The Age of Radiance (44 page)

Fuchs had left Los Alamos on June 14, 1946, to begin his next assignment, developing nuclear weapons for the United Kingdom at Harwell, a former air force base just to the south of Oxford, where he was still currently employed. Lamphere informed his FBI higher-ups as well as British intelligence, MI5, with whom he’d had a strong professional relationship, since he had discovered in 1948 “that someone in the British embassy in Washington in 1944–45 had been providing the KGB with high-level cable traffic between the United States and Great Britain.” That someone was Donald Maclean, who turned out to be key to the most humiliating espionage betrayal in British history, and now the same Robert Lamphere would present MI5 with the second-most humiliating betrayal in its history. The British, however, were not the only ones to feel the sting of embarrassment, for Maclean’s colleague Kim Philby regularly received copies of Venona decrypts, while KGB agent Bill Weisband had worked within Arlington Hall
(the signal intelligence unit’s operation in what was once a Virginia girls’ school) for five years.

Since the FBI had originally stolen the Russian cables decrypted by the Americans, under English law these could not be used by the prosecution as evidence at trial, and as the Soviets were allies during Fuchs’s years of betrayal, his acts could not be called treason. The harshest sentence he could get would be fourteen years. Additionally, without the FBI documents, MI5 would have to get Fuchs to confess, a job assigned to traitor specialist William Skardon, who was, according to Lamphere, “sort of a British Columbo character, complete with disheveled appearance and an intellect that was sometimes hidden until the moment came to use it to point to incongruities in a suspect’s story.”

On December 21, Skardon began his interrogation with a friendly conversation about Fuchs’s childhood. Then he asked, “Were you not in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York?” Fuchs replied vaguely, “I don’t think so,” and when Skardon announced that they had “precise information which shows that you have been guilty of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union,” Fuchs again said, “I don’t think so.” The conversation continued, with Skardon edging Fuchs further and further away from ambiguity, until, on January 24, 1950, Fuchs admitted what he had done. The trial then lasted less than two months, since the government avoided using many witnesses needed to convict as they would in turn reveal the incompetence that had allowed so much to slip to the Kremlin, and that those who knew the technical details of Fuchs’s work were seriously alarmed. That he was spying for Moscow wasn’t just a revelation of how the Soviets had created First Lightning so quickly—Fuchs and von Neumann’s thermonuclear patent of 1944 included much of Teller’s Super design. Klaus Fuchs had done so much to help the Russians with fission, and now, through him, they could be well on their way to fusion.

It was a turning point in American history. Though the United States
“came out of World War II the most powerful nation on earth—perhaps, briefly, the paramount nation of all time,” as Richard Barnet, founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, remarked in 1985, “it has not won a decisive military victory since 1945 despite the trillions spent on the military and the frequent engagement of its military forces. What the United States got instead of victory was a national-security state with a permanent war economy maintained by a military-industrial complex—much like the Soviet Union in those departments, but with a far greater reserve of resources to
squander. . . . It is one of history’s great ironies that, at the very moment when the United States has a monopoly on nuclear weapons, possessed most of the world’s gold, produced half the world’s goods on its own territory, and laid down the rules for allies and adversaries alike, it was afraid.” Almost seven decades on . . . and we are still afraid, and it all began with the concomitant revelations of Soviet bombs and atomic spies.

Six days after Fuchs’s arraignment, on February 9, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy announced from Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 Communists employed by the State Department, and two weeks after McCarthy’s announcement, Robert Lamphere deciphered another 1944 Soviet cable that gave “reason to believe that someone in a lower-level position at Los Alamos, who had had furlough plans in late 1944 and early 1945, was a KGB agent.” Lamphere informed the FBI in Albuquerque, who determined that the “most logical suspect for [another] Soviet agent” was none other than Edward Teller, as he was a “close associate of . . . Fuchs at Los Alamos [and] Dr. Teller had considerable contact with Fuchs in England in the summer of 1949,” and he “made frequent trips away from the Los Alamos Project and could have furnished information to the Russians on a regular basis.” The level of absurdity was institutional. An NKVD officer familiar with the FBI’s operations in World War II said that the Bureau’s agents were
“like children lost in the woods.”

With information from Klaus Fuchs’s confession, Philadelphia FBI agents visited Harry Gold in March 1950 and found, hidden behind a bookcase, a Chamber of Commerce map of Santa Fe. They told him the “jig was up,” and one reported,
“After about one minute and at 10:15 a.m., Gold stated, ‘I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave his information.’ ” Fuchs was given a photograph of Gold on May 24 and admitted, “Yes, that is my American contact.”

The unveiling of Klaus Fuchs then led to the Rosenbergs. At the end of 1949, Julius Rosenberg told his wife’s brother, David Greenglass, that he was “hot . . . something is happening which will cause you to leave the United States.” David’s immediate reaction: “I’ll never be able to read
Li’l Abner
again.” Greenglass had been honorably discharged from the army in February of 1946 and had returned to live in New York City, where he was regularly extorting his brother-in-law: “Julius had money. I went to Julius, ‘Look, I need money,’ and he would give me money . . . about a thousand dollars all told.” After Fuchs’s arrest, Julius “said to me I would have to get out of the country with my family. . . . You remember that man out in Albuquerque. . . . This man knew me and that when Fuchs was taken . . . he would
tell about Gold and he would lead them to me. . . . He wanted me to go with my whole family: pouf, disappear! . . . I figured I might [really disappear], so I better not go.”

On the morning of February 14, 1950, Ruth Greenglass’s nightgown caught fire from the open-gas heater in their Lower East Side apartment, and she spent nearly a month at Gouverneur Hospital getting skin grafts. They could not flee, as Julius was planning, to Czechoslovakia. David Greenglass: “The day after my wife came home from the hospital [Julius arrived with] the
Herald Tribune
or
Times.
Anyway, there was a picture of Gold on the front page. And he said, ‘That’s your man, look at the picture.’ I said, ‘You’re silly, that’s not the fellow; my wife said it was not him.’ He said, ‘That’s the man.’ . . . He feared he would be arrested; they would pick me up, I would lead them to him. . . . [I] said, we can’t go anywhere, we have an infant here; we can’t just up and leave. . . . He said your baby won’t die; babies are born in the air and on trains, and she will survive.”

On June 2, Harry Gold said his other contact in New Mexico was in the “US Army . . . twenty-five years of age, perhaps even younger [whose wife] may have been Ruth.” On June 15, two FBI agents visited David and Ruth Greenglass at 265 Rivington Street, found a picture of the couple back in Albuquerque, took it to Philadelphia, had it verified by Gold, and confronted Greenglass. David immediately confessed, taking Julius down with him, but not Ruth, later saying, “I told . . . the FBI right from the start that if my wife was indicted, I would not testify. I told [them] I would commit suicide and [they] would have no case. . . . I got two children. If the choice was between [Ruth] and my sister, I’ll take [Ruth] any day. That was the choice that I thought I had.” When Ruth was interrogated, she then implicated Ethel. Julius was arrested on July 17, Ethel on August 11, and Ruth was never indicted.

David Greenglass pled guilty on October 18, 1950, then testified at the Rosenbergs’ trial in March 1951, as did Ruth Greenglass and Harry Gold. The Rosenbergs insisted, throughout, that they were innocent, and many in the global audience transfixed by this dramatic story of atomic spies believed them. Even though both Hoover and his Justice Department colleagues did not want to pursue the death penalty—especially against Ethel, a mother of two young children—Judge Irving Kaufman believed his trial could
“make people realize that this country is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a completely different system.” At their sentencing on April 5, he told the Rosenbergs, “I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb, years before our best scientists predicted Russia
would perfect the bomb, has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand, and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”

Ethel Rosenberg publicly replied, “And what of our children, noble testament to our sacred union, fruit of our deep and enduring love; what manner of ‘mercy’ is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness? Know then, you warped, gross eaters of dust, you abominations upon this beauteous earth, I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon your execrable bounty.”

In time, Venona would reveal 108 Soviet spies working within the United States and Great Britain. Meredith Gardner’s discovery of a November 1944 message listing the key scientists of Los Alamos was tracked to the nineteen-year-old Ted Hall, who was found to be now working with Ed Teller in Chicago. When the FBI interviewed him there, though, Hall revealed nothing. That night, he and his wife, Joan,
“took all the left-wing stuff and packed it in boxes, and put it in the car, and put [our daughter] Ruthie into her snowsuit,” Joan remembered. “She was just, then, just over a year. Put her in her car seat and got in the car and drove to the bridge that crosses over the Chicago drainage canal. We dumped all the stuff into the canal. . . . [Ted] told me that he had done it because he was afraid that the United States might become ‘a very reactionary power’ after the war—those were his words—and that this would give the Soviet Union a better chance of standing up to them. . . . He certainly broke the law. He certainly broke his security oath. But he did not betray his country. He didn’t betray the people. Everything that he did was done because of his concern for the people. It was a humanitarian act. His motive was a humanitarian motive. Now, if you want to call that sort of thing treason, go right ahead.”

The FBI was never able to amass enough evidence to bring Ted Hall to trial. Instead, Harry Gold was sentenced to thirty years; David Greenglass to fifteen years; and the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. President Eisenhower, wanting to show American fortitude in the morning hours of the Cold War, refused clemency.

Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary inmate Alger Hiss:
“The June evening of the executions was calm and cloudless. We were all aware that . . . the executions had been scheduled for just before sunset. As the sun sank, silence spread over the recreation yard. Men stopped their games of baseball,
boccie
,
handball, their exercises with weights, their trotting about the cinder track, their endless conversation. We sat or stood in an eerie quiet until after the sun had disappeared. . . . We felt we were honoring the very moments of death. . . . We had all been aware of the worldwide demonstrations and protests, which at those moments were proved to be futile. In all the months I spent at Lewisburg this occasion was unique—the inmates transcending their own unhappiness and self-involvement and joining in a mood of universal sadness at an act of inhumanity.”

Julius Rosenberg died in the electric chair at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, at 8:06 p.m.; Ethel at 8:15.

I
n early 1950, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung told his ally Joseph Stalin that he was going to reunite the Koreas, that
“the attack will be swift, and the war will be won in three days.” Stalin replied, “According to information coming from the United States . . . the prevailing mood is not to interfere.” As the American army was next door occupying Japan and as the skirmish reminded Pentagon chiefs of the early days of World War II, however, the United States immediately moved to defend its ally—unlike what Britain and France did for Poland—and made great advances into North Korean territory. At his first postintervention meeting with the Joint Chiefs, Truman asked for a study on the use of the Bomb if the Russians entered the conflict. Then in response to a request from Douglas MacArthur two weeks later, the Joint Chiefs decided that ten to twenty atomic bombs could be made available for his use, which the general thought could stop either the Russians or the Chinese from intervening:
“I would cut them off in North Korea . . . I visualize a cul-de-sac. The only passages leading from Manchuria and Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb—to strike a blocking blow—which would require a six months’ repair job. Sweeten up my B-29 force.” The Joint Chiefs, however, vetoed this strategy.