why did the rosenbergs spy

Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven and London 1999), ix. Surname that of her husband, first name ETHEL, 29 years old. Why Were Atomic Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Executed? - SPYSCAPE In 1951, Julius and his wife Ethel were tried and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union with classified information. With the exception of the Rosenbergs and Sobell there were no other Americans convicted of espionage (or conspiracy to commit espionage) in the 1950s; Rudolf Abel, whose conviction ends this chronology, was a Russian operative, not an American communist. Cohn was a prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy trial, chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a close friend to Nancy Reagan and a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. So reading the Rosenbergs after Venona is not very different from reading the Rosenbergs before Venona, except that the revisionist approach to the case has been temporarily muted by an increasingly noisy right-wing counter-revisionism. The time lag between the public announcement that these documents existed and their declassification and release was necessitated, according to the Agency, by concerns regarding privacy. The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins in New York Southern District federal court. Two of them, Werner Eisenberg and Strassenman, had no connection with the project. A HALF CENTURY after the Rosenbergs were executed as atom spies, there's really only one nagging question left about the case: Why did two seemingly ordinary people from Manhattan's Lower East . What is clear is that the privacy interests of some appear to be dealt with differently from those of others. And, finally, did they always transmit that information accurately, given that they too had to code and encrypt data? Scrutiny of text is one way in which the Venona messages may be reassessed; study of context is another. Perhaps the most controversial element in the Radosh and Milton work is their reliance on the FBI reports of a jailhouse informer, Jerome Tartakow, who told the FBI that Julius Rosenberg, while in prison, had confessed his guilt to Tartakow. There is general agreement that the process of decoding was complex and difficult. They base their conclusion on a Venona document dated 5 April 1945: If [6 groups unrecovered] LIBERALs membership of the FELLOWCOUNTRYMENs ASSOCIATION [ZEMLYaChESTVO] [5 groups unrecovered] and precise information about him through the leadership of the FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN [ZAEMLYaKI] does not exist. He was a good suspect for Antenna until sometime later when we [the FBI] definitely established through investigation that Antenna was Julius Rosenberg. Roberts, The Brother, 419. Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950, a few weeks after the Korean War began. The relevant passage states: LIBERAL and his wife recommend her [Ruth Greenglass] as an intelligent and clever girl. Like all the other intercepts, the two involving Ethel Rosenberg are vague and suggestive, not clear and definitive. With their choice of the word dedication, Radosh and Milton remove the need for any evidence of an overt act. Sons of executed spies Julius, Ethel Rosenberg seek documents to clear It tells us nothing at all about her alleged recruitment of her brother David Greenglass. According to Haynes and Klehr, National Security practices on transliterating Russian words and names from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet changed several times. By 1983, then, the Schneirs and Radosh and Milton had provided each side of the Rosenberg controversy with analysis and information sufficient to encourage further debate without, however, delivering the long-awaited knockout punch. In the scant three years . To cite this article in an academic-style article or paper, use: Guest Contribution, "Rosenberg Trial: A New Analysis", History Cooperative, July 16, 2003, https://historycooperative.org/rosenberg-trial-an-analysis/. One way to understand the NSAs insistence that the work of the Venona project did not benefit from computer technology, but was achieved by a labour intensive, time-consuming iterative process of layered decoding that took many years, may be to mitigate this embarrassing fact. [34], GNOM, we are told, is William Perl and LIBERAL is Julius Rosenberg. Moreover, it bears the hallmark of respectability, mainstream commercial publishers, starting with Doubleday who put out the first 1967 edition and ending, in 1983, with a fourth edition published by Pantheon. See, for example, Michael Meeropol, The Rosenberg Case, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1984, 139; Hugh Brogan, The Rosenberg Case, Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 1984, 191; Igor Kopytoff, The Rosenberg Case, Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 1984, 247; Jack Gold, The Rosenberg Case, Times Literary Supplement, 6 April 1984, 373; Invitation to an Inquest: An Invitation. Letter from Walter and Miriam Schneir and reply from Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, New York Review of Books, 29 September 1983, 55-63; and An Exchange on the Rosenbergs, Letters from Max Gordon and Drs. [62]. [18] There is, finally, a list of the 99 translated messages and, in italics, the editors notations of the names security agency cryptologists associated with each message. In other words, when Schrecker says that the Venona documents show, what she means is that if the Venona documents are read in relation to already existing versions of the Rosenberg case, then they illustrate the case. Julius did run a large spy ring which sent U.S. military secrets to the Soviet Union from 1944- 1950. Julius died without providing the government with names of his alleged accomplices; once Julius was dead, how could the government possibly justify the execution of Ethel? 40. This is not to say that what these Soviet agents have to say is valueless; it is just that knowing how to evaluate such interventions requires care. The Rosenbergs claimed that they were being persecuted for being Jewish. Nigel West, Venona. He was U.S. citizen and electrical engineer. Most of the Rosenberg traffic is not, however, concerned with details of domesticity. In other words, whatever the status of its truth claims, the documents and the publication are part of a political debate, framed by a particular reading of the recent past, and brought forth in the mid-to-late 1990s in a way that reinforces that reading. The story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951, reads like something out of a John le Carr novel with its components of shadowy spies,. Hugh Brogan, Spies and Martyrs, Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1983, 1426. The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (Hammersmith, London 1999), ix. Groups unrecoverable is quite different: it means that the groups are unpaired with other messages, and therefore offer absolutely no possibility of future solution. Nigel West, Venona. The Rosenberg children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, began a long and convoluted process, not yet complete, of extracting all the files related to their parents from the FBI and other agencies of government under the then newly enacted Freedom of Information Act. Their exercise of linguistic standardization rests on the premise that all references to Anatolii and to Anotoly are to the same person, although why this assumption should be made is not explained. He is described as having a wife, Ethel, a woman of strong politics and sickly disposition: Information on LIBERALS wife. But it does not follow that all 3,000 are exactly what the NSA, the CIA, Allen Weinstein, Radosh and Milton, and Haynes and Klehr say they are, if for no other reason than that neither the US translators and decrypters nor the KGB and their informants are infallible. How these circumstances illustrate the integrity of the American justice system as Radosh and Milton contend is unclear. [47] At the time of its publication, this work was heralded as definitive. Haynes and Klehr raise this matter to explain their editing of the plain texts to produce a single standard of anglicization so that readers will not be left to wonder if the Anatolii of one document is the same person as the Anotoly of another. Haynes and Flehr, Decoding Soviet Espionage, ix. The seven-year-old was engrossed in his favorite program. What is particularly surprising is that the Schneirs express no interest in how these intercepts came into the possession of the United States government at a time when the Soviet Union was its ally in World War II. [28]. He would never return. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies, but their sons have spent. Sobell worked on military and government contracts with General Electric and Reeves Instrument Corporation in the 1940s, including during World War II. At what point the government began to suspect MLADs activity is unclear. 1. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage under the U.S. The guilt of Julius now hinges on nineteen Venona messages. The search for the missing Titanic sub in maps and graphics Some, even many, of the Venona releases may be exactly what they appear to be. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - Wikipedia The Polar Prince and seven ships have been searching an area of more than 25,000 sq km, with military planes and sonar buoys also being used. (Fuchs, Gold, and Greenglass served long prison terms.) On July 17, 1950, agents returned to the Rosenberg's apartment. Take, for example, one of the first messages translated by American cryptographers. The most famous of the works of art responding to the Rosenberg case is Picassos idealized line drawings of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, which were used on picket signs at demonstrations in Europe and North America to protest the execution of the Rosenbergs. The release of the Venona decrypts is embedded in an ongoing debate about the nature of the Cold War, and needs to be understood as justifying and advancing the official version of that period as its history continues to be scrutinized and contested from a variety of revisionary perspectives. Their caveat about unfairness is a throwaway line. Let us take these documents at face value, assuming they are exactly what the NSA and the CIA say they are, authentic and unaltered KGB traffic. In 2008, the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, admitted that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military espionage. These typographical features help create an impression of authenticity. Rosenberg, Hiss, Oppenheimer Cases | Encyclopedia.com As I have argued earlier in this paper, without further clarification about when the Venona releases were translated, the correlation between real and code names may well have been established after rather than before the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in which case the names in the Venona releases cannot be used as corroboration of a spy ring. Implicit in the analogy is a belief that, like Dreyfus, the Rosenbergs were innocent, and deserve exoneration. Why did the Rosenbergs spy and die for communism? 19. Perhaps the best example of the difficulties with the Russian tell all genre is the book by Pavel and Anotoly Sudoplatov entitled Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness A Soviet Spymaster, published in 1994, a little more than a year before the release of the first Venona documents. According to these documents Rosenberg, a mechanical engineer, was an active agent who recruited about ten of this friends, CCNY classmates into an espionage ring .The documents do not identify all of Rosenbergs people, but the ones they do, like Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, Max Elitcher, Michael Sidorovich and William Perl, have long been connected to the case. Benson and Warner, Venona, 191. They were both executed by the U.S. government in 1953. . In the new conservative moment, it was argued that Julius Rosenberg was most assuredly guilty of some kind of espionage, even if Ethel was not. A member of the Young Communist League in the early 1930s, it was through her activism with the Communist Party that she met Julius Rosenberg in 1936. Reinforcing this view of the Venona project as requiring herculean human effort, all the Venona documents, both in the volume and the web site, that is, all 3,000 messages, are reproduced from typescript most of which appears to have been composed on manual typewriters. Espionage Act of 1917. In 2017, state-owned Israeli arms maker invested in two firms in bid to compete with NSO. The importance of this omission is in part occluded by the instant impact of viewing such honest looking documents. In the more liberal 1960s and 1970s the Rosenbergs were seen as victims of Cold War hysteria, their trial and execution a miscarriage of justice. They were then available to have their real names correlated with code names, particularly since the code names have few identifying particulars. Soviets as a spy. There are three different ways you can cite this article. The "parity" argument, though, was definitely part of Ted Hall's and Klaus Fuchs' motivations, along with the fact that the USSR was the one bearing the brunt of Hitler at that point. [11]. For the reaction of Michael Meeropol, see Subject: Michael Meeropol Statement on Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, ttp://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ meeropol-on-rosenbergs.html (13 December 2001).\. This front material serves two functions. The Story of Congressional Investigations (New York 1955), 138. A related question involves the order in which the releases were translated and read. Further examination of the accuracy of these messages and analysis of their contexts may very well further qualify their meaning. [43] On the other hand, revisionist historians, civil libertarians, and others argue that the Rosenbergs were convicted by the hysteria of the time, that there were many procedural irregularities in their trial, and that their sentence was unnecessarily harsh because they had not been proven guilty, or because they were innocent, or because what they (and especially Ethel) were convicted of did not warrant the death penalty. After 50 years of decoding, decryption, translation, and investigation, the tangible results of the Venona project are remarkably thin. Between 1983 and the release of the Venona messages, the Soviet Union collapsed. 31. 17. The reviews in the establishment press The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker were uniformly favourable. O n June 19, 1953, Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted, having been found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Relatives were afraid to take them in. [6] Accompanying Venona was a series of five very short pamphlets summarizing the history of the Venona project (in the first pamphlet of eleven pages) [7] and then (in the next four) [8] outlining the nature of the documents available through the Venona project. Harry Gold, an American chemist, confessed in May 1950 to being Fuchs American courier in the period 1944-45, and having received atomic information from David Greenglass when Greenglass worked at Los Alamos. The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit' - NPR The list includes both codenames and real names. For the most recent treatment of the role of David Greenglass in the Rosenberg case, see Sam Roberts, The Brother. David Greenglass - Wikipedia Finished secondary school. Julius Rosenberg was charged with a specific crime, conspiracy to commit espionage, and in particular, amongst the overt acts, of having conspired with David and Ruth Greenglass to steal atomic secrets and transmit them to the Soviet Union. Sobell received a thirty-year sentence. Likewise, in Washington [Naval-GRU] 2505-12 to Moscow, 31 December 1942, AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is identified as Edna Margaret Patterson although the connection is based on inexact spelling and a double probability: AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Probably Francis Yakilnilna MITNEN (exact spelling not verified) who is probably identical with Edna Margaret PATTERSON. Benson and Warner, Venona, 212. [21]. [29] Of these, twelve appear in Venona. The counter-revisionist argument that American communists were engaged in extensive espionage activity on behalf of the Soviet Union is strengthened by the NSAs narrow and unambiguous definition of fellow countrymen. The intercepts themselves, however, do not appear to require such fixed meaning. David Greenglass was born on the Lower East Side on March 2, 1922, to immigrants from Russia and Austria. Further, a portion of work was done by British linguists, who rendered the translations in British English rather than American English. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona. The legal charge of which the Rosenbergs were convicted was vague: "Conspiracy to Commit Espionage." But in a practical sense they were held accountable for giving the so-called "secret of the atomic bomb" to the . Robert Louis Benson, Introductory History of Venona and Guide to the Translations (Fort George G. Meade, MD 1995). Sobells impressions of the proceedings and their significance in relation to his conviction are recorded on the H-DIPLO web site. There is no indication of who worked on which documents. First it attempts to establish the intellectual authority and scholarly authenticity of the work through the formal apparatus of academic writing. 6. Even if Julius was guilty of conspiring to commit espionage, Ethel was not. The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and not minor ones either. Benson and Warner, Venona, New York 1340 to Moscow, 21 September 1944, 341-2, and Benson and Warner, Venona, Moscow 298 to NY, 31 March 1945, 425-6, appear to have been produced on electric typewriters. The US Coast Guard released a graphic on Thursday . Radosh and Milton, The Rosenberg File, Second Edition, xxv. These barebones facts do not adequately convey the controversy surrounding the trial, sentencing, and execution of the Rosenbergs. The Smith Act had nothing to do with acts of espionage. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg asked him to pass highly confidential instructions on making atomic weapons to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the controversy created by the Sudoplatov revelations made it clear that information emanating from Russia would not automatically be seen as reliable, much less persuasive. [66] Eisenberg and Strassenman are mistakenly linked to the other fifteen either by the informant or by the KGB agent. See also Venona Chronology, ttp://www.nsa.gov/docs/ venona/venona_chron.html (13 December 2001). Dedication criminalizes a state of mind. [60]. Between the acquisition of this material in the 1940s and its appearance in Benson and Warners Venona in 1996, the communiqus were decoded and reworked using an iterative process that involved re-writing as new material was decoded. [30]. He was 14 when he met Julius Rosenberg, who began courting Ethel, who was seven years . Benson and Warner, Venona, back cover. Telford Taylor, Grand Inquest. Rosenberg Case Overview | Rosenberg Fund for Children Even so, the official version of the Rosenberg case continues to unravel. Notwithstanding such concerns, Radosh and Miltons work has become as foundational a text for such subsequent counter-revisionist studies of the Cold War as Haynes and Klehrs influential and highly regarded Venona. The case against them was based largely on the word of one confessed spy. 42. Does someone so dedicated conspire to commit espionage, or does that person actually commit espionage, or does that person, perhaps, do nothing at all except believe that obtaining secrets for the USSR might be a good idea? Footnote letters and numbers have been interpolated into the text, and anonymous footnotes, sometimes of a length far in excess of the message, are added to the bottom of the message as if they flowed automatically from the text instead of being material added by translators and/or editors. Roberts interviews with David Greenglass confirm what the Rosenbergs and their supporters have long contended, that Greenglass perjured himself when he testified that Ethel typed the secrets of the atom bomb. Fifteen of those mentioned were involved in the American atom bomb project. 43. There is no record or notation on the Venona messages of all the dates on which the partial decryptions and translations were made, footnotes added or amended, and names confirmed. The absence of this information from the messages reproduced in Venona tends to encourage a perception of stability and certainty about the plain text that a more heavily annotated version, with its accumulated evidence of choices made, might not so readily convey. In a chapter on Atomic Spies, the Sudoplatovs accuse four leading atomic physicists associated with the Manhattan Project, (Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and J. Robert Oppenheimer), of having supplied vital information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. 18. Such reconfirmation of their position ought to be the occasion for angry demands that the Rosenberg case be reopened, but it is not. As to the Rosenbergs, according to the Sudoplatovs, they were very minor players. Along the same lines, in a lengthy note, Sam Roberts quotes from an FBI memo in which it is clear that the FBI initially identified Antenna as Joseph Weichbrod. The most effective authenticating detail is the reproduction of the material as typescript, the overwhelming majority of which was generated on manual typewriters, revealing all the unevenness of that crude technology. During the repressive 1950s, popular and official views of the case coalesced: it was commonly believed that the Rosenbergs were Communist spies who deserved to die. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb (and effectively started the Cold War) in September 1949 based on information, including that from Greenglass, they had obtained from spies. 3. Why did the Rosenbergs spy and die for communism? There he notes that he is not definitely identified with any cover name, although he is tentatively associated with RELE in three. HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate and informative content. Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes, 178-180. You can navigate days by using left and right arrows. The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York 1978). Edgar L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York 1972). During the war these scientists and engineers gave Rosenberg information about the weapons they were working on that he then photographed and handed to the KGB. 44. [65] Eisenberg was, according to West, actually Werner Heisenberg, who not only was not invovled in the American project, but was the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in physics who remained in Germany during World War II. Tue 14 Oct 2014 23.22 EDT Last modified on Tue 6 Mar 2018 09.58 EST David Greenglass - who served 10 years in prison for his role in the most explosive atomic spying case of the Cold War, and gave. [57], The brutality and shallowness of this judgement compromises the Radosh and Milton work.
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