Imagine being the poor engineer tasked with making this stuff work on the the other end.
As Sherlock Holmes says in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"; “What one man can invent, another can discover.”
So you're assuming the Austrian actually knows what the US deformed? Why would they tell him?
One way might be by simple black-box behaviour testing of gizmo-x received in the USSR vs. the same done in a legal company in the US/Europe/Japan and then narrowing down the problem.
I will bet my bottom dollar that the same thing is going on even today (w.r.t. the usual suspects like China/Iran/etc.) given how crucial Technology has become to maintaining Economic/Military superiority.
All he could possibly know is "this thing may be sabotaged." I suppose that is some help to the Soviets.
This whole story is based upon the ignorance of the general public in how manufacture and how silicon processes work. It's designed to convince you that "intelligence" agencies are doing _anything_ worthwhile when in reality they're playing childish games and putting third parties lives at risk to do it.
It's so boring and tiring to read crap like this.