10-06-08, 9:05 am
The Rosenberg “atomic spy” case is 58 years old, yet its reverberations are still being felt. Many still use the case to either justify or condemn some of the worst excesses of the Cold War period. This past September, the release of previously secret grand jury testimony that appears to further exonerate Ethel Rosenberg and an alleged 'admission' by Morton Sobell made news. And with the inevitable host of misrepresentations and claims made as a result, the case is worth reexamining from an historical perspective.
I joined the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (formerly the Committee to Re-Open the Rosenberg Case) in the mid-1970s. There, I met Michael and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenberg’s sons, and also the late Marshall “Mike” Perlin, Morton Sobell’s attorney in the 1951 trial and the driving force behind the case. I also came to know Walter and Miriam Schneir, whose pioneering work, Invitation to An Inquest, in effect re-opened the case for a new audience in the late 1960s.
FOIA compelled the FBI to release under the Freedom of Information Act heavily censored and incomplete documents on the case. While the documents failed to prove Julius Rosenberg’s innocence, they provided strong evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had been brought into the case as a ploy to intimidate Julius.
The declassified documents also showed that Judge Irving Kaufman, who pronounced the death sentence on the Rosenbergs, had in the two years leading up to their execution conspired with the Justice Department to thwart the appeals in the case, in what was by any standard a huge violation of judicial ethics.
Subsequently Ronald Radosh, an historian who previously was associated with New Left radicals in the 1960s, joined Joyce Milton, a journalist, to use these documents and various interviews to publish the Rosenberg File in 1983. This book claimed to affirm Julius Rosenberg’s guilt and presented through its melodramatic narrative the standard HUAC-FBI portrayal of the Communist Party USA as a conspiratorial front for both a Soviet-led world revolution and Soviet conquest of the United States.
After its publication, I strongly criticized the Radosh and Milton work as an attempt to legitimize the Reagan administration’s extreme intensification of the Cold War. Reagan, who not by accident gave Judge Kaufman the Medal of Freedom in 1987, adopted an anti-Soviet foreign policy and Cold war mentality that also enlisted a cadre of historians to recycle anti-Communist ideas of the 1950s. “The Witch-hunter’s Truth,” a pamphlet published by the Fund for Open Information and Accountability, dealt with these issues. That same year, I attended a packed town hall debate between the Schneirs and Radosh and Milton sponsored by The Nation Magazine, a debate in which various sections of the left and the former left, ranging from Communists and ex-Communists to Cold War liberals and ex-Cold War liberals (who were now supporting the Reagan administration as self-styled “neo-conservatives”) showed up to cheer and boo the respective sides.
In the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government released its decryptions of Soviet intelligence messages under the code named heading of the “Venona Project.” Anti-Communist historians used decryptions, often uncritically, even though such documents are notoriously inaccurate and politically colored themselves, to become a sort of archival HUAC, to latch onto every encoded reference as fact and compile lists of “agents” and “dupes” of the Communist conspiracy. Despite the fact many such references have been shown to be false or planted, scientists, government officials, non-Communist left journalists like the late I.F. Stone, found themselves accused of being Soviet agents because of listings in the Venona files. Julius Rosenberg, too, appeared in the Venona files as someone code-named “liberal” providing information to the Soviets during World War II.
In intelligence documents of these kinds, agents often try to advance themselves by exaggerating the value of the material they gather. Additional investigations uncovered the fact that Kim Philby, the leading Soviet agent in the world in the 1940s who also happened to head British counter-intelligence, had been informed of the Venona Project. Forced out of British intelligence in 1949 and under suspicion for years, Philby fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. Philby’s role and subsequent exposure suggest that Venona materials after 1949 should be considered suspect. In addition, few of us doubted that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership, would hold itself above doctoring documents to support its political maneuverings. Hoover after all had furnished HUAC and Joe McCarthy with all sorts of distorted and incomplete documents to foster their scurrilous investigations. Historians also now know that Hoover had for decades used FBI files, many of them distorted, to blackmail prominent figures.
By the mid-1990s, the case receded into memory. Ronald Radosh took to writing books connecting Bill Clinton and the Democrats with Communists and becoming even more of a caricature of a 1950s red-baiter. Second and third generation historians, who studied the Communist Party in the late 1980s and 1990s, began to emerge from the smog of anti-Communism to portray CPUSA activists as making a huge and positive contribution to the labor movement, civil rights and other struggles, even if this largely non-Marxist and certainly non-Communist scholarship often looked critically at formal CPUSA positions and leadership.
In this period, I wrote an article for the Encyclopedia of American National Biography on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which told the story briefly of their lives and the case. I dealt with the case as a political case and contended that it had by the late 1990s lived longer than the Rosenbergs themselves. I also wrote about the clear anti-Semitic subtext of the case. My article had an interesting effect. Both far rightists on the Internet and historians for whom study of the Communist movement can only be the study of espionage denounced the publication for permitting me to write the article. They referred to me as a “proud, “self-confessed, “admitted” Communist, which should have disqualified me from writing about the Rosenbergs, since anything that I wrote would be untrustworthy, false and deceptive. Only anti-Communists, they opined, could write about Communists without being biased. I was also 'accused' of contending that the Rosenbergs were simply 'Jews' who were victims of prejudice, because I had dealt with their Jewish American background. I felt as though I had been transported back into the period I had written about, a period that these right-wing activists and establishment scholars seemed to have never left.
The recent “revelations” about the Rosenberg case add important documentation to the contention that many had made for years: that evidence was fabricated, particularly against Ethel, which strengthens the interpretation of the event as a political show trial. In September, the National Security Archives at George Washington University revealed declassified documents that added new evidence. According to the documents, testimony by Ruth Greenglass, Ethel's sister and wife of alleged accomplice David Greenglass, against Ethel Rosenberg was likely fabricated during the trial. The documents revealed that during her grand jury testimony, Ruth Greenglass claimed that information allegedly obtained by David Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg was sent to Soviet agents written in her own (Ruth's) handwriting. During the trial, however, she testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed the information, a perjured contradiction historians reviewing the new documents said seemed to both exonerate Ethel and indicate that the federal attorneys on the case fabricated evidence against her in order to include her in the proceedings. Such a fabrication, by any reasonable legal standard, should have put the entire trial into jeopardy. It also shows that the US government executed a woman it knew to be innocent.
Also, Morton Sobell’s “confession,” the only really new aspect for those for whom the spy story is everything and the staged trial and execution nothing, made no mention of nuclear espionage or that he knew that Julius Rosenberg had anything to do with nuclear espionage, impressions that the press accounts created. And it was a fabricated connection to nuclear espionage, that is, handing to the Soviets 'the secret of the atomic bomb,' for which both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed.
Sobell, now over 90, stated this clearly in a letter to New York Times (September 20, 2008), saying that he all he said he did was work with Julius Rosenberg to pass non-nuclear information to the Soviets during World War II. Sobell wrote, “As for me, I helped an ally (admittedly illegally) during World War II. I chose not to cooperate with the government in 1950. The issues are now with the historians.” For a man who spent 19 years doing hard time in federal prison for those wartime activities, that is a fairly magnanimous statement. First, let’s look at the larger picture, which I see as true today as it was in 1945. There was no such thing as the 'secret of the atom bomb,' no more than there was a secret to the automobile, something that no scientific expert witness had the courage to say at their trial in 1951. The “secret” was nuclear fission, which had been uncovered and known in the scientific world since before World War II. The atomic bomb project, as physicist Phillip Morrison, who was involved in its development, said eloquently was “an industry, not a recipe.”
The US government shared nuclear information with the British during the war, but not with the Soviets. When Harry Truman informed Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the US had successfully tested such a weapon, he meant it as an implied threat to the Soviets to conform to US dictates. Stalin immediately had his subordinates contact Moscow and make the Soviet atom bomb project a high priority.
The Americans were the first to build the bomb, but no serious scientist thought they would be the last. The Truman administration, as part of its developing policy to force the Soviets out of the areas they liberated in Eastern Europe and defeat Communist led revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia (the “Cold War”), made the calculated decision right after World War II not to work with the Soviets through the United Nations to develop a nuclear disarmament program. Truman sought to maintain a monopoly over nuclear weapons, develop those weapons in quantity and quality, and use this nuclear monopoly and superiority to gain global hegemony.
The goal to maintain a nuclear monopoly failed for many reasons, one but only one of which was the Soviets’ successful explosion of a nuclear device in 1949. Political reactions in the US then led directly to hysterical claims that Communists who were Soviet spies stole the “secret” of the atomic bomb and gave it to the Soviets. Using this fabricated claim, opinion makers and demagogues blamed American Communists and the Soviets, not the US government, which had used the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for complete responsibility for the nuclear war danger. Based on that assertion, actions to fight the Soviets, all Communist movements believed to be linked to the Soviets, and non-Communist movements which could be listed as Communist using HUAC formulas of guilt by association, were justified. The Rosenberg-Sobell political show trial was “proof” for that assertion.
I am not saying there were no spies involved with nuclear questions. No one argued in 1951 that Klaus Fuchs did not pass information to the Soviets. Fuchs after all was an actual physicist, not an engineer and machine shop operator like Julius Rosenberg or a draftsman and college dropout like David Greenglass.
In recent years, it has been shown and universally accepted that Theodore Hall, a young Los Alamos scientist who feared that a US nuclear monopoly after World War II would have disastrous consequences for the world, literally came in from the cold and met with Soviet officials in New York in June 1945, providing them with a drawing of a model of the atomic bomb which was of real value for their project. Hall was to say shortly before his death (he went on to a distinguished scientific career in Britain) that he did this to keep the US from establishing monopoly control over the atom bomb and nuclear weapons after the war, because that would have endangered world.
Likewise, historians believe that physicist Joel Koval worked for the Soviets. Koval, born in Iowa, was the son of pre-revolution immigrants from Czarist Russian oppression. The Koval, however, moved with Joel to the Birobidjan, a Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union established for Jewish citizens who wished to live in an area specifically set aside for Jews. There, Koval distinguished himself as a student of physics and then, in a story fit for Hollywood, returned to the US as an agent of Soviet military intelligence. Ironically, the Putin government of the capitalist “new Russia” gave him a posthumous medal.
But the Soviet Union wasn't the only foreign country with spies operating in the US during the 1930 and 1940s. New Deal America had a large racist, openly anti-Semitic isolationist right wing which was reluctantly fighting in World War II. This ultra right included corporate leaders who had been happy to do business with Hitler, as well as US military and State Department figures who sought to limit aid to the Soviets at a time when they were taking on more than 80 percent of Axis ground forces in Europe. With the future of the world literally hanging in the balance, World War II was a desperate and unusual circumstance. Although the Soviet Union and the US were allies, the FBI, extensive recent scholarship has shown, continued to regard the CPUSA, anti-fascist émigrés from Germany and other countries, and all who had contact with the Soviet Union during the war as enemies, greater enemies in fact than individuals and groups that had pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sympathies. J. Edgar Hoover even had Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends put under surveillance in an attempt to discredit her and her circle on political and personal grounds. And most of the military and corporate leaders whose powers now greatly increased during the war refused to hide their deep and long-standing hostility to the Communist Party or see the war in anti-fascist terms.
Thousands of Communist Party members in the military services initially faced major forms of discrimination, from segregation into units that the military reserved for troublemakers to attempts to bar them from officers training programs. This didn’t prevent an estimated 15,000 communists from serving in the US armed forces during World War II. Some served in the OSS (ironically, the predecessor to the CIA), where their knowledge of and commitment to fighting fascism made them in effect “advanced” soldiers. Others received decorations for individual acts of heroism. Collectively, the Communist Party focused its energies on achieving victory over fascism, winning the war and the peace. Communists organized the campaign to open an early Second Front, which had it come to fruition earlier might have saved millions of lives in Europe and Asia.
The Communist Party made serious mistakes, supporting for example, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, for which it later issued a formal apology long before the US government did. Its total commitment to winning the war and the use of all of its influence in all sectors of society, however, represented the highest form of patriotism. This sense of patriotic duty, shared by millions of working-class people, went unmatched by the capitalist class, which had to be bribed with cost-plus contracts to increase war production. Conservative politicians, who turned a blind eye to war profiteering, fought to protect corporate profits and sowed the seeds of racism.
Large sections of the US ruling class felt uneasy with and expressed contempt for what they saw as a “love affair” with the Soviet people. Mass media celebrated Soviet heroism and even portrayed Joseph Stalin as a friendly “Uncle Joe.” Capitalists and the right-wing feared that these sentiments somehow would spill over into a postwar radicalization, making it more difficult to trot out the Soviet bogey.
These conditions fostered an environment in which some people concluded that providing aid to the Soviet Union to help their war effort served the interest of both the Soviet and American people.
Serious students of Communist Party activists in this period, those who have looked at rank and file Communists and their activism, stress their identification with and love of the US working class, its vital popular culture and its potential to advance democracy and socialism. These widely held beliefs became something like a left “American exceptionalism,” a belief that all of US history from the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights were large steps on the road to an eventual socialist “great society” which would play a major role in liberating humanity. While such views may be criticized as naïve or even utopian, making it difficult for many to respond to the massive and relatively sudden postwar repression, the one thing they were not was “subversive” as they were portrayed in the Cold War era.
Friends of the Rosenbergs have long portrayed them in this way, that is, people who could admire and even revere both Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt as advancing the struggle for working-class liberation and anti-fascism, helping to bring about more than a “better world,” but a world characterized by a socialist system that would foster equality, peace, and social justice. If patriotism in its most simple definition means love of country, this was the America that communists defended and loved, rather than the America of Standard Oil, Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover, the corporate leadership ready and willing to do business with Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists both to make money and fight socialist revolutions.
Attorney Mike Perlin always said that the Rosenberg Case-Sobell trial was a frame-up, and even with the recent statement of his client, Morton Sobell, the new material released by the National Security Archives at George Washington University shows that the trial was certainly that. Those who for political purposes continue to try to make the history of the Communist movement everywhere, and the Communist Party USA specifically, the story of espionage and conspiracy should be permitted to wallow in their own irrelevance, both to any serious study of the Communist movement as a social movement or for that matter to any serious understanding of the complexities of espionage. There are other questions which remain unanswered, some perhaps unanswerable. Did the information that Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Joel Koval, and others provide the Soviet atom bomb project enable them to get a bomb in four years rather than the 10 years estimated by US intelligence? I don’t think anyone can say. Had the Soviets not gotten the atomic bomb when they did, would Truman's threat to use atomic weapons in the Korean War against both Korea and China have been carried out? I think that there is a strong possibility.
Judge Irving Kaufman, in sentencing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death, accused them of sentencing to death millions, including their own children by “giving” the Soviet Union the “secret” of the atom bomb. In that statement rationalizing the death sentence, Kaufman both told the big lie of the Rosenberg-Sobell Case and expressed perfectly the purpose of the trial. There was no “secret” of the atom bomb for Julius Rosenberg to provide anyone. There was a Korean War, a new race to build the hydrogen bomb, and Cold War policy which promised wars without end. The ideology of anti-Communism buttressed by the terror that possible nuclear war would bring stood at the heart of the trial, the conviction and the executions.
Let me conclude by putting the shoe politically on the other foot. In the future, the US government may view it politically feasible to give historians and journalists the incentive to study seriously the relationship of US corporations both before and during World War II to their business allies and subsidiaries in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. As a result of those relationships some corporations made available important secrets used for information technology, synthetic rubber, aircraft development, and other materials of immediate and direct military value was made available to the Axis war machines.
And perhaps these writers will study those political, business, and military leaders who were commented upon favorably in Axis intelligence reports, not to mention those who leaked information about Roosevelt’s pre-war efforts to aid the allies in order to deliberately scuttle those efforts, or the military leaders like George Patton who wanted an immediate war against the Soviets after hostilities with the Germans ended. Perhaps new light may be shed on US military leaders who busily prepared “preventive war” scenarios against the Soviets in which the US control of atomic weapons was seen as “the winning weapon” against the Soviet Red Army.
Some historians have found bits and pieces of evidence to support such views in government archives (see, for example, the book IBM and the Holocaust, by Edwin Black), but access to classified materials on this side of the issue might present a much fuller picture of politics, social struggle, and intelligence in the period.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of PoliticalAffairs.net.
