G-Man, page 58
When agents brought Rosenberg in for questioning in July 1950, Hoover was hoping that what had happened with Fuchs, Gold, and Greenglass would now occur again—that Rosenberg would confess, name names, and keep the whole investigation going. The Venona decrypts assured Hoover that they had the right man: “the operating head of a large espionage group” who “personally handled the recruiting of agents and the collection of scientific data,” in the words of one FBI document. But Venona alone could only do so much. By the time Rosenberg went to trial, Venona had helped the FBI to identify 108 people who had worked with the Soviets in one manner or another—of whom a whopping sixty-four “were not previously known to us as involved in espionage.” Despite this mother lode of information, vanishingly few had been arrested, and even fewer had been prosecuted in court. Without other evidence to corroborate what they knew from Venona, Hoover and the federal authorities were unable to act against even the most obviously guilty parties. As a result, many of them got off scot-free. Some, like Rosenberg’s friends Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, fled the United States, eventually ending up in the Soviet Union. Others, such as the young nuclear physicist Theodore Hall, who supplied technical information from Los Alamos, stonewalled the Bureau and then simply went on with their lives.[14]
The Rosenberg case had more going for it. Rosenberg appeared to be “possibly the most important espionage agent which we have arrested to date,” in the words of one FBI assessment. The FBI also already had a highly voluble and cooperative witness. In his confession, Greenglass had ticked off the secret technical information he had provided to Rosenberg. He had second thoughts about his participation in espionage only after Rosenberg warned him to flee the country as the FBI began to close in on Gold and Fuchs. Greenglass had ignored the advice, since the family had a new baby and his wife, Ruth, had recently suffered an accident that left her with severe burns over much of her body. Instead, he chose to stay and tell the FBI what he knew, in hopes of winning leniency. Ruth agreed to talk as well. Under FBI questioning, she identified both Julius and Ethel as active participants in what amounted to an atomic espionage plot.[15]
The Greenglass statements had problems; both David and Ruth changed their stories frequently, conjuring up provocative new details at just the moments they seemed to be needed. But what they said aligned well enough with what Hoover was learning through other sources—the Venona cables, the Gold and Fuchs confessions—to give him the confidence to press ahead. In an ideal scenario, FBI agents would use the Greenglass statements to pressure Rosenberg into confessing and cooperating. But he surprised them. “ROSENBERG will not talk,” one agent noted ominously in the wake of his initial interview. Rosenberg stuck with that position under interrogation and then, as of July 17, under arrest.[16]
Rosenberg’s reticence inspired Hoover to consider another point of leverage. “If Julius Rosenberg would furnish details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals,” he wrote two days after Rosenberg’s arrest. “Proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter.” Ethel had appeared in Venona as the twenty-nine-year-old wife of Liberal. About her involvement in espionage, though, the cables were more ambiguous. One crucial message noted that she “knows about her husband’s work” but that “in view of (her) delicate health does not work” herself. Venona analysts speculated that the reference to “work” might not mean “the earning of her bread and butter, but conspiratorial work.” In other words, they suspected that she knew about but did not necessarily participate in her husband’s espionage activities.[17]
From this analysis the Justice Department had originally concluded that “they do not believe there is sufficient evidence developed to charge ETHEL ROSENBERG.” After weeks of stonewalling by her husband, however, they changed their minds. In August, department lawyers questioned Ethel before a grand jury in New York. Like her husband, she refused to talk, aside from admitting to a general history of communist sympathies. On August 11, FBI agents arrested her as she left the Foley Square courthouse, primly dressed in white gloves and a light blue dress with white polka dots. Both she and Julius spent the next several months in prison, cut off from their two sons, ages three and seven. Hoover hoped that seeing his wife and children suffer—combined with the threat of conviction—would induce Rosenberg to talk. But as the Venona analysts noted in late February, neither Julius nor Ethel “have been in any way cooperative.” Under the circumstances, Hoover agreed, the next logical step was prosecution.[18]
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If the government had chosen at this moment to reveal Venona, with its frank descriptions of Julius’s espionage activities (and more ambiguous words about Ethel), the Rosenberg name would have meant something very different to a generation of Americans, especially to the liberals and leftists who took up the Rosenbergs’ cause as their own. It might also have spared the Rosenbergs from their fate, since what was revealed in Venona about the actual information handed over to the Soviets was somewhat less dramatic and consequential than the Rosenbergs’ popular image as master atomic spies would suggest. At the very least, it would have given the Rosenbergs less reason to insist upon their innocence. But nobody, including Hoover, truly entertained the idea. As during the Coplon trial, Hoover was convinced that protecting Venona would be worth almost any amount of difficulty, since it was the government’s one reliable way to trace the Soviets’ connections and networks. The trial and its aftermath nonetheless swirled with rumors of “secret evidence” that explained the government’s confidence in the Rosenbergs’ guilt. To Hoover, the couple’s refusal to admit the truth—when Hoover knew what Julius had done—only reinforced the idea that they were indeed heartless communist agents of the first order. Their limited success as spies mattered less than the single great fact that they had cast their lot with the Soviets.[19]
The Rosenberg trial began on March 6, 1951, in room 107 of the same Foley Square courthouse where the three-ring circus of the Hiss, Smith Act, and Coplon trials had played itself out. Hoover liked the judge, Irving Kaufman, who had served as a special assistant to the attorney general after the war and was known, in one FBI official’s words, to be “historically pro-Hoover” and anticommunist. Hoover was less fond of U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, who in prosecuting both the Hiss and Smith Act cases had revealed himself, in the view of top FBI officials, as a showboater. Both Saypol and Kaufman were Jewish—proof, according to their supporters, that the Rosenberg prosecution was not being driven by anti-Semitism. So was the Rosenbergs’ codefendant Morton Sobell, a fellow Communist Party member and City College graduate. Sobell had fled to Mexico with his family, hoping to make his way to the Soviet Union. Hoover had arranged for them to be snatched up by local authorities and driven eight hundred miles back to the U.S. border.[20]
The prosecution’s opening statement drew upon Hoover’s black-and-white view of the communist threat. “The evidence will show their loyalty to and worship of the Soviet Union, and by their rank disloyalty to our country these defendants joined with their co-conspirators in a deliberate, carefully planned conspiracy to deliver to the Soviet Union the information and the weapons which the Soviet Union could use to destroy us,” Saypol declared. The defense countered that the whole idea was a wild fantasy, that Julius was merely an innocent leftist and Ethel “basically a housewife.” The jury’s chief task, according to the defense, was to guard against the “bias or prejudice or hysteria” raging through American society. Hanging over both sides was the possibility of the death penalty, the first time since the execution of the Nazi saboteurs that accused traitors might be put to death on the basis of FBI evidence. Hoover viewed a death sentence not only as a potentially just outcome but also as another point of leverage toward what was still his top priority: neither convicting nor killing the Rosenbergs, but persuading them to talk.
Both Elizabeth Bentley and Harry Gold testified at the trial. But it was David Greenglass who emerged as the star witness, describing how his brother-in-law, Julius, with the quiet assistance of his sister, Ethel, had convinced him to become a Soviet spy. The family connections gave the trial a soap-opera quality—betrayal on a grand and highly personal scale. Ruth testified as well, recounting a critical scene in which Ethel, acting as her husband’s assistant, had typed up some notes from Los Alamos. The Rosenbergs offered little in the way of rebuttal, taking the stand only to say that their relatives had made up the whole story. Sobell never took the stand at all. “This is a case of the Greenglasses against the Rosenbergs,” defense counsel maintained—and on this point, at least, both sides could agree. On March 29, after less than a month of testimony, the jury sided with the Greenglasses, delivering guilty verdicts for all three defendants.[21]
Kaufman gave Hoover credit for the outcome. “I say a great tribute is due to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to J. Edgar Hoover for the splendid job they have done in this case,” he declared in court. When it came to sentencing, though, Hoover and Kaufman did not quite see eye to eye. Queried via back channels about his preferred scenario, Hoover recommended death for Julius as well as for Sobell, who had “not cooperated with the government and had undoubtedly furnished high classified information to the Russians.” For Ethel he proposed a more lenient sentence of thirty years, in deference to her secondary role in her husband’s espionage and her status as the mother of two children. He based these judgments less on what had happened at trial than on two external factors: his assessment of likely public opinion and his understanding of what the Venona cables had revealed. He expressed particular concern about the “psychological reaction” that might ensue if Ethel were sentenced to death, a young left-wing mother martyred by the American government. For David Greenglass, who had pleaded guilty, Hoover recommended fifteen years. Ruth Greenglass would not be prosecuted at all, in thanks for her cooperation.[22]
Kaufman took most of Hoover’s suggestions, with one great exception. Rather than sparing Ethel and condemning Sobell, he sentenced both Julius and Ethel to death and gave Sobell thirty years. In explaining his decision, he blamed the Rosenbergs not just for facilitating the transfer of some moderately useful technical drawings, but for revealing the secret technology behind “the A-bomb” years before the Soviets would otherwise have discovered it. In the process, according to Kaufman, the Rosenbergs had subjected Americans to the threat of nuclear annihilation and enabled the start of the Korean War, with its fifty thousand U.S. casualties and counting. “I consider your crime worse than murder,” he told them. “By your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”
History was not yet done with the Rosenbergs, however. As Hoover had predicted, the dual death sentence, at first seen as an unequivocal FBI victory, soon began to inspire outrage throughout the world. In late 1951, American supporters organized the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, mobilizing prominent left-leaning political, intellectual, and artistic figures to push for a reversal of the verdict. Saving the Rosenbergs soon became an international cause célèbre, embraced by Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre and even the Pope, along with millions of other sympathizers. The Rosenbergs continued to maintain their innocence, publishing sentimental jailhouse letters insisting, “We are an ordinary man and wife,” persecuted only for left-wing idealism. Hoover thought the pressure campaign would—and should—backfire. “If the sentence is reduced,” he wrote in May 1953, “we may well be charged with knuckling under to Communist pressure, not only abroad but in this country.”[23]
Hoover held out hope to the end that the Rosenbergs, after exhausting all their appeals, would at last break down and talk. On the date of their execution, he stationed a team at Sing Sing prison to be on standby in case of any last-minute change of heart. He even made arrangements for leaping into action “if the Rosenbergs desire to talk after they go into the execution chamber and even after they are strapped into the chair.” They did not. On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted just before sundown—first Julius, then Ethel—without ever naming names or disclosing to the FBI what they knew.[24]
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Publicly, Hoover promoted the Rosenberg case as an unmitigated FBI victory. Among confidants, though, he acknowledged that things had not worked out entirely as planned. By refusing to talk, the Rosenbergs disrupted the thrilling chain of discovery that had begun with Fuchs. And when the next round of identifications came through, Hoover’s spirits sank further. In the spring of 1951, Venona decryptions helped to identify two more men as Soviet operatives. Both were high up in British intelligence. And both were friends with FBI liaison Kim Philby. Based on this evidence, Hoover began to suspect that Philby, too, was an active Soviet spy—and that he had been sharing everything he learned about Venona with his bosses in the Soviet Union.
Hoover’s path to this devastating conclusion was long, winding and painful. Not long after the Rosenberg arrests, Hoover received an honorary knighthood from the British government, bestowed by MI5 chief Percy Sillitoe—Hoover’s British counterpart—in a cocktails-and-hors-d’oeuvres ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington. Throughout those months, Philby continued to entertain all manner of FBI and CIA officials at his home, often accompanied by Guy Burgess, a Foreign Service official and newcomer to Washington, assigned to the Embassy. Burgess had some of Philby’s charm but none of his polish, maintaining a “poor personal appearance” as well as questionable personal behavior, according to the FBI, including drunken brawls, well-delivered insults, and the sexual company of men. But Philby liked, or at least tolerated Burgess, another old friend from Cambridge days. So the rest of the Washington intelligence establishment largely accepted the newcomer.[25]
Then, in April 1951, just days after the end of the Rosenberg trial, a new Venona decryption began to unravel the whole cozy arrangement. According to the latest breakthrough, the spy “Homer”—long known to be an employee at the wartime British Embassy—had taken a trip from Washington to New York in June 1944 to visit his pregnant wife. The details left no doubt that Homer was Donald Maclean, Philby’s long-ago Cambridge friend who had also served in Washington. In 1948, Maclean had returned to Britain and ultimately become head of the American Department in the British Foreign Office, a post that now seemed to have alarming significance. A few days after the Homer discovery, Burgess went back to Britain to confer about the matter. A few weeks after that, both men went missing, presumed to have defected to the Soviet Union.[26]
In Washington, it fell to Philby to notify the FBI about his two AWOL friends, and about the suspicion, already bubbling within British intelligence, that both had been longtime Soviet spies. During his “short interview” with Hoover, Philby assured him that the FBI could in no way be at fault—that it was the British who failed to identify the traitors in their midst. Hoover “jumped at” the absolution, according to Philby, never a “man to look a gift-horse in the mouth.” Even then, though, Hoover did not see what would soon become obvious: Philby himself had been working with Maclean and Burgess.[27]
He finally came to that conclusion a few weeks later, after Philby had been called back to Britain amid questions about his own loyalty. High-ranking emissaries from British intelligence made a special trip to Washington to let FBI officials know of their “gravest suspicions” concerning Philby. At the CIA, a former FBI agent named Bill Harvey prepared a report on the available evidence. Like many CIA men, Harvey had joined Philby more than once for drinks, dinner, and gossip. Upon Philby’s departure, Harvey undertook a study of the man, looking to fact patterns and circumstantial evidence to determine whether Philby, like Maclean and Burgess, might have been working for the Soviets. He concluded that the answer was obviously yes. Hoover was convinced, though not everyone yet agreed. Back in Britain, many of Philby’s colleagues initially rejected the notion as impossible, simply not the sort of thing that a man like Philby would do. At Hoover’s FBI, faith in Philby’s guilt quickly became conventional wisdom.[28]
The suspicion of Philby’s betrayal “shook the Western intelligence and counterintelligence services to their cores,” Lamphere recalled. It was particularly devastating for the Venona team, which had proudly shared each new discovery with Philby. “The worst thing was that I believed he had compromised a lot of the intelligence advantage the FBI had as a result of deciphering the 1944-45 KGB messages,” Lamphere later wrote. “For years I had had the optimistic feeling that, based on the breakthrough that the messages provided, we would go on and on uncovering and rolling up KGB networks in the United States. Now I understood that the KGB had to have known of our decipherment of the messages, and that our advantage was gone.”[29]
Indeed, it was not just Philby who had taken a wrecking ball to the FBI’s work. In 1950, amid the swirl of the Fuchs and Rosenberg cases, the Venona team learned that there was another spy with them inside Arlington Hall. A naturalized U.S. citizen born to Russian parents, William Weisband had none of Philby’s aristocratic finesse or high-level access. But his job as a translator and language expert meant that he could wander the facilities, consult on top-secret decryptions, and peruse documents. Hoover’s agents interviewed Weisband, hoping to elicit a confession that would lead to a prison sentence. Like the Rosenbergs, he refused to talk—and this time, there was no David Greenglass to point the finger. Weisband received a one-year sentence for contempt of court after refusing to testify before a grand jury. Then he went on with his life, albeit no longer in the employ of the U.S. government. At the FBI, he left behind a trail of shock, embarrassment, and dismay. But as the NSA later acknowledged, the Weisband disaster “was so successfully hushed” that the public and most of official Washington knew nothing about it.[30]
