Harry Gold Pleads Guilty to Spying for the Soviets
Harry Gold stood before a federal judge and admitted he'd carried atomic bomb secrets in his coat pocket on a Greyhound bus. The Philadelphia chemist had ferried Klaus Fuchs's Manhattan Project diagrams to Soviet handlers for five years, receiving $150 payments and occasional bottles of vodka. His confession unlocked the Rosenberg case—he'd also been their courier. Gold got thirty years. Fuchs served nine in Britain. But the information they passed let Stalin detonate his first atomic bomb in 1949, eighteen months before American intelligence predicted possible. One nervous man on public transportation had erased the nuclear monopoly.
July 20, 1950
76 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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