From: "Steve Usdin" susdin@ix.netcom.com
Subject: "Engineering Communism" Book launch, talks
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005
Readers of Johnson's Russia List may be interested in "Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley" (Yale University Press, October 2005). A press release is attached, as is a notice about the launch event that is co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project and the International Spy Museum. I will also be giving a talk at the Harriman Institute on Oct. 4 (see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/REGIONAL/HI/events.html).
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For Release:
Contact: Brenda King
Publication Date: October 13, 2005 (203) 432-0917
Yalebooks.com
brenda.king@yale.edu
“Engineering Communism provides a fascinating look at a virtually unknown facet
of Cold War spy lore, the story of two Americans who worked with the Rosenbergs
to transfer American military technology to Russia, and went on to help found
the Soviet computer industry. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested
in an age we have quickly forgotten, in which Americans could become committed
Communists and risk everything for the sake of ideology.”
¬ Francis Fukuyama
Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley By Steven T. Usdin An incredible true story of espionage, the Cold War, and tangled dramas of love and betayal
Steven T. Usdin’s Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (Yale University Press; publication date October 13, 2005; $40) is the amazing true story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, dedicated Communists and members of the Rosenberg spy ring who stole information from the U.S. during World War II that proved crucial to building the first advanced weapons systems in the USSR. On the brink of arrest, they escaped with the KGB’s help and eluded American intelligence for decades.
Usdin brings his subjects to life, drawing on extensive interviews with Barr and many people who knew him and Sarant in the U.S. and the USSR, and new archival evidence. Unlike most accounts of espionage, Engineering Communism tells in Barr’s own words why he became a spy. It reveals how Barr and Sarant obtained military secrets, and details FBI blunders that led to their escape. Engineering Communism provides new insights into the Rosenberg spy ring, including the fullest account to date of technology it gave the KGB and how it was incorporated into weapons that were deployed on battlefields from Korea to Vietnam.
Usdin’s depiction of counterintelligence failures “has policy relevance for today’s concerns with reforming the Intelligence Community,” according to Lieutenant General William E. Odom, US Army (retired), former director of the National Security Agency. By explaining why American communists risked their lives to commit crimes on behalf of a power opposed to the basic tenets of modern society, Engineering Communism also answers questions that are essential to constructing a defense against 21st-century terrorism.
Chronicling Barr and Sarant’s success in convincing Khrushchev to build a secret Silicon Valley, an entire city near Moscow, Usdin illuminates the origins of Soviet high technology. He describes the two Americans’ role in designing the USSR’s first transistorized computer, inventing new microelectronic devices, and designing a computer that is still being manufactured and used in Russian submarines. He also pinpoints the root causes of Soviet technology’s failure to live up to its potential.
Engineering Communism tells an incredible personal story of Barr’s dual lives in Leningrad with his Czech wife and children and with a married Russian mistress who bore him two children. It follows the two spies through Sarant’s death, Barr’s unbelievable return to the United States after more than four decades, and the reconciliation of Sarant’s common-law wife with the husband and children she had abandoned in America.
About the Author . . .
STEVEN T. USDIN is senior editor at BioCentury Publications, in Washington, D.C., where he reports and writes about issues at the intersection of policy, politics, law, science, and ethics. For the past twenty years he has written widely on security issues, technology, and the arts for publications ranging from the New Scientist and Far Eastern Economic Review to PC Week to and the Moscow Times.
In 1990, while in Moscow researching an article on Soviet-American technology transfer, he met a Russian scientist named Joseph Berg. He later learned that Berg had another identity, that he was known in the United States as Joel Barr, and that he was closely linked with Julius Rosenberg. Usdin and Barr became friends, and after Barr’s death in 1998, Usdin decided to tell his story. Barr’s life was intertwined with that of Alfred Sarant, the man whom Barr recruited into espionage in New York and who was his senior partner in Russia as they tried to reshape the face of Soviet technology. Engineering Communism brings their story to light for the first time.
Usdin will be speaking about Engineering Communism at the following venues. For more information or to set up an interview with the author, contact Brenda King at (203) 432-0917 or brenda.king@yale.edu.
l Raleigh International Spy Conference, Raleigh, NC, August 31–September 2.
l Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, October 4, noon.
l Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., co-sponsored by the International Spy Museum and the Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project, October 26, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
l National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History Symposium on Cryptology and the Cold War, College Park, MD, October 27-28.
Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
By Steven T. Usdin
ISBN: 0-300-10874-5 Cloth * Price: $40.00 * Pages: 352 * 14
b/w illus.
Publication Date: October 13, 2005
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Wednesday, 26 October 2005
4 – 6 pm
Discover the Cold War story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, two comrades who spied for the Soviet Union during World War II. As members of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage operation, they later fled behind the Iron Curtain, where they were among the founders of the Soviet microelectronics and computer industries. Through his personal access to Barr and newly declassified documents, Steven Usdin sheds new light on the Rosenbergs, their collaborators, their tradecraft, and the significance of the technology that the Soviet spy ring gave to the USSR. He will also describe FBI counterintelligence failures that prevented the Bureau from halting the flow of intelligence to the Soviets.
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20004-3027
Free. No registration required!.
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