Engineering Communism

"At the time the Rosenbergs were arrested, suspicion also fell on some of Julius’s friends who were engineers. And we now know that he encouraged a number of them to spy for him. At the time of the Rosenberg case two of those engineers vanished. One of them dropped out of sight and the other fled the United States and was never found. Steve Usdin found out what happened to both of them. They eventually went to the Soviet Union and there they founded the Soviet micro-electronic industry and made the first mini computer. They were responsible for helping to build the Soviet equivalent of Silicon Valley. But, their fates were not terribly happy. They ended up being fired from their positions because they were seen as too American. The kind of work rules they followed, emphasising entrepreneurship and hiring Jews, didn’t go down well. One of them died of a heart attack, while the other survived the collapse of Communism. He occasionally went back to the United States to claim his social security payment! I think that one of the things we have learned in the past decade with archives opening up is that hundreds of American Communists were so devoted and dedicated to the Soviet Union that they were willing to spy for it. We are talking about probably 400-500 Americans serving as Soviet spies. And they did quite extensive damage to American security over the years. The American Communist Party was never a particular threat to America in the sense that it might come to power. It was the spying it encouraged and enabled that was the danger. It enabled the Soviets to develop their atomic bomb three to four years before it otherwise would have and at a much lower cost. The Soviets were able to know things about American diplomatic decisions because of spying . And, of course, that is linked to the McCarthy era and the American reaction to this. Some would say the United States overreacted but the concern was legitimate: there was a very serious threat to national security."