| Julius and Ethel Rosenberg | |
|---|---|
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg |
|
| Born | September 28, 1915 (Ethel) May 12, 1918 (Julius) New York City, New York (both) |
| Died | June 19, 1953 (aged 37) Ethel June 19, 1953 (aged 35) Julius Sing Sing Prison (both) |
| Charge(s) | Conspiracy to commit espionage |
| Penalty | Capital punishment |
| Status | Executed |
| Occupation | Actress, Singer, Secretary (Ethel), Electrical engineer (Julius) |
| Children | Michael Meeropol, Robert Meeropol |
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28, 1915 – June 19, 1953) and Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. This was the first execution of civilians for espionage in United States history.[1]
In 1995, the U.S. government released a series of decoded Soviet cables, codenamed VENONA, which supported courtroom testimony that Julius acted as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, but cast doubt on the level of Ethel's involvement.[2][3] The decision to execute the Rosenbergs was, and still is, controversial. The New York Times, in an editorial on the 50th anniversary of the execution (June 19, 2003) wrote, "The Rosenberg case still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria."[4] This hysteria had both an immediate and a lasting effect; many innocent scientists, including some who were virulently anti-communist, were investigated simply for having the last name "Rosenberg."[5] The other atomic spies who were caught by the FBI offered confessions and were not executed. Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who supplied documents to Julius from Los Alamos, served 10 years of his 15-year sentence.[6] Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass, served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for Greenglass and the German scientist, Klaus Fuchs.[7] Morton Sobell, who was tried with the Rosenbergs, served 17 years and 9 months of a 30-year sentence.[8] In 2008, Sobell admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was "in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb."[9]
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Julius Rosenberg was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City on May 12, 1918. Census records show that his family lived at 205 East 113th when he was two years old. The family moved to the Lower East Side by the time Julius was eleven. His parents worked in the shops of the Lower East Side, as Julius attended Seward Park High School. Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League, USA while at City College of New York. In 1939 he graduated from college with a degree in electrical engineering.
Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915, in New York City. An aspiring actress and singer, she eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936.[10]
Julius and Ethel married in 1939. They had two sons, Robert and Michael. After their parents' convictions and executions, the boys were adopted by the teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne (and took the Meeropol surname to protect their privacy while they were growing up).[10]
Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945. He was fired when the U.S. Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party. Important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was undertaken at Fort Monmouth during World War II.[11]
According to a 2001 book by his former handler Alexandre Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited by the NKVD on Labor Day 1942 by former spymaster Semyon Semenov.[12] He had been introduced to Semenov by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA as well as Earl Browder's personal NKVD liaison. In fact, Feklisov, a life-long Communist, was covering the role of Jacob Golos, who in 1942 passed the Communist "information" cell of young engineers headed by Julius Rosenberg into direct contact with the Soviet operatives in New York. After Semenov was recalled to Moscow in 1944, his duties were taken over by Feklisov.[12]
According to Feklisov, Rosenberg provided thousands of classified (top secret) reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuze, the same device an upgraded model of which was used to shoot down Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. Under Feklisov's administration, Rosenberg is said to have recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell.[13] The Venona intercept shows that Julius Rosenberg (code name LIBERAL) was the head of this particular spy ring.
According to Feklisov, he was supplied by Perl, under Julius Rosenberg’s direction, with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for the Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star. Feklisov says he learned through Rosenberg that his brother-in-law David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he used Julius to recruit him.[12]
The USSR and the U.S. became allies during World War II, after Nazi Germany's surprise attack on the USSR in 1941, but the U.S. government was highly suspicious of Joseph Stalin's long-term intentions. The Americans did not share information or seek assistance from the Soviet Union for the Manhattan Project. The Soviets were aware of the project as a result of espionage penetration of the U.S. government and made a number of attempts to infiltrate its operations at the University of California, Berkeley. The FBI file CINRAD (Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory) implicated J. Robert Oppenheimer, a consultant at the Radiation Lab and later, the key figure at Los Alamos, because of his earlier communist sympathies.[14] A number of project members—some high-profile—voluntarily gave secret information to Soviet agents, many because they were ardent communists[15] or were sympathetic to the Soviet Union's role in the war and did not feel the U.S. should have a monopoly on atomic weapons.[16]
After the war, the U.S. continued to protect its nuclear secrets, but the Soviet Union was able to produce its own atomic weapons by 1949. The West was shocked by the speed with which the Soviets were able to stage their first nuclear test, "Joe 1", on August 29, 1949.[17] In January 1950 the U.S. discovered that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs' identified his courier as Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950.[18] Gold confessed and identified Sergeant David Greenglass, a former machinist at Los Alamos, as an additional source.
Greenglass confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold. Though he initially denied any involvement by his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, eventually he claimed that she knew of her husband's dealings and typed some documents for him.[15] He also claimed that her husband, Julius, had convinced her sister Ruth Greenglass to recruit David while on a visit to him in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1944. He said Julius had passed secrets, and linked him and Ethel to the Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev. This connection would be necessary as evidence if there was to be a conviction for espionage.[19]
Another accused conspirator, Morton Sobell, was on vacation in Mexico City when both Rosenbergs were arrested. According to his memoir, On Doing Time, he tried to figure out a way to reach Europe without a passport. Abandoning that effort, he returned to Mexico City, where he claimed to have been kidnapped by members of the Mexican secret police and driven to the U.S. border, where he was arrested by U.S. forces.[20] The government claimed Sobell was arrested by the Mexican police for bank robbery on August 16, 1950, and extradited the next day to the United States in Laredo, Texas.[21] He was charged and tried with the Rosenbergs on one count of conspiracy to commit espionage.
In August 1950, a federal grand jury was convened to hear the Justice Department's case for indictments. The grand jury transcripts,[22] made public in 2008,[23] record that on August 3, Ethel Rosenberg's sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass, testified that in November 1944, Julius Rosenberg recruited Ethel, and urged her to recruit David Greenglass (Ruth's husband) into a conspiracy to engage in atomic espionage for the Soviet Union:
| “ | [H]e proceeded to tell me that he knew that David was working on the atomic bomb.... that he felt there was not a direct exchange of scientific information among the Allies, and that it would be only fair for Russia to have the information, too... and he wanted to make that possible. He asked me if I would relate this to David and ask him to pass on information through Julius. | ” |
She added that Ethel participated in this effort, urging her to comply:
| “ | His wife said that I should at least relay the message, that she felt that David might be interested, he would want to do this.... [S]he urged me to talk to David. She felt that even if I was against it, I should at least discuss it with him and hear what he had to say.[24] | ” |
On August 17, the grand jury returned an indictment alleging 11 overt acts. Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indicted, as were David Greenglass and Anatoli Yakovlev.[25]
The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The judge was Irving Kaufman, the prosecutor was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Irving Saypol and the attorney for the Rosenbergs was Emanuel Hirsch Bloch.[26][27] The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, stated that his sister Ethel typed notes containing U.S. nuclear secrets in the Rosenberg apartment in September 1945. He also testified that he turned over to Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb (the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, as opposed to a bomb with the "gun method" triggering device as used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima).[28] The notes allegedly typed by Ethel apparently contained little that was relevant to the Soviet atomic bomb project and some suggest Ethel was indicted along with Julius so that the prosecution could use her to pressure Julius into giving up the names of others who were involved.[29] However, neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg named anyone else and during testimony each asserted their right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to not incriminate themselves whenever asked about involvement in the Communist Party or with its members. The then Deputy Attorney General of the United States William P. Rogers, when later asked about the failure of the indictment of Ethel to extract a full confession from Julius, reportedly said, "She called our bluff."[30]
The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, and on April 5 were sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 U.S. Code 32 (now 18 U.S. Code 794), which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information "relating to the national defense."[31] The conviction helped to fuel Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into anti-American activities by U.S. citizens. While their devotion to the Communist cause was well documented, the Rosenbergs denied the espionage charges even as they faced the electric chair.[32]
The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.[33] In imposing the death penalty, Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:
| “ | I consider your crime worse than murder... 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 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.[34] | ” |
After the publication of an investigative series in The National Guardian and the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, some Americans came to believe both Rosenbergs were innocent or received too harsh a punishment, and a grassroots campaign was started to try to stop the couple's execution. Between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of antisemitism; the charges of antisemitism were widely believed abroad, but not among the vast majority in the United States, where the Rosenbergs did not receive any support from mainstream Jewish organizations nor from the American Civil Liberties Union as the case did not raise any civil liberties issues at all.[35]
Marxist Nobel-Prize-winning existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices — we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb."[36] Others, including non-Communists such as Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey,[37] as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America's Dreyfus affair.[38] In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place."[39] The all-black labor union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest.[40] Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest.[41] Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.[42][43]
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated how much the Soviet spy ring helped the USSR to build their bomb. In 1945, Moynihan found, physicists Hans Bethe estimated that the Soviets would be able to build their own bomb in five years. “Thanks to information provided by their agents,” Moynihan concluded in his book Secrecy, they did it in four. That was the edge that espionage gave them: one year.”[44]
Because the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons did not operate an electric chair at the time, the Rosenbergs were transferred to the New York State-run Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining for execution. The couple were executed at sundown in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.[1][45] This was delayed from the originally scheduled date of June 18 because, on June 17, Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas had granted a stay of execution. That stay resulted from the intervention in the case of Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts had previously met with scorn from the Rosenbergs' attorney.[46]
On June 18, the Court was called back into special session to dispose of Douglas' stay rather than let the execution be delayed for months while the appeal that was the basis of the stay wended its way through the lower courts. The Court did not vacate Douglas' stay until noon on June 19. Thus, the execution then was scheduled for later in the evening after the start of the Jewish Sabbath.[47] Desperately playing for more time, their lawyer, Emanuel Hirsch Bloch, filed a complaint that this offended their Jewish heritage, so the execution was scheduled before sunset, at 8 pm on Friday instead of the regular time of execution at Sing Sing of 11 pm. which usually took place on Thursday.[48]
Eyewitness testimony (as given by a newsreel report featured in the 1982 documentary film The Atomic Cafe) describes the circumstances of the Rosenbergs' death, noting that while Julius Rosenberg died after the first series of electrocutions, his wife did not. After the normal course of electrocutions, attendants removed the strapping and other equipment only to have doctors determine that Mrs. Rosenberg had not yet died (her heart was still beating). Three courses of electrocution were ultimately applied, and at conclusion eyewitnesses reported, Bob Considine among them, that smoke rose from her head in the chamber.[49]
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were buried at Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn, New York.[47]
The posthumous memoir of Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 records that he learned from Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav M. Molotov that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg "had provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb." The memoir adds:
| “ | Let this be a worthy tribute to the memory of those people. Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over our state to blackmail our state and undermine its proletarian cause..."[50] | ” |
The engineer who later became director of Chelyabinsk-40, the plutonium production reactor and extraction facility which the Soviet Union used to create its first bomb material, denied any involvement by the Rosenbergs. In 1989, Boris V. Brokhovich told The New York Times in an interview that development of the bomb had been a matter of trial and error. "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing", he said. "We got nothing from the Rosenbergs."[51]
According to Alexandre Feklisov, the former Soviet agent who was Julius' contact, he had not provided the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb, "He didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."[3]
In 1995 the results of the Venona decryption project were released by the US government. Among these was a Soviet Intelligence cable of September 21, 1944, from New York station to Moscow Center which read in part:
| “ | LIBERAL recommended the wife of his wife's brother, Ruth GREENGLASS.... She is 21 years old, a TOWNSWOMAN [GOROZhANKA], a GYMNAST [FIZKUL'TURNITsA] since 1942.... LIBERAL and his wife recommend her.... [Ruth] learned that her husband ... is now working at the ENORMOUS [ENORMOZ] plant in SANTA FE, New Mexico. | ” |
Notes by U.S. Signals Intelligence Service cryptographers identify the code-names LIBERAL as "Julius ROSENBERG," GOROZhANKA as "American Citizen," FIZKUL'TURNITsA as "Probably a Member of the Young Communist League," and ENORMOZ as "Atomic Energy Project."[52]
David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and key prosecution witness, recanted his testimony about his sister's typed notes. He stated in an interview in 2001: "I don't know who typed it, frankly, and to this day I can't remember that the typing took place. I had no memory of that at all—none whatsoever."[33] He said he gave false testimony to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so; "I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister."[33] He refused to express any remorse for his decision to sacrifice his sister, saying only that he did not realize that the death penalty would be invoked.[33]
In a hearing, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein decided to make public the grand jury testimony of 36 of the 46 witnesses but not that of Greenglass. Citing the objections of Greenglass and two other living witnesses, the judge claimed that their right to privacy "overrides the public’s need to know."[53] Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck argued on behalf of historical groups that because of recent interviews, Greenglass forfeited the privacy he now claims and that the testimony should be released. Hellerstein was not convinced. The testimony of the other seven witnesses will be released upon their consent, or confirmation that they are dead or impossible to find.[53]
In September 2008, hundreds of pages of grand jury transcripts were released. With this release, it was revealed that Ruth Greenglass had irreconcilable differences in her grand jury testimony in August 1950 and the testimony she gave at trial. At the grand jury, Ruth Greenglass was asked, "Didn't you write [the information] down on a piece of paper?"[54] She replied, "Yes, I wrote [the information] down a piece of paper and [Julius Rosenberg] took it with him."[54] But, at the trial she testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed up notes about the atomic bomb.[54]
In 2008, after many years of denial, Morton Sobell finally admitted he was a Soviet spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was "in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information ... [on] the atomic bomb."[9] However, he stated that the hand-drawn diagrams and other atomic-bomb details that were acquired by David Greenglass and passed to Julius were of "little value" to the Soviet Union, and were used only to corroborate what they had already learned from the other atomic spies.[9] He also stated that he believed Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband's deeds, but took no part in them.[9] In a subsequent letter to The New York Times, Sobell denied that he knew anything about Julius Rosenberg's alleged atomic espionage activities – that the only thing he knew for sure was what he (Sobell) did with Julius Rosenberg.[55]
The Rosenbergs' two sons, Robert Meeropol and Michael Meeropol, spent years trying to prove the innocence of their parents. After Morton Sobell, at age 91, confessed in 2008, they acknowledged their father had been involved in espionage, but not passing secrets of the bomb. They noted that new evidence cast more doubt on their mother's guilt and said they considered her an innocent person, set up by the government.[56] The Rosenberg children were orphaned by the executions and no relatives adopted them. They were adopted by the songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, and they assumed the Meeropol surname. Under the pen name of Lewis Allan, he wrote the classic anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit", made famous by singer Billie Holiday.
Robert and Michael co-wrote a book about their and their parents' lives, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975). Robert wrote a later memoir, An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey (2003). In 1990, he founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a nonprofit foundation that provides support for children of targeted progressive activists, and youth who are targeted activists.[57] Michael is recently retired as the Chair and Professor of Economics, School of Arts and Sciences, Economics at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Michael's daughter, Ivy Meeropol, directed a 2004 documentary about her grandparents, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.[58]
Michael and Robert Meeropol believe that "whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death penalty."[56] Their mother, they concluded, had not been a spy, but rather had been framed by the false testimony of her brother, and should never have been tried, much less executed.