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Alfred Sarant | |
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| Born | Alfred Epaminondas Sarant September 26, 1918[2] New York City, U.S. |
| Died | March 12, 1979 (Age 60) |
| Burial place | Bolsheokhtinsky Cemetery inLeningrad[3] |
| Other names | Filipp Georgievich Staros Philip Georgievich Staros |
| Awards | Doctor of Technical Sciences 1967,USSR State Prize 1969[3] |
| Espionage activity | |
| Allegiance |  United States (defected) Soviet Union |
| Service years | 1941–1950 |
| Codename | Kh'YUS/HUGHES[1] |
Alfred Epaminondas Sarant, also known asFilipp Georgievich Staros andPhilip Georgievich Staros (September 26, 1918 – March 12, 1979),[2] was an engineer and a member of theCommunist party in New York City in 1944. He was part of theRosenberg spy ring that reported to Soviet intelligence. Sarant worked on secret military radar at the United StatesArmy Signal Corps laboratories atFort Monmouth, New Jersey.Alexandre Feklisov, one of theKGBcase officers who handled the Rosenberg spy apparatus described Sarant andJoel Barr as among the most productive members of the group. Sarant was recruited as a Soviet espionage agent by Barr.
A member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) during the Second World War, Sarant worked at the nuclear physics laboratory of Cornell University.[4][5] In 1941, Julius Rosenberg and Joel Barr were recruited as Soviet spies byJacob Golos. They in turn persuaded Sarant to join the network.[6]
According to Alexander Feklissov:
Joel and Alfred were good friends and spent a lot of time together. I must admit that Sarant had the makings of an undercover agent; he was a cautious young man, yet full of resolve, with progressive ideas. Before we recruited him though, he had to pass a test. Barr asked Sarant to borrow some secret documents to which he had access because he, Barr, needed them for his personal use. Alfred did not hesitate in helping his friend and in the meantime the Center approved a bona fide approach."[7]
However, he was at first reluctant to become a spy but was eventually convinced to join the network by Barr. Sarant was given the code name Hughes.
TheVenona project transcript of 14 November 1944 reported to Moscow that Sarant had been successfully recruited.[1] The transcript noted Sarant and Barr were roommates and good friends and proposed to pair them off and get them to photograph their own materials. Initially Barr delivered film to Rosenberg, who passed it on to officers of theSoviet intelligence. Later, Barr met directly with KGB officers; Sarant did not have direct contact with the KGB in the U.S. One transcript reports Sarant and Barr delivered 17 authentic drawings relating to theAN/APQ-7, an advanced and secret airborne radar system developed jointly by theMassachusetts Institute of Technology andWestern Electric for the United States military.
In 1946 Sarant moved toIthaca, New York, where he worked atCornell University in the physicslaboratories. Sarant's next door neighbor wasPhilip Morrison, a formerManhattan Project scientist and personal friend who joined theCommunist Party of the United States in 1939. Sarant knew socially several prominent physicists, includingHans Bethe andRichard Feynman.[8]
Two days after Julius Rosenberg's arrest on 17 July 1950, theFBI interviewed Sarant but did not arrest him, although it possessed decrypted MVD cables that clearly identified Sarant as a member of the Rosenberg ring.[9][10] Three days later Sarant ran away with Carol Dayton, the wife of his close friend and neighbor, Bruce Dayton; Sarant and Dayton abandoned their children and spouses. The two crossed intoMexico and eluded the FBI.[11]
In Mexico City, Sarant sought assistance from officials at an obscure Polish trade office, guessing correctly that they were intelligence officers. Following instructions from the KGB, the Poles hid Sarant and Dayton in Mexico, then engineered an escape that involved crossing the border toGuatemala on foot, taking a freighter to Casa Blanca, and flying to Poland via Spain.[12] After six months in Warsaw they moved on to Moscow. The KGB arranged a dramatic reunion with Barr, who was summoned from Prague, where he had fled shortly after the Rosenberg ring started to unravel. Sarant was assigned a new identity, Philip Georgievich Staros, claiming aCanadian background to explain his accent. From Moscow, Barr and Sarant were resettled inCzechoslovakia and put to work as electrical engineers. They led a team that designed and built a prototype of the Soviet bloc's first automated anti-aircraft weapon. Their technology was quickly deployed and was in use, with some minor modifications, into the 1980s.
| External images | |
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 Lengingrad, April 1962, Alfred Sarant (Staros) is on the left. On the right:Alexander S. Shokin [ru], Titov (all sitting) | |
| Leningrad, May 1962, Alfred Sarant and collegues meetNikita Khrushchev. |
In 1956 Sarant and Barr moved toLeningrad where they were placed in charge of a military electronics research institute. They have been credited with being the founders of the Sovietmicroelectronics industry, in part because Sarant and Barr conceived of, designed and won political backing for the creation ofZelenograd, the Soviet Union'sSilicon Valley. Sarant was the scientific director of Zelenograd untilNikita Khrushchev's forced retirement. In 1969 Sarant received a state honor for the UM-1, a computer that was widely used in Soviet industry.[13] He led the team that created theUzel, the first digital computer installed in a Soviet submarine. The Uzel was integrated into theKilo-class submarines and as of 2007 was still in use in the Russian, Iranian, Chinese and Indian navies. In 1979 Sarant died of a heart attack.[14] Carol Dayton, the woman who fled with him, returned to the United States in 1991.[15]
It was not until 1983, thirty-three years after Sarant's flight to Mexico, that the full story of Sarant's life was told. A Russian émigré working at Harvard, Mark Kuchment, who had readThe Rosenberg File linked Barr and Sarant to two prominent Soviet scientists, both native speakers of English.[16]
Sarant's cover name in Soviet intelligence and in theVenona project is "Hughes".[1]
LIBERAL[ii] has safely carried through the contracting of "Kh'YuS"[iii]. Kh'YuS is a good pal of METR's[iv]. We propose to pair them off and get them to photograph their own materials having given a camera a camera for this purpose.- [iii] Kh'YuS: i.e. HUGHES, probably Joel BARR or Alfred SARANT
He died in Moscow in 1979, and his ashes were buried at the Bolsheokhtinsky Cemetery in Leningrad.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)In March 1944, the FBI obtained copies of the New York County Committee of the CPUSA's membership records, probably through an illegal burglary. The records included the names of Rosenberg, Barr, and Sarant, along with their addresses and party aliases. Quick action on this intelligence would have prevented the group from making some of its most important contributions to the USSR, including the SCR-584 radar, proximity fuse, and P-80 designs, all of which were passed after March 1944.
Meanwhile, the FBI's net was finally tightening. On July 17th, 1950, Rosenburg was arrested. On July 19th, Sarant's house in Ithaca was searched. He did not wait around to see if they dug up anything incriminating. Sarant left his wife - her efforts at befriending the Bethes not leading to much beyond a few cordial house parties — and leaves town. But he doesn't leave alone: Together with the wife of a Cornell physicist, he takes on the assumed identity of Mr. and Mrs. Dayton and flees to Mexico on August 9, 1950.
Please carry out a check and sanction the recruitment of Alfred SARANT[i], a lead of ANTENNA's[ii].
An interesting example of the type of material found in the reports would be in Special Report #6, 28 April 1948, which summarizes or gives the text of a significant number of LIBERAL/ANTENNA translations. [...] The translation of New York to Moscow No. 628, 5 May 1944 (paragraph 4), is important to the story of the development of the Rosenberg case. As of April 1948 the Arlington Hall VENONA unit had not been able to decrypt the first twenty-four groups of that message. Lacking this critical context, Mr. Gardner translated the message as giving a description of ANTENNA. When those missing twenty-four groups were decrypted see the reissue of the translation on 27 June 1950 it was shown that the message was in fact about Rosenberg's description of his friend Al Sarant, whom he recruited for the KGB.
The subject was a member of the ROSENBERG espionage ring. In 1950 he deserted his wife and disappeared with CAROL DAYTON, the wife of BRUCE DAYTON. He has not been heard from since that time.
Map showing route and means used by Alfred Sarant when he fled the USA to Moscow. [...] Sarant was given a new identity, Filip Georgiyevich Staros. He and Dayton were stashed in a luxury apartment in Warsaw for six months, before being sent to Moscow, where they were surprised to be reunited with Joel Barr. Josef Berg (Barr) and Filip Staros (Sarant) were soon sent to Czechoslovakia, where they took on leadership positions working on Soviet defense technology systems.
In July 1959, Sarant and Barr attracted attention at the highest levels of the Soviet military when they completed a working prototype of a digital computer based on off-the-shelf components, including germanium transistors. The UM-1, intended as an airborne computer to control navigation and weapons systems, was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, was light enough for one person to lift, and required about the same power as a light bulb.
Sarant/Staros died of a heart attack in the USSR in 1979.
In 1950, Carol Dorothy abandoned her husband and two small children to help her lover and next-door neighbor escape from the FBI. Over the next three decades, he became a star of Soviet microelectronics. She became an Iron Curtain housewife. She had four more children. Then she came back.
The tale pieced together by Dr. Kuchment finally revealed that Filipp Georgievich Staros, a high official in the secretive world of Soviet military research, and Alfred Sarant, an American engineer who fled the United States after the arrest of his close friend Julius Rosenberg in 1950, were one and the same.
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