Immersed In Red

by Mike Shotwell

  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were among many Hollywood stars who formed a support group that traveled to Washington, DC in 1947 to defend the Hollywood Ten, calling themselves The Committee for the First Amendment,” but they withdrew when presented evidence validating the charges.

  Bogart wrote an article entitled “I’m No Communist” for the March, 1948, issue of Photoplay. In it, he explained that he and other members of the Committee had not realized that some of the Hollywood Ten actually were communists. Bogart, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of his time, was attacked by many liberals and fellow travelers, who claimed he was selling out to save his career. Orville could barely mention his name without showing obvious revulsion.

  The Rosenbergs: But the biggest target of the House committee, and the legal battle that was heard around the world was the spy case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their espionage network.

  During the late 30s through the 40s, Julius Rosenberg, with the assistance of his wife, Ethel, organized and ran an espionage ring on behalf of the Soviet government. They were arrested in 1950 on charges of turning over atomic bomb and other military secrets to Moscow, which were later confirmed by Soviet intelligence and testimony from co-conspirators. The couple, convicted in 1951, was executed at Sing-Sing prison in New York in 1953, the last people in the US involved in a treason trial to be convicted and sentenced to death.

  During the Rosenberg’s incarceration and trial, Orville, my mother, and thousands of pro-Soviet leftists around the world, rose in anger, marching in the streets and crying out for the end of the “injustice” against the Rosenbergs. When the duo was convicted, the depression in the leftist community was palpable and widespread.

  I was well aware of the intense activity on behalf of the Rosenbergs. Along with the demonstrations there were fund raising efforts, and I recall being taken to many events at the Unitarian Church and elsewhere. It loomed as one of the most important events of the era, at least as far as the radical left was concerned. For the rest of the country, it was justice being served; a justice that was far kinder than what was happening in their beloved Soviet Union.

  The effect of the Rosenberg case on that community was described by Ronald Radosh, an adjunct professor at the Hudson Institute and a leading author on the subject of the Rosenbergs, as “a lynchpin of the American left’s argument that the United States government was not only evil during the Cold War years, but was ready to kill regular American citizens because they were against the Truman administration’s anti-Soviet policies embodied in the ‘Truman Doctrine.’”

  There was, at the same time, consternation on two fronts within the Jewish community; on one hand, they were deeply concerned about justice, but on the other hand, there was fear of a backlash against them if the American public felt they condoned spying. According to Marc Tracy, a staff writer with the New Republic, the case against the Rosenbergs, and its inherent issue of justice, “obsessed the American Jewish community for six decades,” with just about everyone taking one side or the other.

  During the six decades after the trial and execution, the case was kept in the forefront of public opinion with a continuous and ongoing campaign of articles in the old leftist newspaper the National Guardian, books written by the Rosenberg’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, and a castigating chorus of other leftist writers and commentators. Storylines centered on the well-worn themes that questioned the American justice system and basic American civility; the evil motives of the American government’s conspiratorial framing and implicating of the Rosenberg’s; a vile anti-Semitic American undercurrent; and the accusation that the Rosenbergs were simply scapegoats in the era of “red hysteria,” engineered by the despised Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The supposed innocence of other members of the Rosenberg spy ring, including Morton Sobell, Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, and others, was also touted.

  However, the facts clearly flew in the face of any perceived innocence on the part of the Rosenbergs and their cohorts. The official accusations were that William Perl, a brilliant aeronautical engineer and a member of the Rosenberg cell, obtained a massive quantity of technical data from the safe of Theodore Von Karman, the chairman of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. The information included the hovering performance of helicopters powered by jet propulsion; reciprocating engines; high-speed wind tunnel tests; information about the D-558 research airplane; preliminary tests of the NACA 66-006 airfoil; and also data pertaining to the Lexington Report, a detailed study of the feasibility of nuclear-powered aircraft. The tests and diagrams included everything that Von Karman, Americas leading space engineer, was working on. In addition, during Julius Rosenberg’s incarceration, government informant Jerome Tartakow, sharing the same cell, reported to the FBI that Julius had bragged about the purloined data and that the documents had kept a four-man team busy for seventeen hours, photographing documents with their Leica cameras.

  Since the early 1980s, much has been written by researchers who have studied a wealth of information in regard to the Rosenbergs, and offering counter-arguments to their alleged innocence. The most prominent of these are Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Ronald Radosh, Steven Usdin and Allen Hornblum, who collectively have authored some six books and numerous articles on the subject. Much of the following is taken from their research and writings, mixed with my own remembrances and independent research.

  Major revelations appeared with the release of both the Venona decrypts collected during WWII, containing the decoded messages between the KGB and their field agents, and the extensive KGB files released by a Russian defector, Alexander Vassiliev.

  Ronald Radosh confirmed through these sources that Julius Rosenberg was a KGB agent who organized and ran an espionage spy ring of college friends, made up of engineers and scientists and that his wife, Ethel, knew of and supported his activities. The archival documents show Ethel Rosenberg hid money and espionage paraphernalia for her husband, served as an intermediary for communications with his Soviet intelligence contacts, provided her personal evaluation of individuals Julius considered recruiting, and was present at meetings with his sources. They also demonstrated that Julius reported to the KGB and that Ethel persuaded her sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass, to travel to New Mexico to recruit Ethel’s brother David as a spy. David Greenglass was working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan project’s development of the atomic bomb. In addition, the Venona decrypts regarding Ruth’s KGB recruitment states, “Liberal (Julius) and his wife (Ethel) recommend her (Ruth) as an intelligent and clever girl.”

  The information gathered by the spy ring, Radosh writes, was an “extraordinary trove of non-nuclear espionage on radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines to the Soviets, but the Rosenberg’s contributions to the Soviet nuclear weapons program was also important, as it was valuable and practical confirmation of data it was receiving from Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, the two major nuclear spies in the Manhattan project.”

  Morton Sobell, who had spent 18 years in the penitentiary for his collaboration with the spy ring, spent years vociferously and condescendingly promoting his innocence in books and to the media. But in 2008 he suddenly had a change of heart.

  In an article in The New York Times dated September, 11, 2008, Sobell confessed to journalist Sam Roberts that he had in fact been a Soviet spy; implicated Julius Rosenberg, and admitted they had stolen major military secrets “desired by the Soviets.” He also confirmed that Ethel was aware of her husband’s activities, which aligned with the Venona decrypts and KGB information. This was certainly a bombshell to the left, however, there was still more to learn. When questioned more deeply as to his spy activities, he hedged a bit before responding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that.” He then added his incredulous conclusion, that, “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”

  Additionally, he stated that he turned over the information during WWII when we were “allies with the Soviets.” This, of course, was a bending of the truth as the year of the theft for
which he was indicted was 1948, well into the Cold War period. He also de-emphasized the quality of the stolen data, making the distinction that it was “non-nuclear” and intended to produce weapons that were defensive only. By discounting the massive military information they passed on, Sobell, in his odd and contorted reasoning, did not believe they were guilty of anything close to nuclear espionage.

  Three years later, in December, 2010, an even greater bombshell hit squarely into the Rosenberg defenders’ midst. During an interview with researcher Peter Usdin, author of Engineering Communism, Sobell added important information to the 2008 interview. He now recounted with great specificity his and other members of the ring’s involvement in espionage activities. Sitting in his living room under a portrait of Ethel and Julius, he recounted to Usdin his involvement in stealing the documents and what they consisted of:

  On a nonstop photo session over a July 4 weekend in 1948, he, Julius Rosenberg, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics scientist William Perl, and a fourth man took films of 1,885 pages of classified documents stolen for them by Perl from a Columbia University safe belonging to Theodore von Kármán, at that time the nation’s most prominent aerospace engineer. It included information about the designs and capabilities of every American bomber, designs for analog and digital computers used to automate antiaircraft weapons, and specifications for land-based and airborne radars later used in Korea [emphasis added.] He thus provided information that advanced the capabilities of the Soviet military machine.

  Both Radosh and Usdin also reported on Sobell’s role in the transfer of film to the KGB. During the interview, Sobell told Usdin, “We got all the manuals and secrets from Langley Field.” On the following Monday morning, Sobell and Rosenberg, “packed canisters of developed 35 mm film in a box that was so heavy one man could barely carry it, took a train to Long Island, and gave it to the Russians on the platform [emphasis added].”

  Sobell grinned from ear to ear as he described the Leica cameras and apparatus they used to photograph the massive espionage haul and how quickly the documents had to be returned by Perl to Von Karman’s safe. The “Leica camera” statement reinforced informant Tartakow’s jailhouse conversation with Julius that was so derided by the left at the time of the trial, a piece of information condemned as being part of the government frame-up.

  Usdin and Radosh reported that Sobell acknowledged he was engaged in this espionage not because he was anti-fascist, but, as he told them, “I did it for the Soviet Union.” His parents were communists who were dedicated to support of the Soviets, his mother even holding Communist Party meetings in the family’s apartment when Sobell was a toddler. One of Sobell’s uncles ran a communist summer camp in the Catskills and another worked as a secret courier carrying messages between New York and Moscow. Sobell never perceived of himself as anything but a communist. His spying continued until the day he fled to Mexico in 1950 and tried to book passage on a Soviet freighter in an attempt to escape arrest. He was eventually apprehended, however, by Mexican police and returned to US authorities. Not surprisingly, Sobell described it as an unfair “kidnapping.”

  During the original trial, testimony from another member of the spy ring, Max Elitcher, Sobell’s former college roommate, was also enlightening. He told of shaking off an FBI tail on his way to Sobell’s home, and accompanying his friend on a late-night excursion to East River Drive in New York City, parking on a deserted waterfront street, and waiting while Sobell delivered a film canister to Rosenberg a few blocks away.

  Usdin wrote of other thefts by the spy ring, both during and after WWII:

  The Rosenberg network, especially the agents Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, passed on the 12,000-page blueprints for the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, airborne radars for nighttime navigation and bombing, and other new radar technology. Rosenberg’s band of amateur spies turned over detailed information on a wide range of technologies and weapon systems that hastened the Red Army’s march to Berlin, jump-started its postwar development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and later helped Communist troops in North Korea fight the American military to a standoff.

  Both Barr and Sarant fled the U.S. immediately after the Greenglass and Rosenberg arrests, first to Czechoslovakia, and later to the Soviet Union where they were instrumental in establishing the Soviet ‘Silicon Valley.’

  Radosh’s book, Cold Case: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, referred to additional information which he included in an earlier article for the Jewish on-line magazine, Tablet. It contained his response to Sobell and the outspoken leftists, who claimed that the information turned over to the KGB by the Rosenberg ring was “harmless,” “of little value,” or “junk.”

  As new information found in espionage historian Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks revealed, Greenglass had in fact not only given a primitive sketch of the bomb’s lens configuration to Harry Gold, Rosenberg’s courier, but later delivered to him the physical mold of a detonator for the bomb. The detonators were built in the shop in which Greenglass worked.

  Greenglass clarified in his testimony that the elements of the explosive lenses of the Fat Man bombs used for the Trinity nuclear test and the bombing of Nagasaki were poured into the molds.

  Further addressing the “harmless” data turned over, to the Soviets. Radosh wrote, “Moreover, the supposedly ‘harmless’ material the Rosenberg ring handed over to the KGB included radar specifications and aircraft designs that gave the Soviet military critical information about American capabilities, allowed the Red Army to jam US radar, and contributed to the development of sophisticated Soviet fighters that equaled those deployed by the US Air Force. There can be no doubt that this technology directly led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam.”

  By now, if anyone needs further proof of the treachery of this America-hating cabal assembled by the Rosenbergs, Radosh continued in an article for www.nysun.com in 2014.

  As for Greenglass himself, he not only provided the famous sketch of the bomb’s lens mold, but as KGB reports indicate, he gave them a “report on a scientific experimentation center for preparing a uranium bomb, with a general floor plan and sketches of individual buildings attached.” KGB agent Leonid Kvasnikov described a 33-page letter he received from Greenglass on the preparation of a uranium bomb, the structural solutions for building one, and methods for obtaining Uranium-235, which Kvasnikov called “highly valuable.” Finally, not only did he give them the sketch that was displayed at the trial, but he provided the KGB, as their reports indicate, with “a physical sample of material used in the detonator.”

  This begs an obvious question: If the information was so harmless, why did the entire Rosenberg ring work so hard at the risk of their lives to copy and hand it over to their KGB handlers?

  In 1997, Alexsandre Feklisov, the KGB underground operative and agent of the Rosenbergs, wrote in his memoirs that he considered the pair to be “heroes” and described their traitorous behavior “in glowing terms.” A photo in his book shows him kissing Ethel and Julius’s tomb. Radosh writes that the modern day KGB foreign intelligence arm (the name was changed to the SVR in 1954) “proudly proclaims both Julius and Ethel as ‘greats’ who served Moscow.”

  Even Nikita Khrushchev, in his dictated memoir of 1970-74, published in 1990, admitted that the Rosenberg data was instrumental in building the first Soviet atom bomb. A New York Times article from September, 25, 1990 quotes the memoirs,

  From Stalin and from the longtime Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the memoir says, Khrushchev learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had “provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb … Let this be a worthy tribute to the memory of those people … Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over our state to blackmail our state and undermine its proletarian cause [emphasis added].”

  Marxist
apologists for the Rosenbergs and the Meeropols have also tried to use the argument that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were only “helping a war-time ally against fascism,” and that Julius Rosenberg “was ignorant of the Atomic bomb project.” Both Radosh and Usdin state that these are absurd defenses considering the fact that “Julius set up his network during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when the United States and Russia were not allies,” and kept the network alive after the war’s end during the Cold War. The myth that Julius was motivated by anti-fascist concerns, rather than a desire to serve Stalin, according to Radosh, “is the greatest myth of all.” David Greenglass, in an interview with Radosh stated, “He and Julius saw themselves as ‘soldiers for Stalin.’”

  John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book Spies, stated that not only did Ethel suggest her brother, David Greenglass, be recruited by the KGB, but even more importantly Julius had recruited a second atom spy, Russell McNutt, precisely because he thought that McNutt would be able to gather atomic bomb information from the plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

  Greenglass, who served 9 1/2 years in the penitentiary for his role, worked first at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then for the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. He lied on his security clearance application, omitting details of his and his wife’s former Communist Party membership dating back to 1942. His testimony was significant in the prosecution of the case against his sister and Julius, testimony that he later repudiated with the excuse that he was protecting his wife and that she was a lot more important than his sister.

  The law at the time the Rosenbergs were convicted was Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 US Code 32 (now 18 US Code 794), which “prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information relating to the national defense.” But because some still argue that the Rosenbergs would not have been found guilty in a present-day court of law, I quote the same law as it stands today: