My Friend, Yakovlev
The buxom, pretty matron spoke up very clearly in the quiet Manhattan federal courtroom. Calmly, Mrs. David Greenglass, mother of two small children, told court and jury some of the incidents of her domestic life. She told how, in 1945, when she was living in Albuquerque, she and her husband had a visit from a man named Harry Gold. The incident was to set the Greenglasses apart forever from their fellow citizens in the U.S. They delivered to Gold some atomic information stolen from the secret atomic project at Los Alamos, where Sergeant David Green-glass was stationed.
The dispassionate voice of Ruth Green-glass droned on. Gold paid them $500. She sensibly put $400 in the bank, she said, "bought a $50 defense bond for $37.50 and used the rest of the money for household expenses." Thus prosaic Mrs. Greenglass added her testimony to the story of a far-flung Russian espionage ring whose purpose was to steal U.S. atomic secrets (TIME, March 19). She admitted that she had recruited her husband into the conspiracy which included British Physicist Klaus Fuchs, Philadelphia Chemist Harry Gold, and Spymaster Anatoli Yakovlev, Russian vice consul in New York.
Didn't she realize that she had committed a crime against the U.S.? "I think it's wrong," she admitted. "I've always known it was wrong." She had been talked into the whole sordid affair, she explained, by her husband's sister, Mrs. Rosenberg. Seated before her in court were short, plump Mrs. Rosenberg, her pale, spectacled husband, Julius Rosenberg, and worried-looking Morton Sobell--all three accused of wartime espionage, punishable by the maximum penalty of death.
The Incredible Details. Ruth Greenglass' testimony fitted neatly into the damning story previously told by her husband, who had already pleaded guilty. Ex-Sergeant David Greenglass had begun his tale with a flabbergasting account of how the Russians, through him and other spies, gained detailed knowledge of the atomic bomb at least seven months before the first explosion at Alamogordo (see SCIENCE). He had concluded with further incredible details of the ring's efficiency and cloak & dagger methods.
Greenglass testified that Defendant Julius Rosenberg did not confine his interest to the atomic bomb. Julius, he said, personally stole the secret proximity fuse when he was working for the Emerson Radio Corp. "He took it out in the briefcase he brought his lunch in and gave it to the Russians," Greenglass explained
simply.
Then he went on to tell how Rosenberg had planned an escape for the Greenglass family in February 1950, when the arrest of the British spy, Dr. Klaus Fuchs, had tipped the conspirators off to the fact that the FBI and Scotland Yard were hot on their trails. "Julius came to my house and woke me up," Greenglass testified. "Julius said Harry Gold was one of Fuchs's contacts, and that Gold would undoubtedly be arrested soon and that would lead to Julius. He said I would have to leave the country."
"I Am Here." Greenglass got $5,000 from Rosenberg for their flight, he said, and he memorized a form letter which he was supposed to write to secretaries of Soviet ambassadors at various points on an escape route. It was a fantastic enterprise.
The first stop was to be Mexico City. Greenglass was to send the letter to the Soviet embassy and sign it I. Jackson. " was to wait three days . . ." said Greenglass. "On the third day I was supposed to go into the city and stand in a plaza with a statue of Columbus, at 5 o'clock,
with my finger in a guidebook. When a man
approached me I was to say: 'That is a
magnificent statue. I am from Oklahoma
and I never saw anything like it.' Then
the man would say: 'There are much more
beautiful statues in Paris.' That would
complete our identification, and he would
give me money and passports to go on."
In Sweden, the meeting place was to be
a statue of the botanist, Linnaeus, in
Stockholm's Humlegarden Park; another
meeting place was set up for Switzerland.
In Czechoslovakia, the final destination,
the masquerade would end. Greenglass
would sign his own name to a letter to the
Soviet embassy, saying simply, "I am
here," and settle down behind the Iron
Curtain.
The Greenglasses decided not to flee--why neither ever fully explained. But they kept the $5,000. "It wasn't out of Julius Rosenberg's pocket," the witness explained. "It was out of the Russians' pocket, and I had had plenty of headaches."
The Signals. The Government had one more point to make. Harry Gold, the spy ring's courier who has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, took the stand to testify that the information collected had indeed been passed on to the agents of Soviet Russia. As precisely and matter-of-factly as a high-school teacher explaining a problem in geometry, he laid out an account of his adventures that could serve as a handbook for espionage.
He had been spying for Russia for nine years, Gold said, when Anatoli Yakovlev entered the picture in 1944 as Gold's new Russian contact. Gold became Yakovlev's go-between with Americans who could supply atomic secrets.
"Yakovlev continually advised and instructed me," said Gold. "My duties were to obtain information from a number of sources . . ." Gold told how he had arranged with Dr. Fuchs to make contacts with agents in Britain. Fuchs was to follow these instructions: go to London's Paddington subway station at 8 p.m. on the first Saturday of each month until contacted. Hold five books, bound by strings, suspended from two fingers; in the other hand, carry two books. Make contact when stopped by a man carrying Bennett Cerf's Stop Me If You Have Heard This.*
"Very Agitated." "Now, once the introduction had been effected," Gold carefully explained, "I proceeded to work. I conducted myself in the following manner: I give the source of information in America ... a list of the data or material which was desired. Secondly, in case there had been a Soviet agent who had preceded me, I would take steps so that the person with whom I was working would first clean up all of the back work. Then, thirdly, we would arrange for a series of meetings . . .
"In addition to this, I made payments of sums of money to some of the people whom I regularly contacted, and always I wrote reports detailing everything that happened at every meeting with these people, and these reports I turned over to Yakovlev." The money for paying spies came from Yakovlev.
Gold recalled particularly a day in January 1945, when he saw Klaus Fuchs in Cambridge, Mass. He returned to New York to hand Yakovlev a packet of papers and some apparently exciting information given to him by the British scientist.
"About a week later," Gold said, "I wrote a report which I turned over to Yakovlev ... I told Yakovlev that Fuchs was now stationed at a place called Los Alamos, New Mexico, that this was a large experimental station." Later Gold was ordered to go to New Mexico and make contact with both Fuchs and Sergeant David Greenglass.
"Very Valuable." Gold accomplished his mission easily, using as his identification the matching half of a torn Jell-O box cover which David Greenglass had already described. On his return, Gold put the Fuchs papers in an envelope labeled "Doctor," and the Greenglass papers in one marked "Other," and gave both to Yakovlev. "Yakovlev told me that the information which I had given him some two weeks previous had been sent immediately to the Soviet Union. He said that the information which I had received from Greenglass was extremely excellent and very valuable."
Gold's last meeting with Anatoli Yakovlev was in December 1946, when Yakovlev decided that things were getting too hot, and disappeared. But that did not end the spying. Gold said he kept filching U.S. secrets for Russia until he was finally arrested.
After Harry Gold left the stand, the Government announced that it had about wound up its case. With that testimony on the record, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol said he was "satisfied now I have proven my case."
* Apparently he meant Author Cerf's Try and Stop Me.
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