Atomic Spies - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Quiz

Answer: 1918

Julius Rosenberg was born in 1918 in New York City. His wife, Ethel Greenglass, was three years older. The couple married in 1939. The children of Jewish immigrants, Julius, Ethel, and Ethel's younger brother David grew up in the Lower East Side, an area populated with immigrants from many nations. During the Depression the Lower East Side was a center for left-wing causes, particularly labor organization.

Answer: Electrical Engineer

Julius Rosenberg studied electrical engineering at City College in New York, and graduated a semester after the rest of his class. His political and social activism apparently interfered with his studies. His brother-in-law, David, dropped out of college and trained as a machinist. Ethel, who once aspired to be an actress, worked as a secretary. None of those accused of stealing atomic secrets had any training in physics or any other field that would allow them to understand the workings of the Manhattan Project.

Answer: From Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who was assigned by the U.S. Army as a machinist to Los Alamos

David Greenglass was drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War. He was scheduled to ship overseas as a Seabee, until an eye examination revealed that he was color-blind. The Army then decided to utilize his training as a machinist. Following a security check, Greenglass was sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, a secret military establishment where the atom bomb was being developed. Greenglass provided information that he obtained from Los Alamos to the Soviets.

Answer: True

Julius Rosenberg offered his brother-in-law's services to the NKVD, and then sent Greenglass' wife, Ruth, to New Mexico to ask him if he would be willing to cooperate. Greenglass was agreeable. The Soviets then used Harry Gold, a Philadelphia chemist who had been spying for them for several years, to make contact with Greenglass. Gold carried half of a Jello carton with him that Julius has prepared as a sign; the Greenglasses had the other half.

The Soviets made a fatal error in sending Gold as a courier to Greenglass, as Gold was also the liaison for Klaus Fuchs, a German-born, British physicist who was working at Los Alamos and who was also spying for the Russians.

When Klaus was arrested for spying he led his interrogators to Gold, and Gold then led them Greenglass.

Answer: Eight hours

David Greenglass was first questioned by FBI agents on June 15, 1950. After searching his home, the agents escorted Greenglass to the U.S. District Courthouse in Foley Square. Shortly thereafter, Greenglass provided them will a full confession. What is remarkable about Greenglass' confession is that he implicated his wife, his sister and his brother-in-law along with himself. Apparently, Greenglass eventually made a deal regarding his wife, Ruth, and she was never charged.

However, Greenglass' confession and later testimony in court were responsible for his sister Ethel's and brother-in-law's Julius eventual conviction and execution.

Answer: They did not want to be forced to reveal the names of other members of the Party.

During the course of their trial, both Julius and Ethel repeatedly cited the Fifth Amendment. Apparently they were afraid that if they admitted to being members of the Communist Party, they would be forced to divulge the names of other party members, who would also be charged with espionage.

However, their use of the Fifth Amendment did not win the trust of the jury. Other mistakes made by the Rosenberg defense team was Julius' attorney move not to allow a drawing David Greenglass made of a cross-section of the atom bomb to be entered as evidence.

While the lawyer wanted to give the court the impression that he was an American patriot and concerned that revealing the drawing might constitute a breach of security, he ultimately gave credence to the idea that Greenglass passed on significant information to the Soviets. Decades later, when nuclear scientists examined Greenglass' drawing, they dismissed it as worthless.

Answer: Irving Kaufman

Irving Kaufman was the presiding judge at the Rosenberg trial. Irving Saypol was the federal prosecutor, and Roy Cohn was his assistant. Cohn later went to work for Senator Joe McCarthy. Manny Bloch was Julius' lawyer and his father, Alexander Bloch, represented Ethel. All the major players in the trial were Jewish, though none of the jurors was. (There was one woman and one African-American man on the jury.) In the wake of Holocaust and just a few years after the creation of the State of Israel, the Rosenbergs' arrest and trial was a great source of anxiety for the American Jewish community.

While some believed in the Rosenbergs' innocence and feared that the underlying cause for the prosecution and unprecedented punishment was antisemitism, others believed the Rosenbergs had put the community at risk and sought to distance themselves from them. Sam Roberts believed that the choice of a Jewish judge and prosecutor was to avoid the appearance of an "anti-Semitic vendetta".Others, like writer Howard Fast, and Vincent Lebonitte, the jury foreman, felt the Jewish community was expected to deal with its own rogue elements.

Answer: All of them

In 1944, when David Greenglass handed over atomic secrets to a Soviet agent, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies fighting against the Nazis. David Greenglass, in fact, justified his activities by claiming that he wanted to strengthen the Soviets in the war against Germany. By 1950, when Greenglass and the Rosenbergs went to trial, the Second World War was over and the Cold War was in full swing.

In 1949 the United States Air Force detected high levels of radiation over the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia, and concluded that the Soviet Union had tested a nuclear bomb.

The North Korean Army crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea two months later, supported and equipped by the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower and the U.S. military were convinced that the Soviets would not have had the confidence to permit the invasion of South Korea if they had not possessed the bomb, thus drawing a direct line between the Rosenbergs and the tens of thousands of American casualties in Korea.

This conclusion, coupled with the intense anti-communist atmosphere, meant that the Rosenbergs were prosecuted with great determination.

Answer: They were adopted by a childless couple called Abel and Anne Meeropol

Without doubt, the most tragic figures of this tale were the Rosenbergs' two young sons. Michael and Robert were ten and six years old respectively, when their parents were executed in 1953. They were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, a Jewish couple from the Bronx who shared the Rosenberg's social and political ideas. Abel Meeropol wrote the anti-lynching song, "Strange Fruit", made famous by Billy Holiday, under the pen name of Alan Lewis. Michael and Robert lived quietly and anonymously until the seventies, when they wrote their own memoirs, "We Are Your Sons", and have remained active in the fight to have their parents case reopened and their names exonerated. Michael's daughter, Ivy, has made a film about the Rosenbergs.

Answer: Julius Rosenberg was almost certainly guilty of espionage; Ethel had little or nothing to do with his activities

The Venona Project was initiated in 1943 by US Army Intelligence. It was a secret project aimed at "translating" coded messages sent by the Soviet embassies in the US and Britain to the Soviet Union. The project was maintained by the National Security Administration when it took over Army Intelligence, and continued until 1980. US intelligence was able to learn a great deal about Soviet espionage inside the US and Britian from material gleaned from Venona; it was information provided by Venona that originally led to Fuchs' and Greenglass' arrest.

However, this information could not be introduced as evidence during the trial, since the United States was determined to keep the project secret. In 1995, under the Freedom of Information Act, the Venona files were made available to historians. Serious researchers, like Ronald Radosh and Sam Roberts, concluded that Julius Rosenberg was working as a Soviet agent. Ethel, however, played a very minor part, and it appears that she was originally charged in order to put pressure on her husband to confess.

However, both Ethel and Julius were executed on June 19, 1953.