimed that the three employees were all non-union workers who had been warned by Rosenberg that there could be no vacations because the firm had made no money in the past year and a half. The employees also disclosed that at one time David Greenglass had worked at the shop as a business partner of Rosenberg. (22) Time Magazine noted that "alone of the four arrested so far, Rosenberg stoutly insisted on his innocence." (23)

Harry Gold appeared before the grand jury on 29th July, 1950. He testified for several hours and later the same afternoon the FBI reported that several more spies had been arrested including Abraham Brothman and Miriam Moskowitz. She later recalled that the charge was “conspiracy to obstruct justice.” Moskowitz claimed: "I had no idea what that meant or what the government thought I had done but I knew it portended trouble for the charge had overtones of Soviet espionage and in the McCarthyite political atmosphere such hints of wrongdoing, true or not, would be disastrous. In its details, the government accused Brothman, my co-defendant, of having influenced a key witness to lie to the grand jury which was then investigating Soviet espionage, and, it said, I had known of it. That key witness was a chemist from Philadelphia who had shaken up the world only months earlier with a startling confession that he had been America’s No. 1 spy although he made no accusations that we had participated in his wrongdoing… His name was Harry Gold." (24)

While no information regarding Miss Moskowitz's alleged involvement in the spy ring was available, Brothman was revealed to have been named earlier by Elizabeth Bentley, self-confessed Soviet espionage courier, as a person who had supplied her with blueprints and other documents. It was reported by the New York Times: "The importance of the new arrests was stressed by official statements in Washington that Brothman and Gold were part of a Soviet spy apparatus under a Russian trade organization chief working to ferret out atomic secrets." (25)

Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, the authors of Invitation to an Inquest (1983) "Curiously, despite these extra-legal accusations, neither Brothman nor Miss Moskowitz was indicted for espionage. They were charged by the grand jury - which acted on the last possible day before a three-year statute of limitations would have made prosecution impossible - with the far less serious offense of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Each pleaded innocent and was held in $25,000 bail. Soon after, Miss Moskowitz's attorney tried unsuccessfully to have her bail reduced to $1,000, reportedly asserting that the case had been presented to the public in "a grossly exaggerated and misleading fashion." (26)

Trial of Abraham Brothman

Abraham Brothman and Miriam Moskowitz went on trial in November 1950. They were charged, not with espionage, but with conspiring with Harry Gold to impede a federal grand jury investigation in 1947. Although the Justice Department was aware that Brothman was only a minor agent they saw it as an important dress rehearsal for the forthcoming trial of Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell. (27) Irving Saypol, who led the prosecution, had been described by Time Magazine as "the nations's number one legal hunter of top communists." (28) He told the jury that most of the trial was devoted to "evidence of activities in the interests of the Russian government, of membership and affiliation and activities connected with... the Communist Party." (29)

During the trial Brothman's lawyer explained that he had passed out unclassified blueprints as a way of drumming up business. (30) The blueprints, which were his own, sometimes were returned and sometimes were not. Elizabeth Bentley was one of the most important witnesses against Brothman. She insisted that Brothman was a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States and that she collected his dues. Bentley testified: "Usually we first had something to eat. By the time it was fairly late and then during the meal I would explain the latest Communist Party policy and theories to Mr. Brothman or he would talk a bit about himself, and then afterwards he would hand me the blueprints and sometimes he would dictate a very involved technical explanation of what the blueprints were all about." (31) Bentley also claimed that Brothman told her that "he had access to blueprints for what he termed a kettle to be made for the United States arsenal in Edgewood, Maryland. She said that Jacob Golos told her that the Soviets "would be very much interested in obtaining that particular blueprint." (32)

Harry Gold also testified against Brothman. He argued that his first meeting was on 29th September, 1941. At the second meeting, Gold told Brothman what industrial information was desired by the Soviet Union and also asked for "any and all information which Abe might find available to him regarding matters of military interest." Gold claimed that at their fourth meeting he gave him a "blueprint of a piece of chemical equipment known as an esterifier." Irving Saypol asked him what he did with this blueprint and he replied that he gave it to Semyon Semyonov. Gold also told the court that Brothman told him that he had given Golos and Bentley "plans regarding high octane gasoline, a turbine aircraft engine, and an early model of the jeep." (33)

Gold admitted that he went to work as chief chemist for Abraham Brothman in May 1946. He was promised the possibility of becoming a partner. However, the company was not profitable. Gold commented: "When there was no money, I was a partner. When there was money, I became an employee." Gold claimed that he was owed $4,000 in back salary when he left the company. Gold was eventually sacked and Brothman changed the locks to keep him out.

Brothman and Moskowitz did not testify on their own behalf. Moskowitz argued that the reason for this was they did not want to expose the fact that they were having an affair. “He was married. I had no right to do that. And I was overcome, I guess, with humiliation that I had ever let myself get into that.” (34) The jury was not impressed by this decision and after deliberating for three hours and fifty minutes, the jury found both defendants guilty.

Judge Irving Kaufman expressed "regret that the law under which these defendants are to be sentenced is so limited and so restricted that I can only pass the sentence which I am going to pass, for I consider their offense in this case to be of such gross magnitude. I have no sympathy or mercy for these defendants in my heart, none whatsoever." He sentenced both to the maximum term permissible under the statute: Brothman, seven years and a $15,000 fine; Miss Moskowitz, two years and a $10,000 fine. (35)

Alexander Feklissov, a Soviet diplomat working as an intelligence agent in New York City later argued: "On July 29 it would be Harry Gold's former employer Abraham Brothman's turn, along with Miriam Moskowitz, his associate and mistress, to go behind bars. Neither one had anything to do with atomic espionage nor even with the Rosenberg network. Brothman, code named Konstruktor and subsequently Expert, had worked for the INO but had only provided the results of his own research, which had no military value... As for Miriam Moskowitz, while she knew of her lover's secret activities, she had taken no part in them." (36)

Imprisonment

Abraham Brothman was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He later reported to the parole board: "I reviewed that I had been accused of a conspiracy to obstruct justice and, implicitly, of espionage. The former, I contended, either had to be the willful, calculated design of one guilty of the latter, or it was the irrational act of one whose attachment to purpose is precarious. Or, these charges weren't true at all! I was willing to join the prosecution in dismissing the second alternative for the story of my life would hardly support such a notion. On that account I was willing to evaluate the accuracy or the falsity of the charges, not as they would be handled in a hysteria-driven court but on the basis of my public record." (37)

On his release from prison, Abraham Brothman went to see Miriam Moskowitz. "Abe was freed soon after me, but we had difficulty reconnecting. We realized there would be no healing and no moving back into the flow of normal life if we spent our time together rehashing events and weeping for what we had lost. The adjustments we needed to wrestle with could only be done alone; mea culpas would destroy us. Complicating all this was that I now had a newly generated need to be my own person. We parted with wrenching resolve, with pain and with ineffable sadness." (38) Moskowitz later told Rebecca Mead: “He came to see me at my house. We embraced, and as he embraced me he said, ‘I have had such a terrible time.’ And then everything got clear.” (39)

Abraham Brothman died in 1980.

Primary Sources

(1) Miriam Moskowitz, Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice (2010)

Abe Brothman was a chemical engineer who had worked for a design and equipment manufacturer in New York City in the late 1930s and early 40s. Part of his income accrued through sales commissions. The firm advertised in trade and professional journals and it was through such means, Abe had told the FBI, that a man called on him in early 1940 who said he had business connections with the Russian Amtorg Trade Commission in New York. The man's name was John Golos; in return for his obtaining business from Amtorg he and Abe agreed that he would be paid the usual finder's fee of ten percent. Abe welcomed his offer; he had previously tried to interest the Russians in doing business with him but could never get past their reception desk.

Subsequently Golos' secretary, Helen, called on Abe when Golos himself was not available. From time to, time, Abe provided her with technical proposals and blueprints of flow sheets. It was his own work, it was not connected with any government project and it was not classified information. Like many left-leaning individuals at the time, Brothman regarded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact as a defensive measure growing out of France and England's reluctance in the late 1930s to join the USSR in a united front against Nazi aggression. If he sympathized with the Soviet Union's need to build up its chemical industry, he was also motivated by the prospect of obtaining business from them. There was no reason to believe then, and later, when after Pearl Harbor the Soviet Union was a wartime ally, that his efforts would be regarded with disfavor by the United States government...

Abe would dictate explanatory notes on his material to Helen because he was unwilling to devote excessive time to uncertain, random sales by preparing these notes himself. He quickly found this arrangement unsatisfactory so he asked Golos to send him someone with a technical background who would understand his verbal descriptions of the material he was submitting. In the fall of 1941 a chemist by the name of Frank Kessler took Helen's place and the two men met sporadically thereafter.

No business resulted from this and the Golos/Helen contact seemed to lapse. However, Abe found it useful to employ Kessler from time to time as a freelancer when his engineering work required chemical analyses. He had no chemical laboratory and Frank had the use of the one which employed him in Philadelphia. It was a mutually beneficial business arrangement; Abe gained the professional services of a chemist when he needed it, and the chemist gained extra income. Whenever Abe needed to contact Kessler he used a mail drop Kessler had given him in care of one Harry Gold. Eager to keep the Amtorg possibility alive and needing the chemist's services Abe did not question this.
In August 1944, Abe set up his own consulting engineering business in midtown Manhattan with several other engineers as nominal partners. In October I came to work for him. The following year Abe opened a chemical laboratory in Elmhurst, Queens. He needed a chief chemist and offered the job to Kessler. The wartime shortage of civilian labor, particularly technically trained people, had lingered into the postwar era and qualified technical personnel were not easily obtainable.

(2) Miriam Moskowitz, Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice (2010)

In the beginning, as his personality unfolded, I chose not to see his weaknesses or his warts and I allowed him more sins than I would have accepted in anyone else. I was not alone in this. All, it seemed, who knew him generally thought that Abe Brothman's reasoning was so perceptive, his insight so special, he could never stumble; he was one who anticipated life's pitfalls, and therefore could never be trapped by them; whose step was sure and whose decisions would always be unerringly wise. But this was also a man whose conspicuous intelligence and chronic lack of self-doubt drove him to overestimate his ability to control the forces impinging on his life, and to underestimate everyone else, and whose errors of judgment about others were so wrong they would later almost destroy him...

He joined a large chemical equipment manufacturer in Pittsburgh as a chemical engineer. In a matter of months he became chief engineer; he was now barely twenty-one. His career there and subsequently with other companies was marked by strife. The issues usually involved salary disputes, but there were also his quarrels about the jesting epithets used by some of his colleagues: "Brothman, the Jewboy genius." He was scrappy about anti-Semitism and called them on it repeatedly.

He also found himself disagreeing with corporate outlook. Brothman foresaw that the future route of the American chemical engineering business would find itself at odds with the then prevailing corporate thinking. His perspective was to provide clients not merely with the equipment they needed, but also the particular chemical process if they had not already mapped it out. He urged his company to offer a packaged service; it would be a unique, advanced development in the industry. But each of the companies he had affiliated with in his career was unwilling to go this route; it was an untested idea and could be financially risky. It would require budgeting funds to set up chemical research laboratories and a staff, and would involve a complicated administrative and professional hierarchy. It was simpler and safer to follow the old path: design and sell equipment only, and let the client piecemeal his job out if he needed chemical process development....

It would be inevitable that Abe would want to set up his own operation as a consulting engineer so that he could exercise greater control over his professional life. He was nothing if not self-confident about his ability to build such a business even without adequate capitalization. He wanted the freedom to create without the strictures of moribund corporate vision, but he had family and staff responsibilities he was not able to meet after he set up his consulting office. In 1946 Abe made me a partner in the business so that I would one day recoup financially for having foregone a regular salary when the coffers were low. He made similar commitments to others, in desperation, but he failed to tell me. Ultimately this created confusing and sometimes strained relations between the others and me because I never understood the special claims they seemed to have on him.

He sold rights to patents he owned to raise funds, but those funds did not last long. Eternally optimistic, he had no hesitancy to borrow money to keep the business afloat, not from banks but from individuals who believed in him. My father was one. Unquestionably, he meant to repay those debts but he never achieved the financial stability to do so. Yet he continued to go deeper into debt instead of setting limits on the scope of his operation or retrenching, or ending them altogether and becoming a salaried employee again.

(2) Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen (2002)

Her first assignment in her new role as courier, secret agent, and Girl Friday was to handle an irascible and annoying industrial scientist. Abe Brothman, a New York engineer, had designed a mixing machine for chemicals. He periodically met with Golos to pass along blueprints for this invention and other new industrial processes. The blueprints were Brothman's personal property, so he hardly qualified as a major spy at this point in his career. Golos's long-term plan, though, was to develop the engineer as a future source of industrial secrets.

Because of his girth and waddle, Elizabeth dubbed Brothman "the Penguin." Beginning in the spring of 1940, she began to meet with him regularly. They would rendezvous on the street, then proceed to dinner. In the course of the dinner, Brothman would hand her an envelope full of blueprints .

Elizabeth found the work boring and her contact difficult. So she was pleased in the fall of 1940 when Golos told her that he was "somewhat discouraged" with the Penguin and the quality of his information. The Soviets were planning to turn him over to someone else.

Brothman's new controller was a Philadelphia chemist, spy, and pathological liar named Harry Gold. Gold had such a talent for espionage that the Soviets used him as a courier for several sources. Some, like Brothman, would become skilled industrial spies; others, like Sergeant David Greenglass, who was stationed in the machine shop in Los Alamos, had access to top-secret military information. Gold's most important contact, though, was the Russians' prized spy, British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.

In 1945, when Elizabeth gave Brothman's name to the FBI, she would help agents uncover the trail that led from Brothman to Gold to David Greenglass-and eventually to Julius Rosenberg. When Julius and his wife, Ethel, were later tried for the "crime of the century," Elizabeth Bentley would be a key witness for the prosecution.

(3) Allen Weinstein, The Hunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999)

Yatskov had not seen Gold for an entire year. By the time they concluded their conversations, the Soviet operative undoubtedly regretted his neglect. Gold had been fired from his job as a chemist at a sugar plant in March 1946 when the company laid off a number of employees because of business losses. He remained unemployed until May, when Abe Brothman hired him as a chief chemist in his company. In short, the NKGB's chief courier in America now worked daily for one of his own leading sources!

(4) Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (1983)

On Saturday morning, July 29, a little more than a week after he had pleaded guilty to conspiring with Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold was rushed from Philadelphia to New York to appear before a hastily convened federal grand jury. He testified for a number of hours and, according to the Times, looked "the picture of utter dejection when he left the grand jury room and was taken to Mr. Saypol's office."

Later that same afternoon, the FBI announced arrests number five and six: Harry Gold's former New York City employer, Abraham Brothman, a thirty-six-year-old chemical engineer, and Brothman's business associate, Miriam Moskowitz, thirty-four. Headlined the Times: "New Spy Round-Up Brings 2 Arrests; Others Due Soon."

Time magazine described the pair as "two more links in the Soviet atomic spy chain which the U.S. started to unreel early this year after the arrest of the British atomic scientist, Dr. Klaus Fuchs. While no information regarding Miss Moskowitz's alleged involvement in the spy ring was available, Brothman was revealed to have been named earlier by Elizabeth Bentley, self-confessed Soviet espionage courier, as a person who had supplied her with blueprints and other information.

Once again, the Department of Justice and the FBI Director attacked the accused in a public arena, months in advance of their formal trial by jury. Reported the New York Times: "The importance of the new arrests was stressed by official statements in Washington that Brothman and Cold were part of a Soviet spy apparatus under a Russian trade organization chief working to ferret out atomic secrets." Time magazine attributed to J. Edgar Hoover the information that "Gold, who . . . is now talking freely, said that Brothman had been commended by a Russian official for doing work that was "equal to the efforts of one or two brigades of men."'

Curiously, despite these extra-legal accusations, neither Brothman nor Miss Moskowitz was indicted for espionage. They were charged by the grand jury-which acted on the last possible day before a three-year statute of limitations would have made prosecution impossible-with the far less serious offense of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Each pleaded innocent and was held in $25,000 bail. Soon after, Miss Moskowitz's attorney tried unsuccessfully to have her bail reduced to $1,000, reportedly asserting that the case had been presented to the public in "a grossly exaggerated and misleading fashion."

(5) Alexander Feklissov, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs (1999)

On July 29 it would be Harry Gold's former employer Abraham Brothman's turn, along with Miriam Moskowitz, his associate and mistress, to go behind bars. Neither one had anything to do with atomic espionage nor even with the Rosenberg network. Brothman, code named Konstruktor and subsequently Expert, had worked for the INO but had only provided the results of his own research, which had no military value... As for Miriam Moskowitz, while she knew of her lover's secret activities, she had taken no part in them.