by Vikas Khatri
Philby, with his enormous memory for facts and faces, remained an important member of Russian Intelligence. He also helped Russian agent Gordon Lonsdale, the key figure in the Portland (a top secret underwater naval base in Dorset, England) Spy Case, to write his memoirs. Later, Philby fell in love with Melinda Maclean whom he married.
ef
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg:
Traitors or Victims?
The trial which began on March 5, 1951, in the Federal Court House in Foley Square, New York City, may well prove to be the most celebrated espionage trial in American history. Certainly no case of its kind in the United States has had wider ramifications and repercussions, both nationally and internationally.
There were three defendants, Julius Rosenberg, his wife Ethel, and their confederate Morton Sobell, who had fled to Mexico but had subsequently been extradited. They were jointly charged with conspiring together with others, including Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass; Harry Gold, a Swiss-born Russian, whose real name was Goldnitsky; and Anatoli Yakovlev, a Soviet agent who was ostensibly a clerk in the Soviet Consulate-General in New York.
The object of the alleged conspiracy was a plan to deliver information, documents, sketches, and material vital to the national defence of the United States to a foreign power—namely Soviet Russia—in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. All these individuals had originally been charged in the Grand Jury indictment.
However, Gold pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years. Greenglass and Yakovlev were ordered to be tried separately, but Greenglass, who had also pleaded guilty, had not yet been sen¬tenced. Yakovlev was not apprehended, since he managed to escape to the Soviet Union before F.B.I. agents could catch up with him.
The Hon. Irving R. Kaufman, one of the district judges for the Southern District of New York, presided on the bench. The prosecution was led by U.S. District Attorney Irving H. Saypol, who had three assistants. The Rosenbergs were defended by Emanuel H. Bloch, a well-known criminal lawyer, and his father Alexander Bloch. O. John Rogge held a watching brief for Greenglass, who was expected to testify for the prosecution.
After the three defendants on trial had pleaded not guilty, the District Attorney opened the case for the prosecution. “The significance of a conspiracy to commit espionage,” he said, speaking in deadly earnest tones, “takes on an added meaning here where the defendants are charged with having participated in a conspiracy against our country at the most critical hour in its history, a time of war.” He continued: “The evidence will reveal to you how the Rosenbergs persuaded David Greenglass . . . to plot the treacherous role of modern Benedict Arnold while wearing the uniform of the United States Army. We will prove that the Rosenbergs devised and put into operation with the aid of Soviet nationals and Soviet agents in this country an elaborate scheme which enabled them, through Greenglass, to steal the one weapon which might well hold the key to the survival of this nation and the peace of the world—the atomic bomb.”
The prosecutor gave due credit to the F.B.I. for breaking the spy ring. At the same time, he made it clear that this could not have been done had it not been for the information revealed by a German-born naturalised British subject named Klaus Fuchs—who had pleaded guilty in England to spying for the Soviet Union, and received the maximum sentence of
14 years under the relevant British statute.
Fuchs, who was one of the senior scientific officers at the British Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell—had been sent to the United States during the war to cooperate in the development and production of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. While there he had witnessed the explosion of the first test bomb in New Mexico. Nothing was hidden from him, said J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the F.B.I., “Dr. Fuchs had all our greatest secrets.”
After Fuchs began to serve his sentence in England, F.B.I. agents were allowed to question him, and subsequently got on to the trail of the Soviet spy ring in the United States. Fuchs was able to identify Harry Gold, a biochemist whom the Bureau had previously suspected of being active in Soviet espionage, but whom it had previously been impossible to incriminate. The British in turn had picked up Fuchs through the revelations of a Russian cypher clerk named Igor Gouzenko, who was employed in the Military Attache’s office in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.
The first of the star witnesses to be called to the stand was Max Elitcher, an electronics engineer who had worked in the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance between 1938 and 1948. Elitcher admitted to being a Communist and to having become a member of a “cell” at Sobell’s urging. It was also through Sobell that the witness had met the Rosenbergs and learned that they were active party members and secret Soviet agents.
Julius Rosenberg, Elitcher went on, invited him to help transmit secret information from the ordnance office files. Elitcher swore that he pretended to do so, but in fact he had never given Rosenberg any information classified as secret. Under cross-examination, Elitcher admitted that he lied when he took a loyalty oath. But he firmly insisted that “ever since the F.B.I. got hold of him he had told the entire truth”. Finally, Elitcher admitted that he had regularly acted as a courier between Sobell and Rosenberg.
Ruth Greenglass then testified that her husband, David had been a Communist, and described how in the autumn of 1944 Julius Rosenberg had asked her to go to Los Alamos and obtain classified information from David—a member of the United States armed forces and working on an atomic bomb project there. At first she demurred, but Julius assured her that her husband would want to help. Russia was an ally of the U.S., argued Julius, and as such deserved information about the bomb, but Communists were not getting the information which they should. Eventually, said the witness, she agreed to make the trip, as her second wedding anniversary was coming up and she wanted to spend it with her husband. Julius gave her $150 for her expenses, saying the money came from “his friends the Russians”.
At first David Greenglass was reluctant to cooperate. The next morning, however, he agreed to give his wife “the general layout of the Los Alamos project”, together with the number of employees, the experiments being conducted, and the names of the scientists working there. The witness carefully memorised this information, she said, and duly passed it on to Julius Rosenberg on her return to New York.
In January 1945, she continued, her husband came to New York on leave, and they both met the Rosenbergs by appointment at the latters’ apartment. They were introduced to a Mrs. Sidorovich. First, they discussed the kind of information Greenglass should look out for when he returned to Los Alamos. Rosenberg then explained that Mrs. Sidorovich might be sent to New Mexico to get this information from Greenglass, and he produced two torn halves of a Jello box top.
It was arranged that Mrs. Greenglass, who planned to return to New Mexico with her husband should keep one part, and whoever was sent to get in touch with her and her husband would establish his or her identity by producing the other half. Ruth Greenglass remembered that when David commented on the simplicity and cleverness of this device, Julius Rosenberg remarked, “The simplest things are always the cleverest.”
Subsequently, contact was made in June 1945, when the Greenglasses were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Early one morning, a man called on them. “I come from Julius,” he said, and produced the matching piece of the Jello box top. Ruth Greenglass identified him as Harry Gold, who gave her husband $500 which David Greenglass handed over to her.
By May 1950, the witness said, she and her husband, who had then been discharged from the army—were back in New York, and their relations with the Rosenbergs were closer than ever. On May 24, according to Ruth, Julius Rosenberg burst into their apartment brandishing a copy of the New York Herald Tribune, which carried a picture of Harry Gold on the front page together with the news of his arrest as a Soviet spy. “You will be next,” said Julius, and urged them to escape at once to Mexico.
Ruth did not think their ten-month-old baby could stand the trip. Rosenberg, however, brushed
aside her objection and left $1000 with them to cover preliminary expenses, telling her to have passport photographs taken and get vaccinated against smallpox. In spite of these warnings, the Greenglasses stayed in New York. On June 15, David was arrested.
In cross-examination, Alexander Bloch tried to bring out that the witness knew she had committed a crime, and that her direct testimony had been influenced by fear of the F.B.I. “Weren’t you frightened of the F. B. I?” he asked.
“Everyone is frightened by the F.B.I.,” Ruth Greenglass replied, “but it was not because I realised it was a crime that I was frightened. I didn’t think the F.B.I. wanted my husband, I thought they wanted someone my husband would lead them to, someone much more important than he and much more deeply involved.”
David Greenglass generally corroborated his wife’s
testimony when he followed her on the witness stand. However, he denied that he had known of the atomic bomb until he had learned about it from Julius Rosenberg. As a machinist at Los Alamos, he knew only that he was working on “a secret device of some kind”.
The details, he insisted, he had first learned from Rosenberg in January 1945 — “fissionable material at one end of a tube and on the other end a sliding mechanism with fissionable material, and when the two were brought together under tremendous pressure nuclear reaction was accomplished.” As far as it went, this description fitted the uranium bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima seven months later.
In the following September, he continued, he and his wife went to New York, where he met the Rosenbergs and handed over a sketch of the atom bomb and a ten-page analysis, which Ethel later typed out. “This is very good,” said Julius when he read it. “These particulars,” said Greenglass, related to the plutonium bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki. The witness’s testimony in this respect revealed such an expert knowledge that Judge Kaufman ordered the court to be cleared, and cautioned the newspaper reporters present “to exercise discretion in what they printed”.
The tension created in the courtroom by the witness’s long recital of treachery was relieved by a small touch of humour at its close. He was asked in cross-examination if, when looking at the Jello box top, he had noticed the flavour.
“Yes raspberry,” he promptly replied. This answer raised the only laugh in the sombre proceedings.
Harry Gold was the next prosecution witness. He told how he had been working for the Russians as far back as 1935, and how in 1944 he acted as a go-between for Russian agents and persons who procured information for them. At that time, his Soviet superior was Anatoli Yakovlev, but Gold only knew him as “John”. It was at Yakovlev’s instruction that in June 1944, the witness first met Fuchs who promised to give him information “relating to the application of nuclear fission to the production of a military weapon”.
At a subsequent meeting in Cambridge, Mass., in January 1945, Fuchs told the witness that he was working on the atomic bomb with other scientists in Los Alamos, which he described, particularly mentioning a lens which was one of its essential parts. It was agreed between them that Gold should visit Los Alamos in June—when Fuchs hoped to have more information about the bomb and its lens.
When Gold told Yakovlev of this, the Soviet master spy intimated that he had another very “vital” job for him in New Mexico, namely to contact Greenglass in Albuquerque. At first the witness objected, he said, but when Yakovlev insisted he agreed, since he took this to be an order. After he had seen Fuchs, and obtained a sealed envelope from him, Gold went on to Albuquerque where he met the Greenglasses and received another envelope from them.
A few days later, he reported to Yakovlev in Brooklyn, handing over the two envelopes, which Yakovlev later told him contained “extremely excellent and very valuable” information. The witness’s last meeting with Yakovlev took place at the end of 1946, the day before Yakovlev sailed for Europe.
Gold was not cross-examined. This was good tactics on the part of Sobell’s attorneys, since Gold’s testimony had not implicated their client in any way. As for the Rosenbergs’ counsel, they may well have decided not to cross-examine, because Gold had shown himself eager to help the government in any way he could—and answers elicited in cross-examination might only have made matters worse for the Rosenbergs.
Several other witnesses testified to the value of the information imparted by Greenglass as being of “inestimable value to a nation which did not possess the secret of nuclear fission”. If Sobell and the Rosenbergs had committed the crimes they were charged with, they said, their actions seriously jeopardised the security of the United States.
Emanuel Bloch opened the defence by calling Julius Rosenberg to the witness stand. Answering his attorney, Rosenberg admitted that he was a first-generation American of Russian parents who had emigrated to New York City. He was a Bachelor of Science, having graduated from New York City College. He told how he married Ethel Greenglass, and in 1940 became a junior engineer in the U.S. Signal Corps, from which he was dismissed five years later.
“Did you ever have any conversation with Ruth Greenglass about November, 1944 with respect to getting information from David Greenglass at the place where he was working?”
“I did not.”
“Did you know in the middle of 1944 where David Greenglass was stationed?”
“I did not.”
“Did you know in the middle of 1944 that there was such a project known as the Los Alamos project?”
“I did not.”
“Did you ever give Ruth Greenglass $ 150, or any other sum for her to go out to visit her husband at Los Alamos for the purpose of trying to enlist him in espionage work?”
“I did not.”
Julius Rosenberg denied everything. Shown the sketch of the atomic bomb that David Greenglass had made, he denied that his brother-in-law had ever delivered such a sketch to him. “I never saw this sketch before.” Apart from what he had heard in court, he could not describe the bomb. Nor had he ever taken a course in nuclear or advanced physics.
He also denied all knowledge of the Jello box top; he had never introduced David Greenglass to a Mrs. Sidorovich. Nor had he tried to induce the Greenglasses to leave the country, and he had not provided them with money for their trip. Finally, he denied that he and his wife had ever contemplated fleeing from America themselves.
Asked in cross-examination by Saypol whether he had been discharged from his job in the Signals Corp because he was suspected of being a Communist, and thus belonging to an illegal organisation, he admitted that this was so.
“Were you a member of the Communist Party?” the District Attorney asked.
Rosenberg paused for a few moments. Then he replied: “I refuse to answer on the ground that it might tend to incriminate me.”
He repeated this reply when confronted with a statement he had signed on joining the Signals Corp stating that he was not then, and never had been, a member of the Communist Party. The court sustained the witness’s objection to incriminating questions, and ruled that he was not required to answer them.
At the same time, in answer to further questions, Rosenberg protested his loyalty to the United States. “I will fight for this country if it were engaged in a war with any other country,” he declared. On the other hand, he admitted that he felt some admiration for the achievements of the Russians—particularly in improving the lot of the underdog. “I felt and still feel,” he added, “that they contributed a major share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed six million of my
co-religionists, and I feel emotional about that thing.”
Judge Kaufman intervened at this point to ask a couple of questions which the witness tried to dodge.
“Did you approve the Communist system of Russia over the capitalist system of this country?”
“I am not an expert on those things, Your Honour, and I did not make any such statement.”
“Did you ever belong to any group that discussed the system of Russia?”
Again the witness too
k refuge behind the protective constitutional amendment. “Well, Your Honour, I feel at this time that I refuse to answer a question that might tend to incriminate me.”
Ethel Rosenberg’s testimony was along the same lines. She blandly asserted that she was a loyal citizen of the United States and had never engaged in espionage. Everything her brother and sister-in-law had testified to was false, she said. But when she was asked in cross-examination about her affiliations with the Communist Party, she refused to answer.
No further witnesses were called for the defence, since Morton Sobell did not testify. In rebuttal, the prosecution called a New York commercial photographer, who stated that about mid-June 1950, the Rosenbergs and their two children had three sets of passport photographs taken in his studio.
Mr. Rosenberg, the witness said, told him that they were going to France to look at some property Mrs. Rosenberg owned there.
In his closing speech to the jury on behalf of the Rosenbergs, Emanuel Bloch concentrated on the unreliability of Ruth and David Greenglass as witnesses. “Don’t you think that the Greenglasses put it over on the government when Ruth Greenglass was not even indicted?” he asked the jurors. She walked out and put Greenglass’s sister in. David Greenglass was willing to bury his sister and her husband to save his life. Not only are the Greenglasses self-confessed spies, but they are mercenary spies. “They’d do anything for money.”
“Any man who will testify against his own flesh and blood, his own sister, is repulsive, revolting, and is violating any code of civilisation that ever existed. He is lower than the lowest animal I have ever seen.
“The Greenglasses have told the truth,” asserted District Attorney Saypol in winding up for the prosecution. “They have tried to make amends for the hurt which has been done to our, nation and to the world.”
In reality, the D.A. continued, the unreliable testimony came from the Rosenbergs—who had denied planning to leave the country, in spite of the testimony about the passport photographs. “The Rosenbergs have magnified their treachery by lying here.” Furthermore, they were linked with Sobell in their espionage activities—since Sobell had flown to Mexico with his family in the same month that Greenglass had been paid by the Russians, through Rosenberg, to do likewise. “Sobell’s conduct fits the pattern of membership in this conspiracy and flight from an American jury when the day of reckoning had come.”