why did the rosenbergs spy

This caveat about privacy would suggest that the plain text versions of the intercepts were subject to alteration and editing as late as 1995-6. Haynes and Klehr, Decoding Soviet Espionage. These exchanges continued for well over a year. Ellen Schreckers Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America uses the Venona releases in a more critical and judicious manner than do either the Schneirs or Radosh and Milton. This paper argues that the Venona intercepts require far greater scrutiny than they have so far been afforded, that the Rosenbergs guilt has not been established, and therefore, that the case is not closed. 6. There are three different ways you can cite this article. Here's the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Benson and Warner, Venona, back cover. [53]. In 1983, the same year as the Schneirs fourth edition of Invitation to an Inquest appeared, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published their study of the Rosenberg case, The Rosenberg File. The counter-revisionist argument that American communists were engaged in extensive espionage activity on behalf of the Soviet Union is strengthened by the NSAs narrow and unambiguous definition of fellow countrymen. The intercepts themselves, however, do not appear to require such fixed meaning. Why Were the Rosenbergs Executed? Despite its usefulness, this method of correlation of names and documents does not provide easy means for assessing relative frequency of mention. Indeed, the code has not yet been completely broken since components of varying length within the supposedly decoded messages are still not decoded. The execution of New York City couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after their conviction for being Soviet spies was a major news event of the early 1950s. 24. Radosh and Milton, The Rosenberg File, Second Edition, xxv. Even so, the official version of the Rosenberg case continues to unravel. For example, consider the intercept New York 1657 to Moscow, 27 November 1944. The codename METR is associated with both Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, and so could be either. Spy Ethel Rosenberg (1915-1953), along with her husband, Julius Rosenberg, was tried and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project. The prosecution includes Roy Cohn, best known for his association with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Knows about her husbands work and the role of METR and NIL. The "parity" argument, though, was definitely part of Ted Hall's and Klaus Fuchs' motivations, along with the fact that the USSR was the one bearing the brunt of Hitler at that point. In the end, both were found guilty and sentenced to death. Precisely because the Venona documents are so vague they invite readers to play connect the dots and superimpose on these disconnected and incomplete communications a narrative continuity that derives not from their intrinsic meaning, but from prior knowledge of the Rosenberg story. Also see Robert Meeropol and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons (Boston 1975) and the second edition (Urbana and Chicago 1986). The intercept New York 1699 to Moscow, 2 December 1944 provides a list of seventeen scientists engaged in the problem, that is, American atomic research: Enumerates [the following] scientists who are working on the problem Hans BETHE, Niels BOHR, Enrico FERMI, John NEWMAN, Bruno ROSSI, George KISTIAKOWSKI, Emilio SEGRE, G. I. TAYLOR, William PENNEY, Arthur COMPTON, Ernest LAWRENCE, Harold UREY, Hans STANARN, Edward TELLER, Percy BRIDGEMAN, Werner EISENBERG, STRASSENMAN. Finally, she points out that the KGB officers stationed in the United States may have been trying to make themselves look good to their Moscow superiors by portraying some of their casual contacts as having been more deeply involved with the Soviet cause than they actually were. [61] Nevertheless, Schreckers assessment of the Rosenberg case is heavily indebted to her reading of the Venona releases: The Venona releases also show that the KGB was pleased with Julius Rosenberg and his work. The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (Hammersmith, London 1999), ix. They were both executed by the U.S. government in 1953. . Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. But the logic of dedication makes Ethel guilty too. Footnotes direct the reader to endnotes which provide references to the relevant intercepts. Benson and Warner, Venona, 191. Where there are only one or two unrecovered groups, the most likely explanation is a transmission garble in the original version; longer groups are probably as the consequence of obscurity or the use of arcane language. [33] These not only point a finger of wrongdoing at those receiving such payment, they also advance the main theme of Venona, that Americans were willing (if not totally cost free) tools of the KGB. 57. 59. Most of the Rosenberg traffic is not, however, concerned with details of domesticity. In the scant three years . Roberts goes on to say that Antennas identity was established to the FBIs satisfaction within weeks of Davids arrest, Roberts, The Brother, 419. 62. To date, this effort has not produced the smoking gun to prove conclusively that the Rosenbergs were framed, and it may have been naive to expect that such definitive evidence now (or ever) exists in a format that does not require interpretation. 1. With Greenglass testimony in tatters, the official case against the Rosenbergs collapses. In 1997, under the prestigious imprimatur of Yale University Press, the second edition of The Rosenberg File appeared, virtually unchanged from its first edition. [21]. (Fuchs, Gold, and Greenglass served long prison terms.) He was also a closeted gay man . They were then available to have their real names correlated with code names, particularly since the code names have few identifying particulars. If the Soviets were spying on the Americans, the Americans were most assuredly spying on the Soviets. An assortment of historians, government employees, members of the fourth estate, and other interested parties attended, including Morton Sobell, who had been tried and convicted with the Rosenbergs. Espionage Act of 1917. 58. These messages, taken at face, suggest that Julius was engaged in some form of espionage. Scrutiny of text is one way in which the Venona messages may be reassessed; study of context is another. This seems a flimsy basis on which to declare the Rosenberg case closed. [18] There is, finally, a list of the 99 translated messages and, in italics, the editors notations of the names security agency cryptologists associated with each message. Radosh and Milton conclude: The decision to prosecute Ethel Rosenberg on a capital charge, in an effort to put pressure on her husband, is hardly surprising. 8. It is just as possible that because Barr, Sarant, Elitcher, and the others were friends and classmates of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, they were sucked into the investigation and, once implicated, they were assumed guilty by their past associations. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb (and effectively started the Cold War) in September 1949 based on information, including that from Greenglass, they had obtained from spies. A related question involves the order in which the releases were translated and read. What is particularly surprising is that the Schneirs express no interest in how these intercepts came into the possession of the United States government at a time when the Soviet Union was its ally in World War II. Clearly, there is no Venona text that does not require the reader to interpret and thereby to create a master narrative to give meaning to the plain text. Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes, 178-180. According to these documents Rosenberg, a mechanical engineer, was an active agent who recruited about ten of this friends, CCNY classmates into an espionage ring .The documents do not identify all of Rosenbergs people, but the ones they do, like Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, Max Elitcher, Michael Sidorovich and William Perl, have long been connected to the case. The situation appears to be not so very different from that reflected in the Mad Magazine series, Spy vs. Spy. American efforts at subversion in the former Soviet Union are themselves the subject of academic research and in time this research may generate new contexts for interpreting the Venona messages. 18. The Rosenbergs claimed that they were being persecuted for being Jewish. In their penultimate paragraph, they say that they now believe the leadership of the American Communist Party knew about, and by implication condoned espionage, a position that is the cornerstone of counter-revisionist histories of the Cold War. Indeed, according to Benson and Warner, the KGB occasionally re-used covernames; consequently, a single covername can designate two different persons. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona Soviet Espionage and The American Response 1939-1957 (Washington D.C. 1996), 191. The Cyrillic letters presumably were combined into Russian words, which were then encrypted by the interpolation of random units. British and American English differ in relation to usage as well, and without knowing the nationality of the translator of an intercept (or portion of an intercept), it is impossible to know whether the translation has been nuanced by the nationality of the translator. Haynes and Klehr raise this matter to explain their editing of the plain texts to produce a single standard of anglicization so that readers will not be left to wonder if the Anatolii of one document is the same person as the Anotoly of another. Haynes and Flehr, Decoding Soviet Espionage, ix. Venona is divided into three parts of unequal length. Greenglass got fifteen years for his cooperation. These had been decoded, decrypted, translated, and rendered as English plain text [2] over the years by several security services of the United States government as part of an enterprise that was given the codename Venona. [29] Of these, twelve appear in Venona. The Polar Prince and seven ships have been searching an area of more than 25,000 sq km, with military planes and sonar buoys also being used. The documents, for the most part, carry only two dates, the date the message was sent, and another date that is unexplained, but which may be one of the dates (presumably the last date) the message was worked on. [66] Eisenberg and Strassenman are mistakenly linked to the other fifteen either by the informant or by the KGB agent. The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (Hammersmith, London 1999), 21. 66. They base their conclusion on a Venona document dated 5 April 1945: If [6 groups unrecovered] LIBERALs membership of the FELLOWCOUNTRYMENs ASSOCIATION [ZEMLYaChESTVO] [5 groups unrecovered] and precise information about him through the leadership of the FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN [ZAEMLYaKI] does not exist. In their 1983 edition, the Schneirs incorporate into their argument material obtained from government files under the Freedom of Information Act. Robert Louis Benson, Introductory History of Venona and Guide to the Translations (Fort George G. Meade, MD 1995), 1. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anotoly Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness A Soviet Spymaster (Boston 1994). Schrecker says she finds it credible that the Venona documents associate these men with Julius Rosenbergs spy ring because they have long been connected to the Rosenberg case. [67] So why did they continue to use them? The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair (New York 2001). The Venona messages need to be read in relation to FBI and other US government agency files; they also need to be read in relation to KGB and other Russian government files. 17. The only direct evidence of the Rosenbergs involvement was the confession of Greenglass. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File. READ MORE: Why the Rosenbergs' Sons . Between the acquisition of this material in the 1940s and its appearance in Benson and Warners Venona in 1996, the communiqus were decoded and reworked using an iterative process that involved re-writing as new material was decoded. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. These messages, decoded and decrypted, then had to be translated into English. Along the same lines, in a lengthy note, Sam Roberts quotes from an FBI memo in which it is clear that the FBI initially identified Antenna as Joseph Weichbrod. [1] On 5 April 1951, the presiding judge, Irving Kaufman, sentenced Morton Sobell to thirty years, and Ethel and Julius to death. Finding the appropriate contexts to answer this and the other questions provoked by the Venona intercepts will undoubtedly influence not only how the Venona intercepts are read, but also how the Rosenberg case is understood. Naturally enough, the Venona project and its interest in the Rosenbergs did not come from political terra incognita, nor did it fall on virgin political soil. Atomic Secrets Spy Case. David Greenglass was born on the Lower East Side on March 2, 1922, to immigrants from Russia and Austria. [6] Accompanying Venona was a series of five very short pamphlets summarizing the history of the Venona project (in the first pamphlet of eleven pages) [7] and then (in the next four) [8] outlining the nature of the documents available through the Venona project. The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. BLAIR: So, the same man who wrote "Strange Fruit" is the same man who adopted the . Mason-Dixon Line Besides embodying the ideological predisposition of the volume and the project, this finger pointing is also a strategy for avoiding accountability. Likewise, in Washington [Naval-GRU] 2505-12 to Moscow, 31 December 1942, AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is identified as Edna Margaret Patterson although the connection is based on inexact spelling and a double probability: AUSTRALIAN WOMAN: Probably Francis Yakilnilna MITNEN (exact spelling not verified) who is probably identical with Edna Margaret PATTERSON. Benson and Warner, Venona, 212. A HALF CENTURY after the Rosenbergs were executed as atom spies, there's really only one nagging question left about the case: Why did two seemingly ordinary people from Manhattan's Lower East . David Greenglass was a machinist at Los Alamos, where America developed the atomic bomb. The names in this message (and elsewhere in Venona) are clear; the actions, typically, are a blur. [65] Eisenberg was, according to West, actually Werner Heisenberg, who not only was not invovled in the American project, but was the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in physics who remained in Germany during World War II. As I have argued earlier in this paper, without further clarification about when the Venona releases were translated, the correlation between real and code names may well have been established after rather than before the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in which case the names in the Venona releases cannot be used as corroboration of a spy ring. Robert Louis Benson, Venona Historical Monograph #6: New Releases, Special Reports, and Project Shutdown (Fort George G. Meade, MD 1997). The Foley Square courthouse in lower Manhattan in which the Rosenbergs were tried was also the site, just weeks before, of the highly publicized Smith Act trials of the leaders of the CPUSA, creating a strong visual link between the two trials, which reinforced their ideological connections. For the most recent treatment of the role of David Greenglass in the Rosenberg case, see Sam Roberts, The Brother. The release of the Venona decrypts is embedded in an ongoing debate about the nature of the Cold War, and needs to be understood as justifying and advancing the official version of that period as its history continues to be scrutinized and contested from a variety of revisionary perspectives. You can navigate days by using left and right arrows. Benson and Warner, Venona, back cover. Even if Julius was guilty of conspiring to commit espionage, Ethel was not. In the domain of scholarly prose and commercial non-fiction, the findings are more divided. So reading the Rosenbergs after Venona is not very different from reading the Rosenbergs before Venona, except that the revisionist approach to the case has been temporarily muted by an increasingly noisy right-wing counter-revisionism. The list includes both codenames and real names. They refused and were executed. 25. During the repressive 1950s, popular and official views of the case coalesced: it was commonly believed that the Rosenbergs were Communist spies who deserved to die. Their exercise of linguistic standardization rests on the premise that all references to Anatolii and to Anotoly are to the same person, although why this assumption should be made is not explained. Since so much of the interest in these documents hinges on these identifications, the absence of explanation is a serious lacuna. [43] On the other hand, revisionist historians, civil libertarians, and others argue that the Rosenbergs were convicted by the hysteria of the time, that there were many procedural irregularities in their trial, and that their sentence was unnecessarily harsh because they had not been proven guilty, or because they were innocent, or because what they (and especially Ethel) were convicted of did not warrant the death penalty. Dedication criminalizes a state of mind. He was a good suspect for Antenna until sometime later when we [the FBI] definitely established through investigation that Antenna was Julius Rosenberg. Roberts, The Brother, 419. The time lag between the public announcement that these documents existed and their declassification and release was necessitated, according to the Agency, by concerns regarding privacy. 5. 22. Edgar L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York 1972). [9], Finally, in keeping with their putative desire for transparency with regard to this work, the NSA established a Venona web site through which the entire collection of documents can be viewed. The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins in New York Southern District federal court. [14], To include the Yates v. US decision, along with the accompanying explanation of the difficulties that decision apparently created in dealing with American Communists, in the final portion of a list of alleged espionage and subversion creates the impression, implicit throughout Venona, that the CPUSA was an organization devoted to espionage. Enter a date in the format M/D (e.g., 1/1), The espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins, Why the Rosenbergs' Sons Eventually Admitted Their Father Was a Spy, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-rosenberg-trial-begins, Walter Cronkite signs off as anchorman of "CBS Evening News", Helmut Kohl elected West German chancellor, President Monroe signs the Missouri Compromise, New York demands Sandy Hook lighthouse be dismantled. Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York 1976). In the new conservative moment, it was argued that Julius Rosenberg was most assuredly guilty of some kind of espionage, even if Ethel was not. How these circumstances illustrate the integrity of the American justice system as Radosh and Milton contend is unclear. Soviets as a spy. Robert Louis Benson, Introductory History of Venona and Guide to the Translations (Fort George G. Meade, MD 1995). Let us put aside questions of chronology. It sold Cytrox to Intellexa, a firm operating outside of Israel, but documents show it's still linked to the other. The emotional high point of this debate came relatively early, however, at a 1983 happening at New York Citys Town Hall, entitled Were the Rosenbergs Framed? [51] Radosh and Milton and Walter and Miriam Schneir, playing to a packed audience, confronted each others versions of the Rosenberg case in often angry exchanges. 2. 49. In 2017, state-owned Israeli arms maker invested in two firms in bid to compete with NSO. The footnotes contain the crucial information of the names; sometimes there is an indication that the identification is only probable; sometimes there is an apparently gratuitous amplification as when it is noted that William Perl is also known as Mutterperl, a fact not in the message. If, moreover, the Venona intercepts were the basis for the arrest, trial, and execution of the Rosenbergs, as is now alleged by the FBI, then it is not farfetched to suspect that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were framed, a position that has been advanced by Morton Sobell, [37] the Rosenberg children, [38] and Walter and Miriam Schneir, [39] among others. For Heisenbergs role in German atomic research, see Thomas Powers, Heisenbergs War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (New York 1993).

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