Vincent Reno

Franklin Vincent Reno (14 May 1911 – 1 May 1990) was a mathematician and civilian employee at the United States Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the 1930s. Reno was a member of the "Karl group" of Soviet spies which was being handled by Whittaker Chambers until 1938. Reno confessed in late 1948 to his espionage activities on behalf of the GRU. He is listed as number "118th" in the Gorsky Memo. Reno was sentenced to three years in prison.

Biography Reno was born in Salt Lake City, to a stock raiser and his wife from "Reno, Idaho" (likely Reno Ranch, Idaho). He attended Fort Collins High School from 1924 to 1928 and Colorado State College in Fort Collins from 1928 to 1929. He graduated from University of Colorado Boulder with "top honors" in mathematics in 1932. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in spring 1932 as Victor Reno. While doing graduate studies in astronomy at the University of Virginia in 1935 he joined the Communist Party under the name "Lance Clark." In 1945 he was "given the war department's gold medal for devising a complicated bomb table." He worked on the Norden bombsight and was said to have passed information on this device to Alger Hiss. The judge gave Reno a month's delay in reporting for his sentence so he could finish his work on the book.