David Greenglass
Encyclopedia
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
who worked in the Manhattan project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
. He was the brother of Ethel Rosenberg.
Biography
David Greenglass was recruited into Soviet espionage by his wife, Ruth GreenglassRuth Greenglass
Ruth Leah Printz Greenglass was an Atomic spy along with her husband.-Biography:She was born on April 30, 1924 in New York City to Max Printz and Tillie Leiter. She grew up in the same neighborhood, the Lower East Side, as her future husband, David Greenglass. She graduated with honors from Seward...
, at the behest of his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy
Conspiracy (crime)
In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement...
to commit espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
with regard to American atomic secrets. Greenglass reportedly shared an interest in Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
with the Rosenbergs. Greenglass would later claim that he lied at the Rosenberg trial in order "to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so."
Born on March 2, 1922, Greenglass married Ruth
Ruth Greenglass
Ruth Leah Printz Greenglass was an Atomic spy along with her husband.-Biography:She was born on April 30, 1924 in New York City to Max Printz and Tillie Leiter. She grew up in the same neighborhood, the Lower East Side, as her future husband, David Greenglass. She graduated with honors from Seward...
(née Printz) in 1942, when she was 18 years old. The two joined the Young Communist League
Young Communist League
The Young Communist League was or is the name used by the youth wing of various Communist parties around the world. The name YCL of XXX was generally taken by all sections of the Communist Youth International.Examples of YCLs:...
shortly before Greenglass entered the U.S. Army in 1943. A machinist at the Army base in Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
, Greenglass was promoted to sergeant and assigned to the secret Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
, the wartime project to develop the first atomic weapons. He was first stationed at the massive uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about west of Knoxville. Oak Ridge's population was 27,387 at the 2000 census...
, and later worked at the Los Alamos
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
laboratory in New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
. Greenglass humorously 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.
After Julius Rosenberg recommended Ruth 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 to produce the first atomic bomb
Nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first fission bomb test released the same amount...
. After Julius Rosenberg was relieved of his duties by the NKVD because they feared discovery (he had been fired from his job with the United States Signal Corps because they had discovered his membership in the Communist Party), 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
Venona project
The VENONA project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II...
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". Greenglass defended himself in court by stating that when he began his work, the Soviet Union was still an ally of the United States. 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.
According to KGB materials published in the book THE HAUNTED WOOD, David continued his contacts with the Soviets after World War II independent of Julius Rosenberg. [FN: See FINAL VERDICT by Walter Schneir -- p. 145]
In 1950, UK and US intelligence agencies discovered that a Los Alamos theoretical physicist, Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research to the USSR during and shortly after World War II...
, had also been a spy for the USSR during the war. Through Fuchs' confession, they found that one of his American contacts had been a man named Harry Gold
Harry Gold
Harry Gold was a laboratory chemist who was convicted of being the “courier” for a number of Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project.-Early life:Gold was born in Switzerland to poor Russian Jewish immigrants...
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
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. Instead, they went to the Catskills and used the money to seek legal advice.
David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage in June 1950 and quickly implicated the Rosenbergs. He had explicitly denied his sister Ethel Rosenberg's involvement in his Grand Jury testimony in February 1950, but by August of the same year he changed his testimony to claim that Ethel had typed up his notes. He testified against his sister and her husband in court in 1951 as part of an immunity agreement. In exchange for that testimony, the government allowed Ruth to stay with their two children. She was named a co-conspirator, but was never arrested, indicted or prosecuted. David told the court, "I had a kind of hero worship there with Julius Rosenberg and I did not want my hero to fail..."
Trinity test
Trinity was the code name of the first test of a nuclear weapon. This test was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, at the new White Sands Proving Ground, which incorporated the Alamogordo Bombing...
" test and the bomb used on Nagasaki, "Fat Man
Fat Man
"Fat Man" is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States on August 9, 1945. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons to be used in warfare to date , and its detonation caused the third man-made nuclear explosion. The name also refers more...
." At first this was a matter of difficulty for the prosecution, who wanted Greenglass to testify in open court about the secrets he had given—something which would by definition make them no longer "secret." The Atomic Energy Commission
United States Atomic Energy Commission
The United States Atomic Energy Commission was an agency of the United States government established after World War II by Congress to foster and control the peace time development of atomic science and technology. President Harry S...
decided that the "implosion" concept could be declassified for the trial, and limited all discussion to the weapons used in World War II (fearing that Greenglass may have seen prototypes for future weapons while at Los Alamos). As a result of a surprise defense motion that all testimony about the alleged "secret of the atomic bomb" be impounded, Federal Judge Irving Kaufman at first made all spectators and news reporters leave the room when Greenglass began testifying about his "secrets".
Because we now know that the testimony Greenglass gave about passing the information to Julius Rosenberg in September, 1945 to have been false [See Schneir, FINAL VERDICT, pp. 131-144] the defense's strategy begins to make sense. Julius Rosenberg had no knowledge of any of this and so his attorney's effort to demonstrate the defendant's "concern" for national security appeared a gamble worth taking.
Ten minutes later Judge Kaufman invited the news reporters back in, asking them to use their discretion in reporting on Greenglass's testimony. Defense attorney Bloch's effort to convince the jury that he and his clients were concerned about issues of national security failed. The Greenglass testimony, later seen to be crude and in the words of many scientists who examined it "worthless," remained sealed until 1966. Greenglass also testified that Rosenberg had stolen and given to the Russians a proximity fuze
Proximity fuze
A proximity fuze is a fuze that is designed to detonate an explosive device automatically when the distance to target becomes smaller than a predetermined value or when the target passes through a given plane...
and information about a speculative space platform which would sit between the Earth and the Moon.
During the trial, Bloch claimed Greenglass wanted revenge for the machine shop business failure. Bloch attempted to discredit the character of Greenglass and his testimony (a legal tactic which failed with the jury). Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 10 years, and later successfully reunited with his wife.
After his release in 1960, the Greenglasses lived in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
under an assumed name; for some years they lived at 130-73 228th Street in the Laurelton section of Queens. In 1996, Greenglass recanted his sworn testimony in an interview with New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, claiming that he had lied under oath about the extent of the involvement in the spying plot by his sister Ethel, in order to protect his wife, Ruth. At the trial, Greenglass had testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed his notes to give to the Russians, though he now intimated that it had been Ruth who did the typing. Greenglass explained, "Look, I had a wife and two children. I didn’t care so much what happened to me, but I cared what happened to them.” When Roberts asked Greenglass if he would have done anything differently, he replied, "Never."
It is important in this context to recall that Ethel Rosenberg was never given a code name in the VENONA decryptions. Government officials candidly admitted that she was arrested to use as a lever against her husband.
Some former Soviet intelligence agents, including Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell is a former spy for the Soviet Union. Sobell was an American engineer working for General Electric and Reeves Electronics on military and government contracts. He was found guilty of spying for the Soviets , and sentenced to 30 years in prison...
, have claimed that they believed Ethel was not an active part of Julius' espionage ring, and Greenglass' crude drawings were not very useful to them since they already possessed Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research to the USSR during and shortly after World War II...
' superior information. However, this has been disputed by other intelligence records and the statements of Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
. No explanation has yet been made as to why Soviet intelligence later secretly recommended the Rosenbergs for a Soviet medal for acts unrelated to espionage.
In 2008, when the government sought to release transcripts of the Rosenbergs' grand jury proceedings, Greenglass objected to the release of his testimony. As a result, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein declined to release the testimony of Greenglass and other witnesses who refused consent, or who could not be confirmed as dead, or located to obtain consent.
See also
- Klaus FuchsKlaus FuchsKlaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research to the USSR during and shortly after World War II...
- Soviet atomic bomb projectSoviet atomic bomb projectThe Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb , was a clandestine research and development program began during and post-World War II, in the wake of the Soviet Union's discovery of the United States' nuclear project...
- Julius and Ethel RosenbergJulius and Ethel RosenbergEthel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...
- Atomic spiesAtomic SpiesAtomic Spies and Atom Spies are terms that refer to various people in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada who are thought to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War...
Further reading
- Robert Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War (New York: Random House, 1986)
- Ehrman, John. Book Review of "The Brother" by Sam Roberts, Studies in Intelligence (Unclassified) 46:4 (2002). Retrieved April 4, 2006.
- Richard C.S. Trahair and Robert Miller, Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations (New York: Enigma Books, 2009) ISBN 978-1-929631-75-9
- Subject of Richard GreenbergRichard GreenbergRichard Greenberg is an American playwright. He is the author of over 25 plays including eight South Coast Repertory world premieres: Our Mother's Brief Affair, The Injured Party, The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, Hurrah at Last, Three Days of Rain Richard Greenberg (1958–present) is an American...
play "Our Mother's Brief Affair" - Walter Schneir "FINAL VERDICT, What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case?" NY: Melville House, 2010. (with a Preface and Afterword by Miriam Schneir) ISBN 978-I-935554-16-5
External links
- An Interactive Rosenberg Espionage Ring Timeline and Archive
- The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) has the full text for former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks containing new evidence on Greenglass's cooperation with the Soviet Union
- Famous Trials by Doug Linder
- Complete transcript of the Rosenberg trial
- Children of the Manhattan Project
- Spartacus
- Crime Library
- Annotated bibliography for David Greenglass from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues