In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  Morton Sobell received a thirty-year prison term.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were both condemned to die in the electric chair.

  And both Bob and Meredith knew beyond any doubt the wrongness of Ethel Rosenberg’s death sentence. Christian name Ethel. Does not work. They had seen the incontestable proof with their own eyes, the source unimpeachable. Only they had been ordered to keep this knowledge secret. If they were to betray what they knew, write a revealing letter to the judge, perhaps the president, or even slip an informed hint to a reporter, they would be committing treason. Their dilemma, in its broad challenges, they came to appreciate with a ghastly sense of recognition, was not unlike the one that Julius Rosenberg and the other operatives in the ring had faced when they had decided to work for the Soviet cause. Either they could throw everything over to follow a grand moral principle, care nothing about compromise, the opinion of others, reduce their lives to the one thing that mattered, or they could do nothing.

  In the weeks, then months, that followed, as the appeals worked their tedious way through the courts, both Bob and Meredith tried to believe that the Rosenbergs would confess. They would save their own lives and in the process spare the two men who had so avidly hunted them. Neither of the men had any misgivings about rooting out traitors. Justice, they felt with a patriotic certainty, demanded that the Rosenbergs and the members of their ring be punished. But vengeance was something else entirely. And now the two friends were left grappling with a sophism that struck at the core of their own lives. They had embarked on their shared quest, determined to stop the progress of evil. But if they did nothing when they possessed the truth, if they allowed a woman, a mother of two young sons, to die, they would be reinforcing all that they knew was wrong. And with their inaction they would be condemning themselves to another sort of death sentence.

  Epilogue

  A Toast

  AT EIGHT P.M. ON A warm June evening in 1953, Julius Rosenberg was strapped into the oak-paneled electric chair in the Sing Sing prison death chamber. One electrode was fastened to his leg, another covered the shaved crown of his head. The switch was thrown at 8:04. Two minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

  A guard mopped up the urine that had collected under the seat. He used an ammonia solution, but its sharp smell was not sufficient to cloak the lingering odor of burning flesh.

  Ethel Rosenberg was brought into the death chamber minutes later and strapped into the chair. At 8:11, 2,000 volts of electricity jolted her body, three times in rapid succession. But her heart remained beating, and so two additional surges were administered. At 8:16, she was finally dead.

  Both died without making any confessions.

  SASHA, BEREFT, BLAMED THE KGB. The spymasters should have taken the necessary steps to have helped the Rosenbergs escape. But if that had been too difficult to organize in time, then his country could have intervened at the trial. “The U.S.S.R. should have openly declared that Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell had passed on electronic secrets that were used in the struggle against Nazi Germany,” he complained to his friend Anatoly after he had heard the horrible news. It would have told the Americans the truth: they were not atomic spies. And it would have sent a message to Libi, letting him know he was freed from any obligation to keep silent. His agent, his friend, could have confessed and saved his own life. As well as his wife’s.

  Bob heard the news in Mickey Ladd’s office, where a direct line to Sing Sing had been installed. From his vantage point by the window, his eyes darted from the silent phone to the darkening sky closing in on the courtyard five floors below. He had lost all hope by the time the news arrived, but nevertheless it came as a shock.

  As he was walking out of the office, one of the agents made a joke, something crude and grisly about burning flesh. Bob whirled on him, fist clenched. But then he realized there was no longer any point. And nothing he could do, no punch he could throw, would lessen the immense sense of guilt he felt. He turned and left without a word, suddenly feeling very alone.

  Meredith could not sleep after he heard the news. He was sitting in his armchair in the living room, reading, when his wife, after realizing he wasn’t in bed, had discovered him just before dawn. Blanche knew better than to ask why he was awake. She simply picked up her own book, sat in her armchair, and, pretending to read, kept her husband company as the light of the new day began to spread across the sky.

  IT TOOK TWO YEARS, AND Bob put the blame on a series of bureaucratic indignities when he quit the Bureau in July 1955. The truth was, however, as he’d later acknowledge, that in the aftermath of the Rosenbergs’ execution, his heart was no longer in his playing spy catcher. That was why, rather than head to the CIA, which had offered him a top-level position when the news of his departure from the Bureau had begun circulating around the intelligence community, he decided to take a job at the Veterans Administration. He had had enough of the heavy responsibilities that went hand-in-hand with the secret life.

  As for Meredith, he, too, needed to get away. The memories of what he had done at Arlington Hall, and its unforeseen consequences, were too raw. In his private notebooks, home to a madcap scattering of thoughts big and small, one jotting stood out with an eerie prominence. “I hope the Rosenberg sons won’t get on my trail and come around with a gun,” he had written. Anyway, he made sure he was soon beyond their reach. When the chance came to work abroad, breaking codes at the Cheltenham facility in England, he took it without hesitation. He was eager to leave, to put a physical distance between himself and all the reminders of his complicitous silence.

  Sasha, still the professional, his role as the handler of the Rosenberg ring still a secret from the opposition, returned to America just before the 1960 presidential election. He had diplomatic cover, but he was, as he had always been, a spy. In recognition of his work, he had been appointed the Washington, D.C., rezident, running operations out of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street. And each day as he set in motion new covert schemes, as he sent his agents off to steal America’s secrets, he did so determined to get vengeance for what a barbaric enemy had inflicted on his dear Libi and Ethel.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1996, SASHA, NO longer a secret agent, just an old man getting used to his retirement, walked through the gravestones lined in orderly rows in Pinelawn Cemetery on Long Island. It took him a while to find what he was searching for.

  It was a squarish gray stone, the name “Rosenberg” boxed with a black border. It bore two laconic inscriptions, carved parallel to each other.

  ETHEL

  JULIUS

  Born: September 25, 1915

  Born: May 12, 1918

  Died: June 19, 1953

  Died: June 19, 1953

  There is a Russian custom to leave some soil taken from one’s home on the grave of loved ones buried on distant shores. The gesture is meant to demonstrate that neither the many miles, nor the expanse of oceans, can separate the departed from the strong pull they continue to have on the heart.

  In a small bag, Sasha had a handful of soil he had gathered from under an apple tree at his dacha, and he now spread the rich brown earth in front of the gravestone.

  Standing at attention, he spoke as one soldier to two others. “Julius and Ethel,” he began formally, “here I am at your graves to pay my respect.” But his voice broke as he continued. “Forgive us for not having known how to save your lives,” he pleaded.

  When he was done, he still couldn’t bring himself to leave. He stood there, hoping that somehow they had heard him, and somehow across the blackness of time and space they could convey to him that he was forgiven.

  IT WAS THAT SAME YEAR when Bob and Meredith, both also in retirement, met up for dinner in a French restaurant in Washington. Bob was living in Arizona, playing a lot of golf, and Meredith, who had his notebooks and the London Times crossword puzzle to keep him busy, had moved to a condominium a short drive from the restaurant. Meredith came with Blanche, and Bob brought his fourth wife, Martha, an elegant
Southern lady he had married in 1985 (the marriage to his third wife had been, by mutual agreement, a short-lived mistake). It was to be a social occasion, Bob had promised Martha, just two old friends sharing a friendly evening. He had told her not to worry, they wouldn’t be going on about the past. But Martha felt her husband must have known they’d get around to it.

  They wound up talking about nothing else, and Martha felt very estranged; she was not, as she’d tell people, “Bob’s FBI wife.” Names were being thrown about that meant nothing to her; she’d never paid too much attention to politics, she explained defensively. Her recollections of the entire evening were vague. Except for one small incident that left her puzzled at the time, and still stuck sharply in her memory years later.

  It was toward the end of the meal, and Bob had looked across the table at Meredith and spontaneously raised the glass of scotch he’d been nursing. “A toast to old times,” her husband had proposed. “To what we accomplished.”

  Meredith raised his wineglass as if to clink against Bob’s, but abruptly he hesitated. Then he lowered his glass.

  Bob slowly placed his back on the table, too.

  The two men sat across from each other, staring, gripping their glasses tightly as if in anger, as a leaden silence descended between them.

  What, Martha would always wonder, was that all about?

  Notes on Sources

  On a brisk, late October day in 2005, John F. Fox, the studious Ph.D. who served as the FBI’s official historian, stood at the podium at the annual Symposium on Cryptologic History and launched into a riveting presentation. “One man,” he began, “was tall, thin, a genius linguist at the NSA who was working on breaking coded telegrams sent from Soviet offices in the U.S. to Moscow. The other was a lawyer and cop, a young FBI supervisor recently transferred to Headquarters. . . .”

  Nearly a decade later I received the transcript of this short speech describing the unique working partnership of Bob Lamphere, an FBI counterintelligence agent, and Meredith Gardner, the man who re-created the KGB codebook. It had been sent my way by a friend in the intelligence community who presciently thought “there might be a bigger story here.” After my initial reading, I knew he was right. Here was a true-life espionage tale, a story of two very different and very unlikely friends who had teamed up to chase down the most consequential spy ring in American history—the atomic spies. And it was also the story of one of the nation’s great, but barely known, intelligence triumphs, the long-running secret operation—hidden away at a former school for well-bred young women in Virginia—that had cracked the “unbreakable” Russian codes.

  It was a tale, I quickly realized, I wanted to tell, and I began my own hunt to get at the previously unknown heart of the story and the people who had lived it.

  This book is the result of that investigation. It is a narrative nonfiction spy tale. It has no ambitions to be a scholar’s buttoned-down, footnoted tome. Still, it is no less a true story. It is no less a history. It is no less buttressed by a firm foundation of facts.

  My covenant with the reader is this: When I relate certain events in this drama—whether on the world stage, behind the closed doors of secret intelligence, or in the minds and hearts of my characters—they are products of the historical record and my research. They can be substantiated by official government records, documents, and reports; bookshelves filled with volumes of Cold War histories; memoirs; personal notebooks; contemporaneous newspaper reports; previously transcribed conversations; and, not least, lengthy interviews I conducted with the close relatives of the main actors in this story (Bob Lamphere and Meredith Gardner are deceased).

  Therefore, when quotation marks enclose any dialogue in this book, this is an indication that at least one of the principals was the source. Further, when a character reveals what he is thinking or feeling, I will have found this, too, in a memoir, a letter, a notebook, a transcript of a previously published conversation, or an interview.

  Here, then, are some of the sources that helped me shape this story. It is a select, certainly not exhaustive, list, merely the key books and interviews that I relied on most often as I crafted this account. They are shared with the hope that any reader who continues to be curious about the tense Cold War spy-versus-spy chess game described in the preceding pages (or how I went about its molding) will find them to be rewarding starting points for further exploration.

  At its narrative heart, this is a story about people who made history. Bob Lamphere’s candid account, written with Tom Shachtman, of his career at the FBI and his friendship with Meredith Gardner was invaluable (The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story, New York: Random House, 1986). I also relied on his voluminous FBI Field Personnel Files (which Dr. Fox, the FBI historian whose insightful presentation had started my quest, kindly helped me obtain). I interviewed Bob’s nephew, Theo Schaad, who wrote the self-published family history “A Lamphere Anthology,” and Bob’s sister-in-law, Phyllis Lamphere; they also provided several of the photographs reproduced in this book. And I sat in an apartment in Richmond, Virginia, and spoke at length with Bob’s gracious and elegant widow, Martha. Further, Richard Rhodes, whose own magisterial histories of the events surrounding the manufacture of both the atomic and the hydrogen bomb were essential sources throughout the writing of this book (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012; and Dark Sun, New York: Touchstone, 1996), has posted the transcript of the thoughtful, wide-ranging interview he’d conducted in Arizona with a long-retired Bob Lamphere in three parts on the Web, Voices of the Manhattan Project (http://www.manhattanprojectoralvoices.org/oral-histories/Robert-lamphere-interview). Bob Lamphere also appeared in an on-screen interview in the PBS program Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies, which first aired on February 5, 2002 (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcript/2904_venona.html).

  Meredith Gardner was too guarded to publish a memoir. However, I met with his son, Arthur, and daughter-in-law, Michele, in their comfortable home in Wisconsin, and they told me many insightful stories about him and Blanche, his wife. They also generously shared letters, postcards, and the truly fascinating gray notebooks Meredith had kept over the years as a sort of diary of his thoughts and widely varied interests; the Gardner family photographs that are reproduced here were graciously provided by them. Other insights into Meredith’s work and personality can be found in Peter Wright, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York: Viking, 1987); Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, editors, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939–1957 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, 1996); and several documents the NSA had posted on its website, including William Crowell’s “Remembrances of Venona” (http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/venona/venona_remember.html) and his “Introductory History of Venona” (http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html), as well as the Agency’s untitled official history of Venona, declassified in 2004 and available on its website. There is a specific “Meredith Gardner Page” on the NSA website that was established after his induction into the agency’s Hall of Honor in 2004, and its Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series includes “Polyglot: The Meredith Gardner Story,” declassified in 2011, and this, too, is available on the website (https:www.nsa.gov/). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan included some perceptive remarks about Meredith in the Congressional Record on July 12, 1999 (Congressional Record, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Senate and Government Printing Office). The obituary by David Stout that appeared in the New York Times on August 18, 2002, is an absorbing account of a life well lived (“Meredith Gardner, 89, Dies; Broke Code in Rosenberg Case”), as is his wife’s in the Washington Post on September 3, 2005. And one of the most revelatory articles on the Gardners was published in the University of Wisconsin Alumni Magazine (Candice Gaukel Andrews, “The Code-Breaker and the G-Man,” On Wisconsin, Winter 2002).

  I was able to re-create the tradecraft as well as t
he personal history of Sasha, the Soviet handler who worked out of the New York KGB station, in large part due to his chatty, albeit often self-serving, memoir: Alexander Feklisov, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs (New York: Enigma Books, 2001). I was further assisted in telling the Moscow Center side of this story by the extensive top-secret material Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out of the KGB foreign intelligence archives (Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives and the KGB, New York: Basic Books, 2001). Also valuable were the eight thick notebooks and loose pages kept by Alexander Vassiliev as he researched through KGB archival material, indexed and cross-referenced by the Wilson Center under the direction of John Earl Haynes, and available on the Internet through the Cold War International History Project. Additionally, I made much use of Alexander Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (New York: Modern Library, 1999); John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Operations From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). The extent of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project was well documented in the formerly classified papers supplied by the KGB to the Russian Institute for History of Science and Technology and published by the Institute in its journal (V. P. Visgin, ed., “At the Source of the Soviet Atomic Project: The Role of Espionage, 1941–1946,” in Problems in the History of Science and Technology, 1992). And I found the most authoritative as well as comprehensive history of the Soviet efforts to build an atomic weapon to be David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).