David Greenglass
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David Greenglass (b. 1922 in New York City) was an Atomic Spy for the Soviet Union.
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[edit] Biography
He was recruited into Soviet espionage by his wife, Ruth (Printz) Greenglass at the behest of his sister Ethel Rosenberg, and brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who were executed after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953 with regard to American atomic secrets. Greenglass shared an interest in Communism with the Rosenbergs.
He married his wife Ruth (neé Ruth Printz) in 1942, when she was only 17 years old and they joined the Young Communist League shortly before Greenglass entered the U.S. Army in 1943. A talented machinist at the Army base in Jackson, Mississippi, Greenglass was promoted to sergeant assigned to the secret Manhattan Project, the wartime project to develop the first atomic weapons. He was first stationed at the massive uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and later worked at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. He later told how he slept through the first test of the atom bomb and made artificial diamonds at the laboratory.
After Julius Rosenberg told Ruth Greenglass that the Manhattan Project was seeking to produce the first atom bomb, David Greenglass began to pass nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union via Julius from November 1944 until he left the military in 1946. According to the Venona decryptions allegedly decrypted by the NSA between 1944 and sometime in the 1970s, both David and his wife Ruth were given code names. He 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 in Manhattan, which had failed by 1947.
In 1950, UK and US intelligence agencies had discovered that a Los Alamos theoretical physicist, Klaus Fuchs, 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 from Brooklyn named Harry Gold, who had then passed Fuchs' information on to a Soviet agent, Anatoli Yakovlev, who then would pass it 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 $4,000 to finance an escape to Mexico. But they went to the Catskills instead and used the money to seek out legal advice.
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 of 1950, but in August 1950 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 an unindicted co-conspirator, but never was arrested, indicted or prosecuted. He told the court, "I had a kind of hero worship there [with Julius Rosenberg] and I did not want my hero to fail..."
During his testimony in 1951, Greenglass related in detail the secrets he passed on to the Soviet Union through Julius and Gold. He described his work on the implosion lenses used for the "Trinity" test and the bomb used on Nagasaki, "Fat Man." 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 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 (grandstand) 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", but ten minutes later 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 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 their business failure and attempted to discredit his character and testimony (a legal tactic which failed with the jury). Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 10 years, and later reunited with his wife.
After his release in 1960, the Greenglasses lived in New York City under an assumed name. 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 his sister Ethel's involvement in the plot 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".
Some former Soviet intelligence agents 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' superior information, though this has been disputed by other intelligence records and the statements of Nikita Kruschev, and 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.
[edit] References
- Robert Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War (New York: Random House, 1986)
[edit] Further reading
- Ehrman, John. Book Review of "The Brother" by Sam Roberts, Studies in Intelligence (Unclassified) 46:4 (2002). Retrieved April 4, 2006.
[edit] See also
