Alfred Epaminondas Sarant, also Filipp Georgievich Staros and Philip Georgievich Staros, was a member of the Communist Political Association in New York City in 1944 and engineer who was part of the Rosenberg spy ring that reported to Soviet intelligence in New York City. Sarant worked on secret military radar at the United States Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Aleksandr Feklisov, one of the KGB Case Officer who handled the Rosenberg spy apparatus states that Sarant and Joel Barr were among the most productive members of the group. The Rosenbergs Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (1915-1953) and Julius Rosenberg (1918-1953) were American Communists who captured and maintained world attention after being tried, convicted, and executed for spying for the Soviet Union. ... The U.S. Army Signal Corps was founded in 1861 by Major Albert J. Myer, a physician by training. ... The Committee for State Security, or KGB, (Russian: Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности; Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti  listen?), was the name of the main Soviet Security Agency and intelligence agency, as well as the main secret police agency from March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991. ... Joel Barr, also Iozef Veniaminovich Berg and Joseph Berg, attended City College of New York with Julius Rosenberg and later worked with Rosenberg and Al Sarant at the United States Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey during World War II. Barr and Sarant were recruited into espionage...

Venona project transcript of 14 November 1944 reported to Moscow that Rosenberg had safely carried through the contracting of Sarant. 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. Sarant was considered a good photographer and had a large darkroom in his home. Rosenberg was to pick up the film and deliver it to Soviet intelligence. The memo also noted the two had met Harry Gold, another courier. Ususally the film was forwarded directly to Moscow. One transcript reports Sarant and Barr delivered 17 authentic drawings relating to the APQ-7, an advanced and secret airbourne radar system developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Western Electric for the United States military. The VENONA project was a long-running and highly secret collaboration between the United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdoms MI5 that involved the cryptanalysis of Soviet messages. ... The Committee for State Security, or KGB, (Russian: Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности; Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti  listen?), was the name of the main Soviet Security Agency and intelligence agency, as well as the main secret police agency from March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991. ... Harry Gold born 12 December 1910 in Philadelphia, Pennsyvania. ... Western Electric (sometimes abbreviated WECo) was a US electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of the Bell Telephone Company from 1881 to 1984 . ...

In 1946 Sarant moved to Ithaca New York where he worked at Cornell University in the physics laboratories. Sarant's next door neighbor was Philip Morrison, a former Manhattan Project scientist and personal friend who joined the CPUSA in 1939. Philip Morrison, (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005), was institute Professor, Emeritus and Professor of Physics, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). ... Control panels and operators for calutrons at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ... The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States. ...

Two days after Julius Rosenberg's arrest on 17 July 1950, the FBI interviewed Sarant did not arrest him, being uncertain of his role. Three days later Sarant ran away with a neighbors wife, both abandoning thier children and spouses. The two crossed into Mexico and escaped FBI surveillence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a Federal police force which is the principal investigative arm of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). ...

In Mexico, for fear of surveilence, Sarant contact the Soviets through the Polish embassy. From there the two passed into Guatemala, and then flew to Poland. After six months in Warsaw they moved onto Moscow where Barr had already arrived. Sarant recieved from Soviet intelligence a new identity, Philip Georgievich Staros, claiming a Canadian (according to some sources — South Africa) background to justify his English language accent. From Moscow, Barr and Sarant were resettled in Czechoslovakia and put to work as electrical engineers. The woman who ran away with Sarant accompanied him.

In 1956 Sarant and Barr were transferred to Leningrad where they were placed in charge of a military electronics research institute, and enjoyed the benefits of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Nomenklatura. They have been credited with being the founders of the Soviet microelectronics industry, mainly because Sarant was (until Nikita Khrushchev's forced retirement) a chief scientist of Soviet Silicon valley (where he worked in "shuttle mode"). In 1969 Sarant recieved a Soviet state honor for his contributions to Soviet science. In 1979 Sarant died of a heart attack, and the woman who fled with him returned to the United States in 1991. Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербу́рг, English transliteration: Sankt-Peterburg), colloquially known as Питер (transliterated Piter), formerly known as Leningrad (Ленингра́д, 1924–1991) and Petrograd (Петрогра́д, 1914–1924), is a city located in Northwestern Russia on the delta of the river Neva at the east end of the Gulf of Finland... The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Коммунисти́ческая Па́ртия Сове́тского Сою́за = КПСС) was the name used by the successors of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1952 to 1991, but the wording Communist Party was present in the partys name since 1918 when the Bolsheviks became the All... The Russian term nomenklatura (номенклату́ра), derived from the Latin nomenclatura meaning a list of names, was originally the list of higher responsibility positions or jobs whose occupants needed to be approved by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. ... Microelectronics is a subfield of electronics. ... Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchyov (Khrushchev) (Russian: Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв   listen?, April 17, 1894 â€“ September 11, 1971) was the leader of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin. ... Zelenograd () is a town 40 km from Moscow, Russia (officially is a district of Moscow city). ...

It wasn't until 1983, thirty-three years after Sarant's disappearance into Mexico, that the full story of Sarant's life had been told. A Russian emigre working at Harvard who had read The Rosenberg File linked Barr and Sarant to two prominent Soviet scientists, both native speakers of English.

Sarant's cover name in Soviet intelligence and in the Venona project is "Hughes". The VENONA project was a long-running and highly secret collaboration between the United States intelligence agencies and the United Kingdoms MI5 that involved the cryptanalysis of Soviet messages. ...

Source

• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
• Feklisov, Alexandre, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs: Memoirs of the KGB Spymaster Who Also Controlled Klaus Fuchs and Helped Resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, (New York,Enigma, 2001)
• FBI Venona file
• PBS Nova Online, The November 14, 1944 cable: Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant