employed by General Electric. Elitcher visited him there early in 1946,
only to be pumped about the availability of written reports on the Navy
fire control system. When he told Sobell that “it was not completed, it
was dragging along, it had not been finished yet,” he was advised to
see Rosenberg as soon as possible. Some months later, he met Rosenberg
again in his Knickerbocker Village apartment. This time Rosenberg
complained that “there was a leak in this espionage” and that it would
be better if “I don’t come to see him until he lets me know or until
someone informs me.” In fact, Julius thought that things were so hot
that he ordered Elitcher to discontinue his Communist Party activities
until further notice.
In 1947, Sobell left General Electric and took a job as a project
engineer with the Reeves Instrument Corporation in New York. From time
to time, Elitcher visited him at the plant and, toward the end of the
year, had lunch with him at a restaurant on Third Avenue known as the
Sugar Bowl. During the meal, he remembered that his ex-roommate had
“inquired as to whether I knew of any engineering students ... who
would be safe to approach on this question of espionage, of getting
material.” Elitcher claimed that he knew of nobody who fitted this
bill but “if somebody came along, I would tell him about it.”
After several meetings with Sobell at Reeves, Elitcher made up his mind
to leave the Bureau of Ordinance and enter private industry. In June
of 1948, during a business trip to New York, he telephoned Sobell to
inform him of his plans, and the former told him not to take any final
step “before you see me. I want to talk to you about it, and Rosenberg
wants to speak to you about it.” Later that day, Elitcher met Rosenberg
and Sobell at 42nd Street and Third Avenue. They did everything in
their power to persuade him to stay in the Bureau because, as Julius
put it, “he needed somebody to work at the Navy Department for this
espionage purpose.” During this conversation, Sobell kept repeating,
“Julie is right; you should do that.” But Elitcher was adamant and,
after the three men had dinner together, returned to Washington to
resign from the Navy Department and bring his family back to New York.
At this time, Sobell lived at 164-17 73rd Avenue in Flushing. Elitcher
was successful in landing a job at Reeves and, in late July, drove to
New York on an apartment-hunting expedition. While driving through
Baltimore, he noticed that he was being followed by several cars. When
he arrived at Sobell’s house that evening, he told his friend that one
or two cars had tailed him during most of his northward trek. Sobell
was furious. “At this point, he became very angry and said that I
should not have come to the house under those circumstances.” After he
calmed down, he told Elitcher that he had something in the house “that
he should have given to Julius Rosenberg some time ago....” He said
he was tired and asked Elitcher to join him on the ten-mile trip to
Manhattan. As they were leaving the house, Elitcher “saw him take what
I identified then as a 35-millimeter film can.”
The two men left Queens and drove down the East River Drive to the
Journal-American Building where Sobell parked the car. He took “this
can out of the glove compartment” and, after instructing Elitcher to
drive the car around the corner and wait for him on Catherine Slip,
walked off in the direction of Knickerbocker Village. When he returned
some thirty minutes later, Elitcher asked him, “Well, what does Julie
think about ... my being followed?” Sobell assured him that “it is
all right; don’t be concerned about it,” and headed the car in the
direction of Flushing. As they drove along, Sobell volunteered the
information that Rosenberg had told him that he once spoke to Elizabeth
Bentley on the telephone but that “he was pretty sure she didn’t know
who he was and therefore everything was all right.”
Before Saypol turned the witness over to the impatient defense quartet,
he had extracted the information that Sobell had “a Leica camera, and
an enlarger and material for processing film.” Elitcher was sure that
Sobell had worked on classified material when he was employed by the
Navy, General Electric and Reeves. He had last seen his friend in June
of 1950 when Sobell and his family left for a weekend in Washington.
Q. Did he say anything to you at that time about going to Mexico?
A. No.
Only the uninitiated in the courtroom were ignorant of the fact that
Sobell had been picked up in Mexico City in the late summer of 1950 by
Mexican security police and rushed across the Rio Grande.
On cross-examination, Elitcher conceded that he had signed a loyalty
oath in 1947. “I signed a statement saying that I was not or had not
been a member of an organization that was dedicated to overthrow of the
government by force and violence.”
Q. At the time you verified that oath, did you believe that you were
lying when you concealed your membership in the Communist Party?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. So you lied under oath?
A. Yes.
When he was first questioned about the Sobells and the Rosenbergs, he
“realized what the implications might be” of his perjured statement.
But he insisted that he “didn’t know what would happen to my skin when
I told the story. I certainly have hopes ... that the best will happen
to me.”
With the witness’ admission that he had been going to a psychiatrist
since 1947 because of marital difficulties, the defense attorneys let
him go. There was bigger game in the offing. The bailiff called out the
name of David Greenglass and, accompanied by a United States Marshal,
the ex-sergeant walked up to the witness chair. Although Elitcher
had testified to a connection between Sobell and Rosenberg and some
suspicious activities by both men, he had not shown that either one was
engaged in atomic espionage. This was David Greenglass’ function and he
played his role to the hilt.
After being trained as a mechanic at the Haaren Aviation School,
Brooklyn Polytechnic and Pratt Institute, Greenglass was drafted in
April of 1943. When he finished basic training, he had been sent to
ordinance school at Aberdeen, Maryland. In July, 1944, he was assigned
to the Manhattan District Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After two
weeks orientation, he was sent to Los Alamos where he worked in the
“E” shop as a machinist. He was one of ten machinists in the shop
and became its foreman some eighteen months later. But it was not
until November of 1944 that he learned that the work he was doing was
“concerned with the construction of the atom bomb.”
It was his wife, Ruth, who had enlightened him as to the nature of
the Manhattan Project. On November 29, 1944--their second wedding
anniversary--she visited him in Albuquerque. A few days after she
arrived, the couple decided to walk to the Rio Grande via Route 66. It
was during this outing that Ruth told her husband that the Rosenbergs
had invited her to dinner just before she left New York. Ethel and
Julius had informed her that they had become Soviet espionage agents
and that they were “giving information to the Soviet Union.” Julius
had then told Ruth that David “was working in the atomic bomb project
at Los Alamos and that they would want me to give information to the
Russians.”
At first, David refused to help the Rosenbergs, but, after a night of
soul-searching, he apparently had a change of heart. The next day,
he furnished his wife with the code names for such scientists as J.
Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and George B. Kistiakowski as well as
information about “the general layout of the Los Alamos Atomic Project,
the buildings, number of people and stuff like that.” Ruth told her
husband that she had been instructed by Julius “not to write it down,
but to memorize it.” Two days later, she returned to New York.
Greenglass next saw his wife on New Year’s Day of 1945 when he arrived
home on a fifteen-day furlough. Julius came over one morning and
“asked me to give him information, specifically anything of value
on the atomic bomb, whatever I knew about it.” He was particularly
interested in some high explosive lens molds on which David told him he
was working at Los Alamos. That evening, Greenglass drew some sketches
of the lens molds and gave them to his brother-in-law the following
morning. In order to assist Greenglass in preparing his sketches,
Julius gave him “a description of the atom bomb” of the Hiroshima type.
Two or three days later, the Greenglasses were invited to dinner at
the Rosenberg’s. There they met a woman by the name of Ann Sidorovich.
Later that evening, Julius told David that Mrs. Sidorovich would go
west during Ruth’s next trip to Albuquerque and that the two women
would exchange pocketbooks in a Denver movie theatre. Ruth’s was to
contain the latest information on the atom bomb that David would turn
over to her in Albuquerque.
However, there was a chance that another courier would be sent. To
make sure that the Greenglasses would be able to identify Sidorovich’s
replacement, Rosenberg gave Ruth one part of the side of a Jello box
and told her that whoever came to Albuquerque would have the other
portion. Ruth put the piece of cardboard in her wallet. The rest of the
evening was spent in discussing lenses, and Rosenberg told Greenglass
that “he would like me to meet somebody who would talk to me more about
lenses.” The person Julius had in mind was a Russian scientist and an
appointment was made for David to meet this man a few nights later on
First Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets.
Greenglass borrowed his father-in-law’s Oldsmobile and parked at the
spot Julius had indicated. His brother-in-law brought over a strange
man who got into the car and ordered David to drive around the area.
He asked the machinist a great many questions about lenses--the high
explosive used, the means of detonation and the formula of the curve in
the lens. David promised to find out what he could when he returned to
Los Alamos and he drove the Russian back to where he had entered the
car. He then returned home where “I told my wife where I had been.”
Two weeks later, he returned to the Manhattan Project. Early the next
April, Ruth joined him in Albuquerque. Shortly after she arrived, the
couple found an apartment at 209 North High Street. David managed to
spend Saturdays and Sundays at the apartment, returning to the base on
Monday mornings. It was on one of those Sundays--June 3, 1945--that
Harry Gold made the first of his two visits to the Greenglasses.
After announcing that he came from Julius and exhibiting the other
half of the Jello box side, he was told by David to come back later
as the information was not yet ready. As he left the apartment “Mrs.
Greenglass told me that just before she had left New York City to come
to Albuquerque, she had spoken with Julius....”
That afternoon, David turned over to Gold several sketches of a lens
mold, some descriptive material about atomic bomb experimentation, and
a “list of possible recruits for espionage.” He also indicated that a
test explosion was scheduled for July at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The
Greenglasses then accompanied the courier on a back road that led by
the USO where “we dropped him. We went into the USO, and he went on his
way. As soon as he had gone down the street my wife and myself looked
around and we came out again and back to the apartment and counted the
money.”
Q. How much was it?
A. We found it to be $500.
Q. What did you do with the money?
A. I gave it to my wife.
It was at this point that Saypol introduced a sketch of a lens mold
which had been prepared from memory by Greenglass after his arrest. The
latter stated that it was, for all practical purposes, a replica of one
he had given Gold in Albuquerque.
In September, Greenglass arrived in New York on furlough. He stayed at
his mother’s apartment on Sheriff Street where Rosenberg visited him
the next morning. Greenglass told him, “I think I have a pretty good
description of the atom bomb.” He turned over a sketch and some data
relating to the bomb to his brother-in-law who seemed delighted with
them. He gave David $200.00 and told him that “he would like to have
it immediately, as soon as I possibly could get it written up....”
A replica of this sketch was identified by an atomic engineer at a
later stage of the trial as a cross-section of “the bomb we dropped at
Nagasaki, similar to it.”
That afternoon, Greenglass typed some twelve pages of information and
then drove over to Knickerbocker Village with Ruth where he gave the
manuscript to Julius. The latter insisted that the report’s grammar
be corrected and Ethel retyped it on a portable in the living room.
While this was going on, Julius told David that he had once stolen a
proximity fuse when he worked for the Emerson Radio Company. Before the
Greenglasses left that afternoon, Julius advised David to stay at Los
Alamos as a civilian when he was discharged from the Army.
David received an honorable discharge at Fort Bliss in El Paso on
February 28, 1946. He immediately returned to New York where he went
into business with his brother Bernard, Julius Rosenberg and a man
named Goldstein. The four formed two companies--G & R Engineering and
the Pitt Machine Products Corporation. Some time in 1946 or 1947,
Julius urged David to continue his schooling at Russian expense “for
the purpose of cultivating the friendships of people that I had known
at Los Alamos and also to acquire new friendships with people who were
in the field of research that are in those colleges, like physics and
nuclear energy.” He suggested a number of institutions, including the
University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
New York University, but Greenglass “never bothered” to go.
In August of 1949, David left Pitt and G & R and got a job with the
Arma Engineering Corporation. In the three years he had been working
with his brother-in-law, Julius had told him a great deal about his
espionage activities. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg was receiving
information from General Electric as well as from someone in Cleveland,
Ohio. “He told me that he had people going to school in various
up-State institutions.” In 1947, he revealed that he had heard “from
one of the boys” about a sky-platform project, and information about
“atomic energy for airplanes” from another. As a reward for all his
varied activities, he informed David, he and his wife had been given
watches, a citation and a console table by the Russians.
Q. Did he describe the citation at all?
A. He said it had certain privileges with it in case he was sent to
Russia.
A few days after Klaus Fuchs’ arrest in February of 1950, Rosenberg
awakened Greenglass one morning and insisted that he accompany him on
a walk around nearby Hamilton Fish Park. He told David that the man
who had visited him in Albuquerque five years before had been one of
Fuchs’ contacts and that he would probably be picked up soon. He urged
Greenglass to leave the country and promised to obtain some money for
him from the Russians. For the next few months, Rosenberg kept pressing
David to get out of the United States but it was not until Harry
Gold’s arrest in May that he told him that “you will have to leave the
country.”
At that time, he gave David $1000.00 and promised him $6000.00 more.
He suggested that David and Ruth go to Mexico City and that they get
their tourist visas at the border rather than at the Mexican Consulate
in New York. Once the couple arrived in Mexico City, they were to make
contact with the Russian Ambassador and, by following instructions
that would have delighted E. Phillips Oppenheim, eventually wind up in
Czechoslovakia. Greenglass went so far as to have six sets of passport
pictures taken. On Memorial Day, he turned five sets over to Rosenberg
who, a week later, brought him $4,000 in tens and twenties in a brown
paper bag. Almost all of this money, he said, had been given to O. John
Rogge as a fee for legal services.
In the days that followed this visit, David began to notice that he
was being regularly followed. When Julius asked him, “Are you being
followed?” he told him that he thought he was. His brother-in-law then
asked him what he intended to do about it and Greenglass told him, “I
am not going to do anything. I am going to sit--I am going to stay
right here.” On June 15th, he was picked up by agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. One month later, Julius Rosenberg was taken
into custody and, on August 11th, Ethel was arrested. The circle that
Gouzenko had started in 1945 was full.
Ruth Greenglass told much the same story as had her husband. Julius and
Ethel had persuaded her to encourage her husband to commit espionage.
Her brother-in-law had given her $150.00 for railroad fare when she
first visited David in Albuquerque in late November of 1944. A few
days after she arrived, she and her husband took a stroll out of
Albuquerque on Route 66 and she “told him that Julius was interested in
the physical description of the project at Los Alamos, the approximate
number of people employed there, whether the place was camouflaged,
what the security measures were, and the type of work that David
himself did....” The next day, after consulting “with memories and
voices in my mind,” Greenglass told her what she wanted to know and,
when she returned to New York a few days later, she wrote it all down
for Julius who seemed “very pleased.”
She said that the plan to switch pocketbooks with Ann Sidorovich
in a Denver theatre had soon been abandoned in favor of a meeting
in an Albuquerque supermarket. On March 3, 1945, she left New York
for her second trip to Albuquerque where, after three weeks of
apartment-hunting, she found the place on North High Street. On April
18th, she suffered a miscarriage and immediately wrote to Ethel
Rosenberg to tell her that she was confined to bed and would be unable
to keep the supermarket rendezvous which had been scheduled for “the
last Saturday in April or the first Saturday in May.” Ethel wrote back
that “a member of the family would come out to visit me the last weeks
in May, the third and fourth Saturdays.” The Greenglasses visited the
Central Avenue Safeway, which had been chosen as the meeting spot, on
both Saturdays but “no one came.” It wasn’t until Sunday, June 3rd,
that Harry Gold walked into their living room and announced that he
came “from Julius.”
Her description of the Gold visit was similar to David’s except that
she insisted that her husband had taken the Jello box side out of
her wallet while, as he remembered it, it had been in her purse. The
remainder of her testimony pertaining to the various acts of espionage
that took place during the rest of 1945 did not differ materially from
her husband’s. She did recall a conversation with Ethel in 1946 about
a “mahogany console table” which her sister-in-law told her “she had
gotten ... as a gift.” Julius interrupted to say that “it was a special
kind of a table” and pointed out that its underside had been hollowed
out so that it could be used for microfilming.
The defense made a monumental effort to discredit both witnesses. The
spectacle of a brother testifying against his sister was not a pretty
one and Emanuel Bloch made the most of it.
Q. Do you bear any affection for your sister Ethel?
A. I do.
Q. You realize, do you not, that Ethel is being tried here on a charge
of conspiracy to commit espionage?
A. I do.
Q. And you realize the grave implications of that charge?
A. I do.
Q. And you realize the possible death penalty, in the event that Ethel
is convicted by this jury, do you not?
A. I do.
But David insisted that he had always loved his sister “as far back as
I ever met her and knew her.” If his testimony hurt her, he was sorry,
but he felt “remorse” and had to get it off his chest.
Bloch also tried to show that Greenglass lacked the technical knowledge
necessary to understand the material he said he was obtaining for
Julius. David admitted that he had failed all eight courses he had
taken at Brooklyn Polytech, that he had never obtained a degree in
science or engineering, and that he had had no training in nuclear or
atomic physics. As far as the Army was concerned, he was classified as
an automotive machinist and a toolmaker. What he did know about the
bomb, he had “picked it up here and there.”
As far as the Blochs were concerned, the Greenglasses were testifying
against their clients in the hopes of avoiding punishment for their
participation in the espionage conspiracy. At the time of the trial,
Ruth had neither been arrested nor indicted despite the fact that she
had been very much a part of Rosenberg’s plans. Bloch _fils_ pumped
David about this.
Q. Now, Mr. Greenglass, your wife has never been arrested, has she?
A. She has not.
Q. And she has not pleaded guilty to any conspiracy to commit
espionage, has she?
A. She has not.
Q. And your wife is at the present time home taking care of your
children; isn’t that right?
A. That’s right.
His father tried the same tack when he had Ruth on the stand. She had
stated that, after her husband’s arrest, she had informed her lawyer,
O. John Rogge, that she wanted to testify for the Government.
Q. Well, was it your state of mind, that you thought you would not be
punished?
A. No, I didn’t want to be punished.
Q. Did you hope not to be punished?
A. I did.
Q. And did you at the time you spoke to Mr. Rogge, hope that, if
you told the truth and your husband told the truth, you wouldn’t be
punished?
A. Mr. Bloch, I have always hoped that ...
Q. Will you answer my question, please?
A. Yes.
Bloch Junior’s parting shot at the Greenglasses involved the nature of
their relationship with Julius after the failure of the machine shop
in 1949. Ruth testified that “we lost everything in that business.”
When her husband pulled out in August of that year, he had asked to
be compensated for his twenty-five shares of stock. In fact, Ruth had
“bought a book of promissory notes” and drafted several notes for her
brother-in-law to sign. “We asked Mr. Rosenberg to sign the promissory
notes and he refused, and he said we did not have the understanding
that required it--a verbal understanding was sufficient, and he gave
neither my husband nor his brother a note.” But she insisted that the
incident did not cause any friction between the two families even
though she had consulted Mr. Rogge about David’s rights.
Q. Well, aren’t you a bit angry at either Mr. or Mrs. Rosenberg
because they did not pay you what you think you were entitled to?
A. I don’t think I am angry. I just can’t understand their actions
because there was a debt due.
Q. You are not angry?
A. No, I am not angry. I don’t understand people who do not pay their
debts, Mr. Bloch.
Q. And you resent it?
A. I don’t think I resented it. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t
being paid for what was rightfully mine.
It was David’s recollection that he had assigned his stock to his
sister’s husband in January of 1950 but that it hadn’t been turned over
to him until late April. There was some discussion about the price
to be paid for the stock--David wanted $2,000.00 but finally agreed
to accept half that amount in the form of a note. After he gave the
stock to Julius, he claimed that Rosenberg never signed the promissory
note which Ruth had prepared for him. When Greenglass was arrested, he
asked Rogge to start a law suit against Rosenberg for the “few thousand
dollars” he said he had lost in the machine shop venture. When Ruth
testified, she swore that David had never asked his lawyer to sue
Julius--“I was the one who spoke of it,” she insisted, “not my husband.”
The Greenglasses were followed on the stand by Harry Gold whose
apologia included the saga of his trip to Albuquerque in June of 1945.
His version of the episode was identical with those previously put into
the record by David and Ruth. He had arrived in Santa Fe on Saturday,
June 2nd, where he had a thirty-minute conversation with Fuchs. He then
took the bus to Albuquerque, a sixty-minute run, where he “managed
to obtain a room in the hallway of a rooming house.” Early the next
morning, he had registered in his own name at the Hilton Hotel and then
walked to the North High Street address Yakovlev had given him, and
climbed “a very steep flight of steps” to the Greenglasses second-floor
apartment. Although Ruth and David had testified that they did not
receive the $500.00 from Gold until his afternoon visit, the courier
remembered that he had given them the envelope containing the money
that very morning.