Cold Case

As Usdin shows, the Rosenberg network, especially the agents Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, passed on the 12,000-page blueprints for the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, airborne radars for nighttime navigation and bombing, and other new radar technology. “Rosenberg’s band of amateur spies,” Usdin writes, “turned over detailed information on a wide range of technologies and weapon systems that hastened the Red Army’s march to Berlin, jump-started its postwar development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and later helped Communist troops in North Korea fight the American military to a standoff.”

So why, then, is there still a campaign to declare the Rosenbergs innocent victims? The answer must be found in the desire of now aging New Leftists and the few remaining elderly veterans of the Old Left to keep alive their hope of proving that the United States is the main villain in the world. In an essay written about today’s Tea Party for the New York Review of Books, the historian Gordon S. Wood reflects on the differences between popular memory and history. He notes that “there has always been a tension between critical history and popular memory, between what historians write and what society chooses to remember.” In the case of the Rosenbergs, what the veterans of the old “the Rosenbergs are innocent” school desire is to keep the memory of the cause alive. To admit the couple’s guilt is to demolish in one fell swoop the case their defenders have made over the years about their martyrdom and to force their supporters to face up to issues they would rather ignore. That is why the distinguished historian Eric Foner—one of the most prominent historians in the United States—can write that “the execution of the Rosenbergs was only the most extreme example of a broader pattern of shattered careers and suppressed civil liberties”—rather than an actual espionage case in which two American Communists were recruited out of the Communist Party USA to work for the KGB.

Foner continues to assert that “rather than the nest of Soviet spies portrayed by the FBI, or creatures of Moscow … the party emerges in new [revisionist historical] work as a complex and diverse organization.” He sees the CPUSA as a legitimate political group no different than any other organization or party. But in fact, if not exactly a “nest of spies,” it was, from its top leadership down, a willing recruiting agency for the KGB. It might have been complex, but its diversity included the membership’s willingness to do whatever Moscow ordered.

Indeed, Walter Schneir inadvertently admitted as much, when he wrote in Final Verdict that if Julius Rosenberg had talked, he would have been forced to name “the very friends who he had himself recruited,” as well as reveal “the dark secret” that the CPUSA and its leader, Earl Browder, “had involved itself in enlisting dozens of members for espionage.” When Schneir writes that if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had confessed, they would have “fueled the hysteria of the times,” he is admitting that the so-called hysteria had a real basis in fact—the CPUSA and its members’ principal loyalty was to Moscow.

The Schneirs saw the Rosenberg trial as an American show trial, in which acknowledging the truth that Rosenberg was a Soviet agent would have given their enemies—the U.S. government—invaluable ammunition for their anti-Communist policies. Ironically, the Rosenbergs and their supporters were at the same time giving their total support to a power that was holding real show trials and sending innocent people to their deaths.

When the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell confessed in 2008 to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that despite his decades of asserting his innocence, he was in fact a Soviet spy, the old game ran into big trouble. Sobell qualified his confession by saying he never thought of himself as a spy, just as an individual who was helping “a wartime Soviet ally,” who only handed the Soviets “defensive” weaponry that would be of no harm to America. Moreover, Sobell also argued that the information coming from Greenglass was only “junk.”

Yet even while confessing, Sobell fudged the facts. In an article Steven Usdin and I wrote that appears in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard, we revealed that Sobell decided to admit that what he stole was in fact major military data desired by the Soviets. He told us how on a nonstop photo session over a July 4 weekend in 1948, he, Julius Rosenberg, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics scientist William Perl, and a fourth man took films of 1,885 pages of classified documents stolen for them by Perl from a Columbia University safe belonging to Theodore von Kármán, at that time the nation’s most prominent aerospace engineer. It included information about the designs and capabilities of every American bomber, designs for analog and digital computers used to automate antiaircraft weapons, and specifications for land-based and airborne radars later used in Korea. He thus provided information that advanced the capabilities of the Soviet military machine.

Moreover, Sobell acknowledged that he engaged in this espionage not because he was anti-fascist, but, as he told us, “I did it for the Soviet Union.” His spying continued until the day he fled to Mexico to try and escape arrest in 1950, well into the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were no longer allies.

As new information found in espionage historian Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks revealed, Greenglass had in fact not only given a primitive sketch of the bomb’s lens configuration to Harry Gold, Rosenberg’s courier, but later delivered to him the physical mold of a detonator for the bomb. The detonators were built in the shop in which Greenglass worked. Moreover, the supposedly “harmless” material the Rosenberg ring handed over to the KGB included radar specifications and aircraft designs that gave the Soviet military critical information about American capabilities, allowed the Red Army to jam U.S. radar, and contributed to the development of sophisticated Soviet fighters that equaled those deployed by the U.S. Air Force. There can be no doubt that this technology directly led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam.

Sadly, the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, still continue their campaign to exonerate their parents. After Sobell’s confession, Michael—the elder—acknowledged that for years “we believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent.” But now, he said that they believe “truth is more important than our political position.” However, they are continuing to obscure the truth. After all, their parents went to their deaths admonishing them, in their last letter, to “NEVER LET THEM CHANGE THE TRUTH OF OUR INNOCENCE,” or as the couple put it another time, “The Fact of our innocence will not change. We are the first victims of American Fascism.”

So, it is understandable that it has been hard for their sons to let it go. Perhaps it is more painful for them to direct their anger at their parents who lied to them about their guilt, preferring to leave them orphans rather than to dishonor their pledge to serve Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Robert Meeropol explained to Sam Roberts that had his farther talked, he would have had to “send his best friends to jail, and he could not do that.” He also added that “my parents would have made a bigger betrayal to avoid betraying me, and frankly I don’t consider myself that important.” Evidently, remaining silent to protect the spies he recruited was something Julius saw as sacrosanct, while allowing his sons to become orphaned was excusable. So, now his sons admit only that their father engaged only in “non-atomic espionage,” which somehow makes it appear less wrong. Of course, this is also false, since the Rosenbergs recruited David Greenglass precisely because he was working at the Manhattan Project, where they hoped he would hit pay dirt. Moreover, we now know, thanks to Spies, the book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, that Julius Rosenberg also recruited yet another atomic spy, Russell McNutt.

The sons also claim that even if Julius was guilty, their mother, Ethel Rosenberg, was completely innocent. They make their claim on an evaluation of the once-secret grand jury hearings released by the government in 2008. That material showed that Ruth Greenglass, David’s wife, lied when she testified that material received from her husband was typed up by Ethel. In her grand jury testimony, she said to the contrary that she herself wrote it up in longhand. KGB Venona decrypts confirm that what they received was “hand-written.” (You can find my analysis of the grand jury testimony here.)

This, however, did not mean that Ethel was innocent, even though the government got Ruth to change her testimony. Venona also corroborated that Ethel had recommended Ruth, her sister-in-law, to the KGB as a suitable recruit. She also knew about her husband’s espionage work as well as that of other members of his ring, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant. Ethel, in other words, was knowledgeable, and in legal terms was a conspirator. The fact that the government sought to break Julius by getting him to realize that his children would be left without both their parents does not prove that Ethel was innocent.

The truth is that both Meeropol sons are not what they continually claim to be: objective historians who are researching the Rosenberg case. They are partisans in the fight to prove their parents morally innocent, if not factually innocent. Michael Meeropol once wrote that his parents refused to cooperate because they wanted to keep the United States from creating “a massive spy show trial,” and they hence “earned the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression.” That statement is truly ironic, since the couple gave up their lives on behalf of the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial.

The late Howard Zinn tried to shift the terms of the Meeropols’ argument. Even if their parents were guilty, he wrote before his death, the “most important thing was that they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.” That statement would have had some credibility if Zinn had acknowledged the couple’s guilt. But of course he argued that most of the witnesses against them were lying. No one on the left, it seems, is willing to offer any condemnation for the way in which the Rosenbergs betrayed their own country.

There is, finally, the claim, made by Victor Navasky and echoed by others, that “these guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime.” A nice try—except the new evidence reveals two things: Julius Rosenberg set up his network during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when the United States and Russia were not allies, and second, he kept his network alive after the war’s end, in the period when the Cold War had started. The myth that Julius was motivated by anti-fascist concerns, rather than a desire to serve Stalin, is the greatest myth of all. As David Greenglass told me personally, he and Julius saw themselves as “soldiers for Stalin.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David and Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell all saw themselves as soldiers in a good fight, working behind enemy lines. They were Soviet rather than American patriots, who hid their own motivations in phony remonstrations of their supposed love for the United States.

Ronald Radosh is an adjunct fellow at The Hudson Institute and a writer for Pajamas Media. He is author, with the late Joyce Milton, of The Rosenberg File and other books.