Part 17

Early on the evening of Wednesday, September 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko, an obscure twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, walked into the editorial offices of the _Ottawa Journal_ with an armful of secret Soviet files. When the Canadian authorities, with Gouzenko’s help, translated the 109 documents he had pilfered, they discovered that the country was honeycombed with Russian spies who were part of an extensive network that covered Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Perhaps the most important name that was found in the Gouzenko papers was that of Allan Nunn May, a British atomic scientist, who was then working at the Montreal Laboratory of the National Research Council. It was through Dr. May’s efforts that, on August 9, 1945, Colonel Nicolai Zabotin, the Russian Embassy’s military attaché, was able to report to Moscow that he had obtained samples of Uranium 233. May was arrested when he returned to England in late September and, after pleading guilty to a charge of violating the Official Secrets Act, was sentenced to ten years in prison.

The secret service agents who examined Dr. May’s papers had found the name ‘Fuchs’ scrawled on several pages of notes. For some reason, no attention was paid to this name although Dr. Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, a German-born physicist who was a naturalized British subject, had just returned to England from a tour of duty with the Manhattan Project, the American atomic bomb station at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It wasn’t until four years later that Fuchs was arrested, and immediately confessed that he had been supplying atomic information to a Soviet courier who regularly visited him in New York and New Mexico. He did not know the name of the courier but indicated that he had appeared to have an excellent knowledge of chemistry.

When he was shown photographs of various American chemists who were suspected of espionage, he had pointed to one and said, “That is the man!” The photograph he had identified was that of a biochemist named Harry Gold who was employed by the Pennsylvania Sugar Company in Philadelphia. It was Gold, Fuchs said, who had met him in various parts of the United States and to whom he had turned over certain information for transmission to Anatoli A. Yakovlev, a Russian diplomatic agent in New York. He had first met Gold in Woodside, Queens, in June of 1944, and continued these clandestine meetings until he was transferred to Los Alamos early in 1945.

Upon Gold’s apprehension, he admitted that he had been working as a Soviet espionage agent for more than fifteen years. He had first met Yakovlev, a long-nosed young man who walked “with somewhat of a stoop” and who was known to him only as ‘John,’ in March of 1944, at a Manhattan restaurant. Yakovlev had ordered him to contact Fuchs, who was then working in New York with a British-American atomic team. At the Woodside meeting, the physicist had told Gold that he was “going to give me information. This information was to relate to the application of nuclear fission to the production of a military weapon.” A few weeks later, the two men had met in Brooklyn’s Borough Hall area where Fuchs gave the courier “a package of papers” for transmittal to Yakovlev.

Just before Fuchs left for Los Alamos in February of 1945, Gold saw him in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to the usual package of documents which he had turned over to Gold, Fuchs “made mention of a lens which was being worked on as a part of the atom bomb.” Before the two parted company, they made a date to meet in Santa Fe in June. When Gold told Yakovlev about the lens, the Soviet agent “was very agitated and told me to scour my memory clean so as to elicit any possible scrap of information about this lens.”

Four months later, Gold and Yakovlev met in Volks’ Cafe on 42nd Street and Third Avenue. After the details about meeting Fuchs in Santa Fe had been discussed, Yakovlev told Gold that, on the same trip, he would also have to visit Albuquerque where he was to see an American soldier named David Greenglass who was stationed at Los Alamos. He was to tell Greenglass that “I come from Julius” and show him a piece of cardboard from a dessert box. “Yakovlev told me that the man Greenglass ... would have the matching piece of cardboard.” Either Greenglass or his wife would have some information for him and he was given an envelope containing $500.00 which he was to turn over to them. Yakovlev told him that he would find the Greenglasses in an apartment at 209 North High Street.

On June 2, 1945, Gold, after seeing Fuchs, took a bus from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. About 8:30 that evening, he went to the High Street address that Yakovlev had given him but was informed by a neighbor that the Greenglasses were not home. Early the next day--a Sunday--he returned to High Street and this time found the couple in their apartment. After informing Greenglass that he “was from Julius,” Gold produced the piece of cardboard which matched that in the other man’s possession. Greenglass, who was “a young man of about twenty-three with dark hair,” then introduced Gold to his wife, Ruth, and asked him to come back later that day as the information was not yet ready for delivery. That afternoon, Greenglass gave Gold “an envelope which he said contained ... the information on the atom bomb.” Before Gold took his leave, Greenglass informed the courier that he expected to come to New York on furlough around Christmas and that “if I wish to get in touch with him then I could do so by calling his brother-in-law Julius and he gave me the telephone number of Julius....”

Gold returned at once to New York and turned over the material he had received from Fuchs and Greenglass to Yakovlev. Although he returned to New Mexico again in September of 1945 to see Fuchs, he never saw the Greenglasses again. Fuchs told him that the first atomic bomb had been exploded at Alamogordo in July and that he thought that “he would probably very soon have to return to England.” The scientist was extremely upset because the British had entered Kiel ahead of the Russians and he was afraid that his Gestapo dossier would fall into the wrong hands. Gold told him not to worry and that, after his return to England, he would be contacted on the first Saturday of every month at the Paddington Crescent station of the London subway. He was to carry five books in one hand and two in another, while the man who would meet him would have a copy of Bennett Cerf’s _Stop Me if You Have Heard This_ in his left hand.

When Gold was apprehended on May 23, 1950, he told his story to the FBI agents who had picked him up. As a result of his revelations, David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were arrested three weeks later in their New York City apartment. Like Gold, the Greenglasses confessed that they, too, had been engaged in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. They insisted, however, that they had merely been pawns in the hands of Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, who was married to David’s sister, Ethel. It was Julius, they both claimed, who, with an assist from Ethel, had persuaded them to become atomic spies and who had directed their espionage activities. On July 16th, the Rosenbergs were arrested in their eleventh-floor apartment in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing project on Manhattan’s lower East Side.

One month later, the Federal Grand Jury in New York returned conspiracy indictments against Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg and Anatoli Yakovlev. Four weeks earlier, Harry Gold had pleaded guilty to the same crime in Philadelphia and been sentenced to thirty years in prison. On October 10, 1950, a superseding indictment included David Greenglass and an electrical engineer named Morton Sobell as additional defendants. They were all accused of conspiring to deliver to “a foreign nation ... documents, writings, sketches, notes and information relating to the National Defense of the United States of America.” Since Yakovlev had returned to Russia in December of 1946 and David Greenglass had admitted his guilt, another indictment which named only the Rosenbergs and Sobell was filed on January 31, 1951, and their joint trial began in New York City on March 6, 1951.

When court convened at 10:30 that morning, District Judge Irving R. Kaufman, a comparative newcomer to the Federal bench, presided. Irving H. Saypol, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and five assistants appeared for the government. The Rosenbergs were represented by a father-son team--Alexander Bloch for Ethel and Emanuel H. Bloch for Julius. Harold M. Phillips and Edward Kuntz stood up for Sobell while O. John Rogge, the attorney for the Greenglasses, only hung around long enough to ask Judge Kaufman to notify him when his client took the stand so that he “could be in attendance.” The judge assured him that he would be happy to do so and Rogge, with a grateful smile, double-timed out of the courtroom.

After a jury of one woman and eleven men had been impanelled, Saypol called Max Elitcher, a former employee of the Navy Department’s Bureau of Ordinance. Elitcher had attended Stuyvesant High School and City College with Morton Sobell. He said that Sobell had taken him to a Communist Party get-together in the fall of 1939 and that he had then regularly attended such meetings. In 1941, Sobell had left Washington to study for his Master’s degree at the University of Michigan.

Three years later Elitcher, who had remained with the Navy Department, received a telephone call from “a person who said he was Julius Rosenberg,” a former City College classmate, and who, like Sobell and Elitcher, was an electrical engineer. This man had visited him that same day and asked him whether he would be willing to obtain “classified information about military equipment” and turn this over for transmittal to Russia. He had assured Elitcher that his old friend Sobell was “helping in this way.” Before the two parted, Rosenberg instructed the witness to telephone him as soon as he had any information so that it could be promptly photostated and returned to the Navy Department before it was missed. Elitcher told him that “I would see about it.”

On Labor Day, the Elitchers joined Sobell and his fiancée on a vacation trip to Kumbabrow State Park in West Virginia. When Elitcher mentioned Julius’ visit, Sobell appeared agitated and said, “He should not have mentioned my name.” Elitcher tried to pacify him by pointing out that Rosenberg “knew about our close relationship [and] probably felt safe about it,” but Sobell kept insisting that “it makes no difference, he shouldn’t have done it.”

A few months after Sobell’s marriage in March of 1945, the Elitchers spent a night in New York at Rosenberg’s apartment. The latter announced that he had been discharged by the Signal Corps for security reasons. According to Elitcher, “he thought it had to do with his espionage activity, but he was quite relieved to find out it only had to do with the party activity.” He next saw Rosenberg in September when Julius came to Washington and dropped in for “fifteen or twenty minutes.” The conversation was limited to Elitcher’s work on fire control devices for the Navy. Rosenberg asked him whether he “would want to contribute [to satisfy] a continuing need for new military information for Russia,” and Elitcher testified that “I said I would see and if I had anything and I wanted to give it to him, I would let him know.”

Meanwhile, Sobell had left Ann Arbor for Schenectady where he was employed by General Electric. Elitcher visited him there early in 1946, only to be pumped about the availability of written reports on the Navy fire control system. When he told Sobell that “it was not completed, it was dragging along, it had not been finished yet,” he was advised to see Rosenberg as soon as possible. Some months later, he met Rosenberg again in his Knickerbocker Village apartment. This time Rosenberg complained that “there was a leak in this espionage” and that it would be better if “I don’t come to see him until he lets me know or until someone informs me.” In fact, Julius thought that things were so hot that he ordered Elitcher to discontinue his Communist Party activities until further notice.

In 1947, Sobell left General Electric and took a job as a project engineer with the Reeves Instrument Corporation in New York. From time to time, Elitcher visited him at the plant and, toward the end of the year, had lunch with him at a restaurant on Third Avenue known as the Sugar Bowl. During the meal, he remembered that his ex-roommate had “inquired as to whether I knew of any engineering students ... who would be safe to approach on this question of espionage, of getting material.” Elitcher claimed that he knew of nobody who fitted this bill but “if somebody came along, I would tell him about it.”

After several meetings with Sobell at Reeves, Elitcher made up his mind to leave the Bureau of Ordinance and enter private industry. In June of 1948, during a business trip to New York, he telephoned Sobell to inform him of his plans, and the former told him not to take any final step “before you see me. I want to talk to you about it, and Rosenberg wants to speak to you about it.” Later that day, Elitcher met Rosenberg and Sobell at 42nd Street and Third Avenue. They did everything in their power to persuade him to stay in the Bureau because, as Julius put it, “he needed somebody to work at the Navy Department for this espionage purpose.” During this conversation, Sobell kept repeating, “Julie is right; you should do that.” But Elitcher was adamant and, after the three men had dinner together, returned to Washington to resign from the Navy Department and bring his family back to New York.

At this time, Sobell lived at 164-17 73rd Avenue in Flushing. Elitcher was successful in landing a job at Reeves and, in late July, drove to New York on an apartment-hunting expedition. While driving through Baltimore, he noticed that he was being followed by several cars. When he arrived at Sobell’s house that evening, he told his friend that one or two cars had tailed him during most of his northward trek. Sobell was furious. “At this point, he became very angry and said that I should not have come to the house under those circumstances.” After he calmed down, he told Elitcher that he had something in the house “that he should have given to Julius Rosenberg some time ago....” He said he was tired and asked Elitcher to join him on the ten-mile trip to Manhattan. As they were leaving the house, Elitcher “saw him take what I identified then as a 35-millimeter film can.”

The two men left Queens and drove down the East River Drive to the Journal-American Building where Sobell parked the car. He took “this can out of the glove compartment” and, after instructing Elitcher to drive the car around the corner and wait for him on Catherine Slip, walked off in the direction of Knickerbocker Village. When he returned some thirty minutes later, Elitcher asked him, “Well, what does Julie think about ... my being followed?” Sobell assured him that “it is all right; don’t be concerned about it,” and headed the car in the direction of Flushing. As they drove along, Sobell volunteered the information that Rosenberg had told him that he once spoke to Elizabeth Bentley on the telephone but that “he was pretty sure she didn’t know who he was and therefore everything was all right.”

Before Saypol turned the witness over to the impatient defense quartet, he had extracted the information that Sobell had “a Leica camera, and an enlarger and material for processing film.” Elitcher was sure that Sobell had worked on classified material when he was employed by the Navy, General Electric and Reeves. He had last seen his friend in June of 1950 when Sobell and his family left for a weekend in Washington.

Q. Did he say anything to you at that time about going to Mexico?

A. No.

Only the uninitiated in the courtroom were ignorant of the fact that Sobell had been picked up in Mexico City in the late summer of 1950 by Mexican security police and rushed across the Rio Grande.

On cross-examination, Elitcher conceded that he had signed a loyalty oath in 1947. “I signed a statement saying that I was not or had not been a member of an organization that was dedicated to overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Q. At the time you verified that oath, did you believe that you were lying when you concealed your membership in the Communist Party?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. So you lied under oath?

A. Yes.

When he was first questioned about the Sobells and the Rosenbergs, he “realized what the implications might be” of his perjured statement. But he insisted that he “didn’t know what would happen to my skin when I told the story. I certainly have hopes ... that the best will happen to me.”

With the witness’ admission that he had been going to a psychiatrist since 1947 because of marital difficulties, the defense attorneys let him go. There was bigger game in the offing. The bailiff called out the name of David Greenglass and, accompanied by a United States Marshal, the ex-sergeant walked up to the witness chair. Although Elitcher had testified to a connection between Sobell and Rosenberg and some suspicious activities by both men, he had not shown that either one was engaged in atomic espionage. This was David Greenglass’ function and he played his role to the hilt.

After being trained as a mechanic at the Haaren Aviation School, Brooklyn Polytechnic and Pratt Institute, Greenglass was drafted in April of 1943. When he finished basic training, he had been sent to ordinance school at Aberdeen, Maryland. In July, 1944, he was assigned to the Manhattan District Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After two weeks orientation, he was sent to Los Alamos where he worked in the “E” shop as a machinist. He was one of ten machinists in the shop and became its foreman some eighteen months later. But it was not until November of 1944 that he learned that the work he was doing was “concerned with the construction of the atom bomb.”

It was his wife, Ruth, who had enlightened him as to the nature of the Manhattan Project. On November 29, 1944--their second wedding anniversary--she visited him in Albuquerque. A few days after she arrived, the couple decided to walk to the Rio Grande via Route 66. It was during this outing that Ruth told her husband that the Rosenbergs had invited her to dinner just before she left New York. Ethel and Julius had informed her that they had become Soviet espionage agents and that they were “giving information to the Soviet Union.” Julius had then told Ruth that David “was working in the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and that they would want me to give information to the Russians.”

At first, David refused to help the Rosenbergs, but, after a night of soul-searching, he apparently had a change of heart. The next day, he furnished his wife with the code names for such scientists as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and George B. Kistiakowski as well as information about “the general layout of the Los Alamos Atomic Project, the buildings, number of people and stuff like that.” Ruth told her husband that she had been instructed by Julius “not to write it down, but to memorize it.” Two days later, she returned to New York.

Greenglass next saw his wife on New Year’s Day of 1945 when he arrived home on a fifteen-day furlough. Julius came over one morning and “asked me to give him information, specifically anything of value on the atomic bomb, whatever I knew about it.” He was particularly interested in some high explosive lens molds on which David told him he was working at Los Alamos. That evening, Greenglass drew some sketches of the lens molds and gave them to his brother-in-law the following morning. In order to assist Greenglass in preparing his sketches, Julius gave him “a description of the atom bomb” of the Hiroshima type.

Two or three days later, the Greenglasses were invited to dinner at the Rosenberg’s. There they met a woman by the name of Ann Sidorovich. Later that evening, Julius told David that Mrs. Sidorovich would go west during Ruth’s next trip to Albuquerque and that the two women would exchange pocketbooks in a Denver movie theatre. Ruth’s was to contain the latest information on the atom bomb that David would turn over to her in Albuquerque.

However, there was a chance that another courier would be sent. To make sure that the Greenglasses would be able to identify Sidorovich’s replacement, Rosenberg gave Ruth one part of the side of a Jello box and told her that whoever came to Albuquerque would have the other portion. Ruth put the piece of cardboard in her wallet. The rest of the evening was spent in discussing lenses, and Rosenberg told Greenglass that “he would like me to meet somebody who would talk to me more about lenses.” The person Julius had in mind was a Russian scientist and an appointment was made for David to meet this man a few nights later on First Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets.

Greenglass borrowed his father-in-law’s Oldsmobile and parked at the spot Julius had indicated. His brother-in-law brought over a strange man who got into the car and ordered David to drive around the area. He asked the machinist a great many questions about lenses--the high explosive used, the means of detonation and the formula of the curve in the lens. David promised to find out what he could when he returned to Los Alamos and he drove the Russian back to where he had entered the car. He then returned home where “I told my wife where I had been.”

Two weeks later, he returned to the Manhattan Project. Early the next April, Ruth joined him in Albuquerque. Shortly after she arrived, the couple found an apartment at 209 North High Street. David managed to spend Saturdays and Sundays at the apartment, returning to the base on Monday mornings. It was on one of those Sundays--June 3, 1945--that Harry Gold made the first of his two visits to the Greenglasses. After announcing that he came from Julius and exhibiting the other half of the Jello box side, he was told by David to come back later as the information was not yet ready. As he left the apartment “Mrs. Greenglass told me that just before she had left New York City to come to Albuquerque, she had spoken with Julius....”

That afternoon, David turned over to Gold several sketches of a lens mold, some descriptive material about atomic bomb experimentation, and a “list of possible recruits for espionage.” He also indicated that a test explosion was scheduled for July at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Greenglasses then accompanied the courier on a back road that led by the USO where “we dropped him. We went into the USO, and he went on his way. As soon as he had gone down the street my wife and myself looked around and we came out again and back to the apartment and counted the money.”

Q. How much was it?

A. We found it to be $500.

Q. What did you do with the money?

A. I gave it to my wife.

It was at this point that Saypol introduced a sketch of a lens mold which had been prepared from memory by Greenglass after his arrest. The latter stated that it was, for all practical purposes, a replica of one he had given Gold in Albuquerque.