The RosenbergsPart 1: The InvestigationBy Doug Linder (2011)

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

 Introduction: Julius and Ethel

     Julius Rosenberg was the son of a Polish garment worker living on New York's Lower East Side. He was a quiet, serious youth whose father to hoped become a rabbi. By his senior year in high school, however, it was clear that Julius' passion was for politics, not religious studies. At age 16, Julius was a member of New York City College's Young Communist League. He met his wife Ethel at a union fund-raising party and the couple was married in 1939 when Julius graduated with an engineering degree. In the fall of 1940, he took a job as a civilian employee of the U. S. Army Signal Corps.

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg’s father ran a repair shop for sewing machines, but was barely able to provide for his wife and four children. The

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Greenglass family lived in a shabby tenement that was unheated. Ethel, the only daughter, showed that she was a strong willed and intelligent girl. She graduated high school at the age of only 15. Ethel became a clerk for a shipping company immediately after finishing school, and remained at this job for the next four years until she was let go because of her role as the organizer of a strike of 150 women workers. Ethel was not just an activist at work, she was also interested in politics. Ethel joined the Young Communist League and eventually became a member of the American Communist Party. In addition to her clerk job, Ethel enjoyed singing, alone as well as with a choir. Ethel was waiting to go on stage to sing at a New Years Eve benefit when she first met Julius Rosenberg. The couple was married not long afterwards in the summer of 1939.

After the two married, they became the center of what was the largest trial of the century when they were accused of spying for the Soviet Union. The Rosenberg Trial is the sum of many stories: a story of betrayal, a love story, a spy story, a story of a family torn apart, and a story of government overreaching. As is the case with many famous trials, it is also the story of a particular time: the early 1950's with its cold war tensions and headlines dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.

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1.  The Manhattan Project

    The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret effort of scientists to develop an atomic bomb. President Truman, trying to beat the Nazis to the discovery, funded a top secret program to develop nuclear technology. The main assembly plant was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the final bill was tallied, nearly $2 billion had been spent on research and development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project employed over 120,000 Americans, and led to the creation of the nuclear weapons that the United States used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the Manhattan Project scientists was a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs. Twice in 1945 Fuchs met with a Soviet agent named Raymond and provided notes on the working design for the atomic bomb. In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested and confessed to disclosing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project. One week after Fuchs' arrest, Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin propelled himself into the headlines by charging that the State Department employed over 200 Communist agents. It was a bad time to be a suspected Communist; it was a terrible time to be a suspected spy.

     Fuchs' arrest began the chain of investigations that led authorities to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was made possible by American code breakers who successfully decoded intercepted messages (the "Venona Cables") from the Soviet Consulate to the KGB (Soviet secret police.) One cable was a report by Fuchs on the progress of the Manhattan Project. When confronted with evidence of his espionage, Klaus confessed and told authorities of his meetings with a spy he knew only as "Raymond."

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Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs

Within three months, the FBI began to focus on a pudgy, middle-aged chemist, Harry Gold, as the "Raymond" to whom Fuchs had given information about the bomb. Within a week after the FBI first began to ask Gold questions such as "Were you ever west of the Mississippi?" Gold offered a voluntary confession. By June 1, the investigation of Gold led the FBI to David Greenglass. On June 15, 1950, FBI officials questioned David Greenglass.  In his first interview, Greenglass admitted that he had passed information to Gold. He also identified his wife, Ruth, and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as participants in the Soviet spy ring.

2. The FBI Investigates The Rosenbergs

     it seems incredible that anyone would offer information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union, the main enemy of the United States. We need to remember that in 1943 the Soviet Union was America's wartime ally. Hollywood, with the blessing of the U. S. government, was producing movies such as Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia that depicted life in the Soviet Union in a Utopian way. Even such conservative figures as General Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill were producing a steady stream of praise for the Soviet Union's heroic efforts against the Nazi forces. In such times, it is easy to understand how idealistic and avidly pro-Communist young people

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such as Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass might be tempted to provide the Soviet Union with secret information that might be helpful to their cause.

     Late in 1943, according to Greenglass, Rosenberg began to talk to him in abstract terms about espionage. These conversations coincided with the Rosenbergs dropping out of the open Communist Party activities that had been a large part of their lives. Greenglass would suggest that the decision to drop out of the Party was a necessary consequence of the Rosenberg's decision to undertake espionage work for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs, of course, had a different explanation: that they wanted to have more time at home after the birth of their first child earlier that year.

     Julius Rosenberg asked David Greenglass if he might be willing to provide descriptions of Manhattan Project research. David described his decision to agree to his brother-in-law's request as "like plunging into a cold lake." But plunge he did. Over the course of the next year, David prepared handwritten notes and sketches relating to a high-explosive lens mold being developed in a Los Alamos laboratory. Greenglass told the FBI that Julius Rosenberg had become alarmed when, in October of 1949, he learned through Soviet intelligence that American authorities had information that might lead them to Los Alamos spy Klaus Fuchs and, potentially, to Gold and Greenglass as well. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg urged him to obtain U. S. passports as soon as possible and prepare to flee to Europe. After Fuchs' arrest, Rosenberg's urgings became more insistent. David's decision to reject his brother-in-law's advice was due largely to the condition of his wife, Ruth, who was six months pregnant and still recovering being critically burned in an apartment fire.

3. The Arrest

     Shortly after 8 a.m. on June 16, 1950, FBI agents showed up at the apartment of Julius Rosenberg and asked that he accompany him for

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questioning. Julius denied any involvement in the spy ring. When informed of Greenglass's accusations, Rosenberg said to FBI agents, "Bring him here-- I'll call him a liar to his face." That evening Julius hired Emanuel Bloch, the attorney who would fight tirelessly to save the Rosenbergs,

     Whatever hopes Rosenberg had that Greenglass would withhold from the FBI the additional details of his espionage activities necessary to establish a basis for arrest were dashed by mid-July. On the basis of more complete statements by both Ruth and David, two agents showed up on the evening of July 17, 1950 to clap handcuffs on Rosenberg in the view of both his sons. As he was hustled out of his apartment, a backup team entered his apartment to conduct a sweeping search for incriminating evidence.

   The case against Ethel Rosenberg was very weak. The reason the FBI wanted to charge Ethel, lay in the possibility that threatening her with prosecution would convince Julius to talk. Their hope was that Julius would agree to confess if they agreed to not prosecute Ethel. Because of this, Hoover wanted his FBI employees to build a case against Ethel. "There is no question" but that "if Julius Rosenberg would furnish details of his extensive espionage activities, it would be possible to proceed against other individuals. [P]roceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter." Though holding almost no evidence of her guilt, the FBI arrested Ethel on August 11, 1950, as she walked to catch a subway after testifying before a grand jury. Ethel was imprisoned immediately, denied even the opportunity to return home to arrange care for her two sons, who had been spending the afternoon with a neighbor.

     Weeks after beginning life in the Women's House of Detention, Ethel began to adjust to prison life. Julius, meanwhile, gave no indication that his wife's threatened prosecution would cause him to reconsider his refusal to cooperate with authorities. The threat wasn't working, and now the

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Government was committed to the prosecution of Ethel as an equal partner in the espionage conspiracy.

4. Their Friends Scatter Before the Trial

   As the FBI was closing in on the Greenglasses and the Rosenbergs, things began to happen to several of Julius's acquaintances who shared his enthusiasm for leftist politics. Joel Barr, a college friend of Rosenberg, disappeared in Paris on the day Greenglass was arrested, leaving most of his personal possessions behind. Less than a week later, another college friend, Morton Sobell, boarded a plane with his family at La Guardia Airport with tickets for Mexico City. A third Rosenberg friend, Alfred Sarant, managed to elude FBI surveillance at a racetrack and make a successful dash by car to the Mexican border, and then to parts unknown. William Perl, a Cleveland scientist, was called before the Rosenberg grand jury where he denied ever having known Rosenberg. On the basis of that statement and ample evidence to establish its falsity, Perl was indicted for perjury. 

A fifth Rosenberg acquaintance, Max Elitcher, chose cooperation over flight. Elitcher told FBI investigators that Rosenberg tried to recruit him to

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espionage work in 1944. Elitcher also described an incident in 1948 when he, along with his friend Morton Sobell, had taken a midnight ride to a deserted waterfront street in New York City in order that Sobell might bring a 35-mm film can to Rosenberg's apartment. Elitcher's story provided the basis for a warrant to arrest Morton Sobell, who the FBI knew to still be in Mexico. On August 16, 1950, after a day spent trying to book passage on a freighter to Europe, Sobell returned to his Mexico City apartment. There he found a band of pistol-waving Mexicans, who forced him into a car, drove him 800 miles to the border, then handed him to waiting FBI agents in Laredo, Texas.

As they moved towards a trial, cold war anti-communist hysteria was gripping the nation. People wanted to punish anyone they saw as helping the Soviet Union and advancing the goals of communism. The fact that the Rosenbergs were Jewish immigrants didn’t help their case. Two major questions loomed on the horizon as their trial approached. Were they guilty? And regardless of their guilt, would they be able to receive a fair trial in the climate of fear that Joe McCarthy created in America?

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