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The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb. By Allen M. Hornblum. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. xiv, 446 pp. $32.50, isbn 978-0-300-15676-8.)
After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in the summer of 1949, Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) agents faced intense pressure to find the Americans who had helped the Soviets match the U.S. feat in New Mexico four years earlier. By May 1950, fbi agents focused on Harry Gold, a thirty-nine-year-old chemist. Questioned about his contacts with suspected Soviet agents and his travels around the United States, Gold at first stuck to false stories and denials. When the fbi searched his family's Philadelphia home and found a map of Santa Fe, New Mexico, however, Gold gave up. He confessed that he had been a spy and...