Joel Barr (also Iozef Veniaminovich Berg and Joseph Berg) dies: he was part of the Soviet espionage network in the United States, along with Alfred Sarant, an electrical engineer and member of the Young Communist League. In the 1930s, they were part of the spy ring led by Julius Rosenberg. Barr and Sarant worked in the United States on radar and other electronic military systems. When the Rosenbergs were executed on the electrical grid, Barr and Sarant realized that the net was closing in on them and left the United States for the Soviet Union, where they worked on the first Soviet computers in Zelenograd, the city Khrushchev had built as a Russian Silicon Valley. But the Soviets gave scientists strict orders to focus exclusively on copying integrated circuits invented in the West as quickly as possible. This condemned the Soviet Union to perpetually lagging behind the West in terms of electronics.
