Remembering David Greenglass and The Rosenberg Spy Case

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• published: 12 Nov 2014
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The Atomic Spies And the Brother Who Turned Them In THE MOST IMPORTANT AMERICAN SPY CASE OF THE 20TH CENTURY David Greenglass was a minor figure at Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project. He also happened to be the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, and in the 1940’s, her husband, Julius, was recruited in New York City to be the agent in charge of a Soviet spy ring. Greenglass and the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets during World War II. In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in part due to the testimony of Greenglass. The Rosenberg spy case is a major part of American Cold War history and has been the subject of debate for decades. David Greenglass (March 2, 1922 – July 1, 2014) was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked on the Manhattan Project. He provided testimony that helped convict his sister and brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for their spying activity. Greenglass served nine and half years in prison. He later claimed that, at the urging of prosecutors, he lied at the Rosenbergs' trial, falsely implicating his sister Ethel Rosenberg, to protect himself and his wife. He was born on March 2, 1922, in Manhattan, New York City, on the Lower East Side. His parents, Theresa (Feit) and Barnet Greenglass, were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria. He attended Haaren High School, and graduated in 1940. He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute but did not graduate.[1] Greenglass married Ruth Printz in 1942, when she was 18 years old. The two joined the Young Communist League shortly before Greenglass entered the U.S. Army in 1943. A machinist at the Army base in Jackson, Mississippi, Greenglass was promoted to sergeant and assigned to the secret Manhattan Project, the wartime project to develop the first atomic weapons. He was first stationed at the massive uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and later worked at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. Greenglass related how he slept through the first test of the atomic bomb and made artificial diamonds at the Los Alamos machine shop where he worked.[citation needed] Julius Rosenberg became a Soviet agent working under Alexander Feklissov. In September 1944, Rosenberg suggested to Feklissov that he should consider recruiting his brother-in-law, David Greenglass and his wife. Feklissov met the couple and on 21st September, he reported to Moscow: "They are young, intelligent, capable, and politically developed people, strongly believing in the cause of communism and wishing to do their best to help our country as much as possible. They are undoubtedly devoted to us (the Soviet Union)."[2] David wrote to his wife: "My darling, I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project (espionage) that Julius and his friends (the Russians) have in mind."[3] After Julius Rosenberg recommended his sister-in-law Ruth Greenglass to his NKVD superiors for the use of her apartment as a safe house for photography, the NKVD realized that David was working on the Manhattan Project. David Greenglass was then recruited into Soviet espionage by his wife at Rosenberg's behest.[4] Julius Rosenberg was relieved of his duties by the NKVD after government officials had discovered his membership in the Communist Party and fired him from the United States Signal Corps. David began to pass nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union via the Soviet courier Harry Gold and more directly with a Soviet official in New York City. Greenglass was a spy for about two years, from November 1944 until he left the military in 1946. According to the Venona project intercepts decrypted by the NSA between 1944 and sometime in the 1970s, both David and his wife Ruth were given code names. David was codenamed "KALIBR" and Ruth "OSA".[4] After the war Greenglass, his brother Bernie, and Julius Rosenberg ran a small machine shop which had failed by 1947. Their shop was located in Manhattan in New York City. He continued his contacts with the Soviets after World War II independently of Julius Rosenberg.[5] In 1950, UK and US intelligence agencies discovered that a Los Alamos theoretical physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had spied for the USSR during the war. Through Fuchs' confession, they found that one of his American contacts had been a man named Harry Gold from Brooklyn, New York. Gold had passed Fuchs' information on to a Soviet agent, performing the role of courier, and Anatoli Yakovlev would then pass the information on to his controllers in the USSR. Through Gold, the FBI's trail led to Greenglass and the Rosenbergs, who had allegedly also used Gold as a courier. When Fuchs was first captured, Julius allegedly gave the Greenglasses $5,000 to finance an escape to Mexico. Instead, they went to the Catskills and used the money to seek legal advice.