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The Rosenberg Case (c) Robert Meeropol, April 1, 2002

<PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION>

Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950 a few weeks after the Korean War began. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. The charge against the Rosenbergs was vague - "Conspiracy to Commit Espionage." But what they were really tried and sentenced for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the USSR.

The Rosenbergs were tried and found guilty in March, 1951. Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman pronounced the death sentence in early April. The Rosenbergs' attorneys' worked for over two years to have the verdict overturned. They appealed to the Supreme Court nine times, but the Court refused to review the record. Neither President Truman, nor President Eisenhower, responded favorably to their two requests for clemency.

Because the charge was conspiracy, their conviction required no tangible evidence that they had stolen anything or given it to anybody. The key government witnesses were all charged with the same conspiracy and received more favorable treatment in return for testifying that the Rosenbergs were guilty. 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 this time David, an army sergeant, worked as a machinist at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, where the first Atomic Bomb was being built. The Greenglasses swore that David provided one set of sketches and an accompanying theoretical description of the bomb to Julius Rosenberg in 1945, and that Ethel was present and typed the notes of their meeting. In return for the Greenglass' cooperation, Ruth Greenglass, who swore she helped steal what the prosecution called "the most important scientific secret ever known to mankind," was never even indicted.

David also testified that he gave another set of sketches to Harry Gold who used the recognition signal "Julius sent me" to identify himself to David when they met. 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, that prosecutors brought Gold and Greenglass together to iron out this discrepancy. At this meeting they suddenly "remembered" the name "Julius" in the recognition signal.

The Rosenbergs testified and denied all charges. They invoked the Fifth Amendment refusing to answer repeated prosecution questions about their political affiliations. During the McCarthy period, many felt that such a refusal to answer was an admission of Communist Party membership and that all Communists were spies for the Soviet Union.

Judge Kaufman's sentencing speech made the political context of the Rosenberg case clear. He justified his death sentence: "I consider your crimes 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 fifty thousand and who knows how many millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." He concluded their: "[l]ove for their cause dominated their lives - it was even greater than their love for their children.

Despite Kaufman's claim, no scientists stated that the Russians perfected their bomb more quickly than expected. In fact, a chorus of scientists including Harold Urey and J. Robert Oppenheimer stated that there was no "secret" of the Atomic Bomb. Atomic scientists did not view the Greenglass sketches until years after the Rosenbergs' execution. Once they did they agreed with a colleague's assessment that the Greenglass material was: "too incomplete, ambiguous and even incorrect to be of any service or value to the Russians in shortening the time required to develop their nuclear bombs."

Recent revelations, including the release by the CIA of the "VENONA" transcriptions in 1995, have caused the mass media to renew prior conclusions that the Rosenbergs were guilty. The transcriptions, however, do not point to the Rosenbergs' involvement in atomic espionage. Julius is never mentioned by name, and the spy code-named "Antenna" and later "Liberal," who the government claims was Julius Rosenberg, was engaged in military/industrial rather than atomic espionage. Even more remarkably, the key reference to Antenna/Liberal's wife states that she was not an espionage agent!

The validity of any of this repeatedly reworked secret government material is open to question. If every word of these transcriptions were true, the following summary remains accurate: Neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg was a member of an atomic spy ring that stole the secret of the Atomic Bomb. Neither committed the crime they were executed for. And the United States government knew all along that Ethel Rosenberg was not an espionage agent.

© R. Meeropol 2002

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