The Faceless Men

Among the nation's scientists and technicians, neither Julius Rosenberg nor Morton Sobell is a conspicuous man. There are thousands like them; their names are unknown. Intense, spectacled, nondescript, they carry out the tedious testing of others' ideas, the intricate mechanical drudgery of the laboratory and the industrial plant. But last week Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, and Sobell, an electronics expert--two faceless men out of faceless thousands--were suddenly projected from anonymity into the hot glare of public scrutiny. They went on trial for a farflung, sustained conspiracy to steal the U.S.'s most vital military secrets during and after World War II and deliver them to Soviet Russia. Maximum penalty: death.

Seated in Manhattan's federal courthouse, in the same courtroom where the eleven Communist leaders were brought to book, Defendant Sobell, 33, nervously scrubbed his fingers along his chin as the Government began its case. Tall and pale, Julius Rosenberg, 33, drummed on the counsel table; his wife, Mrs. Ethel Green-glass Rosenberg, indicted with them as a fellow conspirator, was the calmest. These three, the Government charged, were part of the spy transmission belt for which Physicist Klaus Fuchs (see SCIENCE) was a prime source and Chemist Harry Gold a key courier. The Russian contact for the ring was Anatoli Yakovlev, who was wartime Soviet vice consul in New York. "The evidence of the treasonable acts of each of these three defendants is overwhelming," U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol told the jury.

Friends & Relatives. The conspirators, said the Government, built their belt with friends, college chums and relatives. First the jury heard the college chum. Max Elitcher, a C.C.N.Y. classmate of both Sobell's and Rosenberg's, told how Sobell had recruited him into the Communist party in 1939, when both were working in the Navy's Ordnance Bureau, how Rosenberg and Sobell on various occasions had tried to get him to steal information on projects he worked on. But he insisted he had never actually delivered any information to them himself.

The relative had. Big, beefy David Greenglass, an ex-Army sergeant, was Mrs. Rosenberg's brother. He had been indicted along with the others, and had pleaded guilty. As a machinist, he said, he was assigned by the Army to Los Alamos' Manhattan Project in 1944, where he worked in the machine shop turning out apparatus from sketches drawn up by the scientists. In a voice that often dropped away to a whisper, Greenglass testified that he had no idea what he was working on until his wife came to visit him on their wedding anniversary in November 1944--eight months before the first atomic bomb exploded at Alamogordo and at a time when security regulations were so strict that Los Alamos employees were required to use a Santa Fe post-office box address. Rosenberg had told his wife, said Greenglass, "that I was working on the atomic bomb. That was the first I knew of it."

Names & Sketches. His wife had visited the Rosenbergs, Witness Greenglass went on, and sister Ethel had pointed out that the Rosenbergs were "no longer involved in Communist Party activities, that they didn't buy the Daily Worker any more, or attend meetings . . . And the reason for this is that Julius has finally gotten to the point where he is doing what he wanted to do all along, which was that he was giving information to the Soviet Union."

Julius thought Greenglass should give some, too, he told Greenglass' wife, arguing that "Russia was an ally and as such deserved this information, and that she was not getting the information that was coming to her." Said Greenglass: "I thought about it, and the following morning I told my wife I would give the information." Sergeant Greenglass told his wife the layout of the Los Alamos buildings, the number of workers, and the big names he knew--Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and a scientist known only as "Baker" who, Greenglass had learned, was really Dr. Niels Bohr. His wife, on Rosenberg's instructions, wrote none of the information down but dutifully memorized it all. On furlough in New York in January 1945, Greenglass really delivered.

Rosenberg asked him to write up anything he knew about the atomic project. Greenglass obliged and even added a sketch of a "lens mold" he was working on for use in the atom bomb itself. He drew a copy for the jury, and a Los Alamos scientist explained that these four-leaf-clover-shaped lenses were made of high explosives designed to focus detonation waves as an optical lens focuses light waves. This made an "implosion" rather than an explosion. The sketch, he said, was sufficient to show an expert "what was going on" at Los Alamos.

With Scissors. At the Rosenbergs, the conspirators arranged for future deliveries. Rosenberg tore the back off a package of Jello, took a pair of scissors and snipped the cardboard in half. One-half he gave to Greenglass' wife, the other he kept. The next time Greenglass saw the other half, was in Albuquerque. It was in the hand of Courier Harry Gold--an identification card. Greenglass gave Gold another lens-mold sketch, he said.

Then Greenglass dropped the biggest bombshell yet. In September 1945, he saw Rosenberg again, who handed him $200 and told him it "came from the Russians." Rosenberg already knew about the Hiroshima-type bomb, had once described it to him. Greenglass told him something new, He gave Rosenberg a description of a later-type bomb--"a type which worked on an implosion effect." He also handed over a twelve-page report, including a sketch of the bomb itself, Greenglass testified stolidly. Before the fascinated jury, he flourished a sample sketch that he had brought along with him and casually began explaining some of the inner workings of the bomb. At that, the security-minded judge hustled spectators from the courtroom. It scarcely seemed worthwhile --the horse had apparently been stolen years ago.

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