At 8:11 on the evening of June 19, 1953, Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the electric chair at the New York State prison known as Sing Sing. She was 37 years old and the mother of two young sons. The chair, made of oak and iron, had killed hundreds of convicted criminals over the years, including her husband, Julius Rosenberg, a few minutes before. But the chair was not always reliable, which was one reason inmates gave it the cynical name “Old Sparky.”
Two years earlier, when both Rosenbergs were convicted of spying for Moscow, Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman had handed down their death sentences. The Rosenbergs’ crime, he said, was “worse than murder.” But in fact the penalty was not about justice. It was about vengeance for a loss the American public felt was so enormous that someone must be made to pay a horrible price.
It was “as if a society turned its magnifying lens on these people until they caught fire and were burned alive,” said novelist E. L. Doctorow, whose The Book of Daniel was a fictional account of the case.
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In 1945, the United States had become without question the greatest power on Earth. Americans—and Americans alone—possessed weapons capable of previously unimagined destruction. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the team that developed The Bomb at the secret Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico, conveyed the awe of the first detonation with a quote from Hindu scripture. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later proved that point at the cost of some 200,000 lives. But then, in 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear device. The American monopoly on the apocalypse was over. And someone had to be held to account.
Judge Kaufman blamed both Rosenbergs. Without them, he suggested, the Soviets would not have the bomb and would not have dared challenge American power. He blamed them for the Cold War created by that balance of power, and for the hot war in Korea launched the year before with the backing of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin:
“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 what millions more innocent people may pay for the price of your treason? Indeed, by the cause of your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”
Kaufman’s sentencing reflected the fearful, fearsome tenor of the times. The Rosenbergs’ arrest, trial, and execution took place at the height of national hysteria led by right-wing politicians like Congressman Richard Nixon on the House Un-American Activities Committee and the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy with his constantly evolving lists of supposed communists who had infiltrated the American government.
A star member of the prosecution team at the Rosenberg trial in 1951 was Roy Cohn, who went on to serve as McCarthy’s hyperaggressive counsel in Senate hearings (and subsequently became a mentor to young Donald Trump, teaching him never to admit a mistake).
The vindictive atmosphere was present even in the secret grand jury proceedings that led to the Rosenberg indictments. Transcripts show one member of the grand jury, furious with a reluctant witness who kept pleading the Fifth Amendment, interrupted the prosecutor: “I wish you would ask her whether she is in favor of Russia having the atomic bomb, so that they can drop it on us.”
On the left, many people came to believe that anyone accused by such demagogues as Nixon and McCarthy must in fact be innocent. That the Rosenbergs were Jewish further clouded the picture, as their defenders accused the court of anti-Semitism, while many in the Jewish establishment wanted to distance themselves from communists accused of selling out the country. (That there were no Jews on the jury was raised as an issue after the trial, but Judge Kaufman was Jewish, as were Cohn and other key members of the prosecution team.)
The great, tragic irony in all this is that the intelligence that had led to the discovery of Julius Rosenberg’s operations also held the information that should have saved his wife’s life. It was based on Soviet cables from the mid-1940s decrypted in the Venona Project, an undertaking whose very existence would be kept secret from the American public until the 1980s, and whose specific content was not revealed until the 1990s.
What the evidence now available shows without doubt is that Julius Rosenberg did indeed run an extensive espionage network, and his wife was complicit. But despite his intentions Julius Rosenberg’s agents did not provide the critical information needed to build the Bomb, and not even J. Edgar Hoover, the ruthless Red-hunting head of the FBI, who favored the execution of Julius Rosenberg, thought that killing Ethel was a wise decision.
She was strapped into that chair at Sing Sing because she would not confess, because she would not testify against anyone else, because she supported her husband, and because her brother and sister-in-law, both of whom had spied for Julius, lied about Ethel’s participation in the conspiracy to commit espionage in order to save themselves.
Two thousand volts coursed through her body because the exculpatory evidence in the Soviet cables was too secret to be revealed.
The sense of guilt among those in the know first came to light in The FBI-KGB War, a memoir by the late Robert J. Lamphere published in 1986. Lamphere was the FBI special agent who tracked down leads developed by a polyglot mathematician, Meredith Gardner, the genius at the heart of Venona.
Such was the extreme secrecy surrounding the decryption of the old intercepted Soviet cables that President Harry Truman was not told about it, and the program was not finally discontinued until 1980 even though Moscow had learned about it by 1949.
According to Lamphere’s co-author, Tom Shachtman, when their manuscript was submitted to the National Security Agency for a mandatory review in the mid-‘80s, “The NSA originally wanted the whole book thrown out.” As finally published in 1986, it revealed the fact that codes were broken, and in some detail, but never mentioned the name of the project itself.
Lamphere, in his memoir, says he had “arrived at the belief, shared by others in the FBI, that no purpose would be achieved by sentencing Ethel Rosenberg to death. I had no doubt about her involvement in the conspiracy, but felt she had been acting under her husband’s direction; further, I believed that because she was the mother of two boys who would be orphaned, and would become the focus of public sympathy, she ought to receive a lesser sentence.”
“Did he deserve to be executed? I can’t say. Did she deserve to be executed? Absolutely not,” co-author Shachtman told me. “Lamphere and others wanted to keep them alive to get more information. After you kill them they are of no use.”
But there was more to it than that. “No one in the hierarchy of the FBI who was at all connected with the Rosenberg case wanted a death sentence for Ethel Rosenberg,” the Lamphere memoir tells us. There’s no mention of the exculpatory cable, however.
Leaks from British intelligence in the mid-1980s filled some of the gaps in public knowledge. Ex-MI5 agent Peter Wright’s international unauthorized bestseller, Spycatcher, revealed the name Venona and suggested some of Gardner’s remorse. “I never wanted it to get anyone in trouble,” he had told Wright.
In the mid-1990s, finally, the Venona cables were made available to the public. But it was only last year that Howard Blum’s taut narrative of the joint investigation by Lamphere and Gardner, In the Enemy’s House, focused attention on that one critical cable in particular.
Codebreaker Meredith Gardner was intrigued by references in the Soviet traffic to an operation code-named ENORMOZ, which he soon realized was the Kremlin’s all-out effort to steal nuclear secrets from what the Americans called the Manhattan Project. The defection in late 1945 of Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, had given a hint of the operation. But the ENORMOZ cables Meredith was deciphering, word by painful word, exposed tantalizing details of the Kremlin’s spying activities and the code names of some important operatives.
In April 1948, Gardner wrote a highly classified memo about the cover names “ANTENNA” and “LIBERAL,” which he understood to be the same person and a potentially important go-between in the ENORMOZ operation. He was so intrigued by a description of LIBERAL’s wife under her real name that he went back and re-translated the message again in August 1948. (PDF)
The original Soviet cable from New York to Moscow was dated Nov. 27, 1944:
To VICTOR [VÍKTOR].
Your telgram no. 5356. Intelligence on LIBERÁL's wife. Surname that of her husband, Christian name ETHEL 29 years old. Married 5 years. Finished middle school. A fellow countryman [member of the Communist Party of the USA] in 1938. Sufficiently well-developed politically. She knows about her husband's work … In view of (her) delicate health does not work. … “
Gardner added a further explanation:
“It should be noticed that the noun ‘work’ (RABÓTA) has a special meaning in message 922, and probably the verb (RABÓTAT') sometimes has a corresponding implication, that is, '(conspiratorial) work in the interests of the U.S.S.R.' … The work that ETHEL cannot do in view of her delicate health may not be the earning of her bread and butter, but conspiratorial work.”
When the Soviet traffic used the “Christian name” for subjects, it was also obvious that they had not been given code names, and therefore were not seen as operatives.
It would take the decryption of many more cables, and Lamphere running down many more leads before the FBI would connect the dots that tied Ethel to Julius. But in the meantime, new Venona translations in September 1949 showed that a highly technical paper on gaseous diffusion, vital to the early production of enriched uranium for an atomic bomb, had been passed to the Russians by an agent in the British mission to the Manhattan Project.
That man turned out to be Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré directly involved in the secret atomic research during the war. And as David Holloway made clear in his definitive history, Stalin and the Bomb, it was Fuchs (and possibly other spies who were never discovered by the FBI) who gave the Soviet scientists what they needed to accelerate production of their own nuclear weapons.
As Shachtman recalls from his work with Lamphere on the memoir, “One of the things that was most obvious was that Stalin basically only wanted to believe information that was stolen. If it was given to him by his own people, which it was, he valued it less.”
The Rosenberg network was made up mainly of friends from engineering school in New York who had relatively low-level jobs in the defense industry, and Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who did indeed get a job at Los Alamos, but only as a machinist. He claimed he did not even know he was working on a nuclear project until Julius Rosenberg told him to start passing information about it, and for the Soviet scientists, according to the Holloway book, there were no breakthrough revelations.
Lamphere was able to track down a courier between Fuchs and his Soviet handler, and the trail of that courier, Harry Gold, led him to Greenglass, who started talking. When he mentioned his sister Ethel, married to Julius Rosenberg, who had recruited him, Lamphere realized Julius was the operative code named LIBERAL that he’d been searching for, while Greenglass and his wife Ruth had been given the code names KALIBR (Caliber) and OSA (Wasp).
It was their testimony in court, much of it in response to questioning by Roy Cohn, that led to Ethel Rosenberg’s conviction. The most damning “evidence” was the claim by Ruth Greenglass that she had seen Ethel typing up handwritten notes from David to be conveyed to the Soviets.
Decades later, New York Times reporter Sam Roberts tracked down David Greenglass, who had served a few years in jail and was living under an assumed name with Ruth, who had done no time in prison at all.
Roberts notes in his book The Brother that during the Rosenberg trial, “from the prosecution’s perspective, the Remington [typewriter] was as good as a smoking gun in Ethel Rosenberg’s hands.” David had testified to it. Ruth had corroborated it.
But Greenglass, safe and alive, told Roberts that he didn’t actually remember that scene of Ethel typing up notes in the Rosenberg apartment.
“Yeah, I don’t remember that at all,” Greenglass said. “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.”
“And you didn’t remember it at the time of the trial,” Roberts asked.
“I didn’t remember it then either,” he said. But he testified to it to back up his wife and keep her safe. “My wife is my wife. I don’t sleep with my sister, you know,” Greenglass told Roberts.
When the switch was thrown on the electric chair, Ethel’s body heaved with the shock several times. But the doctor found that her heart was still beating. So the switch was thrown again.
The scene, part of the iconography of the Rosenbergs’ martyrdom, was re-created in the most literal possible terms by the director Sidney Lumet in his film adaptation of the Doctorow book, Daniel.
“The Rosenbergs alive,” wrote Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, “could never have been the symbol that the Rosenbergs dead became.” And perhaps Ethel knew that. Fatalistic, and unwilling to betray her husband, she probably believed that nothing would save her. Julius Rosenberg is said to have enjoyed the game of espionage, but also to have believed when he began it that he was sharing intelligence with an American ally in the war against the Nazis. He knew when he was put on trial long after that war was over and the Soviets declared the enemy, the game was up.
The Rosenberg children were raised by adoptive parents as Robby and Michael Meeropol. They went public with their story, protesting their parents’ innocence, in the 1970s. After the Venona texts were released, they acknowledged that their parents were not as blameless as they had hoped and believed.
Venona might not have absolved Ethel Rosenberg, but it only barely incriminated her, and certainly not to the extent of the penalty exacted. “If Venona is accurate,” Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts, “they took her as a hostage, put a gun to her head, and said to my father, ‘Confess or we’ll kill her.’ And then they pulled the trigger.”
