"A Promise for Tomorrow"
Deconstructing the Rosenberg Case

When I heard the feel-good lyrics of "The House I Live In" on the radio for the third time July 4th, my thoughts turned to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It wasn't just the power of Frank Sinatra's 1945 Academy-Award-winning film version, revived this year as part of his musical epitaph. What moved me was the direct connection between this sentimental patriotic song and the young Jewish couple hastily put to death nearly half a century ago. Its addition to celebrations of Independence Day is a welcome sign that the blinding fog of virulent political prejudice that sealed the Rosenbergs’ fate is at last evaporating into history.

"The House I Live In" articulates messages of love for our country's multicultural melting pot. It salutes the common people in everyday life. It stirs pride in our Constitution and First Amendment freedom of speech. But few Americans know that its author, Lewis Allan, was an American communist during the era when political radicals were maligned as disloyal and even treasonous. Allan's connection with the Rosenberg family is even lesser known. Lewis Allan was the pen name used by Abel Meeropol (1), the adoptive father of Michael and Robert Rosenberg, whose parents were so vengefully and needlessly executed as "atom spies" by the federal government on June 19, 1953.

Most of Europe's intellectuals, writers, religious leaders, politicians and artists of the 1950s actively opposed the execution of the Rosenbergs. They remembered painfully that too many were silent in the face of the Nazi genocide machine that nearly wiped out European Jewry. After the worldwide Rosenberg clemency movement failed to convince President Eisenhower to spare their lives, Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne stepped forward to adopt their two orphaned sons.

Twenty years later Michael and Robert Meeropol (whose names were legally changed) relinquished their anonymity to invigorate the decades-old movement struggling to reopen their parents' case. Following the Meeropols' 1975 hard-fought suit against the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act, hundreds of thousands of FBI and CIA files were declassified and released over 20+ years. These documents, housed in Columbia University's law library in New York City, provide important clues that substantiate many claims that the Rosenberg trial was a sham and they were not master atom spies. For example:

1) The main witnesses against the Rosenbergs — Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, his wife Ruth, and Harry Gold — gave perjured testimony. The FBI and the prosecutors knew these testimonies to be false and encouraged them anyway,

2) The phrase "I come from Julius" cited by Gold and the Greenglasses as the recognition signal allegedly used in a transfer of atomic secrets in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was concocted in the weeks preceding the Rosenberg trial.

3) Trial Judge Irving R. Kaufman was on the side of the prosecution. He collaborated with the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors before, during and after the trial and executions. (4)

4) Judge Kaufman decided on the death sentences before the jury issued its verdict to convict the Rosenbergs on March 29, 1951. (5)

5) Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson met secretly with Attorney General Herbert Brownell before Justice William O. Douglas issued a June 17, 1953 stay of execution on new legal grounds. These officials covertly agreed to recall the Supreme Court from summer recess to overturn the anticipated Douglas stay. (6) The doomed couple were then rushed into the electric chair two days later.

All these claims are documented in scores of books and articles written since 1953. However, except for periods of activism such as the 1970s when the Meeropols led a movement to reopen their parents' case, the popular press has generally ignored scholarly accounts that criticize the government's treatment of the Rosenbergs. (7) Thus generations have grown up knowing little about the real substance of a controversy shrouded in myth and mystery for nearly half a century.

The official FBI story claims the Rosenbergs transmitted the secret of the atom bomb to the Russians during 1944 and 1945, before this awesome weapon's existence became publicly known after the U.S. bombings of Japan. Our country was then allied with the Soviet Union in a life-and-death struggle to defeat Hitler and the other fascist powers. But in studying the Rosenbergs’ indictment, which surprisingly says nothing about atomic secrets, the unbelievable oral testimonies of the Greenglasses and the declassified FBI/CIA files, one learns that this prosecution was conceived and orchestrated to fit a conspiracy theory that covers up lack of real evidence the Rosenbergs committed the crime for which they were ostensibly executed.

As the secrets and lies of the Cold War era have become public in the 1990s, especially the still unsolved assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and possibly Robert F. Kennedy, the phrase "conspiracy theory" has been coined to discredit believers in government wrongdoing. But Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were victims of a real conspiracy theory cooked up in the paranoid imaginations of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Justice Department prosecutors, and congressional witchhunters such as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. This theory was based on the belief in the existence of a militarily aggressive "international communist conspiracy" that was about to destroy our democratic way of life.

The morbid fears fueling this conspiracy belief, a new variation of classic right-wing mythology found throughout American history, (8) escalated into hysterics once the U.S. lost its monopoly on the bomb. The horrors that befell the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the U.S. military dropped atom bombs on them in the closing days of World War II terrified the world. By this time ordinary Americans were exhausted by decades of struggle to overcome - first, the Great Depression and soon thereafter, the fascist threat to world peace and freedom. Our people were thus susceptible to the demagogic schemes of postwar officials who manipulated real fears of communism and nuclear war.

Today many historians believe the post-war threat of Soviet aggression in Europe was exaggerated by U.S. political leaders. (9) Policymakers and their intelligence analysts overlooked the weakened condition of the USSR, one-third of whose industrial capacity had been destroyed by Hitler’s occupation just a few years before. Republican Party candidates such as Richard Nixon cynically used anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric against New Deal Democrats purely to win elections. In the early days of the Cold War, the press dutifully and uncritically printed rumors, gossip and slander about spying and possible leftist connections of New Deal Democrats such as Alger Hiss. Screaming banner headlines about "treason" in government were commonplace from 1948-1952. Thus when the Soviet Union tested its own atom bomb in September 1949, cries of "traitor" and "red atom bomb spies" became more shrill and gained credibility, long before the Rosenbergs’ arrests in the summer of 1950.

From September 1949 to early 1950, the FBI was under heavy pressure to apprehend the "red spies." Then in February, Great Britain announced that Klaus Fuchs, a British nuclear physicist who had briefly worked on the atom bomb at the Los Alamos Manhattan Project, had voluntarily confessed to having transmitted atomic secrets to the USSR. Fuchs said he had met with an American spy courier, but supplied no name, only a general physical description that could fit thousands of men. A three-month FBI manhunt began for Fuchs' American connection to Soviet intelligence agents.

By May 1950 the FBI had zeroed in on Harry Gold, a nondescript Philadelphia chemist. Essentially nonpolitical, he had known and done business with Communist Party members in the 1930s and 1940s, but he had never joined the organization. Yet in keeping with the "red atom spies" conspiracy theory, the press untruthfully identified Gold as a communist. Gold had been questioned inside his home and at FBI headquarters for two weeks while still photos and motion pictures were flown to England and shown to Fuchs.

In Hoover's ego-gratifying public-relations tale of the FBI getting its man, Fuchs led the FBI to Harry Gold's doorstep. But subsequent researchers have documented that Fuchs had still not identified Gold by the time he confessed to being the scientist's spy courier. (10) The truth is that Gold was already known to the FBI, having appeared before a New York grand jury in 1947 investigating whether Communist Party activities could be tied in to spying for the Soviet Union.

After Gold, the next arrest in the FBI's "atom spy" conspiracy did not occur until June 15, 1950, when David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's younger brother, signed a confession. The Greenglass statement said he had stolen atomic information from the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had worked during the war as an Army machinist. His confession included a meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a courier identified as Harry Gold, to whom he said he handed over classified information at the request of Julius Rosenberg.

J. Edgar Hoover also lied to the country about how David Greenglass was apprehended. In the official story, Gold picked out Greenglass from hundreds of photos provided by the FBI. But in truth Greenglass was already known to the FBI, having been visited by them in February, 1950, and confronted about his theft of uranium from Los Alamos. Greenglass's wrongdoing made him ripe for FBI pressure to play the crucial role of linking his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg, a communist already known to the FBI, to the secret place where the atomic bomb was constructed. His statement said that Julius Rosenberg had persuaded him through the intermediary of his wife Ruth to steal data from Los Alamos. Without the Greenglasses’ testimony, the government had virtually no case against the Rosenbergs.

It is now generally acknowledged that the government offered the Greenglasses leniency in return for naming Julius Rosenberg as the leader of the "atomic spy ring." Although both Greenglasses admitted to actions for which they could receive the death penalty, David was only sentenced to prison and Ruth was never even charged. Thus, she was free to remain at home with their two small children. In July Julius was arrested as a result of the Greenglasses' deal. Neither Greenglass said Ethel was a spy, but FBI documents reveal that she was arrested in August after the Justice Department decided to use her "as a lever" to force Julius to confess. The Greenglass testimony implicating Ethel as a "spy" was not developed until the week before the trial. No other evidence was presented against Ethel Rosenberg.

The Rosenbergs were convicted solely on the uncorroborated oral testimony of co-conspirators. No physical evidence of espionage was admitted into court. The standard of proof for conspiracy in federal courts was far more lax than in New York state courts, which required corroboration of overt acts to secure a conviction. (11) Thus, the jury's verdict was based upon their belief that Gold and the Greenglasses were truthful. But FBI files released in the 1970s document that officials knew, though the jury was never told, that Gold was a neurotic, habitual liar, and that the Greenglasses' testimony at trial was very different from what they told the FBI immediately after David's arrest.

FBI memos written by agents conducting interrogations of Harry Gold, (12) and David and Ruth Greenglass, as well as correspondence between these self-confessed spies and their lawyers show a suspicous trail of altered testimony during the 10-month period between Gold’s arrest and the March, 1951 Rosenberg trial. These principal witnesses went over their stories with FBI officials and federal prosecutors under the pressure of hysterical newspaper stories hammering home the death penalty as the certain fate of the "red atom spies."

4. The house I live in,
   My neighbors, white and black,
   The people who just came here,
   Or from generations back,
   The town hall and the soap box,
   The torch of Liberty,
   A home for all God's children,
   That's America to me.

The Rosenberg case played out within the narrow historical window of the Korean War, 1950-53. Our country’s soldiers were dying, going missing, and suffering horrible wounds in what was billed as a war against communism. The ravings of Senator Joseph McCarthy about "communist subversion" of government were front-page news every day.

Prosecutors and the news media focused on the Rosenbergs' leftwing beliefs and associations as motivation for their alleged crime. The public, and particularly jurors hearing the case in 1951, could easily confuse repetitive rhethoric about an evil "international communist conspiracy" with the "atomic spy conspiracy" then on trial in Foley Square, New York City. Today's news stories about the Rosenbergs rarely describe the rabid anti-communist prejudice of the early 1950s, and the perversions of American justice that routinely occurred in the court system during the Rosenberg years. Numerous press conferences were held by Hoover and chief Rosenberg prosecutor Irving Saypol to announce more arrests of "red spies," even after the execution of the Rosenbergs. None occurred and the Justice Department never was able to link atomic espionage to Communist Party officials.

When Judge Kaufman sentenced the Rosenbergs to death, he unfairly blamed them for the Korean War. He used the word "treason" to describe their offense, further inflaming the public. The Rosenbergs could not have been charged or convicted of treason, the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution, because proof requires two witnesses for each overt act. Nevertheless, Rosenberg partisans have concluded that while the Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy, they were actually executed for treason. (13) Adding to the vengeful nature of the injustice done to the Rosenbergs, no one convicted of treason has ever been executed by the federal government in U.S. history. (14) Certainly not the parents of two young children. Since the Rosenberg era, many people have been convicted of spying for Russia — some of them FBI and CIA agents. None has received the death sentence.

Did anti-Semitism play a role in sealing the Rosenbergs’ fate, as many of their contemporaneous defenders publicly claimed? Though open expression of anti-Semitism in these times was more common, clear evidence of such on the part of Hoover, FBI agents, and Justice Department officials has been well hidden. Except for Fuchs, the entire cast of characters prosecuted as atomic spies under the FBI's conspiracy theory were Jewish. Not surprisingly, trial Judge Irving Kaufman and prosecutors Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn were also Jewish. In Chutzpah, lawyer Alan Dershowitz aptly writes, "Governments have traditionally used ‘house Jews’ to go after other Jews in cases raising the specter of possible anti-Semitism." (15)

A January 22, 1953 CIA memorandum released to the Meeropols provides some clues to anti-Semitic prejudice among government officials. It outlines a plan to employ Jewish "emissaries" to pressure a confession from the Rosenbergs in exchange for "generous commutation" of their death sentences. The Rosenbergs could then be used "as figures in an effective international psychological warfare campaign against communism primarily on the Jewish issue."

Further evidence of government anti-Semitism can be found in the handwritten jottings of Harry Gold, penned in his Philadelphia jail cell after Greenglass’s arrest, but before the apprehension of Julius Rosenberg. Gold had told the FBI and his lawyers that his espionage career, which began as "industrial espionage," was motivated by his desire to help the Soviet Union become stronger economically, win the war against fascism and thus help save more European Jews from annihilation. After his first confession in May 1950, Gold was interrogated continuously by FBI agents. He spoke to them without the presence of a lawyer. But evidently he was communicating with his court-appointed attorneys, as meticulously dated "Notes for J.D.M. Hamilton and Augustus Ballard" indicate. On June 23, 1950, Gold listed as item #21 — "Jewish problem." Under this phrase he grouped the three Jewish Americans he fingered who were subsequently indicted on spy-related charges, listed the other people linked by the Justice Department to his "spy ring" who were not Jewish, including Klaus Fuchs, and then wrote, "What are J.D.M.H's and A. Ballard's ideas on how to handle this?" (16)

Obviously, the ethnic makeup of the purported "atomic spy" conspiracy was under discussion both with his FBI interrogators and his non-Jewish attorneys. While advising Harry Gold on "how to handle" what amounted to hundreds of hours of talks with interrogators, his lawyers were communicating directly with FBI officials, prosecuting attorneys and Philadelphia federal trial Judge James McGranery to abet the government’s plan to fashion Gold into a credible witness against other Jewish members of the perceived "communist spy ring." (17)

The official Rosenberg story is being rewritten during the post-cold-war period in the popular media. With the 1995 declassification and release of the Venona transcripts by the National Security Agency, newspapers tend to print articles that accept the authority, accuracy and veracity of decryptions/translations drawn literally from the thin air of wartime intelligence cable traffic. The government has never revealed how it identified real people from the code names used by Russian intelligence agents. Interestingly, a careful review of the released transcriptions by anyone familiar with the Rosenberg case record reveals that they contradict key elements of the government's original case. The only released transcription that the government says focuses on Ethel Rosenberg, for example, indicates that she was not an espionage agent. Another transcription states that the agent the government identifies as Julius Rosenberg knew nothing about atomic espionage. Regardless of this, the government and the press have trumpeted this material as proof positive of the Rosenbergs' guilt. Reporters rarely raise questions about the notorious unreliability of raw FBI, CIA and NSA intelligence files and their uselessness as evidence in a court of law. Practically forgotten is our intelligence agencies' 40-year cold-war record of lying to the American public (euphemistically called "disinformation").

The media have also given uncritical publicity to non-documented oral reports of a number of Russian ex-KGB agents claiming knowledge of Soviet spying activities in the U.S. in the 1940s. For example, in 1997 Alexander Feklisov told the Western media he had personal knowledge of the spying activities of Julius Rosenberg, though not atomic espionage. However, the reliability of Feklisov's memory has been seriously challenged by scholars who once met him at a 1989 Moscow conference on the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.

The propensity for disinformation of U.S. intelligence agencies applies equally to their Russian counterparts. After the cold war ended, a former KGB agent once stationed in the U.S. wrote that he routinely lied to his bosses, an admission that could throw into doubt the basic believability of any of the Venona transcripts some people here take as literal truth.(18) For nearly five decades, the search for the truth about the Rosenbergs has become hopelessly contaminated by the murky world of intelligence psychological operations (psyop).

On the 45th anniversary of their parents' execution this year, the Meeropols issued a press release analyzing recent publicity on the Rosenberg case found in newly published books, interviews with Russian intelligence agents, and declassified NSA/CIA files. They concluded that "FBI officials and agents, government prosecutors, and others, knowingly, willfully and with malice aforethought manipulated the judicial process to execute two people for a crime they did not commit."

The Meeropols' statement is bolstered by a 1998 History Channel documentary, "The Boy Who Stole the Atom Bomb," based on the book Bombshell by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel. Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs says on camera that American scientist Theodore Hall most likely committed the crime for which the Rosenbergs were executed. Albright and Kunstel report that Hall leaked secret information on the construction of the atom bomb to Russia months before the Rosenbergs were alleged to have convinced Ethel's brother David Greenglass to spy for the Soviet Union.

Notes

1. See Margolick, David, "Strange Fruit" in Vanity Fair, September 1998, p. 310, for biographical information about Abel Meeropol, who also wrote the words and music for the song that Billie Holiday made famous.

2. New York Times: "Let's Honor Those Hurt in the McCarthy Era" 1/21/97 letters column; "On Naming the Names, in Life and Art" 1/27/97, C13; "Blacklisted Writers Win Credits for Screenplays" 4/3/97, C13; "Naming Names Part II" 4/6/97, Section 4, 1E; Patricia Bosworth, "Giving Credit Where Credit Is Long Overdue" 4/20/97, H13; "For the Blacklisted, Credit Where Credit Is Due" 10/1/97, E3; "The Blacklist Era Won't Fade to Black" 10/5/97, WK 5; Russell Baker, "No Time for the Future" 10/7/97, A27; "Winning a Battle but Losing The War Over the Blacklist" 1/25/98, AR13; "Alfred Palca, 78, Screenwriter Blacklisted After Basketball Film," 6/22/98, A17.

Boston Globe: Michael Blowen, 'Blacklisted': Solving His Father's Mystery," 8/26/95, pp. 61, 67. Jewish Exponent: Michael Elkin, "Judaism, Communism and 'Names': Former Philadelphian Joel Polis plays Cifford Odets in a drama about blacklisting and betrayals" 3/27/97, 1-X

3. Aronson, James, The Press and the Cold War (2nd ed.). (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1990), 62. DuBois later wrote in his Autobiography (New York, International Publishers, 1968), "America must always be praised and extravagently praised, or you lose your job or are ostracized or land in jail. Criticism is treason, and treason or the hint of treason testified to by hired liars may be punished by shameful death. I saw Ethel Rosenberg lying beautiful in her coffin beside her mate. I tried to stammer futile words above her grave. But not over graves should we shout this failure of justice, but from the housetops of the world." (p. 417)

4. National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case, The Kaufman Papers. United States government documents concerning the trial judge in the Rosenberg-Sobell case, obtained from the F.B.I. as a result of the FOIA lawsuit instituted to force the release of all related government files. 1976.

5. FBI memo #894: A.H. Belmont to Mr. Ladd, March 16, 1951. In The Kaufman Papers, ibid.

6. FBI memo #1823: Mr. Belmont to Mr. Ladd, June 17, 1953. In The Kaufman Papers, ibid.

7. See, for example (in chronological order): Anon, "The Rosenberg Case: Some Reflections on Federal Criminal Law" Columbia Law Review, 54, (January-February 1954): 219-160; Gerald Markowitz and Michael Meeropol, "The ‘Crime of the Century’ Revisited: David Greenglass's Scientific Evidence in the Rosenberg Case," Science and Society, 44(1) (Spring 1980): 1-26; Edward Pessen, "The Rosenberg Case Revisited: A Critical Essay on a Recent Scholarly Examination." New York History (January 1984): 82-102; Parrish, Michael E. "Cold War Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs." American Historical Review, 82 (Oct. 1977): 805-841.

8. See, for example, Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1979), George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1983), Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown (eds), Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), and Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, the Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extemism in America, 1790-1977 (2nd ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

9. See, for example, Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

10. See Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (New York: Pantheon, 1983): 71-73, 115-16, 406-7, 439-40 for discussion of the controversy over Fuchs' identification of Gold.

11. Parrish, Michael E. "Cold War Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs." American Historical Review, 82 (Oct. 1977): 813.

12. The best discussion of Harry Gold's changing memory of "espionage" events can be found in Schneir & Schneir, op.cit.: 90-118, 363-377, 397-403, 419-421, 432-466.

13. Parrish, op. cit., 812.

14. In 1859 John Brown was executed for treason, but by the state of Virginia, not the federal government. Wilson, James G. "Chaining the Leviathan: The Unconstitutionality of Executing Those Convicted of Treason." University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 45 (1983): 99-179. See pp. 156, 165-166, 170, 173, 179 for discussion of the Rosenberg case.

15. Dershowitz, Alan, Chutzpa (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991): 310.

16. "Notes for J.D.M. Hamilton and Augustus Ballard," June 23, 1950. Papers of Joseph Gold, Temple University Special Collections, Philadelphia. The three individuals Gold listed were Abraham Brothman, David Greenglass, and Benjamin Smilg. Gold’s testimony he was a "Soviet spy" would be used in three trumped-up prosecutions. In November 1950 Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced Abraham Brothman and his business partner, Miriam Moscowitz, to two years in prison for conspiracy to obstruction of justice, after Gold convinced the jury the defendants manipulated him into lying to a 1947 New York grand jury investigating communist spying activities. Kaufman gave Greenglass 15 years in prison the day after he sentenced the Rosenbergs to die. Smilg, however, was acquitted of perjury in a June 1955 Ohio trial. This case revolved around whether or not Smilg lied to a grand jury when he swore he did not know Harry Gold was a Soviet spy. Thus, two years after the Rosenbergs' execution, Smilg’s attorney elicited from Gold the admission that he lied to the same 1947 grand jury involved in the Brothman-Moscowitz trial. See Schneir & Schneir, op. cit., pp. 363-364.

17. FBI’s memos written by Philadelphia Special Agent-in-Charge A. Cornelius, Jr. between May 31 and June 7, 1950: File 65-4307, Nos. 162, 190, 192, 256, 257, 300, 305

18. Shvets, Yuri B. Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America (Simon & Schuster, 1994).