Book Review | Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2006

Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley

Steven T. Usdin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. 329 pages, endnotes, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

In February 1950, when the NKGB learned that atomic physicist Klaus Fuchs had confessed to MI5 that he had spied for the Soviets at Los Alamos during World War II, they correctly assumed that Fuchs would identify his courier, Harry Gold, to the FBI. Since Gold had also been a courier for David Greenglass, one of Julius Rosenberg’s agents, the entire network was told to stand down and flee. Only two made it. Joel Barr was in Paris at the time and went first to Czechoslovakia and then to Moscow. Alfred Sarant waited until he was interrogated by the FBI and then managed to escape, leaving his wife and two children behind. Engineering Communism tells the story of Rosenberg’s recruitment of Barr and Sarant; their wartime espionage; their lives in the Soviet Union, where they helped create a scientific laboratory complex called Zelenograd; and what happened to them after the Cold War. Curiously, the State Department never revoked their citizenship and Barr eventually got an American passport, applied for supplementary social security, and voted for Jerry Brown for president! Author Steven Usdin met Barr, then called Joel Berg, at a technology conference in Moscow in 1990. Although initially unaware of his true identity, he struck up a friendship with Barr and this book is the result. It is well written and well documented and probably puts full-stop to the Rosenberg network story.[18]

[18] See Steven Usdin, “Famous Espionage Cases: Tracking Julius Rosenberg’s Lesser Known Associates,” Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 3 (2005), which covers the key points of the Barr/Sarant story.