Inquiry Urged on Associate of Atom Spies

In a reprise of the Cold War’s most notorious spy scandal, three Orange County congressmen are calling on the Justice Department to reopen an investigation of an associate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who fled to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and recently returned to the United States.

At a Capitol Hill press conference Tuesday, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) joined four other members of Congress in denouncing Brooklyn-born electronics engineer Joel Barr as a traitor who for years used his skills to develop Soviet weapons, some of which helped shoot down American pilots in Vietnam.

A third Orange County member, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) joined Dornan, Rohrabacher and 19 other representatives in signing a letter to Atty. Gen. William P. Barr making similar allegations and asking for a new probe of Barr’s activities.

According to a broadcast aired last week on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” program, the 75-year-old Joel Barr has returned to the United States at least twice in the last two years, holds a new U.S. passport and is drawing Social Security. Barr, who helped develop the first Soviet radar-guided anti-aircraft gun, is in St. Petersburg, Fla., according to Ed Wierzbowski, Barr’s American theatrical and literary agent.

On “Nightline,” Barr acknowledged that he was a member of the American Communist Party and that he was a close friend of the Rosenbergs, who were executed in June, 1953, for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet Union. Barr, however, denied that he was a spy.

That claim was disputed on the television program by a retired FBI agent, Robert Royal, who asserted that Barr was, in fact, engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union.

“We’re not talking about a useful idiot,” Rohrabacher said Tuesday. “We’re talking about somebody who most likely . . . committed treasonous acts against the United States of America and cost the lives of American servicemen. . . .

“If Mr. Barr is found guilty of treason, he should be sent on to join the Rosenbergs.”

Dornan said, “This is a traitor to the Free World, to the United States of America, and that he draws taxpayer dollars in Social Security . . . is one of the most ironic outrages that I’ve ever heard.”

Dean St. Dennis, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the department has no comment on the congressional request for an investigation. However, St. Dennis added, “To the best of my knowledge, there is no outstanding federal indictment against Joel Barr, and there was no indictment against him for espionage 40 years ago.”

In the letter to Atty. Gen. Barr, Dornan, Rohrabacher, Cox and the others said: “Mr. (Joel) Barr has publicly admitted to using skills and information derived from his work on classified U.S. military projects to aid the Soviet Union in developing deadly military weapons, including radar-guided anti-aircraft guns.

“Tens of thousands of American servicemen died to stop the spread of communist tyranny. We owe it to them to investigate fully all allegations that secrets were transmitted to the Soviet Union by an American citizen.”

The letter noted that “Nightline” had reported that the FBI had begun an investigation of Joel Barr’s activities before he defected to the then-Soviet Union.

Wierzbowski, Barr’s agent, said the engineer was not guilty of any crime, and had relatively low-level responsibilities when he worked as a civilian on defense projects for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the early 1940s.

“He was just a clerk there,” Wierzbowski said. “It wasn’t that he went over there (to the Soviet Union) and took a lot of skills and secrets with him, that’s an absolute exaggeration. . . .

“In the Soviet Union . . . he worked on microelectronics, which had nothing to do with the work he did here in the United States, in defense. . . . They designed (electronic) chips and the (Soviet) defense Establishment over there put the chips together.”