letters had been censored, those letters, any letter you write you forget about. Who remembers what was in them? There's nothing incriminating in them unless something happens.” The agents took David in for questioning.
Harry Gold was in Holmesburg Prison. An FBI agent mixed the Greenglass photographs freshly arrived from New York into a larger batch of unrelated photographs and asked Gold to look through them. “I made the positive identification of the Greenglasses at about 10 p.m.,” Gold recalled. “… (I said ‘Bingo!’ on seeing a photograph of David and Ruth in front of that house in Albuquerque — Dave was so much younger and thinner then).” The agent in Philadelphia immediately called New York. Confronted with Gold's identification, Greenglass dictated a voluntary statement that implicated Ruth and Julius Rosenberg but not his sister Ethel. After his statement, perhaps giddy with shock, he laughed and said, “I expect to have my day in court, at which time I will plead innocent, repudiate this statement and claim I never saw you guys.” Three decades later, Greenglass remembered that he made a more serious threat: “I told… the FBI right from the start that if my wife was indicted I would not testify. I told [them] I would commit suicide and [they] would have no case.”
Greenglass was placed under arrest at 1:32 a.m. on June 16. Concerned that Rosenberg might flee, the FBI picked up the engineer at home and brought him in for questioning just after nine that morning. But another month passed of legal maneuvering to move David Greenglass's venue to New York from New Mexico, where he committed his crimes, before the Greenglasses really opened up to federal prosecutors. During that period, Joel Barr defected from his Paris apartment, leaving behind a new motorcycle as well as his clothes and books; Morton Sobell fled with his wife and children to Mexico; and Ethel Rosenberg, according to Ruth, asked Ruth to convince David not to talk, arguing that “it [i.e., David's eventual sentence] would only be a couple of years and in the long run we would be better off,” and that “she would take care of me and my kids.” (Ethel Rosenberg would deny Ruth's version of this conversation.) Ruth implicated Ethel in a statement to the FBI on July 17, placing Ethel at the dinner table when Julius proposed that Ruth convince David to pass information and in the kitchen when Julius cut the cardboard identification signal, which Ruth was the first to identify as a “Jello box.” Perhaps following his wife's lead, David implicated his sister in an additional statement two days later.
Julius Rosenberg was arrested on July 17. Ethel Rosenberg was arrested on August 11. Ruth Greenglass was questioned extensively but not indicted. Harry Gold would be brought up to New York City's Tombs prison in October and would meet several times with David Greenglass. In the Tombs, Greenglass told Gold — whether proudly or ruefully, the record does not reveal — that both he and Julius Rosenberg had been awarded the Order of the Red Star.
In October 1939, nine months after the discovery of nuclear fission, the colorful Russian-born economist Alexander Sachs, a vice-president of the Lehman Corporation and an informal adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, had carried to Roosevelt a letter from Albert Einstein warning the President that the Germans might be working on an atomic bomb. In spring 1950, Sachs kept another appointment with Paul Nitze, George Kennan's successor as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. “He brought three papers with him,” Nitze writes: “the first was an analysis of Soviet doctrine on the correlation of forces [i.e., matching Soviet forces against US to see which had advantage]; the second argued that the Soviets would view their successful atomic test and events in China as a favorable change in the correlation; and the third analyzed where and when they might exploit this [change]. Sachs thought that Moscow was naturally cautious, and would try to minimize risks by acting through a satellite. He predicted a North Korean attack upon South Korea sometime late in the summer of 1950.”[40]
Sachs came to the right conclusion on the wrong grounds. Stalin had not felt buoyed by his acquisition of the atomic bomb; to the contrary, it had made him more insecure. He was seventy years old in December 1949 and increasingly suspicious — “weakening mentally as well as physically,” says Nikita Khrushchev, “… declining fast.” Khrushchev points out that “America had a powerful air force and, most important, America had atomic bombs, while we had only just developed the mechanism and had a negligible number of finished bombs. Under Stalin we had no means of delivery… This situation weighed heavily on Stalin. He understood that he had to be careful not to be dragged into a war.” The Soviet Union signed a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance with the new People's Republic of China on February 14,1950, but only with great reluctance did Stalin agree to “render assistance with all means at our disposal” now that those means included atomic bombs — he was afraid that the Chinese might drag him into atomic war.
If there was room for the Soviet Union to maneuver anywhere, it was in Asia, not in Europe. North and South Korea had been divided by no ancient enmity; they emerged as separate governments exactly as East and West Germany had emerged, because they were divided at the end of the Second World War between Soviet and US occupations. The US began to think about “a firm ‘holding of the line’ in Korea,” (in the language of a 1947 report that Dean Acheson approved) at the same time Truman declared the Truman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey. “Please have [a] plan drafted of [a] policy to organize a definite government of So[uth] Korea,” George Marshall had requested casually earlier that year. By the end of 1949 there were two Koreas, the southern Republic of Korea, founded in August 1948 under Syngman Rhee, a seventy-three-year-old Princeton Ph.D. who had fought for Korean independence from the Japanese since before the turn of the century, and the northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea, founded one month later under the young Soviet-trained infantry officer and Communist revolutionary Kim II Sung. Each leader was rabid to invade the other's country and unite the Korean Peninsula under a common flag. North Korea was much better armed, however; besides captured Japanese equipment, the Soviets had left it all their weapons when they withdrew after independence, and would supply it with more military assistance during the late 1940s and early 1950s than they supplied even the People's Republic of China.
Kim first proposed “liberating” South Korea to Stalin in December 1949. The Korean leader seems to have done the correlating of forces that Alexander Sachs would ascribe to the Soviets; according to a senior Soviet diplomat, “the Koreans were inspired by the Chinese victory and by the fact that the Americans had fled from mainland China completely; they were sure that the same could be accomplished in Korea.” Stalin was wary. He doubted, the diplomat writes, that the US would “agree to be thrown out of there and because of that, lose their reputation as a great power.” Stalin discussed the question with Mao Zedong that winter when Mao lingered for months in Moscow negotiating the treaty of alliance; the Chinese leader was even more cautious than Stalin about encouraging a war, possibly with the United States, on his northeastern flank.
Kim continued to push. To bolster his contention that the US would not defend little South Korea when it had not come to the rescue of the Nationalist Chinese in the Chinese civil war, he probably cited a speech Dean Acheson delivered to the Washington Press Club on January 12,1950, which included the curious statement, “So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific [outside the Aleutians, Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines] is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack… Should such an attack occur… the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations… ” Acheson later described this statement as “the warning which I gave… which the aggressor disregarded.” The Secretary of State was not encouraging a North Korean invasion of the South by writing off the peninsula, as Republican partisans later accused; rather, he was discouraging a South Korean invasion of the North by warning Syngman Rhee that he could not count on immediate US support. Kim II Sung found a third meaning in Acheson's statement: that a quick invasion could be decisive.
Stalin for his part wanted to isolate China from the West. He suspected correctly that China still scouted an American alliance; US intervention in a Korean war, if it came, would drive the Chinese deeper into the Soviet camp. In the winter and spring of 1950, Kim prepared to attack. By March, three former North Korean high officials testify, “there was a 100,000-man army, tanks, airplanes, artillery — everything was ready.” Kim returned to Moscow that month. According to a Korean official who was present at the meeting between the two heads of state, Kim “made four points to persuade Stalin that the United States would not participate in the war: (1) it would be a decisive surprise attack and the war would be won in three days; (2) there would be an uprising of 200,000 Party members in South Korea; (3) there were [Communist] guerrillas in the southern provinces of South Korea; and (4) the United States would not have time to participate. Stalin bought the plan.” The Soviet leader did not immediately offer assistance, however: he directed Kim to China to win Mao's endorsement.
Kim saw Mao in May and began masterfully to play off the two Communist leaders each against the other. Mao at that time was planning an invasion of Taiwan, for which he had a promise of Soviet support. (Truman had announced on January 5 that the US would not intervene in Taiwan, a point Mao had taken to heart.) If Mao expressed fear that the US would defend South Korea, he would have to admit the possibility that the US would also defend Taiwan, in which case the Soviets would certainly back away from their promise. Rather than take that risk,
