News - 11-17-05
Steven T. Usdin Talks in Raleigh
Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
Steven T. Usdin
Delivered at the 2005 Raleigh International Spy Conference
I’d like to start out by telling you how I came to be here, the circumstances around my writing Engineering Communism, how I befriended Joel Barr and how that relationship revealed an unusual and little-known Cold War espionage story that played out on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I’ll discuss some new insights into the Rosenberg spy ring stemming from an examination of Barr’s life and that of his close comrade, Alfred Sarant; tell you about some of the more intriguing personal aspects of the story; and conclude with some ideas about the relevance of this kind of Cold War experience for today’s fight against terrorists.
My goals in writing Engineering Communism were to tell an incredible story, but beyond that, to describe why Barr became a Communist and a spy. His background and motives were similar to those of other members of the Rosenberg ring and to others who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, so his story provides broad insights.
As I researched the book, it became clear that the success of the Rosenberg ring was made possible by major counterintelligence failures. Reading the FBI files is like watching one of those old Western movies where you can see the bad guy crouching behind a rock while the good cowboy walks unaware into the ambush. You want to yell “Look out!” Because the Bureau clearly had all of the information it needed to put Rosenberg, Barr and their comrades out of business long before they had stolen any useful information, but it failed to connect the dots.
Finally, I wanted to use Sarant and Barr’s experiences behind the Iron Curtain to give some insight into why the Soviet Union failed to develop the level of high technology that its scientists and engineers were clearly capable of producing.
My first step toward this podium was a meeting in September 1990 in Moscow with an American investment banker. I was visiting Moscow researching articles on Soviet technology and he was doing tech transfer deals. When I asked him for referrals to Russians with promising technology he suggested that return the next day to meet an engineer named Joseph Berg, a Russian, he said, who spoke flawless English and had invented a novel technology for small-scale custom integrated circuit manufacturing.
As soon as Berg opened his mouth it was obvious to me, if not the banker, that he was about as Russian as Bugs Bunny, who’s voice and demeanor he shared. When I asked Berg how he came to speak English so well, he said “we have good schools here.” I pointed out that no school could produce such a classic Brooklyn accent and Berg reverted to his backup story, explaining that he’d grown up in a neighborhood in Johannesburg with a lot of Americans. This didn’t seem credible, but I’d been in Moscow for a couple of months and had run into quite a few people who had equally incredible personal stories. The Soviet system was crumbling but it wasn’t clear what would replace it, so a lot of people who were scrambling to remake themselves as they prepared for an uncertain future told stories that didn’t add up.
After an hour of very animated conversation, Berg invited me to lunch at a hotel near the Kremlin and then offered to let me accompany him to the see a place he said that very few Americans had set foot in, a city he described as Russia’s Silicon Valley. A government sedan drove us 45 minutes to Zelenograd, a once-secret city of 200,000 people, entirely dedicated to the design and production of microelectronic components and computers. We stopped in front of this building, the Scientific Center, which Berg explained was the nerve center for the Soviet microelectronics industry. Berg didn’t say anything about his connection to Zelenograd.
I accepted Berg’s invitation to visit him in Leningrad the next weekend. He met me at the train station and brought me to what was undoubtedly one of the most unusual apartments in Soviet Russia. At that time millions of Russians lived in apartments that were identical not only on the outside – the familiar 5- and 9-story cookie cutter buildings -- but also varied very little in their internal design and furnishings.
In Berg’s apartment most of the walls had been smashed to form a huge room, which featured a huge pre-revolution grand piano in the center; the bathroom and kitchen featured odd handmade Rube Goldberg contraptions. That evening Berg hosted a concert by musicians from the Leningrad Conservatory attended by about 50 people, mostly scientists and engineers.
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