In the early morning hours of August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon. America’s nuclear monopoly was over.
When President Truman announced the event on September 23, he sought to calm the nation. “Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.” General Eisenhower took the news in stride, characterizing it as “a development that was anticipated years ago.” The New York Times commented, “There is no valid reason for surprise at this development . . . . Only those Americans who failed to pay attention to what was said of the atomic bomb by the men who knew most about it—namely, the men who built it—could ever have believed that we possessed a permanent and exclusive monopoly”
Apparently, the ranks of the inattentive included many journalists and politicians. A few days after the explosion, Atomics, a scientific journal, described the resulting outcry: “The news has already rocked the nation; it is being screamed from banner headlines in every newspaper from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, and radio commentators have worked themselves into a minor panic, many of them have the country practically at war with Russia.” Almost immediately, Capitol Hill conservatives deduced that America’s atomic “secrets” had been stolen and cried “treason.” Senator Karl Mundt laid the onus on “earlier and prevailing laxity in safeguarding this country from Communist espionage.” Richard Nixon spoke up from the House Un-American Activities Committee charging the Truman Administration with “hastening” Russia’s atomic know-how by its failure to act against Red spies. The widely publicized estimates of nuclear scientists in 1945—that there were no secrets and Russia would have the bomb in five years or less—had not been given much credence by American policy makers.
The truth, as often happens, did not lie entirely in either camp. During the Second World War, the Soviets launched a major effort to penetrate the American nuclear project. Stalin wanted the bomb as quickly as possible and duplicating the American plutonium device appeared to be the surest route. This, even though one of his own scientists, Georgii Flerov, had the calculations for a uranium-235 bomb as early as 1941, a design successfully tested in 1951. By the best estimates of the time; the fruits of their intelligence saved the Soviets one to two years in developing the plutonium device exploded in 1949.
The estimates made by many politicians, and even Edward Teller, of ten to twenty years before a Soviet bomb was possible underestimated Soviet scientists and the ability of the Stalinist command economy to create an atomic industry in a war-torn nation. The main obstacle for the Soviets lay in the availability of raw materials. David Holloway makes the point in Stalin and the Bomb:1
The length of time the Soviet Union needed to develop the bomb was determined more by the availability of uranium than by any other factor . . . . The first production reactor was built as soon as there was enough uranium for it. The physicists were ready to assemble and test the bomb as soon as plutonium had been extracted from uranium irradiated in the reactor and fabricated into two metal hemispheres. It was this path, rather than the design and development of the weapon itself, that determined how long it took the Soviet Union to build the bomb.
The public search for spies, however, preceded the Soviet bomb test. In 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee charged that the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory had been infiltrated by Communists, who had passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union early in the war. They pointed to a group of talented young physicists who had flirted with communism in the late thirties and early forties, all proteges of J. Robert Oppenheimer.2
Oppenheimer, who supported many a radical cause, was a friend of Steve Nelson, a high-ranking and open member of the Communist Party. Nelson, in turn, held some degree of acquaintance with Oppenheimer’s students. That alone was enough to damn the entire group. In the minds of HUAC and its allies, any connection between a scientist and a Communist could only mean espionage. With this, HUAC seized upon physicist Joseph Weinberg and publicized the case of “Scientist X,” with Nelson as the “master-spy.”
It is likely that Nelson was involved in an effort to garner information. At the time, Army security officers testified to “highly confidential sources” that placed a scientist named “Joe” at the home of Steve Nelson offering to give “highly confidential information.” Surveillance placed Nelson meeting with the Soviet Vice Consul in a park and handing him an envelope. In the years since, the “source” has been revealed to be FBI taps and bugs.3
While HUAC was busy making headlines in the Old House Office Building, more productive investigations were underway on the campus of Arlington Hall, a former junior college in suburban Virginia. There, the Army Signal Intelligence Service was painfully decrypting a stockpile of cables intercepted between Moscow and the Soviet consulate in New York from 1943 to 1945. The cables contained KGB and other Soviet intelligence traffic, as well as diplomatic and trade exchanges. Codenamed JADE, then BRIDE, and finally VENONA, the project would uncover Klaus Fuchs, the most effective Soviet agent in the Manhattan Project.4 It would also lead to the senseless deaths of the only two Americans ever executed for espionage.
On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the parents of two young sons, were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Charged with conspiring to pass the “secrets” of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, they were sentenced as if they had been convicted of treason. In the docket with the Rosenbergs was codefendant Morton Sobell. Sobell was labeled by the press as an “atom spy,” although the prosecution made no such claim. In fact, the Justice Department never presented any clear-cut evidence that he had committed espionage of any kind. Nevertheless, Sobell was given a thirty-year sentence and dispatched to Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
The bitter debate over the guilt or innocence of the Rosenbergs has endured longer than the Cold War itself. In unquiet graves, they became icons of the conflict itself. For many on the Left they were innocents sacrificed in the game of nations. For those on the Right, certain of their guilt, the Rosenbergs exemplified the treachery of the Communist Party, the enemy within. Others took the opinion that Julius was guilty of espionage, but that Ethel was only peripherally involved.
Forty-nine VENONA intercepts, decoded largely between 1947 and 1952, were released in July 1995, the first of more than two thousand to be declassified over the following year. No doubt the cause of much pain and sadness, they show Julius Rosenberg to have been the head of a spy ring gathering and passing defense information to the Soviet Union.
According to Robert Lamphere, the chief FBI agent on the case,5 the trail to the Rosenbergs began in the spring of 1948. A decoded intercept from July 1944 reported: “ANTENNA6 visited his school friend Max Elitcher . . . . He has access to extremely valuable material on guns.” The message gave detailed information on Elitcher and his wife and requested that Moscow “check Elitcher and communicate your consent to his clearance.” Through Naval Intelligence, Lamphere learned that Elitcher had attended an anti-draft rally in 1941 with Morton Sobell. A background check revealed that the two had been fellow engineering students at CCNY and had roomed together after graduation. Lamphere claims that around the same time another message fragment named Joel Barr as a potential recruit for the KGB.7 A third decoded intercept reported background information on a then-unknown woman: “Information on LIBERAL’s wife, Surname that of her husband, first name ETHEL, 29 years old. Married five years. Finished secondary school . . . . Knows about her husband’s work . . . . In view of delicate health does not work.”
While these leads temporarily ran aground, a cable partially deciphered in mid-September 1949 proved to be of more immediate import. The message revealed the partial title of a report on the gaseous diffusion process received from an agent codenamed REST, part of the British contingent to the Manhattan Project. Within a short time, the author of the report was discovered to be Klaus Fuchs, one of the top British scientists. The following January, under interrogation by British Intelligence, Fuchs began to confess. Eventually he would reveal that he had passed vast amounts of classified information to the Soviets during and after the war, including detailed sketches of the bomb’s design.
In May 1950, Fuchs identified a Philadelphia chemist named Harry Gold as his courier.8 Gold in turn implicated another source inside Los Alamos. This person was unknown to Fuchs, a machinist with a tenth-grade education named David Greenglass.9 Arrested in June, Greenglass confessed and identified his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as the head of the spy ring. In time, other deciphered cables would corroborate elements of these confessions. One such cable from September 1944 discusses LIBERAL’s recommendation to recruit “the wife of his wife’s brother, Ruth Greenglass” as her husband “is a mechanical engineer and is now working at the ENORMOUS plant in Santa Fe, New Mexico.” Other cables, using codenames OSA for Ruth and KALIBR for David, detail further approaches to the couple and their eventual compliance.
VENONA settles questions, but raises disturbing ones as well. The messages do not confirm key elements of the atomic spying charges against Julius. The cable that reports the January meeting during which David claimed to have turned over a sketch of the bomb to Julius tells only of “a hand-written plan of the lay-out of Camp-2 and facts known to him about the work and the personnel.” Ethel is revealed to have been aware of her husband’s activities, but as of late November 1944 was not an agent nor active in his work.
On February 8, 1951, one month before the Rosenbergs’ trial began, Justice Department representative Myles Lane met in secret session with the Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Lane informed them that Julius was the “keystone to a lot of other espionage agents” and that the Department believed the only thing that would break him was “the prospect of the death penalty.” He added that it was important to give Ethel “a stiff sentence of twenty-five to thirty years” also as a means to break Julius, even though the case against her “was not too strong . . . . It is about the only thing you can use as a lever against these people.” At that point, the case against Ethel was not only “not too strong,” it was nonexistent. They knew Ethel was aware of Julius’s work, but that was all. Eight days before the trial began, David Greenglass, under pressure from investigators, implicated Ethel in the single act that would take her life.10
Judge Kaufman, in pronouncing sentence, described the defendant’s crime as “worse than murder.” By “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted . . . has caused in my opinion the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but . . . millions more may pay the price of your treason.” With this nonsense Kaufman sentenced Julius and Ethel to death in the electric chair. But their choice remained—confess or die, and the Justice Department fully expected them to confess.
On the night of the executions, FBI agents waited in make-shift offices on death row, armed with a stenographer and a month’s worth of office supplies. The procedure was firmly defined. Both Julius and Ethel would be asked separately by a rabbi if they were willing to confess. If so, then their lives would be spared. Even if one was strapped into the chair, and indicated a willingness to talk, the execution would be halted. A system of signals was arranged for the benefit of the FBI agents waiting down the hall. When an execution had been completed, a guard would step into the corridor and wave his arm.
The executions began at eight P.M. By eight-sixteen, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were dead.
As a codefendant in the Rosenberg atom spy case, Morton Sobell was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He served eighteen and a half, the first five in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. He is an impassioned man who has always asserted his innocence.
I knew Julius. He graduated from City College in the class after mine. We were both in a Young Communist League organization there called the Steinmetz Club. After New York, I moved to Washington, then to Michigan, but we kept in touch. When I came to New York I’d see him. So when they arrested him, they investigated everybody in the class before his and afterwards. Half of our electrical engineering class belonged to the Young Communist League. So they really went after everybody.
In fact, I had a FBI file even before that. I had gone down to Wrens, Georgia, with a letter of introduction to Erskine Caldwell’s father.1 Somebody down there didn’t like this New Yorker and wrote a letter or something, and the mail that I sent was all copied and went to the local FBI. That’s one thing. The other was when Paul Robeson sang at a concert in Washington and the FBI took down the license plates of all the cars parked around there. They had recorded my license plate.
In June of 1950 I went to Mexico.2 I took a leave of absence from Reeves Instruments, where I was working, and went down there under my own name. While we were in Mexico, there was never any indication that the government wanted us back. They could have found us, because our apartment was registered in our own name—in Mexico when somebody rents an apartment they have to register. There was nothing secret about it.
My going there was a very ambivalent act. Things were heating up here—the Hollywood Ten and other things—and a lot of people were escaping the heat by going to Mexico. I had been looking around for a new job, and I couldn’t find anything. I was going down there to sort of try to cut things loose and see what might come of it. But Julius was arrested while I was there, and boy, that really shook me up. At that time I tried to scurry around to find out if I could get out of Mexico. But then when I traveled around to Vera Cruz and all, I used pseudonyms.3
Then at one point we decided hell’s bells, we’d better get back to the United States. We got our vaccinations4 and we were ready to come back. That’s when the Mexican security police kidnapped me.5 They were not acting as agents of the Mexican government, but as agents of the FBI—they got a payoff. They dragged me down to the street, and I was yelling, “Police, police!” They hit me over the head and shoved me in the car. They took my wife and the children in another car.
They took us to their headquarters, where they made arrangements with the FBI. Then they drove us straight to the border, seventeen hours, where I was handed over to the Customs people. I guess it’s like people going to the death chamber, I didn’t stop yelling. At United States Customs I was directed to sign a card, searched, and then arrested. At the trial they produced the card with my signature, but it says “Deported from Mexico” on it. I was supposed to have signed it after they had written “Deported from Mexico.” But they weren’t very clever—the “Deported from Mexico” was in a different handwriting than everything else on the card. The government really lied all along the line on every occasion.
After about five days in jail down at the border, I was taken back to New York and held on one hundred thousand dollars bail. My mother went around borrowing from relatives but could only come up with fifty thousand. My lawyer told me if I had come up with a hundred thousand they would have raised it, so I never got out.
Then they got onto this guy Max Elitcher, who was a very good friend of mine, my next-door neighbor, in fact. After the war he had signed a non-Communist affidavit when he was working for the Navy Department, but he had been a member of the YCL. So they had people who were willing to testify that he was a Communist. Elitcher was facing ten years. He was the one who fingered me and was the only witness who testified against me.6
He claimed that I’d been a member of the Party and that Julius had said I was giving him information. He testified that I got him to join the Communist Party in Washington, that I collected the dues. He testified to other things that involved me, which were not true.7 For instance, that I had asked him about a Navy pamphlet for purposes of espionage. I had asked him about the pamphlet, because I was working on a project at GE; he was working for the Navy Department on the same project. But he turned it around to I asked him for espionage.8 There is stuff in the files which shows how the FBI said to him, “Could it have been for purposes of espionage?” and he said, “Yes.” But at the trial he just told it. This is a classic case of how the FBI operates. They presuppose the story and then they encourage a witness to put it into shape.
The Rosenbergs and I were all charged with one count, conspiracy to commit espionage. I was supposed to have committed naval espionage, and they supposedly atomic. The only thing they had on me was Elitcher, my trip to Mexico, and the fact that I was a friend of Julius. Here’s the crucial thing. Before the trial, we tried to get a bill of particulars,9 in which we would have learned exactly what acts I was accused of committing—which would have revealed that my case was not connected to the Rosenbergs’ atom spy case. The presiding judge granted the petition for a bill of particulars and gave the government ten days to produce it. Thirteen days later, he says this is to be reargued. It was reargued—you know what happened? Nothing! Somebody got to him and told him, “You can’t do this.” I should never have been tried with alleged atom bomb spies, because it prejudiced my case.10 All the publicity led me to believe that the atom bomb case was going to be the accusation. So how do you defend yourself?
The government tried to make the case that I was working as an agent for Julius, but not on the atom bomb. But they couldn’t do it. This wasn’t the only bad thing about it. During the trial, the judge and the prosecutor both kept yelling, “Treason! Traitors!” Now, treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and for one very good reason. Historically, anybody that wants to come down on dissenters redefines treason to suit that purpose. For treason you need two witnesses to the same overt act. Of course, there were no two witnesses. But the trial had all the overtones of a treason trial. Conspiracy is the darling of the prosecutors, because the rules of evidence are much less stringent. Traditionally, a conspiracy charge doesn’t have the same penalties as a charge where you have an overt act. But in this case conspiracy called for the death penalty.
Until two weeks before the trial, they had nothing on Ethel Rosenberg. All of a sudden, after months of interrogation, David Greenglass, her brother, remembers that Ethel had typed up his notes on the structure of the atom bomb, thus implicating her by deed in the conspiracy.11 So how did they justify giving her the death penalty and sentencing her? Judge Kaufman12 said she wore the pants in the family. She was the she-devil. A lot of stuffhas surfaced about the judge. For instance, he claimed that he didn’t take any recommendations from anybody on the sentencing. It turns out he was in touch with everybody.13
When the judge sentenced me, he said, “I’m not doing the popular thing,” as if people were telling him to sentence me to death.14 The law is very funny, thirty years or death. Nothing longer than thirty years; otherwise, he would have given me more. The Rosenbergs got death for conspiracy.
But you know how Greenglass justified himself? I got it from people he knew in prison. How come you turned in your sister? “It was either my wife or my sister.” Which was a lie, but that’s how he justified it.
A book written recently by a lawyer in Washington pointed out that the Rosenbergs should have been tried under a different statute, the Atomic Energy Act. The Atomic Energy Act puts the question of death penalty on the jury. This lawyer, Fyke Farmer from North Carolina, together with another lawyer, Daniel Marshall from L.A., made a last-ditch effort to save their lives using this argument.15 It’s a crazy thing. As bad as my lawyers were, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer was worse, Emanuel Bloch. They had been begging him to file this thing for months and he refused.16
As far as the Communist Party was concerned, it was hands off, because they thought we might implicate them to save our necks. Years later, I spoke to Max Gordon, who was the editor of the Daily Worker at that time, and he told us there were no clear-cut orders, but the Party just told people to stay out of it. So during the trial and almost for a year afterwards, the Party was hands-off because they didn’t know what was going to happen. They finally got involved in it during the appeals process. And then all over the world the various Parties got involved. In France, there’s a saying, “As the Dreyfus case divided France, the Rosenberg case united it.”17
I don’t think it would have made any difference if the Communist Party had gotten involved in the trial. The Party at that time was on the ropes, so how could they have done anything? Maybe they could have provided better attorneys, I don’t know. The government got away with murder because our attorneys were that bad. Murder, literally.
The son-in-law of Kuntz, my lawyer, denounced me because I came down on my lawyers. But I do it with understanding. The Communist lawyers had all been socked with a lot of time for contempt of court,18 and so my lawyers were frightened. The position of the son was, “Look, he took the case, you should appreciate that.” But my point is, he shouldn’t have taken it, because he wasn’t willing to put himself on the line.
At the federal detention house, they kept threatening me with Alcatraz if I didn’t cooperate. They started circulating rumors to this effect two months before the Supreme Court. Once I lose in the Supreme Court they could send me wherever they wanted to.
I lost in the court of appeals, I’m waiting for the Supreme Court, but we never got certiorari.19 So I lose, and bang, they want to drag me out to Alcatraz. I had Howard Meyer at this point, so he goes into court and says, “Give me another week to confer with him on appeal.” The week was up Thanksgiving Eve, and so they put me on a plane. The marshals were cursing because they wouldn’t be able to have Thanksgiving. During a layover in Chicago, they set me up. They took me off the plane and onto the concourse without handcuffs or anything. There were FBI agents all around. This was a setup to make an escape attempt and then they’d be able to plug me.
The FBI planted an item in the New York Mirror, with one of the columnists, a FOB, Friend of the Bureau. This columnist was one of them. He wrote that when I hit the big-time prison I’d wish I had been executed like the Rosenbergs because the men are really going to come down hard. Of course, when I got there it was the other way around. On the Rock, the other prisoners treated me very nicely. A thirty-year sentence gets you respect right away. And then I was a high-profile case, so they knew the FBI had come down on me. The guards were quite nice also. At first they called me Mister. Yeah, the guards never really hassled me or anything like that— they’d been told hands off.
I was in Alcatraz from ’52 to ’58, five and a half years. But you know who got me transferred out to Atlanta? I found this out from the Freedom of Information Act. Eleanor Roosevelt. Of course, I didn’t know it. My wife got to her, and Eleanor wrote a letter of inquiry to the priest on the Rock asking him to verify what my wife had told him—that there was no reason for me to be in such a place.20 So instead of answering, he read the letter to the warden and the warden sent it to Washington, and Washington says, “Get him off!” A lot of people had written who knew better, like James V. Bennett,21 and to no effect. But they were afraid of Eleanor Roosevelt, afraid she might start a public fuss. She was a remarkable woman. That’s what got me off the Rock.
I’ve seen people in prison turn so bitter, and boy, it destroys them. I was a political person, so I knew there wasn’t a prosecutor gunning after me as an individual. He was gunning after the Communist Party, and I happened to be the fall guy. I fitted into the specifications—a friend of Julius, I had gone to Mexico, an engineer. So looking at a thing politically gives you a different orientation than if you take the thing personally.
The whole time I was in prison we were fighting back. We went back into court time after time because each time we came up with new evidence. For instance, Manny Bloch, during the trial, made the motion to impound Exhibit 8, Greenglass’s sketch of the atom bomb. They claimed during the trial that Exhibit 8 was supposedly the most important secret of mankind.22
Well, my lawyer went in and got it unimpounded, and it was a real fight to do that. After it was uncovered, we got the physicists to look at it. They said it’s a caricature of the bomb. So we got into court and we challenged them on it. Well, it didn’t make any difference.23
I don’t think that even with absolute evidence of innocence the government would ever back down. A lot of careers were made out of this case. Yes, the chief prosecutor, Saypol, they gave him a job on the state court. Of course, Roy Cohn became very well known. Judge Kaufman thought he was going to get an elevation right away, but they said you have to wait a decent period so it doesn’t look too obvious.
Did Massachusetts back down with Sacco and Vanzetti?24Did California back down on Mooney and Billings?25The federal government has done some dirty things, and they’ve never backed down, not one iota.
Helen Sobell campaigned for twenty years in support of her husband’s innocence.
My son was very young when we went down to Mexico, just a baby, and I had a ten-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Morton had just finished a project that he was working on at Reeves Instruments, where I had worked previously too, but then I had this child and I stopped working for a while. We had been progressive people, not affiliated to any group. We were not members of the Communist Party. Morton had been, but he had drifted away by this time.
When Morton was kidnapped, I yelled at my daughter, Sidney, to call the embassy and then I went down the stairs after them, to see one of them hit Morton over the head and throw him into a car. We had a big pot of soup on the oven which was just about ready for dinner. I didn’t know who the hell these people were. When Sidney called the embassy, she was told that there was only a custodian, nobody was there who could do anything about it.
They tried to push me into another car. There was a man who was trying to hold me and I bit his hand so hard that he swore at me and he pushed me into the car. I was taken by myself to some kind of a government building.
I saw Morton there, he was all slumped over and in very bad shape, absolutely. I called out to him, and the person who was taking me in said something, I don’t remember exactly what, but I know I used language that I’ve never used before or since in my life! They took me into a room and tried to take my picture, and I was really so angry I would move every time they would get the camera set up. I just wasn’t going to cooperate with any of that.
They took me to another room, and then Sidney came up with the baby. I asked them if I could have some milk for the baby and a cot for the children to lie down on. Finally, by and by, they brought one of these fold-up canvas beds, and so the children lay on that for a while. Then in the middle of the night or a little bit toward morning, they told us to get up and come along. They put us into a car with Morton in the front seat. Morton was in pretty bad shape. There was a Mexican in back with us, and we drove night and day without stopping. I tried to argue with them to get some milk for the baby, so finally they stopped at a store and got some canned milk. But it was very hot, and when I wanted another can for the baby—I wasn’t nursing him—they gave me an argument about using this old leftover milk instead of a fresh can of milk.
It was an ordeal. They wouldn’t even stop anyplace where you could use a toilet. They’d stop the car and you’d have to go around the back of the car. They drove night and day. We got to the border and the U.S. Customs man was waiting for us. It was about three o’clock in the morning. Of course, we hadn’t packed anything, but they had packed up everything in the apartment. Some of it they should have left—it was a furnished apartment.
Morton couldn’t remember what the combination to the safe was, and I remembered it. When Morton told me to, I told them what the combination was. They took everything we had in the safe. We had our passports there and some money. Finally, many months—maybe even years—later, we got it back from the FBI.
The children and I were taken to a hotel, and we went to bed. I don’t know how much I slept, but quite early in the morning there was a knock at the door and the FBI agents were there. They wanted me to come down and have breakfast with them and they would have somebody take care of the children. I said, “No way I’m going to be separated from those children!” Then they said, “We’ll take the children down too.” At the breakfast table they were real cute, they asked Sydney whether she wanted pink ice cream. It was at that point they started explaining to me how if I were in Russia they would take me to Siberia, but that they were good guys and they weren’t going to do that. It was really crazy, because they wanted information from me that I didn’t have to give. They wanted me and Morton to become stool pigeons, or whatever the term is. They wanted us to give evidence that they didn’t have about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They asked me right out front—I said no way. They made it very clear that all I had to do was to cooperate with them. I finally got the point that they wanted me to tell whatever story they had made up, but I just didn’t respond. At any rate, they finally went away.
They told me I could visit Morton in prison. I found somebody from the hotel staff to take care of the children and I went down to see him. He had a big gash in his head. There hadn’t been any kind of dressing or anything on it, but it had started healing. He told me to go back to New York and try to get a lawyer. So I took some of his clothes and got them pressed so that he would look nice before the magistrate or whoever it was. I got tickets for myself and for the children to stop off in Washington, D.C.—my mother and my brother were living in Arlington, Virginia, at that time. I figured I’d leave the children there and then go on to New York.
Morton was flown to New York City and put in the Tombs Prison. He was there for quite a while and I used to go and visit him. Very soon I learned to bring a box to stand on, because there’s a little pane of glass there about eight inches by four inches so you can look at the person who is on the other side, and there are holes in the wall that you could talk through. They wouldn’t allow me to be in the same room with him. And being short as I am, I couldn’t even really see to talk to him. So I used to bring a box to stand on.
I developed all kinds of techniques to get by. My family helped me a great deal by taking care of the children. Then we had to find a lawyer, and we had no expertise at all. I just didn’t know any lawyers. I think somebody probably mentioned Kuntz, who was a member of the American Labor Party, and then I went to see him and then afterwards he hired another lawyer. Morton had quite a temper and would have a fit over practically anything that I did or tried to do. But he was under strain, there’s no question about that, and I was under strain, too!
We tried to get more information from the government as to what it was that Morton was supposed to have done. They weren’t coming out with it, there were just the five counts.1
We went through this life for two or three years until finally there was the trial and then the conviction, and then the impending execution of the Rosenbergs. In the meanwhile, there was a writer who had written a series of articles on the case defending the Rosenbergs, and he wrote about Morton too.2 He introduced me to a committee of people. They lived in Knickerbocker Village, neighbors of the Rosenbergs who were very distressed and who felt that this was all wrong. I started going to meetings and I got to know some of these people.
Initially, the organizing was to prepare some kind of a defense for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and for Morton—although Morton at that time was a very minor character because the big scream headlines had been about the Rosenbergs. Although, with the FBI claiming we were trying to escape, the Mexico business was very inflammatory.
At first, it was the Committee to Defend the Rosenbergs, Morton wasn’t even a part, but then they tacked his name on later. The first meeting we had was at the Shriners Hall in New York City. There was a tremendous overflow of people. It was the first time I had ever spoken to a large audience like that. But I spoke and appealed for help, and a lot of people signed up to work and a lot of money was collected. I was so effective in my newness that they even sent me outside, where there had been a loudspeaker set up, to collect the money from the overflow crowd. I worked with the committee for a long time; before, during, and after the trial—something like twenty years.
There was a tremendous amount of effort and participation before the death of the Rosenbergs. Afterwards, everybody was just devastated, everybody had to be picked up and started all over again. But we went back to the same people. We had people who knew about the case, and we got new people. We had committees all over the country.3 It became quite a large organization. We had a West Coast organizer—this was after the death of the Rosenbergs. We had committees in and around Chicago, and on the East Coast too. Then Morton’s mother went to Europe and got support from many people there.
As you know, Morton was in Alcatraz before he was moved to Atlanta. Then he got very ill at one point and was transferred to a prison hospital in Missouri. Wherever he was I would visit him and form committees. Meanwhile, of course, the FBI was very interested in what I was doing and tried to thwart my efforts. They followed me all over. Sometimes it was obvious. I even have documents okayed by J. Edgar Hoover that lay it all out. For instance, when I was on a radio program, they would get to the host of the show. Some would follow through and try to do what the FBI wanted them to do. In my FBI files, they have comments by the host where he says, “Don’t you think I did a good job?” Or something like that, I’m para-phrasing. They did that all the time.
Dr. Urey, the famous atomic scientist, would come and speak at our meetings. And we had Malcolm Sharp, who was a professor of law at the University of Chicago, he wrote a book on the case. These were people who really were very active and very concerned about the case. We had a number of politicians, and some of them spoke at our meetings, congressmen and senators.
Jack Kennedy had promised me that he would free Morton. That was before he was President. And then later, after he became President, I met and spoke with him several times. We had people in Washington, and at one point I was very much in contact with his assistant. When Kennedy was elected, I was waiting and waiting because Morton was supposed to be released. There was a writer for the Daily News, I guess it was Murray Kempton, and he called me up. He said, “Well, Morton is only going to be transferred to Lewisburg.” That’s what it was, something far less than being released. And I said, “He promised me that he was going to free him.” How could he do it, after he had promised me? What Kennedy did, actually, was free someone else, a Communist.4 He figured he could only free one and this one was easier than that one. And this was after years.
I did a lot of traveling in those twenty years, and I dragged my poor little son around with me a lot of the time. My daughter got older, and she went to the University of Chicago. But when Jack Kennedy was down in Florida to give his famous speech after the Bay of Pigs, she and her then husband picketed him. We had a program of picketing him all over the place. We got a lot of publicity. In the Washington Star there’s a front-page picture of me picketing. This was a time when I picketed by myself, it was on Yom Kippur, and I had a sign, “Bring my innocent husband home.”
There was some harassment. My daughter was at the university when the FBI came to get her thrown out. But the people there were very supportive of her. I have a recollection of the teacher saying, “I don’t want you bothering any of my students.” The FBI was always there. On one occasion, a small group of us were picketing Robert Kennedy. He was dedicating a new law school near Lincoln Center. So we got our signs together. There were a couple of men there and I said, “Do you want to picket with us?” And they said, “No, we can’t, we’re the FBI.” So I said, “Well, keep our signs from blowing away!” And they did, it was a very windy day. They were very gentlemanly.
When Robert Kennedy came out, we followed him and I tried to talk to him. He said, “Come see me at my office.” I did, but he didn’t see me. No, I never got anywhere with Bobby.
We raised a million dollars over the years. I didn’t do it all personally, but together with everybody. It was over a long period of time, too! On my European trip I was very well received, not only by the queen mother in Belgium, but I was taken to the Italian parliament in Rome, and I met with Bertrand Russell, who was one of our big supporters. I tried to see the Pope. Actually the Pope came out against the death penalty for the Rosenbergs.
The FBI followed me through Europe. I have documents that show they knew what flight I was on. They would look into bank accounts of the committees, and I have that in my files too. The purpose of all this surveillance and snooping was to discredit us, find something. Some of the FBI documents are really pretty straightforward. One of them says, “We’ve got to stop the efforts of this woman!” And that one is signed, “Okay, JEH.” There’s lots of material where Hoover was very much involved. They had a whole plan of what they’ll do, what their program was. Gradually through the years I’ve managed to get more documents, the first were totally blacked, but then I got more, some of it is still blacked out.
There was one FBI informer that actually was the head of one of our committees in Los Angeles for a while. He happened to have been revealed by some mistakes that he made. His wife really was the one who hadn’t known and who found out. I had even stayed at those people’s houses. He was turning names over. Whatever the FBI wanted, he was doing. Wherever we went, the FBI was there to try and foul us up. At meetings where I spoke, and this was earlier on, there would be three of them just standing there. See, they have two roles, at least: one is for intimidation and the other is really to get information.
In the beginning, everybody was scared. If a friend who I had known before would see me, they would cross the other side of the street. But then there were some people who were courageous enough to come and to greet me, even early on. And then later, of course, I became welcome, once the fear had subsided, and once they realized their own susceptibility.
My family was wonderful, they stood by me. Morton’s family did too. His mother fought for him. His father died early, and I think earlier than he would have, because of his grieving over what had happened to his son.
Steve Nelson, an open Communist and a member of the Party’s National Committee, was alleged to be the go-between during World War Two for “Scientist X” at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and the Soviets. He was assailed by HUAC as “one of the leading espionage agents and saboteurs of the Communist Party in the United States.”
I was never officially charged with espionage, but it was continually being brought up. It was all over the press, headlines that I was an inspector of the Red Army and that I came to Pittsburgh to sabotage the mills, that I knew J. Robert Oppenheimer, who stole the atomic bomb for me to give it to the Russians. Headline stories that helped later to convict me of conspiring to overthrow the government.1 I did know Oppenheimer for a while. I knew him through his wife, Kitty. She had been married to my friend Joe Dallet.
Joe was a radical, a graduate of Dartmouth College. We were friends from 1928 on. A nice, handsome-looking guy. He was one of those guys who turned against the capitalist system, although his father was in business. He became an organizer for the Steelworkers Union. He was organizing in Youngstown, and I was in the anthracite coalfields, near Wilkes-Barre and Scranton.
We ended up on the same ship going to Spain to fight with the International Brigade.2 On the ship, Joe tells me that his wife, Kitty, whom I had never met, was going to be in Paris. He says, “I want you to meet her.” We spent a nice week in Paris, the three of us. They spoke French, I didn’t, so I hung around. I was like a fifth wheel, but we were friends.
To get across the Spanish border, we had to go sub rosa, over the mountains, and be smuggled in. I went to the front immediately, and Joe remained in training for another battalion—the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.3 We didn’t see each other very much. Then I was wounded, and after I was wounded, I was sent to represent the International Brigade in the Soviet Union at their November 7 demonstration.4
It was an honorable thing for me, because the Soviet Union was helping Spain with ammunition and matériel, and I was a high official in the 15th Brigade, the English-speaking brigade—one of the three people in charge. So I was leaving for Paris to wait for my visa. Joe in the meantime wrote Kitty to meet me in Paris, because I’m on my way and I could tell her what’s doing with him. Just before I left Spain, Joe was killed. So Kitty meets me in Paris. I’m shocked with the news, and I have to tell her.
She’s shocked, she doesn’t know what to do. I said, “Kitty, come and stay with us, Margaret and me. Join us in New York for a while.” And that’s what happened, she came to stay with us. In the meantime, she was distraught and nervous. Naturally, you would be, all of a sudden the bottom fell out of her life.
So there was an Englishman named Dr. Harris, who was campaigning in this country to aid Loyalist Spain. He was a good speaker, and the committee hired him to raise money. So Kitty met up with him. About three or four weeks later, she got attached to him and they got married. After a time, I heard she was going to the university out at Berkeley.
About seven or eight months later, there was a meeting in Berkeley for Loyalist Spain and I was invited to make a talk. I come out to Berkeley to this meeting, and who’s on the platform but this guy called J. Robert Oppenheimer. First time I saw the man—first time I ever heard of him, in fact. He made a liberal, but good, talk on why the United States should have supported Loyalist Spain. The Second World War was going on at that point. He was friendly to the Left. His brother, Frank, was in the Party, actually, and Frank’s wife was at one time also.
After I finished making my little speech, he said, “Steve, I’m going to marry a friend of yours. I’m going to marry Kitty.” I had thought that she was married to Harris. He spotted my predicament immediately; he says, “Oh, that was a short-lived thing. They could not get along, and we’re getting married.” He didn’t want to go into it, and I didn’t want to ask him. That’s how I met Oppenheimer.
Now, the story is that I came to California because I knew that he was here and that he was an atomic scientist, which was a word I’d never even heard before. Here’s a woman who attached to me, and later on to Margaret too; we just became good friends. And because of these circumstances they called me a master spy.
Several months later, it was rumored he was going to leave for somewhere. Oppenheimer called me up and said, “Steve, I want to see you.” We had lunch somewhere on Telegraph Avenue. He said, “I’m leaving. I won’t be around for a while. I just want to say goodbye. Don’t ask me anything further.” That was it. He was under obligation. I didn’t know what he was going to do, so I had no reason to ask, even if I’d wanted to. Lawrence Laboratory,5 that’s all I ever heard. I’d never heard of cyclotron.6 I’d never heard of those things, see.
I never saw Oppenheimer again, even after the war, or Kitty for that matter. Kitty became a botanist. And she went somewhere to the South Seas on a boat, and contracted some kind of disease and died before she returned. Poor woman, she went through hell. They paint her as a nasty woman and a drunk. I don’t know whether she was nasty or not, but I know that she was not a drunk when I knew her. I felt sorry that I didn’t connect back with them, but it would’ve just added more fuel to the fire.
Then there was a group of seven or eight young scientists7—some of them were radicals—who were students at the university in Berkeley. We were at some social events together, raising money for the People’s World, or something. I think they were already—what do you call them?—graduate students. I didn’t know that they were physicists. If they’d told me, I wouldn’t have known what that was. They were involved with a group at the university, mainly economists and historians, who had Marxist discussions. I didn’t even attend one single class with them, you know.8
Then there was this guy Vassili Zubilin. He was one of the Soviet counsel men out here during the Second World War. Before the Second Front opened up, there was a campaign in the United States to aid Russia. There were barrels in front of movie houses, “Bring your old shoes here for Russia,” that kind of thing.
I don’t exactly remember when this happened now. However, there was this woman from Russia who was a sniper in the Red Army and supposed to have killed forty or fifty Nazis. I don’t know how they keep records on that. Anyhow, she came out here to raise money for Russian war relief and she was to speak at Berkeley at the university. And the Russian counsel called me up—“I want to see you.” So he came to Berkeley, where we had a little office. He says, “Well, I don’t want to meet here. Let’s meet in the bar or something.” So we go to the bar, and he says, “This woman is coming. Will you do everything you can to get a good crowd out?”
That was the story. So I did talk to Zubilin, and whether he was discreet or indiscreet, I don’t know. The FBI picked it up on a telephone which was tapped, no doubt. Now, of course, when you think about it, it’s so easy to weave a story around this—because there was espionage going on.9 But we in the Party were instructed to stay away from this. We’re not going to do that—political stuff, yes. Whatever else the Party did, and if there was some idiots who might’ve done something, it was never officially condoned. And being that I was a member of the National Committee, I would be the last one to get mixed up with that.
Steve Nelson died on December 11, 1993, at the age of ninety.
1David Holloway. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994).
2J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) directed the building of the atom bomb during World War II. Later appointed the top government adviser on nuclear policy, he was suspended as a security risk in 1953, charged with close associations with Communists and obstructing the development of the N-bomb.
3See Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II (New York: Putnam, 1981), pp. 620–22; also Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 312.
4In 1946, another British scientist, Alan Nunn May, had been arrested for espionage after Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected with a suitcase of files on Soviet activities in Canada. May was sentenced to ten years at hard labor and served six. Klaus Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years and served nine.
5Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (New York: Random House, 1986). As Lamphere published in 1986, well before the intercepts were declassified, he apparently relied on memory to reconstruct details of the messages. Therefore, the cable referring to ANTENNA contacting Elitcher refers to a meeting in July, not June as he states in his book, and no code-name for Elitcher appears to have been assigned.
6Hundreds of code names were used in the encrypted messages to disguise the identities of Soviet intelligence officers and agents, as well as organizations, people, or places discussed. Thus KAPITAN was President Roosevelt, BABYLON was San Francisco, ENORMOZ was the Manhattan Project, REST was Klaus Fuchs, and ANTENNA/LIBERAL was Julius Rosenberg.
7While none of the intercepts mention Joel Barr in this context, a decoded cable of May 5, 1944 discusses the recruitment of Alfred Sarant, “a lead of ANTENNA’s.” Throughout the intercepts, investigators are uncertain whether the codenames HUGHES and METER refer to Barr or Sarant, perhaps leading Lamphere, relying largely on memory, to confuse the two.
8Gold was sentenced to thirty years and served fifteen.
9Greenglass was sentenced to fifteen years and served ten.
10Greenglass and his wife Ruth claimed Ethel had typed up his notes on the atom bomb—the sole overt act that implicated Ethel in espionage. Until this point, however, in their pretrial interviews, the Greenglasses had consistently asserted that all the reports were handwritten. Thirty years later in a rare interview with Ronald Radosh, the Greenglasses were hopelessly vague in remembering the typing incident, although they clearly remembered other events. At one point, Ruth said, “It was almost as if we threw that in to involve her . . . .”
1Erskine Caldwell, Southern novelist, first won fame with Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. His father, Ira Sylvester Caldwell, was a minister for the Reformed Presbyterian Church and an outspoken civil rights advocate.
2At his trial and in the press, the trip Sobell and his family took to Mexico was portrayed as flight to avoid prosecution.
3During this period, Sobell inquired of his neighbor how one might leave Mexico without papers; he traveled to Vera Cruz and Tampico to inquire about passage for himself and family to Europe or South America. Marvin Salt and Morton Solt were two of the five names he used. Saypol, the prosecutor, portrayed these confused efforts as part of the elaborate escape plan allegedly laid out by Julius Rosenberg to both David Greenglass and Sobell. This plan entailed false travel documents, coded letters to the Soviet embassy, the receipt of forged passports, money, and instructions that take the fugitives to Sweden and then Czechoslovakia. Yet, two months after his arrival, Sobell was still in his Mexico City apartment, under his own name. Nor were any false passports or caches of money found in his possession. In a 1953 affidavit filed from Alcatraz, Sobell attributed his actions to panic. “Of course, I had no idea how it could be misinterpreted, and how dangerous it would turn out to be.”
4Among Sobell’s effects confiscated at the time of his arrest is a smallpox vaccination certificate issued on August 8,1950, in his own name, with his correct U.S. address. While this cannot prove he intended to return to the States (many other countries required vaccinations as well), it does show that he did not expect to travel under an alias.
5On the evening of August 16, three Spanish-speaking men burst through the door of the Sobell apartment, waving pistols and accusing Sobell of being a bank robber named “Johnny Jones.”
6By signing a federal loyalty oath in which he lied about his CP membership, Elitcher opened himself to charges of perjury. Although he could not testify to any overt acts of espionage committed by Sobell, the importance of his testimony was attested to when Judge Kaufman charged the jury: “If you do not believe the testimony of Max Elitcher as it pertains to Sobell, then you must acquit the defendant Sobell.”
7Elitcher also testified that one night in the summer of 1948, he accompanied Sobell to a street near Rosenberg’s apartment, where Sobell left him to deliver a 35mm film can to Julius. On cross-examination, Elitcher admitted he had no idea what was in the can. Sobell denied the incident ever happened.
8This occurred in 1946 when Elitcher was visiting Sobell while on a Navy business trip at General Electric, where Sobell also worked. As the men discussed their jobs, Elitcher mentioned that he was working on a gunnery control system. Sobell inquired if any reports were available on it.
9Although Sobell was named as a codefendant in the Rosenberg case, none of the overt acts listed in the indictment mentioned or even alluded to him. When his attorneys petitioned for a bill of particulars specifying the acts of which he was accused, the only information they received was the date of June 15,1944, as the approximate day Sobell “joined the alleged conspiracy.”
10In 1952, Sobell’s appeals attorney, Howard Meyer, argued that the rights of his client had been unfairly prejudiced by pretrial publicity, which included statements by J. Edgar Hoover, the Attorney General, and the U.S. attorney labeling him an atom spy, and as such, no evidence about him was presented at the trial. Nonetheless, Sobell’s conviction was upheld by the court of appeals by a vote of two to one. The dissenter, Judge Jerome Frank, believed that Sobell should not have been tried jointly with the Rosenberg-Greenglass-Gold atom bomb conspiracy and declared that Sobell was entitled to a new trial.
11Ten days before the trial, the prosecution concluded that the case against Ethel needed additional evidence. Ruth Greenglass, David’s wife, obliged, revealing that in September 1945 Ethel had typed up her husband’s espionage notes. David Greenglass quickly confirmed her account, although six months earlier, when questioned about the same event, he swore his sister had not been present, nor had she ever discussed espionage with him.
12The Honorable Irving R. Kaufman, who had been assistant attorney general under Tom Clark, and who, according to a former FBI official, “worshipped J. Edgar Hoover.”
13Roy Cohn, who as the assistant prosecuting attorney made his career on this case, claims in his autobiography to have persuaded Kaufman to give Ethel the death penalty, explaining, “The way I see it is she’s worse than Julius. . . . She was the mastermind. . . . I don’t see how you can justify sparing her.” Cohn claims also that he and Kaufman were in secret communication throughout the proceedings and that “Kaufman told me before the trial started he was going to sentence Julius Rosenberg to death.” (The Autobiography of Roy Cohn [Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1988], pp. 76–77)
14Upon sentencing Sobell to thirty years, Judge Kaufman remarked: “I do not for a moment doubt that you were engaged in espionage activities; however the evidence in the case did not point to any activity on your part in connection with the atom bomb project.” J. Edgar Hoover, however, had no such compunctions. In pressing for the death sentence for Sobell (in a report to the Attorney General), Hoover reasoned, “[Sobell] has not cooperated with the government and had undoubtedly furnished high classified material to the Russians although we cannot prove it.”
15In a “next friend” petition to Justice Douglas presented at the start of the Court’s summer recess, Farmer and Marshall argued that the case had been tried under the wrong law, that the 1946 Atomic Energy Act had superseded the 1917 Espionage Act. This last-ditch effort resulted in Douglas issuing a stay of execution and ordering the matter back to the district court. That same afternoon, under the prodding of Attorney General Brownell, Chief Justice Vinson reconvened the Court. Two days later, at noon, the Court announced that the Douglas stay had been overturned by a six-to-three vote. In Justice Black’s dissent, he questioned the power of the full Court to overturn the stay, saying that the action was “unprecedented” in the Court’s history and he had found no statute or rule permitting it. By eight-sixteen that same evening, the Rosenbergs were dead.
16Many Bloch’s enmity toward the Farmer and Marshall effort has never been adequately explained. While arguing before the full Court whether the Rosenbergs should have been tried under the far more favorable Atomic Energy Act (so much more favorable that the government openly conceded that a conviction most likely could not be had under it), Bloch appeared to be so undercutting the effort that Justice Black was prompted to inquire: “Mr. Bloch, you represent the Rosenbergs, do you not? And it’s your duty to try to save them from the electric chair if possible, is that right?”
17Worldwide support for the Rosenbergs spanned the political spectrum. According to the Washington Post, in 1953, the White House received more than 200,000 messages on the case—most urging clemency. More than 20,000 were received in the week before their execution.
18By the time of the Rosenberg-Sobell trial, the rash of Smith Act prosecutions against the leadership of the Communist Party was already under way. Many of their defense attorneys found themselves the target of contempt citations and disbarment proceedings.
19The writ by which a superior court calls up the records of an inferior court in order to review its proceedings.
20One reason may well have been J. Edgar Hoover. At that time Alcatraz was the depository for the federal government’s most disliked prisoners, and Sobell had already earned Hoover’s enmity by refusing to cooperate.
21Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
22Bloch’s strategy was to concede that espionage had taken place, but not by his clients. But when he declined to attack the value of Exhibit 8, and instead moved to impound it, he only underscored for the jury the importance of the information allegedly passed to Rosenberg. One year after the executions, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, told a secret meeting of the AEC: “I think that the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs was of minor value. I would never say that publicly. . . . I should think it should be kept very quiet, because . . . the Rosenbergs deserved to hang.”
23In 1966, Marshall Perlin, Sobell’s attorney, succeeded in winning the court-ordered release of Exhibit 8. Henry Linschitz, a Los Alamos scientist who worked in lens development and helped assemble the bomb, referred to it as “garbled” and “confused” before concluding: “It is not possible in any technologically useful way to condense the results of a two-billion-dollar development effort into a diagram drawn by a high-school graduate machinist on a single sheet of paper.”
24The still hotly argued case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists who were charged with murdering a pair of payroll guards in April 1920. Their arrest coincided with the first Red Scare of 1919–20, and the resultant political coloring of their case by the press and the authorities arguably prejudiced the case against them. They were executed in August 1927 amid worldwide clamor for clemency.
25The reference is to the most notorious labor frame-up in the first half of the twentieth century. Tom Mooney, a Socialist labor leader, and Warren Billings, his equally radical associate, spent twenty-three years (1916–39) in prison for the deaths often persons killed by a bomb explosion during the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. Mooney’s sentence was commuted to time served. Billings was not pardoned until 1961.
1When arrested at the border, Sobell was charged with “five overt acts” of “having conspired with Julius Rosenberg and others” to violate the espionage act.
2In August 1951, the National Guardian ran a seven-part series by William Reuben on the case, deeming it “a frame-up.” Out of this came the creation of the Rosenberg defense committee. Only a handful of publications either supported the defense or cast doubt on the charges— The Nation, The New Republic, and Scientific American were among them.
3Thirty-seven affiliates of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case were listed as “subversive organizations” by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Characteristically, HUAC dismissed their efforts as “a mammoth propaganda campaign . . . for the purposes of international communism.”
4This may have been Junius Scales (see under “The Fall of the Communist Party”), whose six-year sentence under the Smith Act was commuted by President Kennedy in December 1962.
1See Steve Nelson under “The Fall of the Communist Party.”
2During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) about 35,000 foreign volunteers from fifty-two countries took up arms to defend the Spanish Republic against a fascist uprising led by Franco and aided by Hider and Mussolini. Organized into five International Brigades, three thousand of the volunteers were Americans, who named their units the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the George Washington Battalion, and the John Brown Battery. More than one thousand Americans died in the war. After the war was lost, they returned home only to be persecuted for decades as “premature antifascists.”
3The Mac-Paps, as they were known, were a Canadian battalion formed in July 1937. At first they were led by American officers, Joe Dallet among them.
4The demonstration celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the 1917 revolution.
5Known during World War Two as the Radiation Laboratory, under the direction of Ernest Lawrence. The lab’s importance in the development of the atom bomb centered around its efforts to produce quantities of the fissionable material uranium 235.
6The electromagnetic accelerator that separates out the 235 isotope. The device was developed at Lawrence’s lab. In 1949, HUAC charged that Joseph Weinberg (dubbed by the committee “Scientist X”) had passed some of this information to the Russians through Steve Nelson. Under oath, Weinberg denied knowing Nelson, and he was indicted on three counts of perjury. The government dropped one count, the judge dismissed the second, and the jury acquitted him on the third. Weinberg was blacklisted from academia for many years.
7David Fox, David Bohm, Max Friedman, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and David Hawkins. Not only did these young scientists enrage the authorities by consorting with Steve Nelson, but they had the audacity to organize a union local at the Radiation Laboratory. To varying degrees over the next decade all were blacklisted in academia. Lomanitz, for one, was reduced to living in a shack outside Kansas City, working menial jobs for seventy-five cents an hour.
8Nelson may have attended at least one. On August 14, 1949, in cloak-and-dagger overtones, a former security officer named James Murray testified before HUAC that six years previously he had peered from a neighboring rooftop into the second-story Berkeley apartment of Joseph Weinberg and spied Nelson meeting with the students: “I observed them sitting around the table . . . the conversation appeared to be very serious.” He reported that the participants came and went openly; that “nine or ten” people were present and (aside from Nelson) met weekly; and that curtains, shades, and windows were all open to the summer heat. HUAC wanted spies; they got a study group.
9The story that HUAC and the FBI wove was that in 1942 and 1943, Nelson was in contact with Zubilin and Peter Ivanov, the Soviet vice-consul; that Nelson passed Ivanov “an envelope or package” while sitting in a park, and that a few days later Zubilin met Nelson in his home and paid him “ten bills of unknown denominations.” However, with all the spy-hunters’ dogged certainty that Nelson was a “master spy” in cahoots with Weinberg, and that the pair had betrayed secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviets, no espionage charges were ever brought against either of them.