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Rosenbergs

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https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/29/sons_of_julius_ethel_rosenberg_ask

ethel no kgb code name

meerpol strange fruit

an 11 24

Recently declassified document has historian convinced that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent - Alternet.org

Recently declassified document has historian convinced that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/roy-cohn-filmmaker-on-her-new-hbo-doc-about-trumps-mentor-and-the-man-who-killed-her-grandparents-julius-and-ethel-rosenberg/

salon

Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol has already made a documentary about her family connection to history. As anyone acquainted with 20th-century radical history will already recognize, she is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the supposed “atom spies” executed by the federal government in 1953. Meeropol’s 2004 HBO film “Heir to an Execution” provides a moving, intimate study of that event and its personal and political legacy — although it does not and could not settle the question of the Rosenbergs’ guilt or the fairness of their sentence, which remains contested to this day.

(Full disclosure, although I don’t think it’s relevant to this story: Both my mother and stepfather were American Communists, and my stepfather, Mel Fiske, knew Abel and Anne Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenbergs’ children, including Ivy Meeropol’s father, after their parents were electrocuted. So, yeah, if you want an entirely neutral account of these events, go elsewhere.)

Meeropol’s new film uses her grandparents’ execution as an inciting event, so to speak, but it’s only indirectly about them and about the combustible collision of Communism and anti-Communism in mid-century America. “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which premieres on HBO this week, is instead about one of the most notorious Americans of the last century — the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, who served as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, and who groomed and nurtured a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, seeing in the callow womanizer and tabloid celebrity the seeds of greater things.

Few people shape history as much as Cohn did, and none of it was for the better. Given that, I told Meeropol in our phone interview this week, it’s remarkable that “Bully. Coward. Victim.” offers such a full, complicated and human portrait of Cohn — who may be best known in our age for his vivid satirical portrayal in Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” (as variously played by Ron Leibman, F. Murray Abraham, Al Pacino and Nathan Lane, among others). Not many people would have gone out of their way to be fair to the man who almost literally killed her grandparents.

My recording software glitched out for the first few minutes of our conversation, but I can reconstruct Meeropol’s answer fairly enough. She said that both as a storyteller and a human being, she thought it was important to pierce the mythology surrounding Cohn and depict him as a highly intelligent and almost uniquely conflicted person. Cohn was both Jewish and gay — and only partly in the closet, for the latter portion of his life — and at least initially identified as a liberal Democrat, yet made common cause with the anti-Communist crusade led by a right-wing Republican, which specifically targeted Jews and gay men as agents of the Red menace. (In the film, Tony Kushner observes that Joe McCarthy was too dumb to appreciate that Cohn was dragging him into a self-destructive conflict with the U.S. Army, which ended up destroying the Wisconsin senator’s career.)

The film’s title comes from a square in the AIDS Memorial Quilt that Meeropol and her father Michael (the Rosenbergs’ eldest son) stumbled upon when the quilt was on display in the National Mall in Washington in 1987. Cohn had died of AIDS at age 59 less than a year earlier.Their father-daughter discussion in the film about that discovery offers one of the most powerful moments in what is both a piercing personal memoir and a work of scrupulous and even generous social history.

Then I asked Meeropol about the fact that nearly everyone involved in her grandparents’ trial for treason — from the defendants and their attorneys to the key witnesses, the trial judge and of course Cohn, the lead prosecutor — had been Jewish.

You know, It finally dawned on me that in one sense the prosecution of the Rosenbergs was like something out of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” ashow trial by which Jewish Americans could display their loyalty.

Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, back when I was making “Heir to an Execution,” a Jewish film producer, I’m not going to say who, kind of told Sheila Nevins at HBO, who’d greenlit the film, “You shouldn’t be doing this film. You should leave this story alone.”

Wow. Because, essentially, it “wasn’t good for the Jews”?

Yeah, even then. That was like in 2001 or 2002, when I was in the midst of making that film. “That’s a black hole. That’s a dark moment in Jewish history and you would do well not to revisit it.” That kind of thing. So yeah, in terms of [the Rosenberg trial] it was absolutely calculated. Cohn embraced that and he spent his career making sure that he was clearly – because he was proud to be Jewish, but he really wanted to be certain that he was always identified as an anti-Communist.

You may not want to touch this question, but I was really struck by the presence of Alan Dershowitz in your film. I’ve met him and interviewed him myself, and he’s such a peculiar individual. I’m well aware that in his youth he stood up for the rights of Communists at Brooklyn College, and has for much of his career been a civil liberties lawyer. But given his apparent slide to the right in recent years, and of course his strange relationship with Donald Trump, it was troubling to watch him on screen talking about Roy Cohn. I’m wondering how much any of that was in your mind.

Oh yeah, I mean, I wasn’t necessarily excited by the idea of interviewing Alan Dershowitz because he’d already been publicly for Trump. I find him very confusing. I don’t quite understand where he’s coming from or if he’s just a pure opportunist or what. But I felt that it was a really important interview to get. I went into that interview just really wanting him just to tell me his stories of Cohn, how he knew Cohn and what he knew of him. I knew that Cohn had admitted quite a few things to him about my grandparents’ trial and what had gone down. I never expected Dershowitz to go as far as he did, in saying, ultimately, that it was the greatest miscarriage of justice in his lifetime.

It’s an amazing moment.

Exactly, and to hear it from Dershowitz is important. It’s not the usual suspects telling us this, which is easy for people to dismiss sometimes. “Oh it’s just someone on the left, of course they’re going to say that,” right?

And then to have him be involved in the impeachment process was just like, oh God, there he is again.

Making bizarre circular arguments that I could not follow about how the president can’t be impeached unless he’s been charged with an actual crime, and he can’t be charged with an actual crime because he can’t commit an actual crime.

And then he was never to be heard from again after that day, right? He’s one of the only people from the film who — I have no idea whether he saw the film, or if he did, whether he likes it or not. I did ask him if he had had a chance to see it and he never responded.

Was there anything that really surprised you either about Cohn or about the story in doing the research — stuff that you learned about him or about his life that you hadn’t known about before?

I mean, probably the two biggest things that were most surprising were, one, that he fought so publicly against gay rights. I didn’t know that. By the time the gay rights bill was moving through the New York City Council [in 1986], he was pretty well known in a lot of circles as being gay. Yet there he is, aligning himself with the Archdiocese of New York at the same time. I didn’t know anything about that. So that was very surprising.

Then, I’ve come to learn how integral he was to Donald Trump envisioning himself on a national and even international stage. I knew, of course, about his connection to Trump. That was what made me want to make this film and actually decide to finally pursue it. But what we learned is just how important he was, in terms of where Trump got to, and even how we got to where we are now. I think just to see the machinations, the actual process of Cohn having these relationships with so many journalists. He had a close relationship with Lois Romano [of the Washington Post]. He says “You need to interview my guy Donald Trump, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of him.”

Then he’s on this campaign: You see footage of him talking about how Donald Trump is a genius and this, that and the other thing. He’s promoting him and helping him and he’s introducing him to everyone he needs to know in Washington, who turn out to be people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. All those characters who end up helping him get to the White House. Rupert Murdoch, all these connections that originated with Cohn. I did not know the extent of his influence.

Yeah, that is obviously the big news hook in the film. There is also this sense, and I think you fill in the blanks on this really well, that maybe Donald Trump is nowhere near as bright as Roy Cohn, but he learned a number of tricks from him. Rhetorical tricks, public relations tricks, ways to position himself — maybe more than anything else the attitude of always attacking and never retreating. All those aspects that we see in the White House right now sound like things he picked up from Roy Cohn.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, even when Trump was being pressured about his relationship with Putin, he threw out my grandparents’ names. He said, “Traitors? That’s what Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are. That’s what they did.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Roy Cohn would say to divert attention from himself. You know, we were thinking as a family, at the time, like, “Trump doesn’t even know what the hell he’s talking about.” He probably only heard of them because of Roy. That kind of stuck with him and then he’s able to say “That’s a traitor. A traitor is a Rosenberg.” Then his followers say, “Oh yeah, right, that’s those Commie Jew atomic spies. That’s what a traitor is, not Donald Trump.”

That’s just one small example of that kind of language. He certainly learned how to deflect and blame and gaslightand do all sorts of Roy Cohn things. Whenever I hear about the entire Republican Party being too afraid to challenge him, that’s just like Roy, who would threaten to expose people to try to get a settlement. There’s Trump threatening to tweet you into oblivion.

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http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/rosenb/ROSENB.HTM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were United States citizens who spied for the Soviet Union and were tried, convicted, and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. They were instrumental in the transmission of information about top-secret military technology and prototypes of mechanisms related to the atomic bomb, which were of value to the Soviet nuclear weapons program.[1][2]

Other co-conspirators were imprisoned, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who supplied documents from Los Alamos to Julius and who served 10 years of his 15 year sentence; Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass and served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for Greenglass; and a German scientist, Klaus Fuchs, who served nine years and four months.[3][4]

For many decades defenders of the Rosenbergs, including their sons, maintained that they were innocent and victims of Cold war paranoia. After the fall of the USSR, much information concerning the case was declassified, including a trove of decoded Soviet cables, codenamed VENONA, which detailed Julius's role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets and Ethel's role as an accessory. The Rosenbergs' sons' current position is that Julius was legally guilty of the conspiracy charge, though not of atomic spying, while Ethel was only generally aware of his activities. They believe that he did not deserve the death penalty and that she was wrongly convicted. They continue to campaign for Ethel to be legally exonerated.[5]

In 2014, five historians who had published on the Rosenberg case wrote that Soviet documents show that "Ethel Rosenberg hid money and espionage paraphernalia for Julius, served as an intermediary for communications with his Soviet intelligence contacts, provided her personal evaluation of individuals Julius considered recruiting, and was present at meetings with his sources. They also demonstrate that Julius reported to the KGB that Ethel persuaded Ruth Greenglass to travel to New Mexico to recruit David as a spy."[6]

There is a consensus among historians that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties and they should not have been executed.[7][8] Distilling this consensus, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were "guilty – and framed".[9][10]

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Early lives and education:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

Julius Rosenberg was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City on May 12, 1918. The family moved to the Lower East Side by the time Julius was 11. His parents worked in the shops of the Lower East Side, as Julius attended Seward Park High School. Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League USA while at City College of New York (CCNY). In 1939, he graduated from CCNY with a degree in electrical engineering.[11]

Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915, to a Jewish family in New York City. She originally was an aspiring actress and singer, but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936. They married in 1939.[12] Together they had two sons, Michael and Robert, born in 1943 and 1947 respectively.

Espionage:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945. He was fired when the U.S. Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party. Important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was undertaken at Fort Monmouth during World War II.[13]

According to a 2001 book by his former handler Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited by the NKVD on Labor Day 1942 by former spymaster Semyon Semyonov.[14] He had been introduced to Semyonov by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA as well as Earl Browder's personal NKVD liaison. After Semyonov was recalled to Moscow in 1944, his duties were taken over by Feklisov.[14]

Rosenberg provided thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse, an upgraded model of which was used to shoot down Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. Under Feklisov's administration, Rosenberg recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell.[15] Perl supplied Feklisov, under Rosenberg's direction, with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star, the first U.S. jet plane. Feklisov learned through Rosenberg that Ethel's brother David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he directed Julius to recruit Greenglass.[14]

In February 1944, Rosenberg also succeeded in recruiting a second source of Manhattan Project information, engineer Russell McNutt, who worked on designs for the plants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For this coup, Rosenberg received a $100 bonus. McNutt's employment provided access to secrets about processes for manufacturing weapons-grade uranium.[16][17]

The USSR and the U.S. were allies during World War II, but the Americans did not share information about or seek assistance from the Soviet Union for the Manhattan Project. The West was shocked by the speed with which the Soviets were able to stage their first nuclear test, "Joe 1", on August 29, 1949.[18] In January 1950, the U.S. discovered that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs identified his courier as Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950.[19] Gold confessed and identified David Greenglass as an additional source.

David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage in June 1950 and confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold. He also claimed that his sister's husband Julius had convinced his wife Ruth to recruit him while on a visit to him in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1944. He said Julius had passed secrets and thus linked him to the Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev. This connection would be necessary as evidence if there was to be a conviction for espionage of the Rosenbergs.[20]

Another accused conspirator, Morton Sobell, fled to Mexico City, where he tried to figure out a way to reach Europe without a passport. Abandoning that effort, he returned to Mexico City, from which he claimed to have been kidnapped by members of the Mexican secret police and driven to the U.S. border, where he was arrested by U.S. forces.[21][22] The government claimed Sobell was arrested by the Mexican police for bank robbery on August 16, 1950, and extradited the next day to the United States in Laredo, Texas.[22] He was charged and tried with the Rosenbergs on one count of conspiracy to commit espionage.

Grand jury:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

At a secret meeting on February 8, 1950, twenty senior government officials met to discuss the Rosenberg case. Gordon Dean, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, stated: "It looks as though Rosenberg is the king pin of a very large ring, and if there is any way of breaking him by having the shadow of a death penalty over him, we want to do it." Myles Lane, a member of the prosecution team, said that the case against Ethel Rosenberg was "not too strong", but that it was "very important that she be convicted too, and given a stiff sentence".[23]

The problem of a weak case against Ethel Rosenberg was solved just 10 days before the start of the trial when David and Ruth Greenglass were reinterviewed. They were persuaded to change their original stories. David had said that he'd passed the atomic data he'd collected to Julius on a New York street corner. Now he stated that he'd given this information to Julius in the living room of the Rosenberg's New York apartment and that Ethel, at Julius's request, had taken his notes and "typed them up". In her reinterview Ruth expanded on her husband's version: "Julius then took the info into the bathroom and read it and when he came out he called Ethel and told her she had to type this info immediately... Ethel then sat down at the typewriter which she placed on a bridge table in the living room and proceeded to type the info which David had given to Julius." As a result of this new testimony, all charges against Ruth were dropped.[24]

On August 11, Ethel Rosenberg testified before a grand jury. She refused to answer all the questions and as she left the courthouse she was taken into custody by FBI agents. Her attorney asked the U.S. Commissioner to parole her in his custody over the weekend, so that she could make arrangements for her two young children. The request was denied.[25] Julius and Ethel were put under pressure to incriminate others involved in the spy ring. Neither offered any further information. On August 17, the grand jury returned an indictment alleging 11 overt acts. Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indicted, as were David Greenglass and Anatoli Yakovlev.[26]

Trial and conviction:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

Police booking photograph of Ethel Rosenberg

Police booking photograph of Julius Rosenberg after his arrest

David Greenglass' sketch of an implosion-typenuclear weapon design, illustrating what he allegedly gave the Rosenbergs to pass on to the Soviet Union

The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The judge was Irving Kaufman. The prosecutor was Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The attorney for the Rosenbergs was Emanuel Hirsch Bloch.[27][28] The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, stated that he turned over to his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb (the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, as opposed to a bomb with the "gun method" triggering device as used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima).[29] He also testified that his sister Ethel Rosenberg typed notes containing U.S. nuclear secrets in the Rosenberg apartment in September 1945.

Both Rosenbergs remained defiant and during testimony asserted their right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to not incriminate themselves whenever asked about involvement in the Communist Party or with its members.

The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, and on April 5 were sentenced to death by Judge Kaufman under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 U.S. Code 32 (now 18 U.S. Code 794), which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information "relating to the national defense".[30] Prosecutor Roy Cohn, who would play a major role assisting Joseph McCarthy with his hearings as his chief counsel, later claimed that his influence led to both Kaufman and Saypol being appointed to the case, and that Kaufman imposed the death penalty based on Cohn's personal recommendation.[31]

In imposing the death penalty, Kaufman noted that he held the Rosenbergs responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:

I consider your crime 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 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.[32]

Julius Rosenberg claimed the case was a political frame-up.

Campaign for clemency:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

After the publication of an investigative series in the National Guardian and the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, some Americans came to believe both Rosenbergs were innocent or received too harsh a punishment, and a grassroots campaign was started to try to stop the couple's execution. Between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of antisemitism; the charges of antisemitism were widely believed abroad, but not among the vast majority in the United States, where the Rosenbergs did not receive any support from mainstream Jewish organizations. The American Civil Liberties Union refused to acknowledge any violations of civil liberties in the case.[33]

Marxist (and later Nobel Prize-winning) existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear ... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb."[34] Others, including non-Communists such as Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein and Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist Harold Urey,[35] as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed the US Dreyfus affair.[36] In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L'Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place."[37] The all-black labor union International Longshoremen's Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest.[38] Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest.[39] Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.[40][41]

Execution

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David Greenglass (March 2, 1922 – July 1, 2014) was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked on the Manhattan Project. He was briefly stationed at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then worked at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico from August 1944 until February 1946. He provided testimony that helped convict his sister and brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for their spying activity. Greenglass served nine and a half years in prison.

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Early life and career:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

Greenglass was born in 1922 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. His parents, Barnet and Tessie, were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, respectively. He attended Haaren High School, and graduated in 1940. He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute but did not graduate.[1]

Greenglass married Ruth Printz in 1942, when she was 18 years old. The two joined the Young Communist League shortly before Greenglass entered the U.S. Army in April 1943. They had a son and a daughter. He worked as a machinist at Fort Ord, California, and then at the Mississippi Ordnance Plant in Jackson, Mississippi. In July 1944, Greenglass was assigned to the secret Manhattan Project, the wartime project to develop the first atomic weapons. He was first stationed at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but was there for less than two weeks. In August 1944 he was sent to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. In order to pass his security clearance, he disguised or omitted details of his communist associations, and had friends write glowing references.[1][2]

Julius Rosenberg, who had married Greenglass' sister, Ethel, in 1939, had become an agent for the Soviet Union (USSR), working under Alexander Feklisov. In September 1944, Rosenberg suggested to Feklisov that he should consider recruiting his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, and his wife.[3] On September 21, 1944, Feklisov reported to Moscow: "They are young, intelligent, capable, and politically developed people, strongly believing in the cause of communism and wishing to do their best to help our country as much as possible. They are undoubtedly devoted to us (the Soviet Union)."[4] David wrote to his wife: "My darling, I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project (espionage) that Julius and his friends (the Russians) have in mind."[5]

After Julius Rosenberg recommended his sister-in-law Ruth Greenglass to his NKVD superiors for the use of her apartment as a safe house for photography, the NKVD realized that David was working on the Manhattan Project. He was then recruited into Soviet espionage by Ruth at Rosenberg's behest in November 1944.[6]Greenglass began to pass nuclear secrets to the USSR via the courier Harry Gold, and more directly with a Soviet official in New York City.[7] According to the Venona project intercepts decrypted by the National Security Agency between 1944 and some time in the 1970s, Greenglass and his wife Ruth were given code names. David was codenamed "KALIBR" ("calibre") and Ruth "OSA" ("wasp").[8] Greenglass turned down requests from the Los Alamos Laboratory (and Rosenberg) to work on the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atol because he wanted to be with Ruth. He was honorably discharged from the Army on February 29, 1946. Greenglass returned to Manhattan, where, with his brother Bernie, and Julius Rosenberg, he ran a small machine shop known as G & R Engineering.[9]

On February 14, 1950, Ruth, who was pregnant with their second child, came too close to the gas heater in their Lower East Side apartment, and her nightgown caught on fire. Greenglass extinguished the blaze, but she suffered severe burns. She was taken to Gouverneur Hospital for skin grafts. He suffered second degree burns to his right hand. He was already aware that the UK and US intelligence agencies had discovered that a Los Alamos theoretical physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had spied for the USSR during the war.[10] Through Fuchs' confession, they found that one of his American contacts had been a man named Harry Gold from Brooklyn, New York.[11]Gold had passed Fuchs' information on to a Soviet agent, performing the role of courier, and Anatoli Yakovlev would then pass the information on to his controllers in the USSR.[12] Through Gold, the FBI's trail led to Greenglass and the Rosenbergs, who had allegedly also used Gold as a courier.[13] When Fuchs was first captured, Julius allegedly gave the Greenglasses $5,000 to finance an escape to Mexico. Instead, they went to the Catskills and used the money to seek legal advice.[13][14]

Trial and aftermath:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit:{]}:

David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage in June 1950 and quickly implicated Julius Rosenberg. He explicitly denied his sister Ethel's involvement when he testified before a grand jury in August 1950. In February 1951, weeks before the trial, he changed his testimony to claim that Ethel had typed up his notes. He testified against his sister and her husband in court in 1951 as part of an immunity agreement. In exchange for that testimony, the government allowed Ruth to stay with their two children.[1] She was named a co-conspirator, but was never indicted. Greenglass told the court, "I had a kind of hero worship there with Julius Rosenberg and I did not want my hero to fail ..."[15]

Greenglass's sketch of animplosion-type nuclear weapon, illustrating what he gave Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to pass on to the Soviet Union

During subsequent testimony in 1951, Greenglass related in detail the secrets he passed on to the Soviet Union. He falsely attributed passing the cross-section drawing of the Atom Bomb to the Soviets to Julius and he also acknowledged passing other sketches through Gold. He described his work on the molds into which were poured the component of the explosive lenses of the Fat Man bombs used for the Trinity nuclear test and in the bombing of Nagasaki. At first this was a matter of difficulty for the prosecution, who wanted Greenglass to testify in open court about the secrets he had given—something which would by definition make them no longer "secret".[15]

The Atomic Energy Commission decided that the implosion concept could be declassified for the trial, and limited all discussion to the weapons used in World War II (fearing that Greenglass may have seen prototypes for future weapons while at Los Alamos). As a result of a surprise defense motion that all testimony about the alleged "secret of the atomic bomb" be impounded, Federal Judge Irving Kaufman at first made all spectators and news reporters leave the room when Greenglass began testifying about his "secrets".[15]

Ten minutes later, Judge Kaufman invited the news reporters back in, asking them to use their discretion in reporting on Greenglass's testimony. The Rosenberg's defense attorney, Emanuel H. Bloch, attempted to convince the jury that his clients were concerned about issues of national security, but failed. Greenglass' testimony, later seen to be crude and in the words of many scientists who examined it "worthless", remained sealed until 1966. He also testified that Rosenberg had stolen and given to the Russians a proximity fuze.[15]

However, Aleksander Feklisov also claimed that Julius Rosenberg supplied him with a whole proximity fuze, which would corroborate at least this part of Greenglass' testimony. During the trial, Bloch claimed Greenglass wanted revenge for the machine shop business failure. Bloch attempted to discredit Greenglass' character and testimony. At Greenglass' sentencing hearing, his attorney O. John Rogge repeatedly told the court his client deserved "a pat on the back" for his testimony and argued that a light sentence, no more than five years, would encourage others to follow his example. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison.[16] He was released after nine and a half years and reunited with his wife.[17]

In March 1953, three months before the Rosenbergs' executions, he wrote a letter for his attorney to deliver to President Eisenhower asking for their sentences to be commuted to prison terms so that they would have an opportunity to confess. He wrote: "if these two die, I shall live the rest of my life with a very dark shadow on my conscience". He described his own testimony as "an act of contrition for the wrong I had done my country, my family and myself" and explained how he now viewed its consequences: "Here I had to take the choice of hurting someone dear to me, and I took it deliberately. I could not believe that this would be the outcome. May God in His mercy change that awful sentence."[18] That same month he admitted he had stolen a few ounces of uranium-238 from a bomb laboratory at Los Alamos years before and had tossed it into the East River in 1950 after he first denied having stolen it.[18]

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After his release in 1960, Greenglass and his family lived in New York City under an assumed name. For some years they lived on 228th Street in Laurelton, Queens, New York. In 1996, Greenglass recanted his sworn testimony in an interview with The New York Times reporter Sam Roberts and stated he had lied under oath about the extent of his sister's involvement in the spying plot in order to protect his wife. At the trial, Greenglass had testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed his notes to give to the Russians, though he now intimated that Ruth had done the typing, saying "I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don't remember." Greenglass explained, "My wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother or my father, O.K.? And she was the mother of my children."[1] When Roberts asked Greenglass if he would have done anything differently, he replied, "Never."[19] The role of Ethel Rosenberg in her husband's espionage ring remains a matter of dispute.[20][21]

In 2008, when a group of academic historians sought the release of the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that indicted the Rosenbergs, Greenglass objected to the government's release of his testimony. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein declined to order the release of the testimony of Greenglass and other surviving witnesses who withheld their consent or could not be located.[22] The grand jury testimony was finally released in July 2015. Greenglass never mentioned involvement by his sister in Rosenberg's delivery of atomic secrets to the Russians.[23]

Greenglass died on July 1, 2014. His death was not publicly announced by his family and was only discovered on October 14, 2014, when The New York Times called the nursing home where he had been living under an assumed name.[1]

Irving Robert Kaufman (June 24, 1910 – February 1, 1992) was a federal judge in the United States. He is best remembered for imposing the death sentences on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

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Born in Brooklyn, New York, Kaufman graduated from Fordham Law School at the age of 21. He was Jewish, but earned the nickname "Pope Kaufman" for his achievement in the required Christian doctrine classes at Fordham (a likely apocryphal story since the law school didn't teach Christian doctrine), a Catholic school.[1] Kaufman worked for two decades as a lawyer in New York City, mostly in private practice but also as an Assistant United States Attorney. From 1949 to 1961, Kaufman served as a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, to which he was appointed by President Harry S Truman. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy promoted Kaufman to an appellate position on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He served as an active Second Circuit judge from 1961 to 1987, including a term as Chief Judge from 1973 to 1980. Kaufman assumed senior status in 1987 but continued to hear some cases until his death four years later. On October 7, 1987, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.[2] He died on February 1, 1992 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan of pancreatic cancer. He was 81 years old.[3]

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A substantial collection of Kaufman's personal and judicial papers is archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., but is not yet fully open for research.

Kaufman had been known to lament what he regarded as the distortion of judicial opinion and finding, as it passed through the filter of the media: "The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial."[7]

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