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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

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The Rosenbergs Julius Rosenberg (May 12 1918 – June 19 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28 1915 – June 19 1953) were American citizens, and Communist Party members who were thrust into the world spotlight when they were tried, convicted and executed for spying for the Soviet Union. Specifically, the couple were convicted on conspiracy to commit espionage and of passing nuclear weapons secrets to Russian agents.

Decades later, Soviet communications decrypted by the VENONA project became publicly available which indicated strongly that Julius Rosenberg was actively involved in espionage. However, they did not contain specific details confirming that he performed the specific acts of espionage for which he was convicted, or that Ethel Rosenberg was involved. 



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Background

Julius Rosenberg was born to a Jewish family on May 12, 1918 in New York. He graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and in 1940 joined the Army Signal Corps where he worked on radar equipment. He became a leader in the Young Communist League where, in 1936, he met Ethel, whom he married three years later.


Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915 in New York, also to a Jewish family. She was an aspiring actress and singer, but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she first met Julius. The Rosenbergs had two sons.


According to his former KGB handler, Alexander Feklisov, Julius Rosenberg was originally recruited by the KGB on Labor Day 1942, by former KGB spymaster Semyon Semenov. Julius had been introduced to Semenov by Bernard Schuster, a high ranking member of the CPUSA as well as Earl Browder's personal KGB liaison. After Semenov was recalled to Moscow in 1944, his duties were taken over by his apprentice, Alexander Feklisov. According to Feklisov, Julius was his most dedicated and valuable asset, providing thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio including a complete proximity fuze, the same design that was used to shoot down Francis Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960. Under Feklisov administration, Julius Rosenberg is said to have recruited sympathetic individuals to the KGB’s service, including Joel Barr, Al Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell. Alexander Feklisov and Sergei Kostin, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs. Enigma Books (2001). ISBN 1929631081. p. 140-147.  Sobell, the only person still living from this entire list mentioned by Feklisov denies this and argues that Feklisov is an old KGB agent telling war stories for personal profit. When Barr returned to the United States before his death he, too, denied he had been a spy. [[Citing sources citation needed]]


According to Feklisov's account, 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 Julius that his brother-in-law David Greenglass was working on the top secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and used Julius to recruit him. ibid.


During World War II, the USSR and the US became allies in war, but the US government was highly suspicious of Joseph Stalin's intentions. As such, 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 US government, however, and had made a number of attempts to infiltrate its operations at the University of California, Berkeley. A number of project members — some high-profile, others lower in rank — did voluntarily give secret information to Soviet agents, many because they were sympathetic to communism [[Citing sources citation needed]] (or the Soviet Union's role in the war) and did not feel that the US should have a monopoly on atomic weapons[[Citing sources citation needed]].


After the war, the US continued to resist efforts to share nuclear secrets, but the Soviet Union was able to produce its own atomic weapons by 1949. Its first nuclear test, "Joe 1", shocked the West in the speed it was produced. It was then discovered in January 1950 that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Russians throughout the war. Through Fuchs' confession, US and UK intelligence agents were able to make a case against his "courier", Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950. A former machinist at the top-secret Los Alamos laboratory, Sgt. David Greenglass, confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold as well. He testified that his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband, Julius, had also passed secrets. Another accused conspirator, Morton Sobell, fled to Mexico City, but was later deported back to the United States for trial. 



Trial and conviction

The case against the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, stated that his sister Ethel, working as a "probationer” or "agent", as defined by the VENONA Historical Monographs which accompanied the NSA's release of Venona materialsVENONA Historical Monograph #2: [New York KGB Tradecraft and Operations, 1942-1943]. National Security Agency. 1995., typed notes containing US nuclear secrets. These were later turned over to Harry Gold, who would then turn them over to Anatoly A. Yakovlev of the KGB X-line in New York City. 


From the beginning, the trial attracted a high amount of media attention, and like the trial of Alger Hiss, generated a largely polarized response from observers, some of whom believed the Rosenbergs to be clearly guilty, and others who asserted their innocence. 


Although the notes typed by Ethel apparently contained little that was relevant to the Soviet atomic bomb project, this was sufficient evidence for the grand jury to indict Ethel and enough for the jury to convict on the conspiracy to commit espionage charge. Supporters felt that a capital charge of conspiracy to commit espionage was not only far too severe, but was not supported by the available evidence. 


It is believed that part of the reason Ethel was indicted in addition to Julius was so that the prosecution could use her as a 'lever' to pressure Julius into giving up the names of others who were involved. [[Citing sources citation needed]] If that was the case, it did not work.  On the witness stand, Julius asserted his right under the Fifth Amendment to not incriminate himself whenever asked about his involvement in the Communist Party or with its members.  Ethel did similarly.  Neither defendant was viewed sympathetically by the jury.


Investigations into the couple's history revealed conflicting evidence that Julius Rosenberg had many dealings with an NKVD agent.  Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian government has released documentation that shows Julius Rosenberg was providing information to the NKVD. Alexander Feklisov has stated in a memoir and in many interviews that he was Julius Rosenberg's control agent, and met Julius on over 50 occasions over a three year period beginning in 1943. Feklisov said that, though Julius had provided military secrets, he was never able to provide any information of substance concerning the atomic bomb. He also said that Ethel Rosenberg, as a "probationer," did not meet directly with Soviet Agent handlers, but she assisted Julius's activities and the products of other members of the group. 


The role played by Assistant United States Attorney Roy Cohn, the prosecutor in the case, is controversial, since Cohn stated in his autobiography that he influenced the selection of the judge, and pushed him to impose the death penalty on both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.



Execution

The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, and sentenced to death under section 2 of the Espionage Act, 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," by Judge Irving Kaufman on April 5. The conviction helped to fuel Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into "anti-American activities" by US citizens. While their devotion to the Communist cause was well documented, they denied the spying charges even as they faced the electric chair.  


The couple were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. In imposing the death penalty, Judge Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:



I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-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.



Their case has been at the center of the controversy over communism in the United States ever since, with supporters steadfastly maintaining that their conviction was an egregious example of persecution typical of the "hysteria" of those times (see Red Scare, McCarthyism) and likening it to the witch hunts that marred Salem and medieval Europe (a comparison that provided the inspiration for Arthur Miller's critically acclaimed play, The Crucible).


At the time, some Americans believed both Rosenbergs were innocent or received too harsh a punishment, and a grass-roots campaign was started to try to stop the couple's execution.  Other Americans felt that the couple got what they deserved. Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but he refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.  


The couple were executed in the electric chair on June 19, 1953. Reports of the execution state that Julius died after the first application of electricity, but Ethel did not succumb immediately, and was subjected to two more electrical charges before being pronounced dead.  The chair was designed for a man, and Ethel Rosenberg was a petite woman; this discrepancy resulted, it is claimed, in the electrodes fitting poorly. Eyewitness testimony describes smoke rising from her head.



Posthumous revelations

In 1995, the National Security Agency publicly released documents from the VENONA project, an effort to decrypt intercepted communications between Soviet agents and the NKVD/KGB.  A 1944 cable from New York to Moscow indicates that Julius Rosenberg was engaged in espionage, though the importance of his effort is not clear, particularly considering that the Soviets were receiving information on the Atomic bomb from Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean.  Ethel's involvement is not clear from the VENONA transcripts. A document from November 27, 1944 [link] specifically about Ethel lists her as a "fellowcountryman" and claims that she was aware of Julius' work. Ethel was apparently never assigned a code name — the only reference to her states she "does not work".  Julius was always referred to as "ANTENNA" or "LIBERAL" — which has cast doubt onto her significance and involvement. 


In his memoirs, published posthumously in 1990, Nikita Khrushchev praised the pair for their "very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb." Whether this was in fact the case, however, has been disputed. [link] The quality of the information given to the Soviets, as reported by Greenglass, was also quite poor in comparison to the information given by Fuchs, who had a much more intimate understanding of the research being done, as revealed by records of Fuchs' detailed transmissions in the now-opened Soviet archives. There was also significant information provided independently of Fuchs by the young scientist Theodore Alvin Hall, as well as a number of other agents, the identities of whom have not yet been fully established. In any case, though, it is clear that Fuchs' data was most valuable of all of the Soviet atomic spies, giving a range of specific information on everything from nuclear physics details, production of the plants for uranium enrichment, and the exact values for the bomb design itself.The content and value of Fuchs' data for the Soviet program is discussed thoroughly in David Holloway, Stalin and the bomb : the Soviet Union and atomic energy, 1939- 1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Holloway based his assessment of the value of Fuchs' data in particular from the intelligence transcripts and the reactions of key Soviet personnel—especially Igor Kurchatov—to Fuchs' data. The exact use of espionage information by the Soviets was somewhat complicated, due to mutual distrust of the espionage data and the Soviet scientists themselves by Stalin and Beria: see Soviet atomic bomb project for more information. 


David Greenglass was spared execution in exchange for his testimony. More importantly, his wife, who according to the Venona decrypts was given a code name, was never was even indicted. He spent 10 years in prison and was released in 1960, and has lived under an assumed name since his release. Decades later, in late 2001, Greenglass admitted that he had committed perjury when he testified about the typing activity of his sister Ethel.  Greenglass said he chose to falsely testify against his sister in order to protect his wife and children.



Controversy

From the beginning of their trial through the present, the Rosenberg case has been a controversial issue, with individual opinions falling roughly among ideological lines. There are a number of points of contention which still hold, even after the revelation of many hundreds of pages of previously secret evidence.


The Rosenbergs' children

The Rosenbergs' two sons, Robert and Michael, were orphaned by the execution, and no relatives dared adopt them for fear of ostracism or worse. They were finally adopted by the songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne. Abel Meeropol (under the pen name of Lewis Allan) wrote the classic anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit," made famous by singer Billie Holiday.  He also co-wrote (with Earl Robinson) The House I Live In, made famous in a short film starring Frank Sinatra to promote the war effort under a theme of tolerance for all types of Americans.  (This song has a line referring to "My neighbors white and black" which was omitted from the film and Frank Sinatra's recorded versions.  In the film all the characters, even the members of Sinatra's band are white.)  Robert and Michael co-wrote a book about the experience, We are your sons: The legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975), and Robert wrote another book in 2004, An execution in the family: One son's journey. In 1990, Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a non-profit foundation which provides support for children whose parents are Left-wing activists involved in court cases.


Michael's daughter, Ivy Meeropol, directed a 2004 documentary about her grandparents, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.



Popular culture



Notes





See also



Further reading


  • Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, Henry Holt (1983), hardcover, ISBN 0030490367


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