Harry Gold Timeline and Summary

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• During the Great Depression, Harry moves to New Jersey to take a job in a soap factory that's being vacated by Tom Black.
• Tom Black, manipulating Gold's undying gratitude, works to try and convert Gold to communism.
• Gold agrees to give information about some of the chemical processes used in his factory to the Soviets as a kind of lesser-evil compared to converting.
• His Soviet contact orders him to take a job at a weapons factory, and Gold questions whether he wants to keep working for the Soviets. They tell him he doesn't have a choice—they'll out him if he tries to stop being a spy.
• Gold gets a new contact, "Sam" (Semyonov).
• The KGB demands Gold be the courier for information coming from Klaus Fuchs.
• Gold and Fuchs meet several times, thus relaying incredibly valuable information to the KGB (including explicit instructions on how the Americans are planning the bomb).
• When Fuchs is suddenly relocated to Los Alamos, Gold fears he's lost his contact.
• Desperate, Gold tracks down Fuchs's sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who informs him that Fuchs will be visiting at Christmas time from Los Alamos.
• In late February, Fuchs is finally able to get away from New Mexico and arranges to meet with Gold to give him detailed plans on the plutonium bomb's construction.
• They agree to meet again in Santa Fe in June.
• Yatzkov begs Gold to do a side project in Albuquerque after his meeting with Fuchs. Gold initially protests—it's totally against Russian Spy rules—but eventually agrees.
• Gold goes to Santa Fe. He dumbly draws an X on a map to mark where he's supposed to meet Fuchs.
• Fuchs gives him a ton of information.
• Gold proceeds to Albuquerque to meet with Mr. Greenglass, and despite a delay, manages to get precise details from him as well.
• After Hiroshima, Fuchs and Gold meet one last time outside Santa Fe.
• Three years after the end of World War II, Gold falls in love with Mary Lanning, a fellow chemist. He proposes, but the relationship fails because she can sense he's hiding something from her.
• The FBI starts to crack down on Gold (based on testimony from Fuchs) about his involvement during the war.
• Gold starts to fold under the intense pressure.
• He allows the FBI to search his house, at which point they discover the Santa Fe map with an X drawn on it.
• Gold breaks down and tells the FBI everything, therefore exposing two separate spy rings (Fuchs and Greenglass).
• He is sentenced to thirty years instead of the electric chair because he cooperated so well with authorities.
• Gold is paroled in 1965. He returns home to Philadelphia, where he dies at the age of sixty-one in 1972.