Harry Gold Term Papers

Harry Gold was a 28 year old lab chemist and spy for the Soviet Union living in the U.S. during the Manhattan project (The code name for the effort to develop atomic bombs for the United States during World War II). He lost his job and Tom Black offered him his old job at a soap factory with plans in mind of Gold becoming a communist and spy for the Soviets. Black told him that helping the Soviets would take away poverty in the U.S. so Gold took the job and became a spy. He had to make the tough decision of either working for the Soviets or continuing his normal life in America, or in other words taking on national responsibility or responsibility to other groups. He had recently gotten his job back at the Pennsylvania sugar company and was in a good financial place. Gold was told that all he needed to do was steal documents from his lab and give them to the Soviets and in a way, this would help countries like America over time. Gold eventually decided to take the job and become a spy for seventeen years. He later realized that Tom Black had not told the full truth because Russia wasn’t the “perfect” place that he had described. Although many valuable opinions have been made, no one will ever fully understand why once innocent Harry Gold became a dedicated spy for the Soviet

Gold had the opportunity to drop out early with no harm, but he chose to stick with being a spy for all of the wrong reasons. The narrator explained, “Gold was starting to recognize that the Soviet Union was hardly the workers’ paradise Tom Black had described. In fact, it was a police state ruthlessly run by Joseph Stalin, a dictator who arrested and executed his political rivals, just like Hitler.” (25) Gold didn’t like the Soviet Union from the start but he kept working for them. This shows that working for the SU was a mistake right from the beginning when he was having