Off Base

Lean, black-browed William Mutterperl of The Bronx came of age just in time to profit by an era in which young physicists are scouted almost as assiduously as young ballplayers. As a student at Manhattan's City College (class of '38), he proved himself a veritable Mickey Mantle among rookie scientists. By 1944 he was in the big leagues. The Government hauled him off to Cleveland's Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, where he streamlined his name to Perl and directed an Air Forces research project in supersonic-aircraft design. By 1950, the year he got his doctorate from Columbia with a "secret" thesis on "transonic flows past thin airfoils," it began to look as though William Perl was associating with people who wanted to throw the game.

The federal grand jury which indicted Atom Spies Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell called Perl in and asked him if he hadn't been palling around with them. He denied it. He denied it again last week in a New York federal court where he was tried for perjury. He repeated over & over, "I do not lie." But other witnesses testified that Perl and the spies (both of whom were his classmates at City College) had been seen together dozens of times and that he had frequently attended meetings of the Young Communist League with them in New York.

A jury found him guilty on two counts of perjury, acquitted him on two others, and recommended clemency. But immediately after the verdict, an assistant U.S. attorney rose and suggested that Perl's troubles were only beginning: the FBI, he said, had information "directly" tying Perl to the Rosenberg spy ring. Perl's $20,000 bail was revoked and he was led off to jail to await further judgment.

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