The Smaller Ones

Patiently, month after month, the FBI had been trying to untangle the all-but-invisible skeins of plot and counterplot by which Russia had stolen U.S. atomic secrets. The pursuit of Britain's Dr. Klaus Fuchs, physicist and traitor, started the process. After his arrest, it took 3 1/2 months of painful toil before U.S. agents worked their way back along his trail to Harry Gold, the Philadelphia chemist. After that, the untangling progressed quickly. Last week, 23 days after catching Gold, the FBI picked up two of his confederates.

The first, a 44-year-old chemical technician named Alfred Dean Slack, was arrested ashe left his automobile in a parking lot to report for work at the Sundure Paint Corp. in Syracuse, N.Y. His friends were as astounded as the friends of Harry Gold had been only two weeks before. Slack, a big, rugged-looking man, had been known as a solid citizen, who worked hard to support his wife and two children, a provider who had licked the housing shortage by building his family a suburban cottage with his own hands.

RDX Formula. In a statement issued after his arrest, however, FBI Chieftain J. Edgar Hoover charged that Slack, a World War II supervisor at the Holston Ordnance Works at Kingsport, Tenn., had given Harry Gold samples of a secret,' high-powered explosive called RDX-and data on its manufacture. At the same time, the FBI made public the names of two Russian officials accused of directing Harry Gold in his espionage activities. Unfortunately, the FBI added, the two Russians had already left the U.S.

An Amtorg Trading Corp. employee named Semen M. Semenov was Gold's first boss; after being handed the RDX sample, he told the Philadelphian to forget Slack for "a very important assignment"--getting atomic information from Fuchs. From then on, Gold had reported to Anatoli Antonovich Yakovlev, Soviet vice consul in New York.

Talebearers. The arrest of Family Man Slack was quickly followed by that of another husband & father, a 28-year-old machinist from New York's East Side named David Greenglass. Plump, wavy-haired Machinist Greenglass made no bones about the fact that he had been considering either running away or committing suicide ever since he had read the chill news of Gold's arrest. The FBI discussed his case even more tersely than that of Slack--he had joined the Young Communist League in 1938, had been sent to the Los Alamos atomic project as a machinist while serving as an Army sergeant during World War II, and had passed restricted atomic information to Gold between January, 1945 and February? 1946, when he was honorably discharged from the service.

Was the FBI after more atomic talebearers? They would not say, but it seemed extremely likely. Everyone in the plot seemed to have one thing in common --they talked their heads off about their pals as soon as they were caught. And, as the U.S. was fast learning:

Big spies have little spies and willingly

indict 'em,

And little spies have smaller spies, and so ad infinitum.

--

In Pasadena, the FBI arrested a mild-mannered, chess-playing, Russian-born physicist named Sidney Weinbaum, 52. He was charged with committing perjury and fraud in concealing his past membership in the Communist Party in filling out job questionnaires. A wartime theoretical physicist at Bendix Aviation, he became a senior research engineer in CalTech's jet-propulsion laboratory in 1946, has had only a research fellow's job at CalTech since 1949, when Army Intelligence withdrew his clearance to do confidential work. The FBI did not link him to Spy Courier Gold, or to espionage.

-RDX is a white powder with one and a half times the blasting force of TNT. It was invented by the Germans in 1899, but had been considered too expensive for military use until the U.S. found a way, used it in naval torpedoes and bazooka anti-tank rockets.

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