by Howard Blum
It was a setting that in its unextraordinary way was like much of this low-rent residential neighborhood in New York’s Lower East Side, a community whose streets were alive with families striving to make ends meet, constant big-city hustle and bustle, and streams of immigrants firmly tied to their Old Country ways, muttering a cacophony of languages. Yet for Sasha, an agent behind enemy lines, it held countless perils, provoked a constant wariness. No fieldman heads out on an operation without his active mind warning that at any moment something unexpected can happen, that around the next corner a trap could be sprung.
Sasha, nevertheless, formulated his plan, and Kvasnikov signed off on it. It was, in its direct way, nearly as matter-of-fact as a telephone call. He’d go to Liberal’s apartment unannounced at two on a Sunday afternoon; it was a time when Sasha imagined he’d find him home. Then he’d quickly introduce himself: “I come from Henry.” It would work. Yet, just as likely, a dozen things could go wrong. He tried to find solace in the disturbing truth that his two brothers, infantrymen in the Red Army, faced greater risks each day on the battlefield. “What,” he asked himself in an attempt to add fuel to his flickering courage, “was I doing that was so dangerous in the peaceful traffic of the New York streets?”
On the day of the meet, with his mood shifting each mercurial moment, from stiff confidence to the certainty of impending doom, he left his apartment on West Eighty-Ninth Street an hour and a half ahead of his predetermined schedule. He strolled down Central Park West, the image, he hoped, of a man enjoying a pleasant New York Sunday. Then, he suddenly bolted across the street, weaving through the traffic as enraged drivers honked their horns and slammed on their brakes. This was, he’d boast, “his favorite move.” “It allowed you to see, without showing it, what the situation around you looks like.” After taking stock and finding no apparent cause for alarm, he continued on foot to Columbus Circle, where he boarded a downtown subway train.
He rode it down to Little Italy, all the time trying to catch a purposeful glance from one of the opposition’s watchers. No one had been flushed, but Sasha felt he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t missed something. He took a diversionary bus back uptown to Grand Central.
Grabbing a hot dog from a vendor inside the terminal, he gobbled it down without interest while his eyes scanned the crowd for the telltale signs of people loitering artlessly about. He saw nothing suspicious. With his rumbling doubts now somewhat at rest, he boarded a downtown bus, got off at Rivington Street, and, following the sidewalk at a sedate pace, arrived at the entrance of Liberal’s building at two p.m. to the minute.
He pushed the intercom button.
“Yes?” questioned a man’s voice.
“Hello,” said Sasha with all the authority he could muster. “I’m looking for Julius Rosenberg.”
“That’s me.”
“I’m a friend of Henry’s,” he announced. “May I come up for a minute?”
The door buzzed open and Sasha headed to the elevator. The ride to the eighth floor was its own heart-pounding adventure; if Liberal had been doubled, if, despite all Sasha’s caution, he’d been followed, an army of FBI agents might be waiting to greet him.
The door opened and there was Julius Rosenberg, a skinny man with black hair and a wispy mustache, staring at him mournfully through a bookkeeper’s steel-rimmed glasses. He was alone. His firm handshake was further reassurance.
Without prelude, Sasha dived in. “I’m the one who will come to see you from now on,” he said.
Rosenberg calmly absorbed the news, and when he spoke his words did not betray his feelings. Instead, apparently resigned to the change, he offered his new handler a terse apology. “Excuse me, but I can’t let you come in. We’re entertaining a couple of friends.”
Together they walked down the eight flights of stairs to the lobby, talking all the time, their voices holding a normal pitch; if someone entered the stairwell, whispers would’ve attracted suspicions. It was agreed that they would meet next Tuesday at Childs’ (a decidedly proletarian restaurant on West Thirty-Fourth Street, where the blue-plate special was, famously, a stolid rectangle of gray meat doused in a brackish gravy; the menu insisted it was Salisbury steak). The rendezvous was set for 7:30 p.m., since Rosenberg worked during the day.
Sasha had a final word. He instructed his new agent not to bring any stolen papers with him. A first meet, the rigid protocols of good konspiratsya insisted, should be an occasion where both handler and his new charge take full measure of each other. After all, when your life is at stake, you’d better be able to trust the man with whom you’re working.
Tuesday evening, across the narrow table at Childs’, after Sasha made the requisite toast to his companion and to the success of their future collaboration, he proceeded to the next item on his checklist. The Moscow Center psychologists wanted him to “open his heart,” believing that candor cemented allegiance. Finding the confiding tone that had won over a small legion of previous “joes” (as handlers uniformly referred to their agents), Sasha spoke about his down-at-the-heels childhood in Moscow, his worries about his brothers at the front, his sisters digging trenches at Bryansk directly in the thundering path of the advancing German forces. Rosenberg reciprocated with confidences about his adored wife—he closed his eyes and blew a kiss into his hand, when he spoke about her—and his young son (a second boy would be born in 1948).
In that way, a product of shrewd manipulation, a shared antipathy toward Nazism, and a common faith in the Soviet socialistic ideals, a bond grew. The two men would meet about fifty times over the next three years, passing documents on rush-hour buses, at a boxing match in Madison Square Garden, at restaurants and on street corners in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Sasha provided Rosenberg with a Leica carrying a special lens devised by Moscow Center and shipped over in the diplomatic pouch; the focal length of the lens could be expanded, and that made microfilming documents a perfunctory exercise. The eager agent photographed everything that came his way, and his yield continued to fill the Center’s coffers. His dedication was such, his desire to do more was so strong, that Sasha had to hold him back. Rosenberg routinely took risks that his handler begged him not to take.
In the course of their work together, they became, as Sasha grew to appreciate, “a real team.” Sasha was the professional, but time after time, he conceded operational details to the agent: “He knew his own country, his fellow citizens, their frame of mind and their reactions, and workplaces, far better than I did.” And, another rarity in a harsh world where agent runners value success far higher than any inhibiting concerns about their joes’ safety, Sasha could not help liking Liberal. He took to calling him by the affectionate nickname of “Libi”—an intimacy that would’ve shocked his stern bosses.
And what did Rosenberg get out of all this? Once, above the concealing din of a crowded cafeteria, he shared more of a clue to what was driving him than his usual homilies about the war-beleaguered Soviet state and his sanguine visions of the Marxist-Leninist paradise that would come to pass in the future. “I know you may not be aware of it,” he confessed to Sasha, “but our meetings are among the happiest moments of all my life. . . . I have a wonderful wife and a son whom I adore. But you are the only person who knows all my secrets, and it’s very important to be able to confide to someone.”
AND SO IT HAPPENED THAT Liberal confided to his handler one more secret: the details of his own attempted recruitment of Max Elitcher. It was a brief report, as summaries of failed missions tend to be. But to Libi’s credit, Sasha thought, he told it with the stoicism of someone who remained unprepared to give up.
Rosenberg had telephoned Elitcher, whom he had seen only once in the five years since their graduation from college, and asked if he could come over to say hello; Signal Corps business had brought him to Washington, he’d lied.
There was some talk over coffee in Elitcher’s apartment, all sounding even to Rosenberg’s own ears embarrassingly forced. So, a
bandoning whatever small pretense remained of this being merely a casual visit, he bluntly asked his school friend’s wife if she would be kind enough to give him a few minutes alone with her husband. Once she left, he made his pitch.
Rosenberg had two cards to play, and he laid them both out with a succinct yet earnest passion. He began, as Elitcher would remember the conversation, by highlighting “the great role Russia was playing in the war and the great sacrifice she was making.” Then he quickly followed with the revelation that “some persons were contributing to the Russian war effort by giving secret material and developments to the Russians, which they would not ordinarily receive.” The pointed way he said it left little doubt that by “some persons” he meant himself and some of their mutual City College friends.
He asked if Max would contribute in this way, too.
Rosenberg, by now a veteran recruiter, knew this was the most dangerous moment. A person could say “yes.” He could say “no.” Or, a secret hero in his heart, he might pick up the phone and call the FBI two minutes after you left. It was always difficult to predict how someone would respond to the question of whether he’d betray his country.
Yet Elitcher said neither yes nor no. He was firmly noncommittal. But he certainly didn’t seem as if he’d be running to the FBI.
Rosenberg later told Sasha that it would just take some time. He’d try Elitcher again.
I trust your judgment, Sasha said with a genuine confidence.
When Rosenberg made a second approach to Elitcher, now over a dinner in Manhattan at Manny Wolf’s, the result was more of the same indecision. Only this go-around, Rosenberg had his own second thoughts.
“Elitcher has changed,” he reported to Sasha.
Sasha was concerned enough about this “change” to share his anxieties with his superior. And Kvasnikov, another professional, agreed. He, too, was at once on alert.
“Forget about Elitcher,” Sasha told his agent at their next meet. “It’s not that important.”
His instructions, while an order, were offered with an apparent indifference. He chose a casual, even convivial tone. He did not wish to share that he was thinking of a future that he didn’t want his agent to dare imagine. He did not explain that in Elitcher’s sudden transformation he had a premonition, still faint, still instinctive, of the enemy one day closing in. But as things would work out for Liberal and his ring, perhaps he should have.
20
BUT BOB, SETTING OUT ON his hunt nearly three years later, had no knowledge of these events. He was ignorant of the drama that had taken place between Elitcher and Liberal, or the puppet-master role Sasha had played in the wings. Yet, using just the thin clues in the deciphered cable sent back in 1944—a lifetime of secrets ago, he feared—he went on the offensive. His first step was to try to mobilize the Bureau—again.
Bob was well aware of the irony in this attempt. It wasn’t that long ago that he’d been the salesman trying to convince a disinterested Meredith that the FBI could offer the code breaker a wealth of deductive resources. Now he’d be going to the Bureau, trying one more time to stir them out of their doldrums, and his best argument was the promise in the leads Meredith had uncovered. A further complicating wrinkle: he could not reveal either the source of the information, or how it had been obtained. The most he could do, he’d decided after some tortured pondering, was attribute the clue to a “confidential informant of known reliability.” At least that euphemism, while modest, would be an accurate description of Meredith and his conjurer’s skills.
Nevertheless, as Bob prepared to go, fedora in hand, and try one more time to rally his bosses to the chase, he felt surprisingly prepared to take on the dismissive arguments he fully expected to hear. A large contributing factor to his buoyant mood, he’d later confide to intimates, was that the ambiguity in his married life had been, for now at least, resolved. A son, George, had been born and in their joy both he and Sarah had found reason for a renewed commitment to family happiness. Yet too often Bob would find himself looking at the innocent baby boy, and his thoughts, like a recurring nightmare, would slink away to Enormoz and the dangerous world in which George would grow up.
In that driven yet remarkably steady mood, Bob burst into Al Belmont’s office. Belmont was the assistant director of domestic intelligence and, Bob would say, “FBI through and through.” On some days, that description was meant as high praise, a recognition that Belmont shared Bob’s steely commitment to bringing all the villains to justice. On others, especially when Bob was seething after his exertions trudging through the bureaucratic morass, it could just as easily mean that Belmont was reluctant to authorize any innovative action. That day Bob could only make his case as forcefully as the expurgated facts would allow, and then wait to see which version of the assistant director was sitting behind his impressive desk.
Belmont answered without hesitation: “Bob, we’re going to increase the number of guys on your unit.”
“Who are you kidding?” Bob shot back, incredulous. He’d girded himself for a knockdown brawl, and, deprived of this opportunity, he compensated by not taking yes for an answer.
“What do you mean, ‘who we’re kidding’?”
“It doesn’t work that way. You know damn well it doesn’t work that way, Al.”
Now it was Belmont’s voice that rose suddenly in anger. “Goddamn it, Bob. I just told you. You name them, we’ll get them!”
Bob named them, and within days, still not quite believing his unexpectedly easy victory, he got them. The handpicked force, although tied to their desks in the SE unit at headquarters, hit the ground running. On Bob’s instructions, they reached out to both the Washington and New York field offices and ordered an investigation into Max Elitcher. The priority telex was headed, again on Bob’s say-so, “Espionage R.” R stood for Russian, and he could only hope that the designation would spur on the men in the trenches.
NO SOONER HAD ELITCHER’S NAME gone into the system than lights might just as well have started flashing. The request, Bob was stiffly informed, was redundant: the Bureau was already looking into Elitcher. Only rather than being reassuring, this news filled Bob with a new dread.
The facts that were shared were these: back in 1941, gimlet-eyed Naval Intelligence investigators had spotted Elitcher and a fellow Navy employee, Morton Sobell, packing demonstrators into Sobell’s car to ferry them to an anti-draft rally sponsored by the American Peace Mobilization Committee. Since there were several Communist Party members sprinkled throughout the committee’s leadership hierarchy, the Navy sleuths wondered if the two men, both of whom had access to military secrets, were also Party members. The FBI was brought in to conduct a “loyalty check.”
The Bureau’s background investigation had meandered along over the years. It had never determined if in fact the two men were Communist Party members (which could’ve resulted in a perjury case, since both had sworn they were not when they’d started working for the Navy). All they had come up with was that Elitcher and Sobell had both attended City College from 1934 to 1938, and that they had roomed together for a while in Washington. Then the investigation had petered out. Besides, while Elitcher had continued to work for the Navy during the war, Sobell had moved on, first to the General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York, and more recently joining the Reeves Instrument Company in New York City.
But these small pickings were enough for Bob nearly to scream, Stop! No sooner had the word come back to him at headquarters that the Bureau’s inquiry into Elitcher was, technically at least, still on an active footing, than he sent down the order that rather than gearing things up again, the investigation should come to an immediate halt.
He didn’t explain his decision to the agents in the field offices; for all they knew, this was just one more example of the supervisors at headquarters running hot one day and cold the next. To his own team, however, he revealed a bit more of his thinking.
A reinvigorated loyalty check, talking to neighbors, to
bosses, could scare the prey, he explained. Elitcher would learn, as targets invariably do, that questions were being asked, and he’d bolt. If Elitcher was a Russian spy, the investigation had to be handled with extraordinary care. The operational goal was to catch him in the act—stealing documents, passing these secrets to his handler—and that would require a far more tactful strategy.
Bob issued a new series of orders. With the discreet cooperation of the post office, a “mail cover” went into effect; photocopies of the outside of all envelopes and postcards mailed to Elitcher’s apartment arrived on Bob’s desk before they were delivered. A record of Elitcher’s long-distance calls was obtained, and agents began combing through them, hoping to find something that might catch their interest. And after weighing the matter, Bob finally decided to order visual surveillance on Elitcher. Bob knew the Bureau’s watchers were of variable quality; there was always the chance Elitcher might catch on. But he judged the risks to be worth it: the prospects of nabbing an active Soviet agent in the act were too enticing.
Yet even as he shared all this with his men, there was something that he kept buried deep. It was an investigative secret to which only he and Meredith were privy. Because all the time that he was running his “bandstand operation,” to use the watchers’ term for round-the-clock scrutiny, his own thoughts were fixed on Sobell. He made the connection between the “school friend” who lived in Carthage in the deciphered cable and the scant but confirming details unearthed in the Bureau’s background investigation, and he wondered if he had found a talent spotter. And a leader of a Soviet spy network. Was Morton Sobell Antenna/Liberal?