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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The most famous "atomic spies," Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, never worked for the Manhattan Project. Julius Rosenberg was an American engineer who by the end of the war had been heavily involved in industrial espionage for years, both as a source himself and as the "ringleader" of a network of like-minded engineers dispersed throughout the country. Julius's wife, the former Ethel Greenglass, was also a devoted communist, as was her brother David. David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of 1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it over to Soviet intelligence.

As Greenglass later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist."

The early 1950s were the high point of the “Red Scare” — a time when many Americans feared subversion by Communists within the United States who sympathized with the nation’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. International developments following the end of World War II, including the Soviets’ backing of a 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the 1949 Communist takeover of China, heightened fears that Communists were aiming for global supremacy. The Soviets’ development of an atomic bomb in 1949, ending the American monopoly on nuclear weapons, fueled anxieties that the Cold War could quickly turn into a catastrophic conflict.

At the same time, events at home led many to believe that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government and spying on behalf of the Soviets. Former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of being a Communist spy, was convicted of perjury in 1950; Senator Joseph McCarthy became famous for his claims of widespread Communist infiltration of the federal government; leaders of the Communist Party USA were prosecuted for conspiring to advocate revolution; and the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings to investigate possible Communist influence in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were key figures in the Soviet spy apparatus that included Fuchs and Harry Gold, a network that had enjoyed success thanks to professional skill, American carelessness, and sheer good luck. Then all the good luck ran out at once. Fuchs was trapped; so was Gold. A pliant brother-in-law developed a stubborn streak. The Rosenbergs were arrested, and, worst luck of all, meanwhile the Communists had invaded South Korea. Earlier the Rosenbergs' treason might have been regarded as the work of misguided dupes. The Communists' resort to force in Korea placed it in a different perspective.

In the midst of this heightened concern about Communist subversion, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. They were alleged to have transmitted to the Soviets material related to perhaps the greatest object of American anxiety: the atomic bomb. A chain of arrests beginning in early 1950 led the authorities to David Greenglass, a U.S. Army officer who was alleged to have stolen classified information from the atomic bomb program in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked. Greenglass claimed that he and his wife, Ruth, had been coaxed into espionage by his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband, Julius, both of whom were Communists. It was the Rosenbergs, he said, to whom he passed the information he stole, so that they could deliver it to the Soviets.

Julius Rosenberg was the product of a religious household dominated by a devout father who gloried in the freedom and the modest living he had found in the New World. Refusing to become a rabbi, as his father wished, Julius entered the College of the City of New York to study electrical engineering, became known as a campus radical and a convert to communism. He was a man who gravitated naturally to the sources of power in the party.

Ethel Greenglass was 3 years his senior, a small, dark-haired girl of literary and artistic pretensions. She had joined the party in the 1930's and met Rosenberg at its affairs. Between them, they sandbagged her younger brother, David, with lectures on Communist ideology to such good effect that, when they married in 1939, David joined the Young Communist League. It was his wedding present to the happy pair.

More than a year before Pearl Harbor, Julius Rosenberg became a civilian junior engineer in the Brooklyn supply office of the Army Signal Corps. By May 1943, he had advanced to associate engineering inspector and by the spring of 1944 began spying for the Soviet Union. At the time is was said of him "the world-wide conspiracy rounded up its fellow-traveling scientists and technological experts in an emergency effort to keep pace with the solution of atomic and other scientific mysteries." His Communist associations brought about Rosenberg's suspension in February 1945, but he promptly went to work for Emerson Radio Co., one of the concerns whose war production he had inspected for the Signal Corps.

Although the government had little evidence of Ethel’s involvement, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted her charged as a means to pressure Julius to name other members of the spy ring. After David Greenglass pleaded guilty, the Rosenbergs were tried in March 1951, along with codefendant Morton Sobell, before Judge Irving Kaufman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Kaufman was a staunch anti-Communist who had previously given the maximum sentence to Communists convicted of lying to a grand jury investigating espionage, accusing them of attempting to “destroy” the United States. During the Rosenbergs’ three-week trial, David and Ruth Greenglass provided the only testimony directly linking the Rosenbergs to espionage. Many years later, David Greenglass admitted that he had committed perjury by corroborating his wife’s testimony about Ethel, without which she would most likely not have been convicted.

Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they had hoped that a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would persuade her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables. That strategy failed, said William P. Rogers, who was the deputy attorney general at the time. “She called our bluff,” he said in the book “The Brother.” Authorities hoped to use the death sentences as leverage to get them to name names, but the Rosenbergs maintained their silence. But "the grand jury testimony by Ruth Greenglass directly contradicts the charge against Ethel Rosenberg that put her in the electric chair,” according to Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group based at George Washington University that challenges government secrecy.

An NSA memorandum declassified 10 September 2024, dated August 22, 1950 – ten days after Ethel’s arrest – confirms that the U.S. government knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy long before her trial and execution. Authored by then-chief analyst of the NSA Meredith Gardner, the memo reveals that he concluded from reviewing Soviet Intelligence that Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy. Her conviction was based on perjured testimony and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. The only evidence against Ethel at trial was given by proven liars, David and Ruth Greenglass. US Government files state there was insufficient evidence to indict Ethel but that she could be used as a "lever" against her husband. The KGB gave all its agents in the US code names, but Ethel had none [actually, the covername OSA (WASP) was assigned to Ethel Rosenberg]. After her arrest the National Security Agency’s chief analyst, Meredith Gardner, wrote, that Ethel, “knew about her husbands work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.”

“As we pressed the NSA to declassify and release this memo, which proves that our mother was not a spy, we benefited from the tremendous support of Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) and his staff.” said her son Robert Meeropol.

The "rolling up" of the espionage ring stopped with the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel (who knew of her husband's activities and at times assisted him) both maintained their innocence and refused to cooperate with authorities in order to lessen their sentences. Because of his cooperation, Greenglass received only 15 years, and his wife, Ruth, was never formally charged. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death.

After the jury convicted all three defendants of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, Judge Kaufman told the jurors, “My opinion is that your verdict is a correct verdict.” Soon after, the judge sentenced the Rosenbergs to death while sentencing Morton Sobell to 30 years in prison. Speaking of the “life and death” struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kaufman characterized the Rosenbergs’ crime as “worse than murder,” and blamed them in part for the outbreak of the Korean War. David Greenglass received a lighter sentence of 15 years in prison as a result of his cooperation with the government. While Judge Kaufman stated in court that he had not asked the prosecution for a sentencing recommendation, he had privately solicited the view of the prosecution, other judges, and Department of Justice officials.

For two years after being sentenced, the Rosenbergs fought to avoid execution. Claiming that various aspects of their trial had been unfair—and in particular that extensive newspaper coverage and a hostile trial judge had unfairly prejudiced the jurors—they appealed their convictions and sentences. The Rosenbergs appealed their conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court, with no success. They also requested a rehearing and a reduced sentence from the U.S. District Court; these attempts failed as well. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas granted a stay of execution, but the full Supreme Court quickly lifted the stay. President Eisenhower twice denied the Rosenbergs’ requests for executive clemency.

The National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case formed after the National Guardian, a left-wing newspaper, began a campaign to exonerate the Rosenbergs. There were public protests against the executions in France, England, and Italy. Soviet satellite states exploited the executions for anti-U.S. propaganda purposes. Many Rosenberg supporters, especially outside the U.S., alleged that anti-Semitism was a factor in the case. The U.S. press remained on the side of the government; the Chicago Daily News was the only major U.S. paper to advocate for clemency.

Rosenberg and his wife, who regarded themselves as destined by fate for the glorification of communism, found their destiny in the electric chair. Despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, on June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York.

The Rosenberg case left a complicated legacy. On one hand, the Rosenbergs’ conviction and execution on thin evidence, at least some of which was false, stands as a testament to the antiCommunist hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1950s. Bertrand Russell - Lord Russell - claimed that he has looked into the evidence regarding the Rosenbergs and Sobell, and was certain of their innocence. They were convicted, he said, through perjured testimony which our Federal Bureau of Investigation elicited by use of Nazi-like atrocities and blackmail. Lord Russell wrote 26 March 1956 in the Manchester Guardian "I am almost certain that the Rosenbergs were innocent and quite certain that the evidence against them would not have been considered adequate if prejudice had not been involved. But the Rosenbergs are dead and nothfng can be done for them now except to bold up their official murderers to obloquy."

On the other hand, the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that the Communist Party USA was actively involved in Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Gathering information about the atomic bomb was, after 1941, the Party’s top espionage priority. Julius Rosenberg, this later-released evidence showed, did spy for the Soviets. Ethel, while most likely aware of her husband’s actions, probably was not herself a spy.

The information that Julius gave to the Soviets, characterized during the trial as “the secret of the atomic bomb,” is considered by most scholars to have been of little value. To the present day, the case has served as an ideological battleground for those who denounced what they believed to be government persecution arising from the Red Scare and those who believed that the government had acted appropriately in response to a grave threat to the United States.