He graduated from the University of Missouri and studied Russian at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
[2] In 1996, Barron published a book detailing the saga of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Operation SOLO, involving the infiltration of the top leadership of the Communist Party USA by the FBI's secret informant Morris Childs.
From 1958 through 1977, Childs traveled to Moscow over 50 times, acting as a courier between the CPUSA and Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[4] Barron's and co-author Anthony Paul's 1977 book Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia was important in overturning the Cambodian genocide denial and the myth that the Khmer Rouge rulers of Cambodia were benign agrarian reformers.
Barron's papers are held by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.