ESPIONAGE: Two More Links

In Cliffwood, NJ. one day last week, FBI agents walked into the Ulster Chemicals Co. plant (four employees), there arrested the owner, Abraham Brothman, 36, and a blonde, comely colleague, Miriam Moskowitz. FBI officials identified the pair as two more links in the Soviet atomic spy chain which the U.S. started to unreel early this year after the arrest of the British atomic scientist, Dr. Klaus Fuchs.

They were accused of having been in cahoots with Harry Gold, the go-between who passed Traitor Fuchs’s secrets on to Russia, in giving false testimony to a grand jury.

Brothman’s name was not a new one in the long investigation of Soviet espionage. Elizabeth Bentley, ex-Soviet agent, told a grand jury in 1947 that Brothman, a Columbia University graduate, had given her information which she had passed on to the Soviet ring. Brothman told the jurors that he gave Miss Bentley only simple chemical formulas, and that for the purpose of getting legitimate contracts from Russia for his chemical engineering firm.

After Brothman’s arrest last week, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover gave a different version of Brothman’s operations: Gold, who has pleaded guilty to espionage and is now talking freely, said that Brothman had been commended by a Russian official for doing work that was “equal to the efforts of one or two brigades of men.”