Rosenberg Fund for Children

New Books, Startling Developments

I’ve been asked hundreds of times since starting the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990 about books I would recommend to people who want to learn more about the Rosenberg Case. Recently I’ve lamented that no thorough analysis of the entire case that I respected had been published since Walter and Miriam Schneir’s last revision of Invitation to an Inquest in 1984, and that book became obsolete with the publication of the Venona Transcriptions in 1995.

But the drought has ended. Three excellent new books will be published in 2010! Two of them focus on my parents’ case and a third is tangentially related to it.

In fact the first, Emily and David Alman’s, Exoneration, The Rosenberg-Sobell Case in the 21st Century, is now out. The book’s authors founded the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case. As I wrote here in May, this book is unique in that it tells the inside story of a very successful organizing effort, and explores the issue of anti-Semitism in my parents’ case in greater depth than any previous book.

Exoneration's central thesis is that the government pulled a “bait and switch” which transformed some of the defendants’ work in 1945 to provide military industrial information to the Soviet Union when it was our ally, into a treasonous spy ring that gave the “secret of the Atomic Bomb” to our arch enemy at the height of the cold war. This book is a “must read” for anyone interested in the case. I urge you to order it through your local independent bookstore or directly from the publisher: www.greenelmspress.com.

The second book, Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case, by Walter Schneir, edited with a preface and afterword by Miriam Schneir, will be released by Melville House on September 14th. This posthumously published work (Walter died in April, 2009) presents Walter Schneir’s final meticulous research into my parents’ case.

For decades investigators have revealed how my parents were framed, but no one has presented such a persuasive argument for what actually happened. Walter Schneir has unraveled one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries, and reaches startling conclusions that I am not yet at liberty to reveal. I will be introducing Miriam Schneir when she discusses this new work on Tuesday, October 5th, at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA. I urge you to place an advance order with the Odyssey Bookshop today.

The final book of the year, Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice, published by Bunin & Bannigan, is by Miriam Moskowitz. It is a memoir of her experiences as a co-defendant in the Brothman case, often referred to as the dress rehearsal for my parents’ case.

Miriam was convicted of obstructing justice and sentenced to two years in prison. While awaiting trial she was housed at the women’s house of detention along with my mother. Her trial featured a cast similar to my parents’ trial including judge Irving R. Kaufman, prosecutors Irving Saypol and Roy Cohen, and prosecution witnesses Harry Gold and Elizabeth Bentley.

With great insight Miriam reveals how Judge Kaufman honed his skills, acting as a second prosecutor, to ensure that the jury would return a guilty verdict. Her powerful personal story provides essential background for understanding what it was like to be caught in the crosshairs of the agents of repression during the McCarthy period. Look for this book forthcoming in October.

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Surprise Ending

I don’t consider myself the world’s foremost expert on my parents’ case. For one thing, my brother, who has a better head for details and more patience for pinning them down, can recount more of the finer points than I can. Still, there are very few people in the world who know more about my parents’ case than I do.

One of them, Walter Schneir, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on the case, died in April of 2009. He was in the midst of writing a political memoir about his 50-year career as an investigative journalist. This book contained several chapters on what he’d recently discovered about my parents’ case. After his death, his wife Miriam, also a Rosenberg case expert, extracted these chapters from the larger work, edited them, wrote a preface and an epilogue and found a publisher. The new book, Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case, will be published on October 12th.

It was a humbling experience to discover that despite my expertise, and after 40 years of reading, research, discussion and thought about this major historic event, I was wrong about some of what actually happened. I’ll set the stage, before exploring what this new book has taught me. This requires a brief précis of my parents’ case.

Because the charge against them was Conspiracy to Commit Espionage, my parents’ conviction required no tangible evidence that they had stolen anything or given it to anybody. David and Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother and sister-in-law, testified that Julius with Ethel’s help recruited David into an atomic spy ring in 1944. At that time David, an Army sergeant, worked as a machinist at Los Alamos in New Mexico where the first Atomic Bomb was being built. The Greenglasses swore that David provided a sketch and an accompanying theoretical description of the bomb to Julius Rosenberg in New York City, in September 1945, and that Ethel was present and typed up David’s notes.

David also testified that he gave another set of sketches to Harry Gold who had used the recognition signal “I come from Julius” to identify himself to David when they met. This signal was the only connection drawn between Gold and my father at the trial. Gold swore he was a spy courier transmitting information from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet Union, but that on this one occasion he received information from Greenglass.

FBI documents first made public in the late 1970’s show that Greenglass originally claimed Gold identified himself as “Dave from Pittsburgh” while Gold said he identified himself to Greenglass as “Ben from Brooklyn.” One FBI file shows that after several months in prison, but before the trial, prosecutors brought Gold and Greenglass together to iron out this discrepancy. It was at that meeting that they suddenly “remembered” the name “Julius” was the recognition signal, rather than “Dave” or “Ben.”

On September 11, 2008 almost all of the Grand Jury transcripts that led to my parents’ indictment were made public. David Greenglass’s was not released, but Ruth’s was. Under oath, in front of the Grand Jury as a cooperating witness, Ruth did not mention the September 1945 meeting described above, the atomic bomb sketch, any hand-written notes, Ethel Rosenberg’s typing, or Ethel’s presence at the alleged meeting.

This revelation caused even the mainstream media to question the veracity of Ruth Greenglass’s trial testimony about Ethel’s presence and typing. Yet this was virtually the only evidence presented against my mother at trial. The absence of evidence meshed with material released by the National Security Agency in 1995 (The “Venona” Transcriptions) that indicated Ethel did not engage in spying.

On the same day that the Grand Jury information was revealed, Morton Sobell acknowledged for the first time that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, passed non-atomic, military-industrial information to the USSR. The primary purpose of this work was to help the USSR defeat the Nazis during World War II.

So up until the publication of Final Verdict I would have summarized my parents’ case as follows: Julius Rosenberg engaged in non-atomic espionage during World War II with Morton Sobell and several others. David and Ruth Greenglass were not atomic spies. The Greenglasses were a cowardly couple who committed other illegal acts and under government pressure invented the sketch of the atomic bomb and the September atomic espionage meeting in order to save themselves by helping the government “prove” that Julius Rosenberg was a master atomic spy who organized the theft of the secret of the atomic bomb. Despite the Greenglass’s testimony, neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg was a member of an atomic spy ring that stole the secret of the Atomic Bomb. The United States government knew all along that Ethel Rosenberg was not an espionage agent, but executed them both anyway.

I will explain how Final Verdict alters this picture in my next blog next week.

(Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.)

Listen to a public radio interview with co-author Miriam Schneir, and Rosenberg son Michael Meeropol, here.

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Surprise Ending – Part II

I concluded my blog last week, "Surprise Ending," with an overview of how I would have summarized my parents’ case prior to reading Walter and Miriam’s Schneir’s new book Final Verdict, and promised in my next blog to report on how the new book altered my beliefs. I also reviewed the two key events that led to my parents’ conviction and execution:

1. The Greenglasses swore that David provided a sketch and accompanying notes explaining the sketch to Julius Rosenberg in New York City in September 1945, and that Ethel was present and typed up David’s notes. The prosecution called this “the secret of the atomic bomb.”

2. The June 3, 1945 meeting between David and Ruth Greenglass and spy courier Harry Gold in Albuquerque, during which all the parties agreed Gold had used the code phrase, “I come from Julius.” I neglected, but also should have mentioned, that the three witnesses concurred that at that meeting Gold presented half of a Jello box top, which the Greeneglasses matched to their half. The Greenglasses testified my father had cut a whole box top and given half to Ruth months earlier. This was the only connection between Gold and my father, and implicated Julius in arranging this meeting where a set of sketches related to the triggering device for the atomic bomb were exchanged for a payment.

This is virtually all the evidence implicating Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in atomic espionage that was presented at the trial. Prior to the publication of Final Verdict, I knew from the FBI files that Gold and Greenglass had substituted the name “Julius” for the names “Dave” or “Ben” at a meeting arranged by the FBI while they were in prison awaiting trial. I knew the Jello box presented at trial proved nothing because the only Jello box introduced into evidence was cut by David in the court room as a demonstration model. I also suspected the September 1945 meeting was invented by David and Ruth. Final Verdict sheds new light on all of this.

In 1997 my brother and Walter Schneir discussed the new book, Bombshell, which had just been published. The authors, Albright and Kunstel, were focused on the actions of Theodore Alvin Hall, the youngest atomic scientist, but they also addressed the Rosenberg case. While reading the book Walter realized that Albright and Kunstel had discovered that the original spy reports on atomic espionage from the 1940’s still existed in the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy. The authors referred to “document 464” and commented “This one corresponds to what Greenglass confessed he handed to Julius Rosenberg in September 1945.”

My brother was concerned that if the KGB really had a sketch from David, then our previous belief that David and Ruth had made up their atomic spying under government pressure was false. My brother had obtained from the authors an “inventory” of each document’s contents and shared it with Walter. From this Walter discerned that the sketch described in document 464 contained the same telltale errors as the sketch David presented at my parents’ trial.

David had testified he drew the second sketch from memory in his cell shortly before the trial took place. Could David really have been an atomic spy? And if our father put him up to it could our father have been one as well, even though so much else in the known record of the case made this unlikely?

Walter, in the meantime, went off on another tangent without telling us. He realized the KGB files appeared to cover three sets of incidents relating to atomic espionage. The first two involved Hall and German born atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. Information provided by Hall and Fuchs was transmitted to the Soviet Union within a week, but the third - document 464 - did not arrive in Moscow until December 27, 1945. This date confounded Walter. He could not figure out why there should have been a three-month gap between the September meeting and December delivery. The answer, once he found it, shocked him.

Walter was stymied for years. But after carefully reviewing what the authors of another book, The Haunted Wood, reported the KGB files recorded about atomic espionage, he finally pieced together what actually happened.

In January 1945, the FBI discovered that Julius Rosenberg, who had been working for the Army Signal Corp of Engineers was a member of the Communist Party. As a result, in early February he was fired from that government job. As reported in The Haunted Wood, a KGB file dated February 23, 1945 stated: “The latest events with [Julius Rosenberg], his having been fired, are highly serious…” The KGB memo concluded that the FBI had probably discovered Julius’ work for the Soviets. In response, the KGB immediately terminated Julius Rosenbergs’ career as an active agent and had all his contacts turned over to others.

In Walter’s words, my father was given a pink slip by the KGB in February 1945. Therefore, the supposed September 1945 espionage meeting described above between the Rosenbergs and Greenglass could not have taken place because my father was no longer actively working for the KGB when the meeting was supposed to have occurred.

Instead, Walter discovered that the Greenglasses, ON THEIR OWN, without the Rosenberg’s involvement, met with Soviet agents on December 21, 1945 and delivered the sketch the government called “the secret of the atomic bomb.” That’s why the Greenglass sketch was not delivered to the Soviet Union until December 27th of that year!

I’ll discuss the impact of this startling new information on the phrase “I come from Julius” and the Jello box top in my next blog.

(Read Part 1 here and Part 3 here.)

Listen to a public radio interview with co-author Miriam Schneir, and Rosenberg son Michael Meeropol, here.

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Surprise Ending – Part III

I left off my last blog by promising to discuss the impact of this new information on the phrase “I come from Julius” and the Jello box top.

Walter Schneir notes in Final Verdict that the KGB files as transcribed by The Haunted Wood’s authors “puts the Jello box affair in a startling new perspective.” A KGB file dated February 17, 1945 stated that a recognition signal for that fateful future meeting between Gold and the Greenglasses had not yet been decided upon. The KGB removed Julius from active duty six days later and cut him out of the loop.

Instead, Ruth Greenglass was given the task of creating the recognition signal. In others words Ruth created the Jello box, not Julius! Imagine how my parents felt sitting in the courtroom listening to David and Ruth Greenglass swear that Julius cut the box top in half, gave one half to David and said the courier would have the other half, knowing that they had not been involved in any of this.

No wonder Gold and Greenglass had to be brought together to invent the code phrase “I come from Julius.” Julius was no longer involved when Gold and the Greenglasses met, no one was coming from him, and the KGB would never have permitted either Gold or the Greenglasses to use a code phrase with the first name of an agent they believed had been compromised by the FBI.

These new insights demolish the government’s case that Julius Rosenberg was an atomic spy. All connection between Julius Rosenberg, and the Gold - Greenglass June 1945 meeting at which the sketch related to the bomb's triggering device was supposedly transmitted, has been severed. The September 1945 meeting never took place. And neither of my parents had anything to do with the December 1945 rendezvous at which the Greenglasses – not Julius – gave the sketch the government called "the secret of atomic bomb" to the Soviet Union.

I find this new information staggering. First, it changes my view of my parents’ attorney Emanuel Bloch. His defense at the trial was that the Greenglasses were trying to pin what they did on my parents to save themselves. For decades I thought this was absurd. I was convinced in 1965 by Walter and Miriam’s first book on the case, Invitation to an Inquest, that the government had forced the Greenglasses to make up a crime that never happened, and that Manny Bloch missed the enormity of the fraud perpetrated by the government.

Manny was right and the Schneirs, as well as my brother and I, were wrong. Even my parents’ co-defendant Morton Sobell, who repeatedly said he didn’t really blame the Greenglasses because they were weak, was wrong.

It also changes my view of the Greenglasses. Now I realize that they were much more active spies than I had ever dreamed. They actually did it, and pinned what they did on my parents! The Greenglasses are even more reprehensible than I had imagined.

The Greenglasses greater villainy does not absolve the government. The government played an active role in inventing evidence against both my parents. The government knew the Greenglass sketches were of little value, yet continued to portray my parents as master atomic spies, and knowingly executed two people for a crime they did not commit.

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the "Surprise Ending" blogs about this shocking new book.)

Listen to a public radio interview with co-author Miriam Schneir, and Rosenberg son Michael Meeropol, here.

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