Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair on 19th
June 1953, having been found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. But was
this sentence a just one?
Nuclear Espionage
During the latter years of World War Two and the ensuing
“Cold War”, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a race to
develop nuclear weapons. The US clearly won the race in terms of being first to
actually deploy a weapon – the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945 and brought the war against Japan to an end – but that did not stop the
Soviet Union from doing everything it could to catch up, including stealing
nuclear secrets from wherever it could.
Members of the American Communist Party were recruited who
were in a position to obtain the sort of information that would be useful to
the Soviet nuclear program. This activity began well before 1945 and continued
into the 1950s. The secrets obtained through spying probably took several years
off the time needed for the Soviets to perform their first nuclear test, which
was in 1949.
A Spy Ring
Julius Rosenberg joined the American Communist Party when he
was a student in New York and he married a fellow party member, Ethel
Greenglass, in 1939. He joined the US Signal Corps and worked at the Fort
Monmouth (NJ) radio research laboratories.
He was approached by Soviet agents and agreed to pass on any
useful information that came his way, as well as recruiting a network of fellow
spies.
In addition to his wife, her brother David and his wife Ruth
were members of the spy ring. At first, their duties were purely administrative
as they did not have direct access to classified material.
In 1943 David Greenglass was called up by the US Army and
assigned to the nuclear research project at Los Alamos that was part of the
Manhattan Project. His spying consisted of making copies of plans that came his
way, although just how valuable these documents were to the Soviets is a matter
of debate, given that David Greenglass was not a nuclear physicist.
David Greenglass was not the only spy at Los Alamos. An
employee named Harry Gold was the link between the information gatherers and
Anatoli Yakolev, an agent based at the Soviet Consulate in New York. This route
was also used by Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized British citizen who was a nuclear
physicist and whose contributions were of much greater value to Yakolev than
those of David Greenglass.
Breaking the Ring
The spy ring was discovered in 1950 thanks to British
Intelligence which decoded documents implicating Klaus Fuchs as having spied
for the Soviet Union during his time at Los Alamos. Fuchs had returned to the
UK in 1946 in order to work on the British nuclear weapons program and he had
continued his activities in terms of passing material to the Soviet Union. Once
Fuchs had confessed to the British secret service the details were passed back
to their American counterparts, who up to that point had had no idea that a spy
ring had been operating at Los Alamos.
Fuchs named Harry Gold as his former contact, and Gold soon
implicated David and Ruth Greenglass. It was David Greenglass who told the FBI
that he had been recruited by Julius Rosenberg.
However, when they were arrested the Rosenbergs said
absolutely nothing. They neither confessed to being spies nor agreed to
implicate anyone else.
The Trial
The trial of the Rosenbergs and other members of the spy
ring began in New York on 6th March 1951. This was at the height of
the anti-Communist “Red Scare” initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the
opportunity was not lost to make an example of some real Communist spies who
had been unmasked, as opposed to the many phony cases of supposed
“anti-American activities” that McCarthy claimed to have revealed.
During the trial the Rosenbergs clearly came off worst.
Their fellow conspirators had no qualms about pointing the finger of blame at
them, but they continued their silence and cited the Fifth Amendment to the
American Constitution that allowed them not to answer any questions that might have
incriminated them.
This silence was probably the reason why they received death
sentences as opposed to the prison terms given to the other conspirators. The
essence of McCarthyism was that people under suspicion would seek to lessen the
consequences to themselves by spreading the net of suspicion to others, and
this was what the Rosenbergs refused to do.
The Electric Chair
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution at
Sing Sing Correctional Facility on 19th June 1953. Julius died after
one jolt of electricity but the system did not work as well for Ethel, whose
heart was still beating after three shocks had been applied and a further two
were needed. It is possible that she experienced considerable pain for at least
part of the procedure.
Was Justice Served?
The convictions and executions of the Rosenbergs pose a
number of disturbing questions that revolve around the issue of whether or not
justice was served.
There can be little doubt that Julius Rosenberg was guilty
of the crimes with which he was charged. He was the central pivot around which
everything else revolved, having been the recruiter of his wife and the
Greenglasses. But was Ethel equally guilty, and was she more guilty than her
brother and sister-in-law? That would appear to have been the conclusion of the
trial judges given that she received the same sentence as her husband which was
far more severe than that of any of the other defendants.
When one looks at what Ethel Rosenberg actually did, the
suspicion that a miscarriage of justice took place becomes extremely strong. If
she had any role in the business it was no more than that of a secretary who
typed the handwritten reports produced by her husband and brother. There was
never any suggestion that she actively sought the information that was passed
on and she was certainly not the prime mover of the spy ring.
So why was she executed when others, more guilty than she,
were not? One reason could be the evidence provided in court by her brother,
David Greenglass, who was at the heart of the information gathering at Los
Alamos. Evidence was also given against her by her sister-in-law, Ruth
Greenglass.
Exactly what was said in court was not known at the time,
due to the need to maintain secrecy because of the highly sensitive nature of
the evidence, and it was many years later that the trial transcripts became
public knowledge.
In 2001 David Greenglass, then aged nearly 80, recanted the
evidence he gave in court that sent his sister to the electric chair. His aim
had been to save his own skin and that of his wife, who was given immunity from
prosecution in exchange for his evidence.
The evidence that Ethel Rosenberg was the group’s secretary,
and therefore an important cog in the whole process, was provided by the
Greenglasses, and this was the evidence that David Greenglass recanted and
admitted had been given falsely under oath. He served a jail sentence of less
than ten years, and had to live with the guilt of having – in effect – murdered
his sister for the rest of his long life. He died in 2014 at the age of 92.
Victims of National Hysteria?
As mentioned above, the trial of the Rosenbergs took place
at the height of the McCarthy era when many people believed that the United
States was in very real danger of being subverted by Communism. Many false
accusations were thrown around and careers ruined – most notably in Hollywood –
when perfectly innocent people were accused of having left-wing sympathies. It
is therefore not surprising that a court trying a case of actual espionage
involving extremely sensitive material smuggled to the Soviet Union by admitted
Communists would want to throw the legal book at the perpetrators.
But why was the death sentence passed on the Rosenbergs?
Espionage during wartime is regarded as a capital crime in many jurisdictions
around the world, but this is not normally the case when the countries involved
are not at war. The beneficiary of the spying in question was the Soviet Union,
which was an ally of the United States during World War Two and officially the
nations were at peace during what was termed the “Cold War”. Spies are simply
not executed by civilized countries under such circumstances.
The answer has to be the McCarthyite hysteria and the fact
that the Rosenbergs said nothing at their trial to defend themselves. As a
result, they were executed and others – more guilty than themselves in some
respects – received relatively light sentences. The accusation that justice was
not fairly administered has much to support it.
© John Welford
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