not to censor my letters. I was relieved, and highly amused.
Ironically, Peierls was shocked to learn, after the war, of Fuchs's Soviet espionage. Peierls's charming story conceals a serious point: that Groves, who was not only rigorous about security but also a notorious Anglophobe, made an exception to his rules in the case of the British Mission at Los Alamos. He may have felt that limiting British and Canadian access to knowledge of how to separate U235 and plutonium made knowledge of bomb design academic. But not only Soviet agents spirited secret information out of Los Alamos during the Second World War.
What, if anything, the NKVD learned about the Manhattan Project from Morris Cohen's friend “Perseus” is more difficult to assess. According to Yatzkov/Yakovlev, Perseus was posted to Los Alamos when it opened in April 1943 and Lona Cohen traveled to Albuquerque twice during the war to meet him. In the last months of her life, Lona Cohen confirmed to an American historian that she collected intelligence information from “a physicist” in Albuquerque at least once.
Harry Gold independently confirmed Yakovlev's link with Lona Cohen many years before Yatzkov/Yakovlev went public. “On at least two occasions,” the FBI paraphrases Gold's 1950 testimony, “Yakovlev told him he would introduce Gold to a young woman, whose husband was in the United States Army, who would perform the function of doing leg work between Yakovlev and Gold. He recalled that she lived in upper Manhattan… and she may have been Russian-born, or of Russian descent, although he never met her.”
But nothing in the documents released from Russian archives after the demise of the Soviet Union is identifiable as a Perseus contribution except, possibly, the compilation of 286 papers delivered in 1942 which Igor Kurchatov reviewed on July 3,1943. All the revealed Los Alamos materials match known contacts between Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold. If Perseus passed Lona Cohen the “secrets” of the atomic bomb, as Yatzkov claims, the information was redundant. On the other hand, Soviet foreign intelligence thrived on redundancy. Igor Gouzenko sent out the same questions to twenty or more addresses around the world when he worked as a cipher clerk in Moscow. Elizabeth Bentley sometimes suggested to Jacob Golos that one of her less fruitful and more fearful Washington contacts, “Bill,” who passed her fragments of information about the activities of the War Production Board jotted down furtively on small scraps of paper, should be dropped from espionage work. “‘No,’ [Golos] would say firmly. ‘While the material he is producing is not outstanding, it does help to corroborate or supplement what we are getting through [other sources]. And, besides, there is still the possibility that we can push him into a really good position.’” For an institution as cautious and thorough as the NKVD, serving masters as paranoid as Beria and Stalin, redundancy provided independent evidence of the authenticity of the information its spies gathered. Fuchs and Nunn May passed many pages of documents, but not all ten thousand.
Jacob Golos was a harried man. He was not only responsible for the dozens of contacts Elizabeth Bentley serviced in Washington and for operating the travel agency that served as a front for his espionage activities. She understood that he also controlled other cells of spies. He was usually careful not to reveal his other contacts to her, since doing so would cross-link different lines of his espionage network if she were ever exposed. But early in the war Golos had used Bentley as a courier for another operation he directed, and significantly, she first reported the contact in 1945, volunteering the information to the FBI long before any of her or Golos's sources had been made public:
Another group of whose existence I became aware sometime in the early summer of 1942 was composed of several engineers who, when I first learned of them, were located in New York City. I recall that on one occasion while I was driving through the lower East Side of the City of New York with Golos to keep a dinner engagement, he stopped the car and told me he had to meet someone. I remained in the car and saw Golos meet an individual on the street corner. I managed to get only a fleeting glimpse of this individual and I recall that he was tall, thin, and wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses. Golos told me that this person was one of a group of engineers and that he had given this person my residence telephone number so that he would be able to reach Golos whenever he desired. He did not elaborate on the activities of this person and his associates nor did he ever identify any of them except that this one man to whom he gave my telephone number was referred to as ‘Julius.’ However, I do not believe this was his true name. I received two or three telephone calls from Julius telling me he wanted to see Golos and relayed the message to Golos… Approximately six months prior to the death of Golos [in November 1943], he told me that he was turning over Julius and that group to some other Russian whom he did not identify.
From her conversations with “Julius” and with Golos, Bentley learned that the tall, studious engineer lived in a housing development in lower Manhattan, Knickerbocker Village. She remembered his calls, spread across the next year, because “they always came after midnight, in the wee small hours… I got waked out of bed… This particular party always started his conversation by saying ‘This is Julius.’ “Julius would turn out to be the man's real name, Julius Rosenberg. In 1948, when Bentley went public with her story, Rosenberg told one of his espionage contacts, Morton Sobell, that he knew Elizabeth Bentley, had spoken to her by phone, but that everything was all right because she did not know who he was. He confirmed to his brother-in-law David Greenglass in 1950, in Greenglass's words, “that… he knew Jacob Golos, this man Golos, and probably Bentley knew him.”
Julius Rosenberg was born May 12, 1918, in New York City, one of five children of parents who had emigrated to the United States from Poland. Harry and Sofie Rosenberg hoped their son might become a rabbi, and Julius showed promise, but he discovered politics in high school and chose to major in electrical engineering when he went on to college in 1935. At City College of New York he joined the Steinmetz Club, the campus branch of the Young Communist League, participating with a group of young engineering students that included several who would later be active in Soviet espionage. At a New Year's Eve benefit for the International Seaman's Union during Julius's undergraduate days he met a dedicated, determined young woman, Ethel Greenglass; the two soon fell in love. Ethel, born in 1915, had grown up in poverty in an unheated tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. She had skipped several grades to graduate from high school at fifteen; at nineteen she had organized a strike of some 150 women at the shipping company where she worked — the women finally blocked the company's trucks by lying down in the street. When the shipping company subsequently fired her, Ethel sought and won redress from the National Labor Relations Board and found a better job. Her brother Samuel would testify that she and Rosenberg became “violent Communists” in those Depression years who “maintained that nothing is more important than the Communist cause.” They worked to convert Ethel's younger brother David, then a teenager, whom Ethel had already begun proselytizing. At first David disliked his sister's boyfriend and resisted the couple's politics. According to Samuel Greenglass, the gift of a chemistry set won David over. “Samuel Greenglass said that he became so concerned about the Communist influence of Julius and Ethel over David Greenglass,” the FBI reports, “that he offered to pay the transportation to Russia… if they would agree to stay there. He said that they declined this offer, saying that they desired to remain in the United States.”
Rosenberg graduated from CCNY in 1939, a watershed year for him; he and Ethel married on June 18, and he joined the Communist Party on December 12. (Not even the Rosenbergs’ sons, who have long protested their parents’ innocence of espionage, still dispute the fact of Ethel Rosenberg's CP membership, but the date she officially joined the Party has never been established.) The party cell of which the Rosenbergs became members, Branch 16B of the Industrial Division, included other engineers from Julius's CCNY group, among them Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, who later defected to the Soviet Union.
After college, Rosenberg went to work for Williams Aeronautical Research in New York. He took a tool design course at Brooklyn Polytechnic and studied aeronautical dynamics and aviation engine design at the Guggenheim Aeronautical School at New York University. In the summer of 1940, moving into position for espionage, he became a civilian junior inspection engineer for the US Army Signal Corps. To do so he had to deny his Communist Party membership. Elizabeth Bentley's 1945 FBI testimony independently corroborates that Rosenberg was working as a Soviet espionage agent by 1942. Julius and Ethel were still active in Branch 16B at that time — in fact, Julius was chairman of the cell.
One of Rosenberg's classmates, Max Elitcher, remembered asking him in 1948 how he had started spying:
He told me that he had a long time ago decided that this was what he wanted to do and he made it a point to get close to people, people in the Communist Party… and he kept getting close from one person to another, until
