Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

31. The Executed Spies: The Rosenbergs

227 The Executed Spies The Rosenbergs We are afraid of putting LIBERAL [Julius Rosenberg’s code name] out of action with overwork. KGB message to Moscow, December 5, 1944, decrypted by Venona. David Greenglass was arrested on June 15, 1950. The FBI was a step away from uncovering what its director, J. Edgar Hoover, would call “the crime of the century.”1 Greenglass admitted to the FBI that, during a visit to Albuquerque , his wife Ruth (code-named WASP) conveyed a proposal to spy for the NKGB from his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. To protect his wife from prosecution, Greenglass cooperated with the FBI and confessed all he knew about his brother-in-law’s spy ring. The admission would pit brother against sister, family against family, and the battle would be played out in one of the most famous trials of the twentieth century. Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were born and raised in New York’s Lower East Side, a boiling cauldron of communist fervor in the 1930s and 1940s. Like his compatriots, Rosenberg was troubled by the rise of fascism in Europe and the Great Depression at home, so he embraced communism in his early years and joined the Young Communist League. He was so engrossed in his Communist Party work that he barely managed to gradu31 228 The Atomic Bomb Spies: Prelude to the Cold War ate with a degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York in February 1939. That same year he married Ethel Greenglass, who was a CPUSA member and an organizer of labor strikes. Although Julius openly sold the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, and collected dues for the party, his communist activities went unnoticed when the US Army Signal Corps hired him in 1939. Three years later he met Semyon Semyonov, a Soviet intelligence officer specializing in science and technology, at a Labor Day rally in New York’s Central Park. Semyonov formally recruited the enthusiastic young communist Rosenberg at their third meeting.2 Rosenberg’s motivation, like scores of other CPUSA members of the era, was purely ideological, but he surpassed his comrades in his fanatic zeal to acquire secrets. Alexander Feklisov, his later Soviet handler, believed that Rosenberg passionately felt “a religious calling” to his spy work on behalf of the USSR.3 At the NKVD’s direction, Rosenberg severed his overt ties to the CPUSA and became one of the Soviets’ most prolific collectors of scientific intelligence and aggressive recruiters of new sources. As the principal agent of his growing network, Rosenberg worked so tirelessly in amassing US military and industrial secrets that even his grateful Soviet masters grew concerned: “We are afraid of putting LIBERAL [Julius Rosenberg’s code name] out of action with overwork.”4 Rosenberg was elated when he learned in the fall of 1944 that his brother -in-law had been assigned to a top-secret project in Los Alamos. Like the Rosenbergs, Greenglass had joined the Young Communist League, but, as he later admitted, he was less passionate about the cause: “Julius was a guy that really lived communism. To me it was like a peripheral thing.”5 Greenglass had graduated from a trade school and had become a machinist. After he was drafted into the army, he continued to trumpet his views to his annoyed fellow soldiers. In spite of his openly professed communism, he slipped through the lax security of the Manhattan Project and was assigned first to the Oak Ridge uranium production facility and then to Los Alamos. As Greenglass’s biographer Sam Roberts noted, “It was a propitious moment. The Manhattan Project needed machinists. The Soviet Union needed another spy.”6 Once Rosenberg learned of his brother-in-law’s assignment, he excitedly raised the issue with his new Soviet handler, Alexander Feklisov, who was 229 The Executed Spies • The Rosenbergs initially skeptical that the young and immature Greenglass would become an effective spy.7 The Soviet intelligence services, however, were out of contact with their prize asset, Klaus Fuchs (see chapter 30), and gave Rosenberg the green light. The Rosenbergs huddled with Ruth Greenglass around the kitchen table of their cramped Lower East Side apartment as Julius lectured hissister-in-lawaboutthemoraljustificationofsharingatomicbombsecrets with the USSR. Ultimately, Julius convinced her to make an espionage proposal to her husband when she traveled to see him in New Mexico.8 Ruth Greenglass traveled to Santa...