Still guilty after all these years
Feisty and probably still with a warm spot in her heart for the Soviet cause, Miriam Moskowitz, 98, is trying to clear her name of a six-decade-old conviction. Too bad she was guilty.
She was only a bit player on the fringes of the “atom spies” scandals that gripped the nation in the 1950s — the girlfriend of Abraham Brothman, who’d handed over industrial secrets to Soviet agents.
But Moskowitz was found guilty of obstructing an espionage investigation of Brothman and Harry Gold — a much more central figure in the spy cases.
She may be counting on the fact that few today are even vaguely aware of the context of her conviction, let alone the details of the case. As the guy who literally wrote the book on Harry Gold, I’m one of the few exceptions.
Moskowitz was one of the many in her era at City College who grew captivated by left-wing politics, becoming an active member of what the FBI called the “Hetti Lapatine Club of the Communist Party,” based in Chelsea.
But she only got in real trouble when, after World War Two, she took a job as secretary for and fell in love with Brothman, a chemical engineer with offices on 32nd Street in Manhattan and a laboratory in Elmhurst.
Himself a radical since his teen years, Brothman in the 1930s began giving information to the Soviets, handing over blueprints and designs for commercial vats, filters, oil blowing and resin kettles.
At first he delivered the goods to Jacob Golos, a top Soviet spy in America, then to Elizabeth Bentley, an American who long served as a Soviet operative — and later to Harry Gold.
Gold, an industrial chemist from Philadelphia, would later also become the handler of Klaus Fuchs, the British physicist who gave the secrets of the Atomic Bomb to the Soviets.
Meanwhile, Bentley had a dramatic change of heart toward the war’s end, walking into an FBI office and naming her many US contacts.
When the FBI came knocking at Brothman’s door, he panicked. To explain his ties to Bentley and Golos, he fingered Gold — who’d taken a job at Brothman’s firm.
Gold would later testify that he, Brothman and Moskowitz colluded in preparation for a July 22, 1947, appearance before a federal grand jury.
They met at numerous places (including Topsy’s Restaurant and Sunny’s Chinese Restaurant on Queens Boulevard) to fashion a story explaining away their contacts with Golos and Bentley.
It worked. Deftly parrying prosecutor’s questions, the two men muttered on about boring aspects of the chemical business. Brothman claimed everything he gave the Soviets was developed by him and already part of published literature. Moskowitz wasn’t even called to testify; the chemists evaded indictment.
Why did Gold “turn” after that? Because the FBI caught Fuchs, whose confession finally exposed Gold.
Gold at first denied everything, maintaining his innocence in days of FBI grilling. But then he finally folded — and gave up everything.
He named people, places and classified material that had changed hands. He told of his work with other American spies, including Alfred Slack (who gave away secret Kodak photographic information and a new high explosive, RDX) and David Greenglass (Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, who supplied A-bomb information from Los Alamos), as well as his many meetings with Fuchs.
And he told of the meetings with Brothman and Moskowitz, plotting to deceive the feds.
In 1950, Brothman and Moskowitz were charged for deceiving the grand jury three years before. At trial, the testimony of Bentley and Gold proved decisive. Moskowitz and Brothman chose not to take the stand.
On Nov. 22, 1950, after deliberating just five hours, the jury found both guilty of obstructing justice during an espionage investigation.
Judge Irving Kaufman said he regretted he “could not impose stiffer penalties,” angrily noting that he had “no sympathy or mercy for these defendants; none whatsoever.”
Moskowitz got a two-year sentence and $10,000 fine. She would spend almost 15-months behind bars at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, W.Va.
Long prone to blame “an unstable woman and a very frightened little man” for her incarceration, Moskowitz still holds dear the principles that got her in trouble in the first place.
She told me while I researched my book on Gold, “The Atom Bomb wasn’t exclusively ours, it belonged to the world. No one country had the right to it.”
There is much to learn from the story of Miriam Moskowitz, a flesh-and-blood relic of the Cold War. It’s just not the tale she’s now choosing to tell.
Allen M. Hornblum is the author of “The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb.”
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