Gold started by stealing from his employer, Pennsylvania Sugar Co., industrial techniques that were legally available. Seducing Gold into getting them illegally was how his handler enmeshed him in espionage. It ended with Gold passing secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets, which helped Russia enslave Eastern Europe for a half-century.
The man whom Hornblum calls "the world's most unlikely secret agent" was a Philadelphian through and through. He left his footprints at Southern High (graduating third in his class), he lived in South Philly and Oxford Circle, he attended Penn and Drexel, he worked at Philadelphia General Hospital. He lived and died for the Phillies.
Hornblum writes that the submissive Gold had a psychological need to help people, a trait that led him to become a thief who first betrayed his boss, then his country. But he never was one of the communists, whom he regarded as "despicable bohemians who prattled of free love . . . lazy bums who would never work underany economic system."
The issue of work was central to Gold, who learned from his father's example to work hard and to not complain - even though Samson Gold was a victim of vicious anti-Semites in his cabinet-making job at RCA Victor in Camden. Anti-Semitism was a blood sport in that era.
Gold's desire to help the impoverished Russian masses propelled him to steal information to ease their lives.
A spy for 15 years, he convinced himself that he fought fascism by helping Russia, the only nation that had made anti-Semitism a crime against the state. By the time Russia's Stalin launched show trials to murder his Bolshevik brothers to consolidate dictatorial power, Gold was in too deep to pull out.
