Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1951.
Photo Credit: Not provided.
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British author and journalist, Anne Sebba, who has written biographies on some shadowy British figures, including Jennie Churchill and Wallis Simpson, among others, traveled across the Atlantic to explore one of the most controversial characters of them all in her new book, “Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy."
In one of the most highly debated cases in American history, Ethel, along with her husband, Julius Rosenberg, were tried and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.
Ethel Rosenberg was the first woman executed by the United States Government since Mary Surratt, an American boarding house owner, was hanged (July 7, 1865) for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The Manhattan Project was a code name attached to a top-secret project involving Allied scientists working to develop an atomic bomb. According to recorded testimony, British physicist Klaus Fuchs, working at Los Alamos, met with a Soviet agent (named Raymond) on two different occasions and transferred notes on the working design for the atomic bomb.
Fuchs would eventually be arrested and pressured to name his co-conspirators. He confessed to spying and passing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project.
There isn’t much debate surrounding Julius Rosenberg, the husband of Ethel Rosenberg. He was a card-carrying Communist party member since December 12, 1939, approximately six months after marrying Ethel in a small civil ceremony.
Mountains of court testimony, FBI records, and recently declassified cables, show irrefutably that Julius Rosenberg was a prime mover and shaker of a spy ring which involved transferring classified information about the development of the United States first atomic bomb from the Los Alamos Laboratory (New Mexico) to a courier, Harry Gold, who was alleged to have passed it on to the Soviets.
Testimony reveals David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, passed a "sketch of a high-explosive lens mold" to Gold at Julius Rosenberg’s request; a sketch that was eventually transferred to the Soviets.
Greenglass worked as a machinist-soldier stationed at Los Alamos. He was recruited by Julius Rosenberg to assist in this espionage ring.
So, exactly how did Ethel become linked in this spy ring?
When the FBI questioned Greenglass on June 15, 1950; in addition to naming his wife Ruth and Julius Rosenberg in the spy ring, he told the feds that Ethel Rosenberg, the wife of Julius, was in Julius’s apartment room and typed hand written notes on classified information from him.
In fact, no handwritten or type-written notes were ever found and they were never presented in court, raising credibility problems for the prosecution’s case that Ethel Rosenberg was an accomplice to the spy ring. The charges that Ethel Rosenberg typed the notes, in other words, was unsubstantiated.
In exchange for their testimony, David and Ruth Greenglass were given appreciably lighter sentences.
It wouldn’t be divulged until 2008 that the Greenglass’s (both Ruth and David, active participants in the spying activity) lied in their original testimony about Ethel Rosenberg typing notes that would facilitate the spy ring. They later claim they were coerced by the prosecuting team, led by the ruthless firebrand Roy Cohn, to fabricate their story so they could force Ethel Rosenberg to disclose additional badly needed information about the spy ring.
In order to save his wife from prosecution, David Greenglass told journalist Sam Roberts that he was squeezed by the prosecution to commit perjury. His false testimony additionally saved his wife from prosecution.
David Greenglass was released from prison in 1960 after serving 10 years of his 15-year sentence. His wife, Ruth, was never charged.
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Groundless accusations against Ethel Rosenberg and the reason she was sentenced to death becomes the central focus of Anne Sebba’s fascinating book.
Most observers who have followed the Rosenberg case reach the overriding conclusion that threatening Ethel with a harsh punishment would make her share more information about the spy ring. She never offered prosecutor’s any more damaging information about the espionage activity because she wasn’t privy to such information. She was merely the wife of a Soviet spy, not a collaborator.
Martin Sobell, an American engineer, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, told reporters in 2008 that Ethel was guilty only "of being Julius's wife.”
Anne Sebba writes that the true extent of Ethel’s complicity will probably never be clearly known, but points out, “it was not a crime under U.S. Law to approve spousal wrongdoing, either during the war or the time of the trial.”
The fact that Julius Rosenberg didn’t distance Ethel from the real crime capers during the intense questioning, left many historians and journalists scratching their heads why he wouldn’t save his own wife from possible execution.
Not all observers, however, are convinced Ethel Rosenberg wasn’t an active participant in the spy ring.
Mark Kramer, Director of the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University, told me “the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg at the trial was overwhelming, and Soviet foreign intelligence documents that became available in 2005 provide conclusive evidence that she gave her husband invaluable assistance with his espionage ring.” “She did not deserve to be put to death” Kramer concedes, “but she certainly was guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and was justifiably convicted, despite the misdeeds of the prosecutors.” Kramer thought a sentence of 15 to 25 years for Ethel Rosenberg would have been more appropriate.
Along with the dubious charges against Ethel Rosenberg, Anne Sebba drives home the critical point that the execution of the Rosenbergs happened during a time of heightened paranoia in the United States about Soviet aggression and Communist intrusion into leading American institutions.
At the time of the Rosenberg case, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prominent ring leader of the “Second Red Scare,” charged that the State Department employed over 200 Communist agents, triggering fear and suspicion, leading to the blacklisting of a number of individuals who were hauled in front of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and accused of unfounded subversion and treason charges.
“For one brief moment in time,” Sebba wrote, “hysteria overtook common sense and, in order to appear strong in the face of credible Communist threat, the American government allowed this profoundly moral woman to be executed, and in the most brutally incompetent manner.” “It is hard to imagine,” Sebba went on to write, “any other country, in Western Europe of the wider free world, where this terrible fate would have been inflicted on Ethel.”
The death penalty unquestionably met with the approval of a number of Americans at the time. As many as 68% respondents in a 1953 survey, supported the death penalty.
The death penalty might have been ok with a majority of the American public, but there was pent-up outrage, internationally, for the death sentence of Ethel Rosenberg, which Anne Sebba underscores.
At the time of the trial, for example, The New York Times printed a letter from German born physicist, Albert Einstein, who wrote: “My conscience compels me to urge you (President Eisenhower) to commute the death sentence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
The Vatican newspaper (L’Osservatore Romano) published a passionate plea from the pope not to execute the Rosenbergs. Before he left office, President Truman received as many as three million letters and telegrams asking the Rosenbergs not be put to death.
Further, U.S. Ambassador to France, C. Douglas Dillon, predicted (probably correctly) that the Rosenberg executions would be viewed, many years later, as a knee jerk reaction to McCarthyism. The majority in France, in fact, opposed the executions which they viewed as “unjustifiable punishment.”
For decades after the trial, the Rosenberg’s sons Robert and Michael Meeropol believed both their parents weren’t spies and fought vigorously to clear their names.
All that changed in 2008, when 91-year-old Martin Sobell admitted for the first time that he was a Soviet spy in a New York Times article. He additionally implicated Julius Rosenberg in the spy ring. According to the New York Times, “coupled with some of that grand jury testimony, Mr. Sobell’s admission bolsters what has become a widely held view among scholars: that Mr. Rosenberg was, indeed, guilty of spying, but that his wife was at most a bit player in the conspiracy and may have been framed by complicit prosecutors.”
After such a sobering revelation, the Rosenberg sons finally gave up the fight and acknowledged their father, Julius Rosenberg, was indeed a Soviet spy.
Both sons, however, continue to fight for the exoneration of their mother, Ethel Rosenberg. In 2016, they made an impassioned plea to President Barack Obama to clear her name without success.
Now that there’s a new president, I asked Michael Meeropol whether he and his brother would make a plea to President Joe Biden to decide for himself whether their mother was a spy?
Mr. Meeropol responded to my email only to say, “my brother and I are considering the possibilities, but we have not made any decisions yet.”
Thanks to Anne Sebba’s compelling narrative, readers are given an opportunity to decide for themselves whether prisoner number “10510” (from the Sing Sing prison overlooking the east bank of the Hudson River) really deserved to be executed shortly after 8 p.m. on June 19, 1953, along with her husband, Julius.
--Bill Lucey
June 19, 2021
