(New York Post) 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. . . (read the rest)
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