[Note: Several dramatic developments in the Rosenberg Case occurred on September 11, 2008.  To learn more, read a Statement from Robert and Michael Meeropol, and the brothers' OpEd article in the Los Angeles Times, and visit the RECENT PRESS COVERAGE page.]

Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950 a few weeks after the
Korean War began. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June
19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. The charge against the
Rosenbergs was vague - “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage.” But they really
were tried and sentenced for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to
the USSR. Their co-defendant Morton Sobell also was convicted and
received a 30-year prison sentence.

The Rosenbergs were tried and found guilty in March 1951. Federal
Judge Irving R. Kaufman pronounced the death sentence in early April.
The Rosenbergs’ attorneys’ worked for over two years to have the verdict
overturned. They appealed to the Supreme Court nine times, but the
Court refused to review the record. Neither President Truman nor
President Eisenhower granted their requests for clemency.

Because the charge was conspiracy, their conviction required no
tangible evidence that they had stolen anything or given it to anybody.
The key government witnesses were all charged with the same conspiracy
and received more favorable treatment in return for testifying that the
Rosenbergs were guilty. David and Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s
brother and sister-in-law, testified that Julius with Ethel’s help
recruited David into an atomic spy ring in 1944. At that time David, an
Army sergeant, worked as a machinist at Los Alamos in New Mexico where
the first Atomic Bomb was being built. The Greenglasses swore that
David provided one set of sketches and an accompanying theoretical
description of the bomb to Julius Rosenberg in 1945, and that Ethel was
present and typed up David’s notes. In return for the Greenglass’
cooperation, Ruth Greenglass, who swore she helped steal what the
prosecution called “the most important scientific secret ever known to
mankind,” was never even indicted.

David also testified that he gave another set of sketches to Harry
Gold who used the recognition signal “Julius sent me” to identify
himself to David when they met. Gold swore he was a spy courier
transmitting information from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet
Union, but that on this one occasion he received information from
Greenglass. FBI documents first made public in the late 1970’s show
that Greenglass originally claimed Gold identified himself as “Dave from
Pittsburgh” while Gold said he identified himself to Greenglass as “Ben
from Brooklyn.” One FBI file shows that after several months in
prison, but before the trial, that prosecutors brought Gold and
Greenglass together to iron out this discrepancy. It was at that
meeting that they suddenly “remembered” the name “Julius” in the
recognition signal.

The Rosenbergs testified and denied all charges. They invoked the
Fifth Amendment refusing to answer repeated prosecution questions about
their political affiliations. During the McCarthy period, many felt
that such a refusal to answer was an admission of Communist Party
membership and that all Communists were spies for the Soviet Union.

Judge Kaufman’s sentencing speech made the political context of the
Rosenberg case clear. He justified his death sentence: “I consider
your crimes worse than murder…. 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 fifty thousand and who knows how many millions more
of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.” He concluded
their: “[l]ove for their cause dominated their lives – it was even
greater than their love for their children.”

Despite Kaufman’s claim a chorus of scientists including Harold Urey
and J. Robert Oppenheimer stated that there was no “secret” of the
Atomic Bomb. Years later, many Atomic scientists agreed with a
colleague’s assessment that the Greenglass material was: “too
incomplete, ambiguous and even incorrect to be of any service or value
to the Russians in shortening the time required to develop their nuclear
bombs.”

The release by the CIA of the “VENONA” transcriptions in 1995, caused
the mass media to renew prior conclusions that the Rosenbergs were
guilty. The transcriptions, however, do not point to the Rosenbergs’
involvement in atomic espionage. Julius is never mentioned by name, and
the spy code-named “Antenna” and later “Liberal,” whom the government
claims was Julius Rosenberg, was engaged in military/industrial rather
than atomic espionage. Even more remarkably, the key reference to
Antenna/Liberal’s wife states that she was not an espionage agent.

In 2008 the transcripts of the testimony of 43 of the 46 witnesses
who appeared before the Grand Jury that indicted the Rosenbergs were
released to the public. This included the testimony of Ruth Greenglass
who is deceased, but not David Greenglass who is still alive. Ruth
Greenglass’s testimony did not mention the 1945 meeting described above,
the atomic bomb sketch, any hand-written notes, Ethel Rosenberg’s
typing, or Ethel’s presence at the meeting.

On the same day in 2008, Morton Sobell acknowledged for the first
time that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, passed non-Atomic
military-industrial information to The USSR. The primary purpose of
this work was to help the USSR defeat the Nazis.

This new information support this summary of the case: Julius
Rosenberg engaged in non-atomic espionage during World War II. Neither
Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg was a member of an atomic spy ring that stole
the secret of the Atomic Bomb. The United States government knew all
along that Ethel Rosenberg was not an espionage agent, but executed her
anyway.

© Robert Meeropol 2009

(For additional information about the Rosenberg case, click here for the website for the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case.)