Julius
Rosenberg was
born in New York on 12th May, 1918. He
attended the Hebrew High School and the City College of New York,
where he graduated in 1939 with a degree in electrical engineering.
Later that year he married Ethel Greenglass,
a clerical worker and an active trade unionist.
During the Second World War Rosenberg was employed
as a civilian inspector for the Army Signal Corps, but was dismissed
in 1945 as a result of allegations that he was a member of the Communist
Party. Rosenberg now opened a small
machine shop in Manhattan with his brother-in-law, David
Greenglass. However, the business did badly and Greenglass left
the partnership.
In 1950 Klaus Fuchs, head of the physics
department of the British nuclear research centre at Harwell, was
arrested and charged with espionage. Fuchs confessed that he had been
passing information to the Soviet Union since working on the Manhattan
Project during the Second World War.
The
FBI
were desperate to discover the names of the spies who had worked with
Klaus Fuchs
while he had been in America. Elizabeth
Bentley, a former member of the American
Communist Party, had in 1945 given FBI agents eighty names of
people she believed were involved in espionage. At the time it had
been impossible to acquire enough information to bring the suspects
to court. These people were interviewed again and one of them, Harry
Gold, confessed that he had acted as Fuchs's
courier. He also named David
Greenglass
as being a member of the spy ring.
Greenglass was now interviewed and after confessing, claimed that
Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were also
members of the spy ring. In
July 1950 Julius and his wife were arrested by the FBI
and accused of spying for the Soviet Union. The couple were charged
with conspiracy to commit espionage.
Virtually the only evidence
against them was supplied by David
Greenglass.
He claimed that Julius had given atom bomb secrets
that he in turn passed to Harry Gold, a
convicted Soviet spy. The defense attorney, Emmanuel
Bloch,
argued that Greenglass was lying in order to gain revenge because
he blamed Rosenberg for their failed business venture.
The jury believed the evidence of Greenglass and both Julius and his
wife, Ethel Rosenberg, were found
guilty and sentenced to death. A large number of people were shocked
by the severity of the sentence as they had not been found guilty
of treason. In fact, they had been tried under the terms of the Espionage
Act that had been passed in 1917 to deal with the American anti-war
movement.
Afterwards it became clear that the government
did not believe the Rosenbergs would be executed. J.
Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had warned
that history would not be kind to a government responsible for orphaning
the couple's two young sons on such poor evidence. Rumours began to
circulate that the government would be willing to spare the couple's
life if they confessed and gave evidence about other Communist
Party spies.
The case created a great deal of controversy in Europe where it was
argued that the Rosenbergs were victims of anti-semitism and McCarthyism.
Nobel prize-winner, Jean-Paul
Sartre,
called the case "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole
nation".
Julius Rosenberg
and Ethel Rosenberg remained on death
row for twenty-six months. They both refused to confess and provide
evidence against others and they were eventually executed on 19th
June, 1953. As one political commentator pointed out, they died because
they refused to confess and name others.
(1)
Ethel Rosenberg, letter to Julius
Rosenberg, on hearing that their conviction had been upheld by the
U.S. Circuit Court (26th February, 1952)
Last night at 10.00 o'clock,
I heard the shocking news. At the present moment, with little or no
detail to hand, it is difficult for me to make any comment, beyond
the expression of horror at the shameless haste with which the government
appears to be pressing for our liquidation.
(2)
Julius
Rosenberg, letter to
Ethel
Rosenberg (13th
April, 1952)
Keep your chin up Ethel if we
must suffer through this nightmare then in the manner we conduct ourselves
we will contribute to the general welfare of the people by serving
notice on the tyrants that they cannot get away with political frame-ups
such as ours. It takes a lot of time and hard work to get them to
overcome their inertia but now that grass root sentiments are aroused
public opinion will have its effect. We've left a big chunk of suffering
behind us these last two years and we are coming closer to our emancipation
from all this torture.
(3)
Julius
Rosenberg, letter to
Ethel
Rosenberg (31st
May, 1953)
What does one write to his beloved
when faced with the very grim reality that in eighteen days, on their
14th wedding anniversary, it is ordered that they be put to death?
Over and over again, I have tried to analyze in the most objective
manner possible the answers to the position of our government in our
case. Everything indicates only one answer - that the wishes of certain
madmen are being followed in order to use this case as a coercive
bludgeon against all dissenters.
I know that our children and our family are suffering a great deal
right now and it is natural that we be concerned for their welfare.
However, I think we will have to concentrate our strength on ourselves.
First, we want to make sure that we stand up under the terrific pressure,
and then we ought to try to contribute some share to the fight.
(4)
The National World (7th March, 1997)
Breaking decades of silence on
perhaps the most sensational espionage case of the Cold War, a retired
Soviet spy says Julius Rosenberg helped organize a 1940s espionage
ring for Moscow but was not directly involved in stealing U.S. secrets
about the atomic bomb.
Rosenberg
and his wife Ethel were executed in the Sing Sing electric chair in
1953 for what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the "crime
of the century" - helping the Soviet Union get their hands on
blueprints for the atomic bomb in World War II. The Rosenbergs went
to their deaths, the only Americans ever executed for spying, insisting
they were innocent.
The new twist in the long-argued
story of treachery comes from Alexander Feklisov, 83, a retired KGB
officer who has stepped forward with a detailed account of the Rosenbergs'
role. Feklisov said he held clandestine meetings with Julius Rosenberg
in New York from 1943 to 1946 and claims to be the only Soviet intelligence
officer alive with first-hand knowledge of the Rosenberg case.
He told The Washington Post
and The New York Times that Rosenberg passed valuable secrets
about U.S. military electronics but played only a peripheral role
in Soviet atomic espionage. And he said Ethel Rosenberg did not actively
spy but probably was aware that her husband was involved.
(5)
After the execution of the Rosenburgs, their two sons were adopted
by Abel Meeropol, the writer of the anti-lynching
song, Strange Fruit. Robert
Meeropol was interviewed by the Revolutionary Worker magazine
on 19th September, 1999.
Q: Your parents were executed
for their political beliefs. Could you tell our readers how this happened?
A: My parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were members of the American
Communist Party and they were arrested in the summer of 1950 and charged
with conspiracy to commit espionage. More particularly, they were
charged with conspiring to steal the secret of the atomic bomb and
give it to the Soviet Union at the end of World War 2. There was no
evidence presented at trial that they were directly involved in the
transmission of anything to the Soviet Union. Testimony came from
alleged co-conspirators, that is, people facing prison sentences or
even the death penalty who agreed as part of a government deal to
say my parents were involved with these other people.
Q: You've uncovered evidence that shows your parents were framed -
what government agencies were involved in this?
A: Back in the 1970s, we sued under the newly strengthened Freedom
of Information Act. We asked for the files of the FBI, the CIA, the
National Security Agency, Air Force intelligence, Army intelligence,
the State Department, etc. I think we asked for information from 17
different agencies and we got information from all of them. This whole
effort sort of went across-the-board of the government bureaucracy.
We got a lot of previously secret documents. And what did these previously
secret documents show? They demonstrated that my parents did not get
a fair trial - that the trial judge was in secret communication with
the prosecutors before, during and after the trial; that the trial
judge, according to FBI documents, had actually agreed to give a death
penalty to at least my father and possibly to both of my parents before
the defense even began to present its case; and that the trial judge
interfered with the appeals process and kept the FBI informed of developments
during the appeals process and was actually pushing for a rapid execution
even when he was sitting on further appeals in the case.
The
chief prosecution witnesses, David and Ruth Greenglass and Harry Gold,
all changed their stories. In their initial statements, for instance,
David Greenglass said Ethel Rosenberg wasn't involved in anything.
Then during the trial he testified that Ethel Rosenberg was present
during their meetings and typed up the minutes to their meetings.
We also have files showing that a few weeks before the trial the prosecuting
attorneys, in briefing some of the Congressmen who were involved with
the Atomic Energy Commission, stated that the case against Ethel Rosenberg
was virtually non-existent but they had to develop a case against
her in order to get a stiff prison sentence - to convince my father
to cooperate. And then a few days later David and Ruth Greenglass
gave the new statements that she typed up the minutes - and then that
became the evidence that led to her conviction.
Q: Why do you think the government was so determined to execute your
parents?
A: My parents were unknown. They were just two poor people, members
of the Communist Party living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Then they got arrested and charged with being master atomic spies.
When my father refused to name other people, then they arrested my
mother to get him to name other people. As the National Committee
to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case grew and as the defense that
my parents mounted through their letters grew, articulating the fact
that it was all based on phony government frame-ups, they became more
and more dangerous. General Lesley Groves, who was the military general
in charge of the production of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New
Mexico - where my parents supposedly engineered the stealing of the
secret of the atomic bomb - said he believed that the information
that went out in the Rosenberg case was of minor value but he'd never
want anybody to say that because he felt in the greater scheme of
things that the Rosenbergs deserved to hang.
Q; What happened to you and your brother Michael after your parents
were executed?
A: The FBI came to my parents very soon after the arrest and said,
essentially, talk or die. They said think about what will happen to
your children if you don't talk - and if you talk, Julius, you'll
have a prison term and Ethel, you'll be released and you can take
care of the kids. Well, they offered the same deal to David and Ruth
Greenglass, who also had two kids, and they took the deal. So Greenglass
got a prison sentence and Ruth was never indicted and never spent
a day in jail even though she swore she helped steal the secret of
the atomic bomb. Quite a contrast with my mother.
There
were so many people who put themselves on the line to save me when
I was a kid that I grew up with the most abiding respect for anybody
who would take a chance in order to make this society a better place
for all of us. So I grew up sort of as a child of the movement and
it was no accident that I got involved first in civil rights and then
anti-war stuff and then ultimately SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society) in college.
Q:
You've published letters your parents wrote to you from prison. Is
there anything about them you could share with us?
A: My parents' last letter to me and my brother stands out for me.
They wrote that they died secure in the knowledge that others would
carry on after them. And I think that has multiple meanings. I think
it meant, on a personal level to me and my brother, that other people
would take care of us after they were no longer able to do so. But
I also think it meant on the political level their political beliefs,
the principles that they stood up for, their refusal to lie, their
refusal to be pawns of the McCarthyite hysteria, in other words their
refusal to be used to attack the movements that they believed in -
that even though they were no longer able to carry on those struggles,
others would be able to carry them on their absence. And I saw that
as a call for me to do the same. And in some ways I've dedicated my
life to carrying on in their absence. The Rosenberg Fund for Children
is my effort to justify that trust.
The
Rosenberg Fund for Children is a public foundation that provides for
the educational and emotional needs of children in this country whose
parents have been targeted in the course of their progressive activities.
What that actually means is that we find people today in this country
who are suffering the same kind of attacks that my parents suffered
and if they have children we provide the kind of assistance that my
brother and I were provided with. We connect them with progressive
institutions so the kids can be raised in a supportive environment.
Some of them are the children of political prisoners, whether they
be Puerto Rican nationalists, whether they be ex-Black Panthers, whether
they be white revolutionaries, whether they be people who have fought
against racial discrimination or sexual harassment on the job and
been fired, whether they be activists who have been bombed, maimed,
killed in the course of their activism. There are people like this
all over the country who have either been attacked by government forces
of repression or right-wing non-governmental oppression or what I
call corporate harassment by corporations trying to fight against
their progressive work. We just had our ninth anniversary. We gave
away $100,000 to help slightly over 100 children in 1998. We've really
been growing by leaps and bounds. The demands upon us have been increasing
and we'll probably give away $150,000 this year.
(6)
Michael Ellison, The Guardian,
(6th December, 2001)
One of the most enduring controversies
of the cold war, the trial and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
as Soviet spies, was revived
last night when her convicted brother said that he had lied at the
trial to save himself and his wife.
"As
a spy who turned his family in, I don't care," David Greenglass,
79, said on his first public appearance for more than 40 years.
"I sleep very well.
I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister."
Mr Greenglass, who lives
under an assumed identity, was sentenced to 15 years and released
from prison in 1960.
He said in a taped interview
on last night's CBS television programme 60 Minutes that he, too,
gave the Russians atomic secrets and information about a newly invented
detonator.
He said he gave false testimony
because he feared that his wife Ruth might be charged, and that he
was encouraged by the prosecution to lie.
He gave the court the most
damning evidence against his sister: that she had typed up his spying
notes, intended for transmission to Moscow, on a Remington portable
typewriter.
Now he says that this testimony
was based on the recollection of his wife rather than his own first-hand
knowledge.
"I don't know who
typed it, frankly, and to this day I can't remember that the typing
took place," he said last night. "I had no memory of that
at all - none whatsoever."
(7)
William A. Reuben, review of The Secret World of American Communism
in the journal Rights (1995).
As if progressives had not in recent years been battered
and bludgeoned enough already, we now learn that J. Edgar Hoover,
Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers
& company really got it right: all Communists are/were actual,
or wannabee, Russian spies. We also learn that during the Cold War
years (and even before) hordes of leftists were abroad in the land,
stealing "our" atomic secrets (and God only knows what else)
for delivery to Joseph Stalin.
In recent days, this message
has been dunned into our ears by such opinion-makers as William F.
Buckley, Jr., George Will, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Theodore Draper,
Michael Thomas, Edward Jay Epstein and David Garrow in the pages of
The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentar,
Wall Street Journal, The National Review, the "McNeil-Lehrer
NewsHour," and lots more (without a dissenting voice to be heard
anywhere).
This all-out blitz has
been fueled by The Secret World of American Communism, written
by Professor Harvey Klehr, of Emory University, John Earl Haynes,
of the Library of Congress, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, formerly
of the Comintern Archives in Moscow at the Russian Center for the
Preservation and Study of Documents in Recent History. The authors
claim to have put together a "massive documentary record"
from the hitherto secret Comintern archives, revealing "the dark
side of American communism." These documents establish, they
say, proof both of "Soviet espionage in America" and of
the American Communist Party's "inherent" connection with
Soviet espionage operations and with its espionage services; and that
such spy activities were considered, by both Soviet and the American
CP leaders, "normal and proper."
Such assertions are not
all that different from what J. Edgar Hoover (and his stooges) were
saying half a century ago. But what reinforces the authors' statements
are not only the documents from the Russian archives they claim to
have uncovered, but also the imposing editorial advisory committee
assembled to give this project an eminent scholarly cachet. This editorial
advisory committee consists of 30 academics whose names are listed
opposite the title page. They include seven Yale University professors,
along with professors from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Brandeis,
Southern Methodist, Pittsburgh and Rochester universities. There are
also an equal number of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
and of officials of various Russian archives.
Reproduced in the book
are 92 documents offered by the authors as evidence of what they say
is the United States Communist Party's continuous history of "covert
activity." These documents, according to Professor Steven Merrit
Minor in The New York Times Book Review, reveal that American Communists
"relayed atomic secrets to the Kremlin" and also support
the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and others that the American Communist
Party was engaged in underground conspiracies against the American
Government. The authors also say that the documents suggest that those
"who continued to claim otherwise were either willfully naive
or, more likely, dishonest."
In actuality, many of the
documents are ambiguously worded or in some sort of code known only
to the senders and recipients. They often contain illegible words,
numbers and signatures; relate to unidentifiable persons, places and
events; and are preoccupied with bookkeeping matters, inner-party
hassles or with protective security measures against FBI and Trotskyite
spies. Most importantly, not a single document reproduced in this
volume provides evidence of espionage. Ignoring all evidence that
contradicts their thesis, the authors attempt to make a case relying
on assumption, speculation, and invention about the archival material
and, especially, by equating secrecy with illegal spying.
The book's high points
are sections relating to what the authors call atomic espionage and
the CP Washington spy apparatus. As someone who has carefully examined
the archives at the Russian Center, and who over the past four decades
has studied the trial transcripts of the major Cold War "spy"
cases, I can state that "The Secret World of American Communism,"
notwithstanding its scholarly accouterments, is a disgracefully shoddy
work, replete with errors, distortions and outright lies. As a purported
work of objective scholarship, it is nothing less than a fraud.
In this context, certain
facts ought to be noted:
* The Moscow archives contain
no material relating to these key figures in the Cold War "spy"
cases: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Ruth and David Greenglass,
Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, Elizabeth Bentley, Hede Massing, Noel Field,
Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Colonel Boris
Bykov and J. Peters. In my possession is a document, responding to
my request, and dated October 12, 1992, signed by Oleg Naumov, Deputy
Director of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents
of Recent History, attesting that the Center has no files on, or relating
to, any of the above-named persons.
* Despite the authors'
assertion that the documents in this volume show that the CPUSA's
elaborate underground apparatus collaborated with Soviet espionage
services and also engaged in stealing the secrets of America's atomic
bomb project, not one of the 92 documents reproduced in this book
supports such a conclusion.
* The authors claim the
documents corroborate Whittaker Chambers' allegations about a Communist
underground in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, and while the authors
concede that Alger Hiss's name does not appear in any of the documents,
they assert that the "subsequent documentation has further substantiated
the case that Hiss was a spy." Yet, not one document from the
Russian archives supports any of these damning statements.
A total of 15 pages in
"Secret World" have some reference either to Hiss or Chambers.
By my count, these contain 73 separate misrepresentations of fact
or downright lies. For example, the authors claim that J. Peters "played
a key role in Chambers' story" that Hiss was a Soviet spy. Peters
played no role in Chambers' story about espionage. Chambers said that
the key figure in his espionage activities with Hiss was a Russian
named "Colonel Boris Bykov," a character whose identity
the FBI spent years futilely trying to establish.
The authors claim Chambers
testified he worked in the Communist underground in the 1930s with
groups of government employees who "provided the CPUSA with information
about sensitive government activities." In fact, Chambers testified
to the exact contrary on 12 separate occasions.
References to Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg and their case can be found on five pages. In those
pages, by my tally, are 31 falsehoods or distortions of evidence.
For example, the authors say the Rosenbergs' conviction was for "involvement
in...atomic espionage." In fact they were convicted of conspiracy,
and no evidence was ever produced that they ever handed over any information
about anything to anyone.
The authors also say the
Rosenbergs were arrested as a result of information the authorities
obtained from Klaus Fuchs, which led to Harry Gold, who led them to
David Greenglass, who implicated the Rosenbergs. All of these statements
are based on an FBI press release. In fact, no evidence has ever been
produced that indicates that Fuchs, Gold or Greenglass ever mentioned
the Rosenbergs before their arrests.
Discussing one other "spy"
case, that of Judith Coplon, against whom all charges were dismissed,
the authors in typical contempt of official court records write that
"there was not the slightest doubt of her guilt." In comments
running no less than half a page, they invent a scenario of the Coplon
case that contains 14 outright lies and distortions. For instance,
the authors say she "stole" an FBI report and she was arrested
when she handed over' the stolen report "to a Soviet citizen."
All these statements are false; in her two trials, no evidence was
ever adduced that she ever stole anything or that she ever handed
over anything to anyone.
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