by Howard Blum
37
IN THE INCREDIBLY HECTIC WEEKS that followed the Greenglass confession and the Rosenberg arrest, Bob had the gratifying sense that his life had come full circle. The perplexing mysteries from his past, once shoved aside in frustration, had now returned, but with a new clarity. He had believed all along that the clues Meredith had assembled from the cables would lead straight into the clandestine heart of Soviet operations in America, but he’d been unable to make sense of them. “Now,” he would recall, “many things we had struggled for several years to understand in the deciphered KGB messages became clear.” With this new hard-won knowledge, he at last had the keys to unlock the doors that protected a covert kingdom, and he went to work.
Moving forward, it quickly became evident that one dormant clue was intertwined with another. And with Bob’s first firm shove, the long-running network began to topple. Antenna was sent by the firm to work in Carthage. There he visited his school friend Max Elitcher, who works in the Bureau of Standards. Now Bob understood “it was Julius Rosenberg who had contacted Max Elitcher in Washington and tried to recruit him.” Two years ago, Bob had futilely tried to mine this faint clue with the ineffective tools of background checks and surveillance. This time, however, when FBI agents, armed with a lot more than shadowy suspicions, brought Elitcher down to Foley Square for questioning in the days after Rosenberg’s arrest, he began to open up.
On the first day of questioning, Elitcher confirmed that he had “six to eight” conversations with Rosenberg about “giving information concerning secret material and developments to the Russians.” Elitcher maintained he had simply found his old school friend’s offers “flattering.” He had never cooperated. But Bob didn’t buy it. Would Rosenberg, clearly a careful operative, keep trying to recruit Elitcher, would he continue to put himself and the entire network at risk, only to be rebuffed time after time? That sort of recklessness went against everything Bob knew about Soviet tradecraft. Keep pressing, Bob ordered.
When the agents confronted Elitcher the next day, he still refused to incriminate himself, but he quickly gave up his friend Morton Sobell. Rosenberg, he said, had told him that Sobell had already been supplying information. Which, Bob noted as he sifted through the transcript of the interview, was precisely what he had suspected years earlier; only back then making a case against Sobell had been beyond his grasp. Now, seeing all his labors finally beginning to bear fruit, he “experienced,” he’d remember, “a sense of closure and completeness.”
But in the next moment a new thought supplanted all the others, and his satisfaction was abruptly undermined. “If we had gone ahead and picked up Elitcher and questioned closely after our surveillance in 1948,” he chastised himself, the entire ring might have been broken so much earlier. It had been a squandered opportunity, and Bob felt he was to blame.
The self-recriminations persisted. When Bob gave the order to bring Sobell in for questioning, the agents couldn’t find him. He wasn’t at work. Neither he nor his family was at home. Sobell, Bob suddenly suspected with a terrible sense of foreboding, “had flown the coop.” Once again, Bob fixed ample blame on himself for not having anticipated this turn of events. After all, he berated himself, hadn’t Greenglass disclosed that the Russians had been trying to get him to Moscow by a complicated escape route that originated in Mexico? And no sooner had Bob’s thoughts returned to that discarded intelligence morsel than he decided, more in an act of desperation than even a hunch, that he had stumbled on a plan of attack. At least it was worth a try, he told himself.
A check of airline offices revealed that Sobell, along with his wife and two children, had purchased tickets to Mexico City on July 22, five days after Rosenberg’s arrest. Bob received that news and immediately suffered another pang of guilt: by now the Sobells must be on their way to Moscow. The task of finding them would be, he realistically conceded, “almost impossible.” Nevertheless, with a perfunctory diligence, he sent instructions to the Bureau liaison officer in Mexico City to be on the lookout for Sobell.
And they found him. Sobell was subsequently spotted leaving the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. He had not informed the New York rezidentura of his plans to run, and so he’d been frantically hustling about Mexico, trying to book passage on a freighter, while also checking in from time to time at the Soviet embassy to see if they’d received word from Moscow Center confirming that he was the secret operative he’d claimed to be. He was having a late supper in his rented apartment on Calle Octava de Cordoba when three Spanish-speaking men, waving pistols menacingly, took him into custody for “robbing a bank in Acapulco.” He was hurled into the back seat of a waiting car, his wife and children forced into another vehicle, and the caravan sped nonstop the entire 800 miles to the Texas border. Sobell was promptly transferred into the custody of a waiting squad of FBI agents and charged with “five overt acts” of “having conspired with Julius Rosenberg and others” to violate the espionage statute.
When Bob picked up his phone in Washington to hear the jubilant agent in Laredo announce the arrest, he understood at once just how improbable this victory had been. What were the chances that Sobell hadn’t already made his furtive way deep behind the Iron Curtain? What were the odds that a longtime spy, without disguise or any attempt at subterfuge, would walk straight out the front door of the Soviet embassy? Nevertheless, the arrest went a long way toward soothing the corrosive guilt that had been eating into him since he’d come to realize he should have pursued the Elitcher connection with more operational vigor years earlier.
IN THIS FIRMER MOOD, HE continued his attack on the ring. “Gnome deserves remuneration for material no less valuable than that given by the rest of the members of the Liberal group who were given bonus by you. Please agree to paying him 500 dollars.” That message, sent from the New York KGB station on September 14, 1944, had left both Bob and Meredith puzzled since it had first been partially decrypted in 1948. Who was “Gnome”? And what—this a more unnerving question—had he delivered to Liberal that the parsimonious spymasters at Moscow Center deemed worthy of a $500 bonus? The only clue that Meredith had been able to claw out of the cables was that Gnome did not live in New York. But now, when Bob returned to this mystery, he did so fortified by the certainty that Gnome and all the operatives in the ring “were interrelated, and that the linchpin had been Julius Rosenberg.”
Once again, Bob went back over ground that he had trodden years ago. But from his new perspective, the evidence took on a more incriminating shape. William Perl, an authority on the design of supersonic aircraft, lived and worked in Cleveland, and had gone to school with Julius Rosenberg. He had sublet an apartment from Alfred Sarant, and was friends with Joel Barr—two other suspects Bob had chased without success. And, Bob was now convinced, Perl was Gnome, a spy on Moscow Center’s payroll.
Yet when questioned by the FBI, Perl wouldn’t break. He was innocent, he protested, snarling with indignation through several rounds of interrogation. Bob read the interviews, and was near to admitting defeat. How can I win, he asked himself, if I must be restrained by such stringent rules? If he couldn’t reveal the existence of the Arlington Hall decrypts, he doubted he’d be able to make a solid espionage case against Perl. But Perl saved Bob the trouble of having to continue his chase. In sworn testimony before a grand jury on August 18, 1950, Perl denied knowing either Julius Rosenberg or Morton Sobell. Gotcha! Bob told himself with a genuine satisfaction. He immediately went to work building a perjury case—a crime punishable by five years’ imprisonment for each count—against Gnome.
WHICH LEFT BOB WITH THE two “good friends” he’d tried without success to identify years ago—code names Hughes and Meter, mentioned in a November 1944 cable. “Liberal has safely carried through the contracting of Hughes. Hughes is a good friend of Meter. We propose to pair them off and get them to photograph their own materials. . . .” Now when Bob did his sums he realized that his earlier suspicions had been pointing him in the right direction. He had been o
n their trail, although he hadn’t fully comprehended their significance at the time. At this moment, though, like someone who has finally adjusted the lens of his telescope, he saw it all clearly. Joel Barr was Meter. Alfred Sarant was Hughes. But now when Bob made the connections that directly tied the two friends to Julius Rosenberg and his ring, it was too late.
When Bob had last tried to locate Barr, he’d discovered Barr was abroad, perhaps living in Finland, and he’d routinely passed the inquiry into the electrical engineer’s whereabouts on to the CIA. But then Bob had become caught up in the tempest of activity that surrounded the Fuchs and Gold investigations. All concerns about Barr were, quite reasonably, or so it had seemed at that naïve time, superseded by other priorities. Now Barr was once again in Bob’s crosshairs. He traced him in the summer of 1950 to a rented villa in Neuilly, outside Paris. An urgent cable was dispatched to the Bureau liaison officer in the American embassy in Paris, and he rushed out to Neuilly—only to find Barr was gone. From Washington, Bob sent cable after frantic cable demanding that the agent pursue all leads, dig into every clue; in the wishful part of his mind, Bob wanted to believe that, as in the Sobell case, he’d get lucky. But it was already too late. In the days after Greenglass’s arrest, the KGB had swiftly guided Barr to Switzerland, and then put him on a train that carried him deep behind the Iron Curtain, into the safety of Prague.
Bob resigned himself to settle for Sarant. He’d build an espionage case against the engineer. But once again he found his efforts hampered because the Arlington Hall decrypts—unimpeachable evidence!—could not be revealed. His hope was that when pressure was applied, Sarant would either confess or incriminate himself. Therefore, on July 18, 1950, he sent agents from the Albany Bureau office to Sarant’s home in Ithaca, New York, with the explicit orders to turn the screws.
They worked away at him with increasing success. At first Sarant insisted he barely knew Rosenberg. By the end of the interview, however, he wearily conceded that perhaps he had been “sounded out” about working for the Soviets by Rosenberg. “But,” he told the agents haughtily, “I did not bite.”
Bob read the transcript of this interview and grew encouraged. It would not be long before Sarant broke, he predicted. Sarant undoubtedly reached a similar conclusion. A week after the FBI had shown up at his house, he made his escape. Leaving his own wife behind, he and his neighbor’s wife drove by a circuitous route into Mexico. Shrewdly, he made no attempt to contact the Soviet embassy in Mexico City; he expected it would be carefully watched. Instead he reached out to the Polish embassy. Under their protection, the couple hid out in Mexico for six tense months. A Moscow Center–designed escape route at last led them to Guatemala, then on to Spain, and finally to Russia. Bob knew none of this, however. All he knew was that the agent code-named Hughes had somehow managed to disappear, and the loss stung.
BUT THERE WERE STILL TWO provocative leads lingering from Meredith’s handiwork—the agents code-named Mlad and Star. With absolute certainty Bob knew that Ted Hall and Saville Sax were guilty. The Venona decrypts had established their espionage. But once more, even as he outwardly appeared to be moving forward, he felt the strong pull of the restraints that continued to hold him back. Meredith’s discoveries could not be revealed. The government had decreed that the continued secrecy of the covert work at Arlington Hall was still a higher priority for the nation’s security than any of the secrets it had uncovered. Hall and Sax would be allowed to live out their lives without paying penalty for their treason.
And Bob, despite all his years of striving to stem the flow of evil, would have to live with an awareness of his inability to fulfill his mission. In his struggle to defeat the nation’s enemies, he was beginning to suspect that there would always be unfinished business.
“I WAS BOTH A BIT frustrated and quite pleased”—that was how Bob summed up his continually seesawing state of mind as he made his final push against Soviet operations in America. There was, however, one action that he took in these variable days that gave him no qualms.
As the conspiracy trial of the Rosenbergs, Sobell, and David Greenglass moved closer, Bob made a trip to Arlington Hall. He made his way across the campus to Meredith’s office, and it is easy to imagine that on this auspicious day his thoughts traveled back to his first visits, to his unproductive, almost hostile encounters with the reticent code breaker. Yet despite only the flimsiest of shared motives, they had managed to find a way to work in tandem, each growing to appreciate the other’s judgment and cunning. Against all odds, or even logic, they had conspired together to do the impossible, day after day. They had succeeded in running a dangerous, consequential network of the enemy’s spies to ground. And in the process, paying whatever price was demanded, making whatever sacrifice was required, they had also discovered the rewards of a sustaining friendship.
As if to mark the end of their common quest, Bob arrived carrying a gift. In the past, it was Meredith who had produced the “Special Studies.” Now Bob, wanting to reciprocate, had written one for his friend. It was addressed “Lamphere to Gardner” and titled “Study of Code Names in KGB Communications.”
He handed it to the code breaker, and Meredith began to read:
“[I]t has been determined that one JULIUS ROSENBERG is probably identical with the individual described as ANTENNA and LIBERAL. . . . It is also believed now that DAVID GREENGLASS is identical with the individual described as KALIBRE, and that RUTH PRINZ GREENGLASS is identical with the individual known under the code name OSA. . . .
“More complete details concerning these individuals will be furnished to you at a later date.”
When Meredith completed his reading, he had little to say. His silence was testimony to the momentousness of the occasion, and a tribute to the mysteries that had been finally solved.
Full of purpose, he went to his filing cabinet and removed his large pile of decrypted messages and placed them on his desk. Sorting through the stack, he found a relevant cable. He inserted it in his typewriter.
A line of dashes was typed across the bottom of the page. Then he typed “Comments.” Next, he began to annotate the message to reflect this new information. He added the first footnote. “Osa: i.e. Wasp. Ruth Greenglass.” Then he moved on to the next, and with each typed revision, their long journey proceeded to its final destination.
And all the while as he typed, Bob looked on with a keen concentration, proud and, in truth, overwhelmed, as their mutual accomplishment made its way onto the page, and into history.
38
THEN THERE WAS THE TRIAL. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. David Greenglass had already pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing; his wife was never charged.
It began on a gray, bleak morning, March 6, 1951, in Room 107 in the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan. Bob, from his desk at headquarters in Washington, followed the events closely. Sasha, on his morning subway ride to Moscow Center, would read the daily accounts Tass, the Soviet news agency, had prepared for the Russian press.
As the proceedings played out, both men—the FBI counterintelligence agent who, after learning about the existence of Liberal’s network in a decoded Soviet cable, had led the hunt for the spies, and the KGB handler who had run the network—began to wish for the same conclusion. Both hoped Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would confess.
Bob wanted the Rosenbergs to tell the Bureau everything they knew. He wanted to get on with his job, to chase down the operatives who had eluded him. He believed that with the Rosenbergs’ cooperation, he could return to the cables, ferret out more clues, and at the end of this renewed chase he’d be able, he confidently predicted, “to arrest ten or fifteen more people.”
Sasha, from his isolation a world away in the corridors of the Lubyanka, found himself reduced to imagining heartfelt conversations with his “dear old Libi and Ethel.” What harm would a confession do? he would plead. The Americans can’t touch us. Yatskov, myself—we’re safe,
beyond the enemy’s clutches.
Both men, as they watched the trial move forward toward its inevitable conclusion, wanted the Rosenbergs to save themselves. The penalty for conspiracy to commit espionage could be death.
The trial was short, just three weeks. Only three witnesses were called to testify against the Rosenbergs—David and Ruth Greenglass, and Harry Gold.
Neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg would confess.
At eleven a.m. on March 29, 1951, after a single night’s deliberation, the foreman read the unanimous verdict: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were guilty as charged.
Judge Irving Kaufman announced that the sentencing would take place on April 5.
“THOSE EIGHT DAYS WERE AMONG the most difficult in my life,” Sasha would recall.
Meredith was stunned. “I never wanted to get anyone in trouble,” he would tell people, his voice nearly breaking with despair. He had consciously chosen a life of the mind, a world of cerebral puzzles and intellectual pleasures. But now he was caught up in something very real and very troubling, and he blamed his own vanity for goading him on. He did not want the spoils, the praise, not at this cost.
Bob, in his practical way, did what he felt he could by drafting a memo that Hoover would pass on to Judge Irving Kaufman. A death sentence for Julius Rosenberg “might be correct,” but only if it was accompanied by the judge’s announcing that it would be reduced if Rosenberg cooperated fully with the FBI. “No purpose,” he argued, “would be achieved by sentencing Ethel Rosenberg to death.”
On the morning of the sentencing, Judge Kaufman looked sternly down from his seat on the bench at the defendants, and then spoke.
“I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb, years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb, has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand, and who knows but what millions more innocent people may pay for the price of your treason? Indeed, by the cause of your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”