No. 4

Julius Rosenberg and his wife were listening to the Lone Ranger with their two young sons when a stranger rapped on the door of their battered and drab apartment near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Twelve men filed in from the small hallway and announced that they were from the FBI. They arrested 32-year-old Julius Rosenberg as a spy.

A puffy, spectacled native New Yorker with a smudge-sized mustache and disappearing black hair, Rosenberg was the fourth U.S. citizen arrested in the atomic spy roundup that began after the arrest of

British Physicist Klaus Fuchs. The FBI said Rosenberg had been an important cog in the machinery, working directly under Anatoli Yakovlev, Soviet vice consul in New York. An electrical engineer (C.C.N.Y., class of '39), Rosenberg had been an inspector for the War Department's Signal Service until early 1945, when he was fired for Communist affiliations. He broke off all open contacts with the party, quit subscribing to the Daily Worker and set up as the owner of a small, non-union machine shop in Manhattan. But the FBI kept its many eyes on him.

It was he, said the FBI, who recruited his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, for the spy ring (TIME, June 26) when Green-glass was on furlough from his sergeant's duties at the Los Alamos A-bomb project. Rosenberg tore the top of a Jello box in half, gave a piece to Greenglass as his badge of identification and told him that his contact at Los Alamos would produce the other half. The contact turned out to be Spy Courier Harry Gold, the Philadelphia chemist, who got atomic-energy data from Greenglass and paid him $500.

After the arrest of Fuchs and Gold, said the FBI, Rosenberg told Greenglass to leave the country and report to the Soviet embassy in Czechoslovakia; he gave him "substantial funds in 20-dollar bills" to do so (reportedly $5,000). But before he could get away, the FBI got Greenglass, and he talked. Julius Rosenberg was not surprised when the FBI came for him.

Alone of the four arrested so far, Rosenberg stoutly insisted on his innocence. The FBI's story, said he, was "fantastic--something like kids hear on the Lone Ranger program." Three days after Rosenberg's arrest,Harry Gold pleaded guilty in federal court to all the FBI's charges.

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