8

They Gave the Bomb to Russia

The United States of America

versus

Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell

Early on the evening of Wednesday, September 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko, an obscure twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, walked into the editorial offices of the Ottawa Journal with an armful of secret Soviet files. When the Canadian authorities, with Gouzenko’s help, translated the 109 documents he had pilfered, they discovered that the country was honeycombed with Russian spies who were part of an extensive network that covered Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Perhaps the most important name that was found in the Gouzenko papers was that of Allan Nunn May, a British atomic scientist, who was then working at the Montreal Laboratory of the National Research Council. It was through Dr. May’s efforts that, on August 9, 1945, Colonel Nicolai Zabotin, the Russian Embassy’s military attaché, was able to report to Moscow that he had obtained samples of Uranium 233. May was arrested when he returned to England in late September and, after pleading guilty to a charge of violating the Official Secrets Act, was sentenced to ten years in prison.

The secret service agents who examined Dr. May’s papers had found the name ‘Fuchs’ scrawled on several pages of notes. For some reason, no attention was paid to this name although Dr. Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, a German-born physicist who was a naturalized British subject, had just returned to England from a tour of duty with the Manhattan Project, the American atomic bomb station at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It wasn’t until four years later that Fuchs was arrested, and immediately confessed that he had been supplying atomic information to a Soviet courier who regularly visited him in New York and New Mexico. He did not know the name of the courier but indicated that he had appeared to have an excellent knowledge of chemistry.

When he was shown photographs of various American chemists who were suspected of espionage, he had pointed to one and said, “That is the man!” The photograph he had identified was that of a biochemist named Harry Gold who was employed by the Pennsylvania Sugar Company in Philadelphia. It was Gold, Fuchs said, who had met him in various parts of the United States and to whom he had turned over certain information for transmission to Anatoli A. Yakovlev, a Russian diplomatic agent in New York. He had first met Gold in Woodside, Queens, in June of 1944, and continued these clandestine meetings until he was transferred to Los Alamos early in 1945.

Upon Gold’s apprehension, he admitted that he had been working as a Soviet espionage agent for more than fifteen years. He had first met Yakovlev, a long-nosed young man who walked “with somewhat of a stoop” and who was known to him only as ‘John,’ in March of 1944, at a Manhattan restaurant. Yakovlev had ordered him to contact Fuchs, who was then working in New York with a British-American atomic team. At the Woodside meeting, the physicist had told Gold that he was “going to give me information. This information was to relate to the application of nuclear fission to the production of a military weapon.” A few weeks later, the two men had met in Brooklyn’s Borough Hall area where Fuchs gave the courier “a package of papers” for transmittal to Yakovlev.

Just before Fuchs left for Los Alamos in February of 1945, Gold saw him in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to the usual package of documents which he had turned over to Gold, Fuchs “made mention of a lens which was being worked on as a part of the atom bomb.” Before the two parted company, they made a date to meet in Santa Fe in June. When Gold told Yakovlev about the lens, the Soviet agent “was very agitated and told me to scour my memory clean so as to elicit any possible scrap of information about this lens.”

Four months later, Gold and Yakovlev met in Volks’ Cafe on 42nd Street and Third Avenue. After the details about meeting Fuchs in Santa Fe had been discussed, Yakovlev told Gold that, on the same trip, he would also have to visit Albuquerque where he was to see an American soldier named David Greenglass who was stationed at Los Alamos. He was to tell Greenglass that “I come from Julius” and show him a piece of cardboard from a dessert box. “Yakovlev told me that the man Greenglass ... would have the matching piece of cardboard.” Either Greenglass or his wife would have some information for him and he was given an envelope containing $500.00 which he was to turn over to them. Yakovlev told him that he would find the Greenglasses in an apartment at 209 North High Street.

On June 2, 1945, Gold, after seeing Fuchs, took a bus from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. About 8:30 that evening, he went to the High Street address that Yakovlev had given him but was informed by a neighbor that the Greenglasses were not home. Early the next day—a Sunday—he returned to High Street and this time found the couple in their apartment. After informing Greenglass that he “was from Julius,” Gold produced the piece of cardboard which matched that in the other man’s possession. Greenglass, who was “a young man of about twenty-three with dark hair,” then introduced Gold to his wife, Ruth, and asked him to come back later that day as the information was not yet ready for delivery. That afternoon, Greenglass gave Gold “an envelope which he said contained ... the information on the atom bomb.” Before Gold took his leave, Greenglass informed the courier that he expected to come to New York on furlough around Christmas and that “if I wish to get in touch with him then I could do so by calling his brother-in-law Julius and he gave me the telephone number of Julius....”

Gold returned at once to New York and turned over the material he had received from Fuchs and Greenglass to Yakovlev. Although he returned to New Mexico again in September of 1945 to see Fuchs, he never saw the Greenglasses again. Fuchs told him that the first atomic bomb had been exploded at Alamogordo in July and that he thought that “he would probably very soon have to return to England.” The scientist was extremely upset because the British had entered Kiel ahead of the Russians and he was afraid that his Gestapo dossier would fall into the wrong hands. Gold told him not to worry and that, after his return to England, he would be contacted on the first Saturday of every month at the Paddington Crescent station of the London subway. He was to carry five books in one hand and two in another, while the man who would meet him would have a copy of Bennett Cerf’s Stop Me if You Have Heard This in his left hand.

When Gold was apprehended on May 23, 1950, he told his story to the FBI agents who had picked him up. As a result of his revelations, David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were arrested three weeks later in their New York City apartment. Like Gold, the Greenglasses confessed that they, too, had been engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. They insisted, however, that they had merely been pawns in the hands of Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, who was married to David’s sister, Ethel. It was Julius, they both claimed, who, with an assist from Ethel, had persuaded them to become atomic spies and who had directed their espionage activities. On July 16th, the Rosenbergs were arrested in their eleventh-floor apartment in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing project on Manhattan’s lower East Side.

One month later, the Federal Grand Jury in New York returned conspiracy indictments against Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Anatoli Yakovlev. Four weeks earlier, Harry Gold had pleaded guilty to the same crime in Philadelphia and been sentenced to thirty years in prison. On October 10, 1950, a superseding indictment included David Greenglass and an electrical engineer named Morton Sobell as additional defendants. They were all accused of conspiring to deliver to “a foreign nation ... documents, writings, sketches, notes and information relating to the National Defense of the United States of America.” Since Yakovlev had returned to Russia in December of 1946 and David Greenglass had admitted his guilt, another indictment which named only the Rosenbergs and Sobell was filed on January 31, 1951, and their joint trial began in New York City on March 6, 1951.

When court convened at 10:30 that morning, District Judge Irving R. Kaufman, a comparative newcomer to the Federal bench, presided. Irving H. Saypol, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and five assistants appeared for the government. The Rosenbergs were represented by a father-son team—Alexander Bloch for Ethel and Emanuel H. Bloch for Julius. Harold M. Phillips and Edward Kuntz stood up for Sobell while O. John Rogge, the attorney for the Greenglasses, only hung around long enough to ask Judge Kaufman to notify him when his client took the stand so that he “could be in attendance.” The judge assured him that he would be happy to do so and Rogge, with a grateful smile, double-timed out of the courtroom.

After a jury of one woman and eleven men had been impanelled, Saypol called Max Elitcher, a former employee of the Navy Department’s Bureau of Ordinance. Elitcher had attended Stuyvesant High School and City College with Morton Sobell. He said that Sobell had taken him to a Communist Party get-together in the fall of 1939 and that he had then regularly attended such meetings. In 1941, Sobell had left Washington to study for his Master’s degree at the University of Michigan.

Three years later Elitcher, who had remained with the Navy Department, received a telephone call from “a person who said he was Julius Rosenberg,” a former City College classmate, and who, like Sobell and Elitcher, was an electrical engineer. This man had visited him that same day and asked him whether he would be willing to obtain “classified information about military equipment” and turn this over for transmittal to Russia. He had assured Elitcher that his old friend Sobell was “helping in this way.” Before the two parted, Rosenberg instructed the witness to telephone him as soon as he had any information so that it could be promptly photostated and returned to the Navy Department before it was missed. Elitcher told him that “I would see about it.”

On Labor Day, the Elitchers joined Sobell and his fiancée on a vacation trip to Kumbabrow State Park in West Virginia. When Elitcher mentioned Julius’ visit, Sobell appeared agitated and said, “He should not have mentioned my name.” Elitcher tried to pacify him by pointing out that Rosenberg “knew about our close relationship [and] probably felt safe about it,” but Sobell kept insisting that “it makes no difference, he shouldn’t have done it.”

A few months after Sobell’s marriage in March of 1945, the Elitchers spent a night in New York at Rosenberg’s apartment. The latter announced that he had been discharged by the Signal Corps for security reasons. According to Elitcher, “he thought it had to do with his espionage activity, but he was quite relieved to find out it only had to do with the party activity.” He next saw Rosenberg in September when Julius came to Washington and dropped in for “fifteen or twenty minutes.” The conversation was limited to Elitcher’s work on fire control devices for the Navy. Rosenberg asked him whether he “would want to contribute [to satisfy] a continuing need for new military information for Russia,” and Elitcher testified that “I said I would see and if I had anything and I wanted to give it to him, I would let him know.”

Meanwhile, Sobell had left Ann Arbor for Schenectady where he was employed by General Electric. Elitcher visited him there early in 1946, only to be pumped about the availability of written reports on the Navy fire control system. When he told Sobell that “it was not completed, it was dragging along, it had not been finished yet,” he was advised to see Rosenberg as soon as possible. Some months later, he met Rosenberg again in his Knickerbocker Village apartment. This time Rosenberg complained that “there was a leak in this espionage” and that it would be better if “I don’t come to see him until he lets me know or until someone informs me.” In fact, Julius thought that things were so hot that he ordered Elitcher to discontinue his Communist Party activities until further notice.

In 1947, Sobell left General Electric and took a job as a project engineer with the Reeves Instrument Corporation in New York. From time to time, Elitcher visited him at the plant and, toward the end of the year, had lunch with him at a restaurant on Third Avenue known as the Sugar Bowl. During the meal, he remembered that his ex-roommate had “inquired as to whether I knew of any engineering students ... who would be safe to approach on this question of espionage, of getting material.” Elitcher claimed that he knew of nobody who fitted this bill but “if somebody came along, I would tell him about it.”

After several meetings with Sobell at Reeves, Elitcher made up his mind to leave the Bureau of Ordinance and enter private industry. In June of 1948, during a business trip to New York, he telephoned Sobell to inform him of his plans, and the former told him not to take any final step “before you see me. I want to talk to you about it, and Rosenberg wants to speak to you about it.” Later that day, Elitcher met Rosenberg and Sobell at 42nd Street and Third Avenue. They did everything in their power to persuade him to stay in the Bureau because, as Julius put it, “he needed somebody to work at the Navy Department for this espionage purpose.” During this conversation, Sobell kept repeating, “Julie is right; you should do that.” But Elitcher was adamant and, after the three men had dinner together, returned to Washington to resign from the Navy Department and bring his family back to New York.

At this time, Sobell lived at 164-17 73rd Avenue in Flushing. Elitcher was successful in landing a job at Reeves and, in late July, drove to New York on an apartment-hunting expedition. While driving through Baltimore, he noticed that he was being followed by several cars. When he arrived at Sobell’s house that evening, he told his friend that one or two cars had tailed him during most of his northward trek. Sobell was furious. “At this point, he became very angry and said that I should not have come to the house under those circumstances.” After he calmed down, he told Elitcher that he had something in the house “that he should have given to Julius Rosenberg some time ago....” He said he was tired and asked Elitcher to join him on the ten-mile trip to Manhattan. As they were leaving the house, Elitcher “saw him take what I identified then as a 35-millimeter film can.”

The two men left Queens and drove down the East River Drive to the Journal-American Building where Sobell parked the car. He took “this can out of the glove compartment” and, after instructing Elitcher to drive the car around the corner and wait for him on Catherine Slip, walked off in the direction of Knickerbocker Village. When he returned some thirty minutes later, Elitcher asked him, “Well, what does Julie think about ... my being followed?” Sobell assured him that “it is all right; don’t be concerned about it,” and headed the car in the direction of Flushing. As they drove along, Sobell volunteered the information that Rosenberg had told him that he once spoke to Elizabeth Bentley on the telephone but that “he was pretty sure she didn’t know who he was and therefore everything was all right.”

Before Saypol turned the witness over to the impatient defense quartet, he had extracted the information that Sobell had “a Leica camera, and an enlarger and material for processing film.” Elitcher was sure that Sobell had worked on classified material when he was employed by the Navy, General Electric and Reeves. He had last seen his friend in June of 1950 when Sobell and his family left for a weekend in Washington.

Q. Did he say anything to you at that time about going to Mexico?

A. No.

Only the uninitiated in the courtroom were ignorant of the fact that Sobell had been picked up in Mexico City in the late summer of 1950 by Mexican security police and rushed across the Rio Grande.

On cross-examination, Elitcher conceded that he had signed a loyalty oath in 1947. “I signed a statement saying that I was not or had not been a member of an organization that was dedicated to overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Q. At the time you verified that oath, did you believe that you were lying when you concealed your membership in the Communist Party?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. So you lied under oath?

A. Yes.

When he was first questioned about the Sobells and the Rosenbergs, he “realized what the implications might be” of his perjured statement. But he insisted that he “didn’t know what would happen to my skin when I told the story. I certainly have hopes ... that the best will happen to me.”

With the witness’ admission that he had been going to a psychiatrist since 1947 because of marital difficulties, the defense attorneys let him go. There was bigger game in the offing. The bailiff called out the name of David Greenglass and, accompanied by a United States Marshal, the ex-sergeant walked up to the witness chair. Although Elitcher had testified to a connection between Sobell and Rosenberg and some suspicious activities by both men, he had not shown that either one was engaged in atomic espionage. This was David Greenglass’ function and he played his role to the hilt.

After being trained as a mechanic at the Haaren Aviation School, Brooklyn Polytechnic and Pratt Institute, Greenglass was drafted in April of 1943. When he finished basic training, he had been sent to ordinance school at Aberdeen, Maryland. In July, 1944, he was assigned to the Manhattan District Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After two weeks orientation, he was sent to Los Alamos where he worked in the “E” shop as a machinist. He was one of ten machinists in the shop and became its foreman some eighteen months later. But it was not until November of 1944 that he learned that the work he was doing was “concerned with the construction of the atom bomb.”

It was his wife, Ruth, who had enlightened him as to the nature of the Manhattan Project. On November 29, 1944—their second wedding anniversary—she visited him in Albuquerque. A few days after she arrived, the couple decided to walk to the Rio Grande via Route 66. It was during this outing that Ruth told her husband that the Rosenbergs had invited her to dinner just before she left New York. Ethel and Julius had informed her that they had become Soviet espionage agents and that they were “giving information to the Soviet Union.” Julius had then told Ruth that David “was working in the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and that they would want me to give information to the Russians.”

At first, David refused to help the Rosenbergs, but, after a night of soul-searching, he apparently had a change of heart. The next day, he furnished his wife with the code names for such scientists as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and George B. Kistiakowski as well as information about “the general layout of the Los Alamos Atomic Project, the buildings, number of people and stuff like that.” Ruth told her husband that she had been instructed by Julius “not to write it down, but to memorize it.” Two days later, she returned to New York.

Greenglass next saw his wife on New Year’s Day of 1945 when he arrived home on a fifteen-day furlough. Julius came over one morning and “asked me to give him information, specifically anything of value on the atomic bomb, whatever I knew about it.” He was particularly interested in some high explosive lens molds on which David told him he was working at Los Alamos. That evening, Greenglass drew some sketches of the lens molds and gave them to his brother-in-law the following morning. In order to assist Greenglass in preparing his sketches, Julius gave him “a description of the atom bomb” of the Hiroshima type.

Two or three days later, the Greenglasses were invited to dinner at the Rosenberg’s. There they met a woman by the name of Ann Sidorovich. Later that evening, Julius told David that Mrs. Sidorovich would go west during Ruth’s next trip to Albuquerque and that the two women would exchange pocketbooks in a Denver movie theatre. Ruth’s was to contain the latest information on the atom bomb that David would turn over to her in Albuquerque.

However, there was a chance that another courier would be sent. To make sure that the Greenglasses would be able to identify Sidorovich’s replacement, Rosenberg gave Ruth one part of the side of a Jello box and told her that whoever came to Albuquerque would have the other portion. Ruth put the piece of cardboard in her wallet. The rest of the evening was spent in discussing lenses, and Rosenberg told Greenglass that “he would like me to meet somebody who would talk to me more about lenses.” The person Julius had in mind was a Russian scientist and an appointment was made for David to meet this man a few nights later on First Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets.

Greenglass borrowed his father-in-law’s Oldsmobile and parked at the spot Julius had indicated. His brother-in-law brought over a strange man who got into the car and ordered David to drive around the area. He asked the machinist a great many questions about lenses—the high explosive used, the means of detonation and the formula of the curve in the lens. David promised to find out what he could when he returned to Los Alamos and he drove the Russian back to where he had entered the car. He then returned home where “I told my wife where I had been.”

Two weeks later, he returned to the Manhattan Project. Early the next April, Ruth joined him in Albuquerque. Shortly after she arrived, the couple found an apartment at 209 North High Street. David managed to spend Saturdays and Sundays at the apartment, returning to the base on Monday mornings. It was on one of those Sundays—June 3, 1945—that Harry Gold made the first of his two visits to the Greenglasses. After announcing that he came from Julius and exhibiting the other half of the Jello box side, he was told by David to come back later as the information was not yet ready. As he left the apartment “Mrs. Greenglass told me that just before she had left New York City to come to Albuquerque, she had spoken with Julius....”

That afternoon, David turned over to Gold several sketches of a lens mold, some descriptive material about atomic bomb experimentation, and a “list of possible recruits for espionage.” He also indicated that a test explosion was scheduled for July at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Greenglasses then accompanied the courier on a back road that led by the USO where “we dropped him. We went into the USO, and he went on his way. As soon as he had gone down the street my wife and myself looked around and we came out again and back to the apartment and counted the money.”

Q. How much was it?

A. We found it to be $500.

Q. What did you do with the money?

A. I gave it to my wife.

It was at this point that Saypol introduced a sketch of a lens mold which had been prepared from memory by Greenglass after his arrest. The latter stated that it was, for all practical purposes, a replica of one he had given Gold in Albuquerque.

In September, Greenglass arrived in New York on furlough. He stayed at his mother’s apartment on Sheriff Street where Rosenberg visited him the next morning. Greenglass told him, “I think I have a pretty good description of the atom bomb.” He turned over a sketch and some data relating to the bomb to his brother-in-law who seemed delighted with them. He gave David $200.00 and told him that “he would like to have it immediately, as soon as I possibly could get it written up....” A replica of this sketch was identified by an atomic engineer at a later stage of the trial as a cross-section of “the bomb we dropped at Nagasaki, similar to it.”

That afternoon, Greenglass typed some twelve pages of information and then drove over to Knickerbocker Village with Ruth where he gave the manuscript to Julius. The latter insisted that the report’s grammar be corrected and Ethel retyped it on a portable in the living room. While this was going on, Julius told David that he had once stolen a proximity fuse when he worked for the Emerson Radio Company. Before the Greenglasses left that afternoon, Julius advised David to stay at Los Alamos as a civilian when he was discharged from the Army.

David received an honorable discharge at Fort Bliss in El Paso on February 28, 1946. He immediately returned to New York where he went into business with his brother Bernard, Julius Rosenberg and a man named Goldstein. The four formed two companies—G & R Engineering and the Pitt Machine Products Corporation. Some time in 1946 or 1947, Julius urged David to continue his schooling at Russian expense “for the purpose of cultivating the friendships of people that I had known at Los Alamos and also to acquire new friendships with people who were in the field of research that are in those colleges, like physics and nuclear energy.” He suggested a number of institutions, including the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University, but Greenglass “never bothered” to go.

In August of 1949, David left Pitt and G & R and got a job with the Arma Engineering Corporation. In the three years he had been working with his brother-in-law, Julius had told him a great deal about his espionage activities. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg was receiving information from General Electric as well as from someone in Cleveland, Ohio. “He told me that he had people going to school in various up-State institutions.” In 1947, he revealed that he had heard “from one of the boys” about a sky-platform project, and information about “atomic energy for airplanes” from another. As a reward for all his varied activities, he informed David, he and his wife had been given watches, a citation and a console table by the Russians.

Q. Did he describe the citation at all?

A. He said it had certain privileges with it in case he was sent to Russia.

A few days after Klaus Fuchs’ arrest in February of 1950, Rosenberg awakened Greenglass one morning and insisted that he accompany him on a walk around nearby Hamilton Fish Park. He told David that the man who had visited him in Albuquerque five years before had been one of Fuchs’ contacts and that he would probably be picked up soon. He urged Greenglass to leave the country and promised to obtain some money for him from the Russians. For the next few months, Rosenberg kept pressing David to get out of the United States but it was not until Harry Gold’s arrest in May that he told him that “you will have to leave the country.”

At that time, he gave David $1000.00 and promised him $6000.00 more. He suggested that David and Ruth go to Mexico City and that they get their tourist visas at the border rather than at the Mexican Consulate in New York. Once the couple arrived in Mexico City, they were to make contact with the Russian Ambassador and, by following instructions that would have delighted E. Phillips Oppenheim, eventually wind up in Czechoslovakia. Greenglass went so far as to have six sets of passport pictures taken. On Memorial Day, he turned five sets over to Rosenberg who, a week later, brought him $4,000 in tens and twenties in a brown paper bag. Almost all of this money, he said, had been given to O. John Rogge as a fee for legal services.

In the days that followed this visit, David began to notice that he was being regularly followed. When Julius asked him, “Are you being followed?” he told him that he thought he was. His brother-in-law then asked him what he intended to do about it and Greenglass told him, “I am not going to do anything. I am going to sit—I am going to stay right here.” On June 15th, he was picked up by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One month later, Julius Rosenberg was taken into custody and, on August 11th, Ethel was arrested. The circle that Gouzenko had started in 1945 was full.

Ruth Greenglass told much the same story as had her husband. Julius and Ethel had persuaded her to encourage her husband to commit espionage. Her brother-in-law had given her $150.00 for railroad fare when she first visited David in Albuquerque in late November of 1944. A few days after she arrived, she and her husband took a stroll out of Albuquerque on Route 66 and she “told him that Julius was interested in the physical description of the project at Los Alamos, the approximate number of people employed there, whether the place was camouflaged, what the security measures were, and the type of work that David himself did....” The next day, after consulting “with memories and voices in my mind,” Greenglass told her what she wanted to know and, when she returned to New York a few days later, she wrote it all down for Julius who seemed “very pleased.”

She said that the plan to switch pocketbooks with Ann Sidorovich in a Denver theatre had soon been abandoned in favor of a meeting in an Albuquerque supermarket. On March 3, 1945, she left New York for her second trip to Albuquerque where, after three weeks of apartment-hunting, she found the place on North High Street. On April 18th, she suffered a miscarriage and immediately wrote to Ethel Rosenberg to tell her that she was confined to bed and would be unable to keep the supermarket rendezvous which had been scheduled for “the last Saturday in April or the first Saturday in May.” Ethel wrote back that “a member of the family would come out to visit me the last weeks in May, the third and fourth Saturdays.” The Greenglasses visited the Central Avenue Safeway, which had been chosen as the meeting spot, on both Saturdays but “no one came.” It wasn’t until Sunday, June 3rd, that Harry Gold walked into their living room and announced that he came “from Julius.”

Her description of the Gold visit was similar to David’s except that she insisted that her husband had taken the Jello box side out of her wallet while, as he remembered it, it had been in her purse. The remainder of her testimony pertaining to the various acts of espionage that took place during the rest of 1945 did not differ materially from her husband’s. She did recall a conversation with Ethel in 1946 about a “mahogany console table” which her sister-in-law told her “she had gotten ... as a gift.” Julius interrupted to say that “it was a special kind of a table” and pointed out that its underside had been hollowed out so that it could be used for microfilming.

The defense made a monumental effort to discredit both witnesses. The spectacle of a brother testifying against his sister was not a pretty one and Emanuel Bloch made the most of it.

Q. Do you bear any affection for your sister Ethel?

A. I do.

Q. You realize, do you not, that Ethel is being tried here on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage?

A. I do.

Q. And you realize the grave implications of that charge?

A. I do.

Q. And you realize the possible death penalty, in the event that Ethel is convicted by this jury, do you not?

A. I do.

But David insisted that he had always loved his sister “as far back as I ever met her and knew her.” If his testimony hurt her, he was sorry, but he felt “remorse” and had to get it off his chest.

Bloch also tried to show that Greenglass lacked the technical knowledge necessary to understand the material he said he was obtaining for Julius. David admitted that he had failed all eight courses he had taken at Brooklyn Polytech, that he had never obtained a degree in science or engineering, and that he had had no training in nuclear or atomic physics. As far as the Army was concerned, he was classified as an automotive machinist and a toolmaker. What he did know about the bomb, he had “picked it up here and there.”

As far as the Blochs were concerned, the Greenglasses were testifying against their clients in the hopes of avoiding punishment for their participation in the espionage conspiracy. At the time of the trial, Ruth had neither been arrested nor indicted despite the fact that she had been very much a part of Rosenberg’s plans. Bloch fils pumped David about this.

Q. Now, Mr. Greenglass, your wife has never been arrested, has she?

A. She has not.

Q. And she has not pleaded guilty to any conspiracy to commit espionage, has she?

A. She has not.

Q. And your wife is at the present time home taking care of your children; isn’t that right?

A. That’s right.

His father tried the same tack when he had Ruth on the stand. She had stated that, after her husband’s arrest, she had informed her lawyer, O. John Rogge, that she wanted to testify for the Government.

Q. Well, was it your state of mind, that you thought you would not be punished?

A. No, I didn’t want to be punished.

Q. Did you hope not to be punished?

A. I did.

Q. And did you at the time you spoke to Mr. Rogge, hope that, if you told the truth and your husband told the truth, you wouldn’t be punished?

A. Mr. Bloch, I have always hoped that ...

Q. Will you answer my question, please?

A. Yes.

Bloch Junior’s parting shot at the Greenglasses involved the nature of their relationship with Julius after the failure of the machine shop in 1949. Ruth testified that “we lost everything in that business.” When her husband pulled out in August of that year, he had asked to be compensated for his twenty-five shares of stock. In fact, Ruth had “bought a book of promissory notes” and drafted several notes for her brother-in-law to sign. “We asked Mr. Rosenberg to sign the promissory notes and he refused, and he said we did not have the understanding that required it—a verbal understanding was sufficient, and he gave neither my husband nor his brother a note.” But she insisted that the incident did not cause any friction between the two families even though she had consulted Mr. Rogge about David’s rights.

Q. Well, aren’t you a bit angry at either Mr. or Mrs. Rosenberg because they did not pay you what you think you were entitled to?

A. I don’t think I am angry. I just can’t understand their actions because there was a debt due.

Q. You are not angry?

A. No, I am not angry. I don’t understand people who do not pay their debts, Mr. Bloch.

Q. And you resent it?

A. I don’t think I resented it. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being paid for what was rightfully mine.

It was David’s recollection that he had assigned his stock to his sister’s husband in January of 1950 but that it hadn’t been turned over to him until late April. There was some discussion about the price to be paid for the stock—David wanted $2,000.00 but finally agreed to accept half that amount in the form of a note. After he gave the stock to Julius, he claimed that Rosenberg never signed the promissory note which Ruth had prepared for him. When Greenglass was arrested, he asked Rogge to start a law suit against Rosenberg for the “few thousand dollars” he said he had lost in the machine shop venture. When Ruth testified, she swore that David had never asked his lawyer to sue Julius—“I was the one who spoke of it,” she insisted, “not my husband.”

The Greenglasses were followed on the stand by Harry Gold whose apologia included the saga of his trip to Albuquerque in June of 1945. His version of the episode was identical with those previously put into the record by David and Ruth. He had arrived in Santa Fe on Saturday, June 2nd, where he had a thirty-minute conversation with Fuchs. He then took the bus to Albuquerque, a sixty-minute run, where he “managed to obtain a room in the hallway of a rooming house.” Early the next morning, he had registered in his own name at the Hilton Hotel and then walked to the North High Street address Yakovlev had given him, and climbed “a very steep flight of steps” to the Greenglasses second-floor apartment. Although Ruth and David had testified that they did not receive the $500.00 from Gold until his afternoon visit, the courier remembered that he had given them the envelope containing the money that very morning.

Because Gold, other than by his references to “Julius,” did not implicate either the Rosenbergs or Sobell, he was not cross-examined by the defense team. As he vacated the witness chair to return to the Lewisberg Federal Penitentiary, Saypol called Dr. George Bernhardt. Bernhardt was a physician who lived only a few doors away from the Rosenbergs on Monroe Street. He recalled a telephone conversation he had had with Julius in May of 1950. According to him, the defendant had said, “Doctor, I would like to ask a favor of you. I would like to know what injections one needs to go to Mexico.” When the doctor demurred, Julius had assured him that “it is not for me; it’s for a friend of mine.” Bernhardt then told him that he would need “typhoid injections and a small-pox vaccination.”

During this conversation, Bernhardt informed Rosenberg that if his friend was a veteran “all he would need would be booster doses instead of going through the entire series of injections, and he said, ‘Yes, he is a veteran.’” He told his caller that the typhus injection would not be necessary, however, if his friend was going only to Mexico City but Rosenberg said, “He will probably go into the interior.” Then, Bernhardt had recommended, “if he decided to go ... give me a little notice because I don’t usually stock a typhus vaccine and I would have to get it, and he said he would let me know.”

Q. Did that complete the conversation which you had with him?

A. That is right.

Bernhardt admitted to Block Junior that he had been treating Julius for hay fever during May of 1950. Rosenberg used to come to the physician’s Knickerbocker Village apartment once a week for injections. These injections were usually given in Bernhardt’s living room. But the witness couldn’t remember whether he had ever discussed vacations with his patient or shown him pictures he had taken on Cape Cod. He was certain, however, that he had never discussed “with Julius Rosenberg his taking a vacation in Mexico.”

The Government got back to the subject of Morton Sobell again with the testimony of William Danziger, another City College graduate who had worked with him in the Bureau of Ordinance. Danziger had left Washington in March of 1950 to take a job with the Academy Electrical Products Corporation in New York. Shortly after his arrival, he had looked up the Sobells and, with his wife, visited them in Flushing. It was during this visit that Sobell, after learning that his guest was in “the electrical business,” had suggested to him that he might be able to use Rosenberg’s machine shop.

In the latter part of June, Danziger visited the machine shop where he was informed that Julius was “out at a stamping place. I was at that time rather interested in getting an estimate on stamping, so I went out to the stamping place and saw him out there.” In July, Danziger dropped in at the shop once more “to look over the ... facilities.” Rosenberg told him that “he was rather tied up at that time” and would be unable to accept any new work “for some months.” If Danziger wanted some work done, he was advised “to contact him some time in the future.”

On June 20th, Danziger telephoned Sobell and told him that he was looking for an electric drill in order to do some repair work at his home. Sobell informed him that “he was getting ready to leave for a vacation in Mexico,” but if Danziger wanted a drill, he would have to come to Flushing to get it. When he arrived at the Sobell apartment that evening, he noticed that “there was packing going on, there were valises standing there.” He also saw a car in the driveway with some valises in it. After Sobell gave him the electric drill, he told Danziger that “he was going to Mexico City by air.”

Some weeks later, Danziger received a letter addressed to him at the Academy Electrical Products Corporation from an “M. Sowell” in Mexico City. It was from Sobell and contained two enclosures which he was asked to “forward ... and I will explain to you when I get back.” One was a note to Sobell’s parents and the other to Edith Levitov, a sister-in-law who lived in Arlington, Virginia. Danziger delivered both notes and also followed Sobell’s directions to “deliver my address to Max Pasternak.”

Q. Did you know who Max Pasternak was?

A. I knew he was related in some way.

In the middle of July, he received a second letter from Mexico City. This time, the name on the envelope was “M. or Morty Levitov.” It contained “a letter for me, an enclosure for Miss Edith Levitov and a short additional note which he asked me to forward, using somewhat similar phraseology, ‘I will let you know about it when I get back.’” Danziger promptly forwarded the note to Miss Levitov and never heard from Sobell again. Before he stepped down, the witness said he thought that the return address on the second communication—a Cordova or Corbova Street—was different from the one on the first envelope.

Then a Mexico City interior decorator with the impressive name of Manuel Giner de Los Rios sauntered up to the stand. With an interpreter at his side, he testified in a soft Spanish that he lived in Apartment 5 at 153 Calle Octava de Cordoba. He remembered that the Sobells had rented Apartment 4 at the beginning of July, 1950, and that he had had a conversation on the stairs with Morton about a tank of cooking gas on the day they moved in. A week later, he invited the new tenants to “a party for the family and friends in honor of the saint’s day....”

The Sobells soon reciprocated by inviting de Los Rios and his wife to dinner. A few days afterwards, Sobell, who appeared to be “a little nervous, a little worried,” asked his new friend “how one could leave Mexico.”

Q. Did he make any statement as to why he wanted to leave Mexico?

A. Only because he was afraid.

Q. Did he say specifically what he was afraid of?

A. He was afraid that they were looking for him so that he would have to go to the Army.

Q. Did he say who was looking for him?

A. The military police.

“Sometime around the 20th or 22nd of July, 1950,” de Los Rios recalled, Sobell had gone to Vera Cruz where he stayed “for about fifteen days.” The decorator had received two letters from him during this period, both of which began with the salutation, “Dear Helen.” The first was postmarked Vera Cruz and the second was from Tampico. He delivered each letter personally to Mrs. Sobell.

The interpreter had his work cut out for him that afternoon. Señor de Los Rios had no sooner left the courtroom when the bailiff called out the name of Minerva Bravo Espinosa, who, it turned out, worked in an optical shop on the Calle Cinco de Mayo in Vera Cruz. On July 26, 1950, an American who gave his name as “Mr. M. Sand,” had placed an order with her for a pair of glasses. She had no difficulty in recognizing Sobell as that man. He had filled out a card “which purchasers make out to specify what they buy.” At this point, Mr. Kuntz stood up and announced that “we will concede that we filled out the card and used the name of Sand and bought a pair of glasses there.”

José Broccado Vendrell, who was one of the proprietors of the Grand Hotel Diligencias in Vera Cruz, remembered that a “Morris Sand” had stayed at his establishment until July 30th. Vendrell was followed by Dora Bautista, a clerk at a Tampico hotel. On July 30th, an American, who gave his name as “Marvin Sand,” had registered and asked her for directions to the Banco Granadero. Both witnesses identified Sobell as the man they had seen. Glenn Dennis, an official of a Mexican airline, confirmed that a passenger by the name of “N. Sand” flew from Vera Cruz to Tampico on July 30th, and a “Morton Solt” from Tampico to Mexico City two days later.

Elizabeth Bentley, fresh from her triumphs before sundry Congressional investigating committees, contributed little to the prosecution’s case. Outside of adding to the aura of Communism that permeated the entire trial, her testimony consisted of innuendo only. In the fall of 1942, she had accompanied Golos, her party superior (and lover), to the vicinity of Knickerbocker Village, where he was “to pick up some material from a contact, an engineer.” At that time, she had waited in a car while Golos talked to his “contact.” From then until November of the next year, she used to receive telephone calls from a man “who described himself as ‘Julius.’” Golos had told her that this man “lived in Knickerbocker Village,” but she had “never met anyone whose voice I heard, whom I could describe as Julius.”

The government’s last witness was James S. Huggins, an immigration inspector for the Department of Justice. On August 18, 1950, nine Mexican security policemen had brought Morton Sobell to his office in Laredo, Texas. He identified a manifest record which he had filled out from information given to him by Sobell. At the bottom of the card, he had written, “Deported from Mexico,” despite the fact that the Mexican authorities had not shown him any deportation orders. As soon as Huggins had laboriously typed in the necessary personal data on the manifest, the defendant was arrested by FBI agents who were waiting in the outer office.

As Huggins left the witness stand and headed back for the anonymity of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Saypol announced that “The Government rests, if the Court please.” In a little less than two weeks, the prosecution had presented the evidence which it hoped would convict all three defendants. After some defense motions for a mistrial because of the infusion of testimony about the Communist Party were denied, Bloch Junior informed Kaufman that “my first witness is the defendant Julius Rosenberg.”

It was late on the afternoon of March 21, 1951, that the mustached, bespectacled Rosenberg sat himself down in the witness chair. A thirty-three-year-old electrical engineer, he proudly stated that he had married Ethel on June 18, 1939, and that they were the parents of two boys, Michael and Robert. Outside of the fact that he knew a great many people whose names were mentioned during the trial, he denied that he had in any way been involved in espionage. As for Russia, he “felt that the Soviet government had improved the lot of the underdog there ... and at the same time I felt that they contributed a major share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed six million of my co-religionists.”

Q. Did you feel that way in 1945?

A. Yes, I felt that way in 1945.

Q. Do you still feel that way today?

A. I still feel that way.

But he was, and always had been, loyal to the United States.

He testified that Greenglass had asked him for $2,000.00 in May of 1950. When Julius asked him why he needed this money, he was told, “I need the money. Don’t ask questions.” David had also urged his brother-in-law to see if his doctor “would make out a certificate for smallpox vaccination.” In addition, he had wanted to know “what kind of injections are required to go into Mexico.” It was after this conversation that Rosenberg had questioned Dr. Bernhardt about the medical requirements for a Mexican trip.

Toward the end of May, David had telephoned Rosenberg and pleaded with him to come over to his apartment. He told Julius, whom he usually called Julie, that he was “in a terrible jam.” He said he needed a “couple of thousand dollars in cash” and, when his brother-in-law told him that he couldn’t raise that amount of money, he had shouted “... if you don’t get me that money you are going to be sorry!” Outside of an inconsequential meeting a few days later, that was the last time that Julius had seen David until the latter testified at the trial.

Ethel buttressed her husband’s emphatic denials of any espionage activities. She knew that Julius had purchased their console table at Macy’s and that “it was about $20 or $21.” Long after the trial, such a table, which a Macy employee priced at $20.36, was found in her mother-in-law’s apartment. As far as wrist-watches were concerned, the one she had been wearing when she was arrested had been given to her by her husband on her birthday in 1945. She remembered that Julius had lost his watch on a New York Central train in August of 1948. She was certain that neither the console table nor the watches had been given to them by the Russians.

When Saypol took over, both witnesses refused to answer any questions that had to do with their association with the Communist Party. Julius informed Judge Kaufman that “if Mr. Saypol is referring to the Young Communist League or the Communist Party, I will not answer any question on it....”

Q. You mean you assert your constitutional privilege against self-incrimination?

A. That’s right.

Ethel bridled at any reference to the word “Communist” and refused to answer such questions as “Did you ever sign a Communist Party nominating petition for elective office?” and “Were they [friends with whom the Rosenbergs had lived for a time] members of the Communist Party?”

After Thomas V. Kelly, a Macy’s attorney, testified that it was impossible to check the purchase of the console table because the store’s records for 1944 had been destroyed, the defense called it a day. But Saypol had three rebuttal witnesses up his well-tailored sleeve—Evelyn Cox, a domestic who had worked for the Rosenbergs in 1944 and 1945, Helen Pagano, a legal secretary employed by O. John Rogge, and Ben Schneider, a commercial photographer. Mrs. Cox was there to swear that Ethel Rosenberg had once told her that the console table had been given to her husband as “a sort of a wedding present.” Mrs. Pagano said that Louis Abel, who was married to Ruth Greenglass’ sister, had brought $3,900.00 to Rogge’s office on June 16, 1950, the day after David’s arrest, and that this money had been wrapped “in a brown bag.” Schneider identified the Rosenbergs as the couple who had ordered some passport pictures from him on a Saturday in May or June of 1950.

On March 29th, the jury, after deliberating more than eighteen hours, returned verdicts of “guilty as charged” against all three defendants. One week later, Judge Kaufman sentenced the Rosenbergs to death because, as he somewhat awkwardly put it, “... your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians, the A-Bomb ... has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000....” As for Sobell, he thought that “the evidence ... did not point to any activity on your part in connection with the atom bomb project” and sentenced him to thirty years, the maximum prison term provided by the Espionage Act, with a “gratuitous” recommendation that he never be admitted to parole. The next day, David Greenglass, whose sentence had been deferred to the end of the trial, was sentenced to a fifteen-year term.

After more than two years of fruitless appeals and motions for a new trial, the Rosenbergs’ executions were set for eleven p.m. on the night of June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison. But three days before, Irwin Edelman, “an interested citizen,” filed a motion with Mr. Justice William O. Douglas, in which he argued that the penalties of the Atomic Energy Act rather than those of the Espionage Act were applicable and that, under the former, the Rosenbergs could not have been sentenced to death. On June 17th, Douglas granted a stay of execution in order to give Edelman’s attorneys time to argue their point. But Chief Justice Vinson reconvened the Court on the following day and the full bench, by a six-to-three vote, vacated Douglas’ stay at noon on June 19th. After President Eisenhower refused to grant clemency, the couple’s execution was moved ahead three hours in order to avoid a conflict with the Jewish Sabbath. A few minutes after eight p.m., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg passed into what Joseph Conrad once called “the great indifference of things.”