David at another time: “He said that he had to leave the country himself and he was making plans for it, and I said, ‘Why you?’ He said that… he knew Jacob Golos… and probably [Elizabeth] Bentley knew him.” Ruth: “He says, You have a month to spend this; I'll give you more and get what you need… He said you have got to go to the dashers [sic: dacha]; I said, What is that? He said the Soviet Union. I said, Are you going too? How does Ethel feel about it? He said she is disturbed, but she realizes she has got to go… [I] said, we can't go anywhere, we have an infant here; we can't just up and leave… He said your baby won't die; babies are born in the air and on trains, and she will survive.” It was a “golden opportunity” to go to the Soviet Union, Ruth says Rosenberg added. Rosenberg and David Greenglass went for a walk then and Rosenberg outlined an escape route through Mexico City and either Stockholm or Berne to Czechoslovakia, thence to the USSR
Ruth Greenglass claimed later that they “never intended to leave the United States, because this is our country and we want to stay here and live here and raise our children,” but said they “accepted the money… because David said that if Julius suspected that we would not leave the United States that some physical harm might come to us or our children.” What in fact they intended to do is not clear in the record and may not have been clear even to them at the time. On May 28, they had six sets of photographs taken, larger than standard US passport photos, five sets of which they turned over to Julius Rosenberg. The photographs were probably for KGB use, to identify the Greenglasses along their escape route.
Since February, when Robert Lamphere had passed along information from a cable decode, the FBI Albuquerque field office had been investigating who might have been a second spy at Los Alamos during the war. One serious candidate was William Spindel, Greenglass's fellow SED, in whose wife Sarah's apartment Ruth Greenglass had recuperated from her 1945 miscarriage. But Albuquerque had also looked into the possibility that the second spy was a scientist. Stanislaw Ulam was a suspect. So was Victor Weisskopf. But the “most logical suspect for [the] Soviet agent,” Albuquerque proposed, was Edward Teller. Albuquerque gave several reasons for its conclusions. Teller was a “close associate of… Fuchs at Los Alamos.” Mici Teller had traveled to Mexico City with Fuchs and Rudolf and Genia Peierls “in the latter part of 1945.” “The Tellers had Fuchs at their home for dinner when Fuchs returned to this country in 1947.” “Dr. Teller had considerable contact with Fuchs in England in the summer of 1949.” Besides his affiliation with Fuchs, Teller also had recommended for postwar graduate study at the University of Chicago a man with whom he had worked at Los Alamos who “has been identified as a Soviet espionage agent while at Los Alamos.” Teller's name had appeared on a list of possible espionage recruits that the man had compiled. Teller had traveled to New York during the time periods bracketed in the NKVD cable decode and “made frequent trips away from the Los Alamos Project and could have furnished information to the Russians on a regular basis.” And, oddly, “Dr. Teller is outspoken against furnishing atomic energy information to Russia, which appears strange in view of the fact that his parents and other relatives are in Hungary under Communist domination.”
Had its agents investigated further, the FBI could have learned much more about Edward Teller that might have appeared suspicious. Teller had refused to work on important implosion calculations at Los Alamos in the spring and summer of 1944 and his refusal had led directly to the decision to bring British scientists, including Klaus Fuchs, to Los Alamos. Teller had left Los Alamos to return to private life in 1946 even though he was the leading theoretician responsible for thermonuclear work; his departure had undoubtedly delayed the progress of that work. Teller had insisted on the development of a particular design of thermonuclear weapon, the Super, which had not been determined to be feasible on basic physical principles, when another design, his Alarm Clock, was unquestionably feasible on basic physical principles. The Super design Teller had insisted upon Los Alamos pursuing had recently been shown to be almost certainly inadequate. He had continued to insist on its development, and had encouraged a major commitment of people and funds which the President himself had endorsed, even though the Super was at best a marginal design and even though its development would deprive the country of a large number of atomic bombs which might otherwise be produced. Adding hypothetical charges such as these to the evidence it had already assembled of Teller's associations with Fuchs, the FBI might have built a powerful case that the brooding, volatile Hungarian-born physicist was a Soviet spy. Teller and like-minded patriots such as Lewis Strauss and William Borden would not hesitate to compile similarly hypothetical charges against Robert Oppenheimer in the years to come.
Harry Gold saved Edward Teller from further investigation. The evening Gold saw his father and felt sentenced, Sam Gold asked his son “to try to make up for the damage.” Harry decided that the way to do so was to cooperate fully with the FBI. On June 2, he identified his Albuquerque contact as a “US Army” man, “twenty-five years of age, perhaps even younger,” from New York, whose wife's name “may have been Ruth.” That eliminated Teller. Gold also remembered approximately where the couple had lived in Albuquerque. Greenglass's name was already at hand along with dozens of Los Alamos soldiers, selected on the basis of their furlough records; his Albuquerque apartment fit Gold's description. Lamphere asked New York to acquire surveillance photographs of Greenglass, and on June 4, Gold tentatively identified the young machinist from such a photograph and recalled the Greenglasses’ story about receiving packages of kosher food from New York City. He also fingered Al Slack and Tom Black. “Interviewing Gold was like squeezing a lemon,” one FBI agent quipped at the time; “there was always a drop or two left.”
Julius Rosenberg visited the Greenglasses on June 4, Ruth recalled:
He came to the house and called David into another room and gave him… four thousand dollars… I was in the house when he came… At that time David and I had already discussed it and decided not to tell Julius that we weren't going to leave because David felt that if he knew of our intentions, some physical harm might come to us, that it would be best to let him believe we were going… [Julius] was very melodramatic, discussed everything in whispers, he was under the impression there were ears all over the house, he took David down for a walk… We took the four thousand dollars and David taped the package with Scotch tape and placed it in the fireplace in the flue. The money remained there. It was only there for a few days and David took it out and gave it to my brother- in-law, Louis Abel… [Julius] promised [David] two thousand dollars additional… He told him he would be back with it. David told him to keep away and leave us alone; that we did not want the money.
David Greenglass earned $107 per week working as a machinist for the Arma Corporation in Brooklyn; four thousand dollars was most of a year's wages.
The next day, June 5, Greenglass appeared at Arma and requested a month and a half of leave, claiming his wife had relapsed from her burns. The company denied him leave and he committed to returning to work on June 12. By then he knew he was under surveillance, Ruth would testify; when Rosenberg again came calling, “David said he was being followed and to please leave us alone and not to come back any more. Julius said… he hadn't noticed anyone watching our house and he was sure David was imagining it.”
Greenglass decided to run, he told Ronald Radosh in 1979:
What I did is, I got on a bus at the 50th Street Terminal [on June 11] and I went up to the Catskill Mountains and the FBI followed me all the way. What I had intended to do was to get a place up there and bring Ruthie and the kids and then stay there all summer and then disappear into the hinterlands. Not in any way ever going to Russia or anything like that — but I told Julius I was going to follow what he asked me to do because I wanted to get the money to do something. We never really believed that the FBI would arrest us.
Ruth called the Brooks Farm and Bungalow Colony in Ellenville, New York, the day after David looked it over and reserved a bungalow for the season for $350. Greenglass returned to work that afternoon, June 12.
Two FBI agents knocked on the door of the Greenglass apartment at 265 Rivington Street in lower Manhattan on Thursday, June 15, 1950, at 1:46 p.m. David let them in. “What happened was,” he told Ronald Radosh, “I said, nah, I won't say anything to them. They asked me if it was okay to search the house and I said, sure, why not? It's like if you take the Fifth Amendment you're guilty. Searching the house didn't really have anything for them to see except innocent books by Marx, by Lenin.” One of the agents immediately found a stack of photographs in a bedroom night table drawer, including a photograph of David and Ruth in front of the Albuquerque house, David in his Army uniform. Greenglass gave up the photographs; the agent ran them to another agent in a waiting car; yet another agent carried them to Pennsylvania Station and boarded a Philadelphia train. In the meantime the second agent at the Greenglasses’ turned up a footlocker full of letters, including the couple's wartime correspondence. David let the footlocker go. “The letters?” Greenglass asked Radosh rhetorically. “The
