On April 5, 1951, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are sentenced to death by electric chair. The couple was accused of passing information about nuclear weapons on to the Soviet Union. It later emerged that Ethel was not involved in her husband’s activities. Both were executed in 1953.
Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were American citizens who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The couple were convicted of providing top-secret information about radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines and valuable nuclear weapon designs.
Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to receive that penalty during peacetime.
Espionage
Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945. He was discharged when the U.S. Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party. Important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was undertaken at Fort Monmouth during World War II.
According to a 2001 book by his former handler Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited to spy for the interior ministry of the Soviet Union, NKVD, on Labor Day 1942 by former spymaster Semyon Semyonov. By this time, following the invasion by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Soviet Union had become an ally of the Western powers, which included the United States after Pearl Harbor. Rosenberg had been introduced to Semyonov by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA and NKVD liaison for Earl Browder. After Semyonov was recalled to Moscow in 1944 his duties were taken over by Feklisov.
Rosenberg provided thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse. Under Feklisov’s supervision, Rosenberg recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl, and Morton Sobell, also an engineer. Perl supplied Feklisov, under Rosenberg’s direction, with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star, the first U.S. operational jet fighter. Feklisov learned through Rosenberg that Ethel’s brother David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he directed Julius to recruit Greenglass.
In February 1944, Rosenberg succeeded in recruiting a second source of Manhattan Project information, engineer Russell McNutt, who worked on designs for the plants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For this success Rosenberg received a $100 bonus. McNutt’s employment provided access to secrets about processes for manufacturing weapons-grade uranium.
The USSR and the U.S. were allies during World War II, but the Americans did not share information with, or seek assistance from, the Soviet Union regarding the Manhattan Project. The West was shocked by the speed with which the Soviets were able to stage their first nuclear test, "Joe 1", on August 29, 1949.
However, the head official of the Soviet nuclear project, Lavrentiy Beria, used foreign intelligence, which he did not trust by default, only as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the design teams, who he did not clear to know about the espionage efforts, and the development was indigenous; considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved, if any.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.