THE MURDER OF THE ROSENBERGS

"Ethel was murdered, you can't put it any other way." --Walter Schneir.

 "We didn't want them to die, we wanted them to talk.” --Robert J. Lamphere, FBI, Espionage Section.

Interesting quotes; and now, decades later, after the McCarthy witch hunts (which were given credibility in the eyes of a stunned America by the execution of the “spies”), and after the end of the cold war, let us look at the facts.  To quote Sargent Joe Friday, of the television series Dragnet:  “Only the facts, ma’am.”

Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, and his wife Ethel, the mother of two young children, were executed at Sing Sing in upstate New York on the evening of 19 June 1953.

Other than having been born Jewish and living in an era when Jews were generally linked with Communism as a result of their contribution to the Spanish Civil war and the struggle for organized Labor, were they really guilty of anything else, or were they a convenient scapegoat used to throw the blame on people other than the real traitors, who to this day are protected by a grateful Government; people too trusted and famous ever to be revealed for what they were?

The Rosenberg lawyer, Emmanuel Bloch was unable to persuade a single atomic scientist to testify to the limited significance of Julius's atomic espionage. The sketches that allegedly held the bomb secrets Julius allegedly received from his brother-in-law David Greenglass and delivered to his Soviet controller were never made public. Not once during the trial nor afterward was the prosecution required to show the actual connection between that information and the Soviet bomb.

Among the most useful of Stalin's nuclear recruits was Theodore Hall, an American biophysicist who gave away the bomb. Hall, who worked at Los Alamos with Klaus Fuchs, provided the Soviets with information vital to the success of their bomb program. Hall justified his deed by claiming he'd been troubled by the prospect of an American atomic weapon monopoly, that at the time the Americans and the Soviets were allies in the war against Hitler, and that the Soviets had saved the West from defeat.

Hall, strangely enough, was questioned but never put on trial or sent to prison!

Joan Hall, Theodore Hall's wife, remembered the evening of the Rosenberg executions: "We followed the case, but we weren't in a position to do anything at that time. Ted still had his links with the network. There was no question of our participating in any of the clemency movement or whatever was going on. So we watched from the sidelines in horror... That evening we had been invited to an evening gathering at the home of a colleague of Ted's in Westchester. We were driving up from Queens where we lived. The road took us parallel to the Hudson River past Ossining, the town where Sing-Sing Prison is. It was eight o'clock, and as we drove by the sun was setting. It was red, and it was large over the river going down. I absent-mindedly switched on the radio and, believe it or not, they were broadcasting the last movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a farewell symphony, which is some of the most sad, heartbreaking music that exists. It was a symphony that Ted and I were both very familiar with... So we rode along listening to Mahler and watching the sun go down and feeling indescribable. We didn't say anything, not a word. We got to our colleague's house and did what people have to do in gatherings like that, then went home...Of course, we were thinking, God, that could have been us..."

Shiner asserts  that Ethel Rosenberg was not a Soviet spy, and also that her husband Julius did not receive bomb lens mold sketches from David Greenglass, who'd been employed while in the army at Los Alamos.  He further asserts that if anyone was guilty of stealing atom bomb secrets it was David Greenglass, Ethel's brother.

Invitation to an Inquest ( Schneir, Walter (1983). Invitation to an Inquest. Pantheon Books ISBN 0-394-71496-2.)

In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in London, England. Charged with espionage he gave up his courier Harry Gold. Gold was arrested on 23 May, 1950, his FBI statement led the agency to David Greenglass who was taken into custody 16 June, 1950, Julius Rosenberg a month later, Ethel a month after that.

The key element in the prosecution's case was an alleged meeting in the Rosenberg apartment on an afternoon in September 1945. Ethel was supposed to have sat down at a Remington portable machine and typed out a twelve-page report on the bomb supplied to her by her brother. Walter Schneir maintains that the meeting never took place. Julius had lost his army-related job a few months before the alleged meeting and his Soviet spymasters had suspended his activity on their behalf.

According to Elizabeth Bentley, an American agent who turned herself in to the FBI in 1945, Julius was a key figure in a cell of engineers involved in industrial espionage. In 1944, the New York Cityrezidentura (the head agent handler for the NYC area) warned Moscow that perhaps Julius was being overworked. But this was not for his work on bomb information.

The release in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s of once top-secret documents pertaining to the Soviet atomic project has determined that the Greenglass-Rosenberg information was of limited value. Igor Kurchatov, a leading Soviet nuclear scientist, said the material received from David Greenglass via the Julius Rosenberg network provided at best limited corroboration of what had already been obtained from Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall.

A book by Vladimir Lota published in 2002 with the title The GRU and the Atomic Bomb achieved best-seller status in Russia and was soon followed by a competing volume, The KGB and the Atomic Bomb In Prof. Lota's determination to ensure the GRU received maximum credit, he lumped Robert Oppenheimer with Fuchs, and the Rosenbergs.

(in 2002, Russian historian Vladimir Lota published The GRU and the Atom Bomb.)  

Read more:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Iowa-Born-Soviet-Trained.html#ixzz24eaaTYsZ

“Spies: The Rise and Fall of the K.G.B. in America,” is by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, a former Soviet espionage agent.  In this book they maintain that: “For more than half a century, Oppenheimer has been denounced as the most damaging Soviet spy inside the Manhattan Project or defended as an honorable man undone by false and politically motivated charges. K.G.B. documents demonstrate that he was not a spy, although not for lack of K.G.B. effort.” and he added, “The news that Julius Rosenberg recruited not one atomic spy but two was a total surprise.”

Julius Rosenberg’s code name was Liberal. That his wife apparently was not given a covert identity, Mr. Haynes said, was not surprising, because she was “not active in her own right, but just as an aide to Julius,” he said.

“His wife knows about her husband’s work,” according to Mr. Vassiliev’s notes from one K.G.B. memo. “She could be used independently, but should not be overworked — poor health.”

Mr. Vassiliev’s notebooks contain no references to Ethel Rosenberg’s typing her brother’s notes — the crucial trial evidence against her — but said “this is a lack of evidence, not negative evidence, simply a lack of corroboration.”

“The notebooks show that Greenglass delivered more and richer information about Los Alamos than he later admitted,” Mr. Haynes said.

Mr. Greenglass’s information “was unqualified and far from polished,” for which agents blamed, in part, his “insufficient qualifications” — as a machinist, rather than a scientist or engineer. The authors concluded, though, that he provided “an impressive list of materials from an Army sergeant with only limited technical education.”

Mr. Greenglass, sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, was released in 1960. Through his lawyer, he declined to comment on the latest allegations.

 In the course of the trial Julius took the fifth when asked if he was a Party member and insisted on the couple's total innocence.

While the judge, Irving R.Kaufman and prosecutors Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn were Jews, not a single Jew was allowed on the jury. Julius Rosenberg was found guilty, sentenced to death. Ethel Rosenberg was also found guilty, sentenced to die with her husband. Morton Sobell was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years. David Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years. The U S Supreme Court refused to review the Rosenberg case. On 19 June 1953 the court reversed a last-minute stay of execution.

In a letter dated 16 June 1953, Ethel reminded President Eisenhower that Nazis had received American mercy. “Today”, she wrote, while she and her husband languished on death row, "these ghastly mass butchers, these obscene racists are graciously receiving the benefits of mercy and in many instances being reinstated in public office."

There is no record of a reply.

In his denial of a petition for Executive Clemency, Eisenhower said the Rosenbergs's crime “could very well result in the deaths of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.” On the day of the executions, the number expanded. The Rosenbergs, he said, "may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world."

Ike wrote, in a letter to his son David: "... to the Rosenberg case... in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one. She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring... if there would be any commuting of the woman's sentence without the man's then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women."

Kim Philby, the convicted KGB spy in the highest circles of the English government maintained that all Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were ever really guilty of was being small-time couriers, that they had no connection to the key KGB atomic bomb spies, and further that he never imagined they would be executed.

A week before the execution the FBI presented their lawyer Emmanuel Bloch with a list of twenty-five names. If Julius and Ethel affixed their signatures to the list, branding the men and women on it Soviet spies, the couple might have been spared. Ethel was little more than a hostage to the process and died as hostages do when the demands of their captors have been rejected.

Walter Schneir: "What if Julius and Ethel had confessed? Could they have escaped execution if they had tried to meet the government halfway?... My own conclusion is that it would have been difficult, probably impossible, for them to save themselves. The only sure-fire way would have been for both, Ethel as well as Julius, to have agreed to everything, including all the atomic espionage deeds they had never done, and then for Julius to have testified at trials and Congressional hearings against the very friends he himself had recruited."

On that Friday evening in June, 1953 with the Shabbat hour approaching, FBI agents with stenographers standing by were at the scene to hear last minute confessions. Rabbi Irving Koslowe, the Sing Sing rabbi, attended the executions. After Julius had been pronounced dead, the rabbi approached Ethel, and said: "Julius is gone. Do you have any names?" “No”, she replied, “I have no names”.

There had been was a hasty re-scheduling of the executions to beat the 8:13 p.m. Shabbat deadline. Julius who went first was pronounced dead at 8:06:45. It turned out Ethel, the executioner’s last client, was harder to kill. The first attempt at killing Ethel was at 8:11:30. But she needed a second jolt and wasn't pronounced dead until 8:16, three minutes into the Sabbath.

So were they guilty of everything they were charged with?  The Venona papers (Venona was a top-secret government operation involving cryptanalysts, linguists and mathematicians who decoded thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence cables sent to agents in the U.S.) were not allowed to be presented at the trial, only paraphrased by the FBI to explicitly prove the extent of Rosenbergs guilt.

The papers didn’t finger Julius as an atomic spy. Rather, they identified him as someone engaged in low-level industrial espionage.

The United States government supposedly executed two people for the reason that they stole the greatest secret known to mankind. The judge said that they committed a crime worse than murder, and that they caused the Korean War. President Eisenhower said "I am denying clemency" for essentially the same reason. That’s why they were executed, and Venona is proof that neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for a crime they never committed.

Not long after the trial, the New York Times reported that Dr. James Beckerley, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission Classification Office was not convinced of the extent of their guilt.  “The atom bomb and hydrogen bomb were not stolen from us by spies.” He said.  He went on, “Atom bombs and hydrogen bombs are not matters that can be stolen and transmitted in the form of information.” 

Dr. Harold Urey testified in a March 3, 1946 congressional hearing that, "Detailed data on the atomic bomb would require 80 or 90 volumes of close print which only a scientist or engineer would be able to read."

 Henry Linschitz, who helped assemble the Nagasaki bomb, described Greenglass’s sketches as "garbled" and "highly incomplete." He concluded that it was "not possible in any technologically useful way to condense the results of a $2 billion development effort into a diagram, drawn by a high school graduate machinist on a single sheet of paper."

Previously there had been a major effort on the part of the government to discredit Jews who had helped so much with labor unions and scientific research yet this same government had opened the US to NAZI scientists with Jewish blood on their hands; offering them a home, prestige, and massive salaries to aid the US to become the dominant world power.   By murdering the Rosenbergs the government suppressed dissidence in the US, crippled the labor unions, and gaged Hollywood, and opened the door for the dark days of the McCarthy witch hunt to come.

The last irony in the case came in 2008, when the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, acknowledged that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military spying, but not in atomic espionage.