he was able to approach someone, Russian… who would listen to his proposition.
Rosenberg's proposition was evidently to supply information himself and to recruit engineers from his circle of classmates and acquaintances for espionage as well. He moonlighted his espionage at first — hence the late- night calls to Elizabeth Bentley — but in the longer run he hoped to operate full-time through a front. “I've got powerful friends,” he told David Greenglass in 1943, “and we'll go into business after the war. They'll use us as a screen.” Greenglass understood that his brother-in-law's friends were “Russians.” He dated the beginning of Julius's efforts to “condition” him for possible espionage from that 1943 conversation, which took place, he recalled in 1979, in Manhattan at the Capitol Theater on Broadway. In 1943, Greenglass had thought Julius meant that they would work together after the war and he had been “not so sure” what the work would be. “I suspected espionage,” he said in 1979- “I suspected going into business as the background for espionage.”
When Harry Gold had told Sam Semenov that Abe Brothman wanted the Soviets to set him up in business legitimately, Sam had called the notion “damned fool nonsense.” But if legitimate financing was ludicrous to an agency which was organized, after all, to steal, front operations were not. Jacob Golos's travel agency was one such front. Igor Gouzenko reports a front drugstore in Montreal where the GRU processed espionage film. The expectation that Julius Rosenberg shared with David Greenglass in 1943 was reasonable. It also baited Greenglass with the tantalizing possibility that if he cooperated, he might become the business partner of an older brother-in- law whom he respected and admired.
By the time of his discussion with Rosenberg at the Capitol Theater, Greenglass had been drafted into the Army. He was inducted in April. He had just turned twenty-one — a loud, garrulous young man with a hearty appetite, born on a Lower East Side kitchen table, a machinist like his elderly, Russian-born father, brighter than average, brash, loyal and improvident. The previous November, when he realized that he would be drafted, Greenglass had married his childhood sweetheart, Ruth Printz, a small, pretty nineteen-year-old. Both David and Ruth were members of the Young Communist League, though neither of them ever joined the Communist Party. Ruth was a new convert. From basic training in Aberdeen, Maryland, at the end of April, Private David Greenglass rallied his bride to the cause: “Aluiough I'd love to have you in my arms,” he wrote her, “I am content without so long as there is a vital battle to be fought with a cruel, rutfiless foe. Victory shall be ours and the future is socialism's.” Ruth responded on May 2, after her first May Day, with similar zeal:
Well darling here it is Sunday and I went to the rally. Well sweetheart all I can say is that I am sorry I missed so many other May Days when I had the opportunity to march side by side with you. The spirit of the people was magnificent… Perhaps the voice of 75,000 working men and women that were brought together today, perhaps their voices demanding an early invasion of Europe [i.e., the second front that the Soviet Union was urging on its Allies] will be heard and then my dear we will be together to build — under socialism — our future.
When David shipped out to Fort Ord, California, to work in a machine shop repairing tanks, the Greenglasses continued their ardent political correspondence. By then, late 1943, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had quietly dropped out of the Party, but neither David nor Ruth understood them to have withdrawn in disaffection. In a January 1944 letter, Ruth regretted missing Ethel at a rally at Madison Square Garden where Earl Browder, the chairman of the American Communist Party, announced the party's possible dissolution when the war was over because, wrote Ruth, “the people won't be ready to accept socialism and all its reforms.” The news made David feel “terribly let down”; he asked Ruth to send him a copy of Browder's speech and to “find out from Ethel what she and Julie think about it. Ask her to get the literature [for me]. Darling, I love you and no matter what happens in America politically. In the end it will be Europe and a large part of Asia that will turn Socialist and the American end of the world will of necessity follow in the same course. So, dear, we still look forward to a Socialist America and we shall have that world in our time.”
Around June 1944, Julius Rosenberg traveled to Washington, DC, and called his old CCNY classmate Max Elitcher, who was working for the Navy Bureau of Ordnance on gun fire-control systems. Elitcher invited Rosenberg over. In the course of the evening, Elitcher later testified, Rosenberg asked Elitcher's wife Helene to leave the room and pressed the standard scientific recruiting line on the tall, stoop-shouldered engineer:
Rosenberg told Elitcher what the Soviet Union was doing in the war effort and stated that some war information was being denied the Soviet Union. Rosenberg pointed out, however, that some people were providing military information to assist the Soviet Union, and that [Elitcher's friend Morton] Sobell was helping in this way. Rosenberg asked Elitcher if he would turn over information of that type to him in order to aid the Soviet Union.
The information would be passed along for evaluation, Rosenberg explained, “taken to New York in containers that would protect it and would be processed and returned before it was missed.” According to Elitcher, Rosenberg's June 1944 contact was the first of some nine attempts to recruit him for espionage. After Rosenberg returned to New York, a coded cable reporting the contact went out from the New York NKVD
David Greenglass was transferred to Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1944 to work as a machinist at the Mississippi Ordnance Plant. The work gave him time to read, he wrote Ruth on June 29:
Darling, I have been reading a lot of books on the Soviet Union. Dear, I can see how far-sighted and intelligent those leaders are. They are really geniuses every one of them — Having found out all the truth about the Soviets, both good and bad, I have come to a stronger and more resolute faith and belief in the principles of Socialism and Communism. I believe that every time the Soviet Government used force they did so with pain in their hearts and the belief that what they were doing was to produce good for the greatest number… More power to the Soviet Union and a fruitful and abundant life for their peoples.
Early in July, the Army cut orders to transfer six men from the Mississippi Ordnance Plant to Oak Ridge for assignment to the Manhattan Engineer District. Greenglass's name was not on the list. One of the six men was absent without leave, however, and on July 14 the ordnance plant requested permission to substitute Greenglass for the soldier gone AWOL. Special orders for Greenglass came through on July 24. “I had been conditioned [to consider passing information to the Soviet Union] a long time before,” Greenglass recalled in 1979. “Then when I got to Oak Ridge, I said, ‘Gee.’”
Oak Ridge was a secret installation, not even marked on public maps. In an isolated region of parallel valleys in the hills of eastern Tennessee, the MED was building a vast gaseous-diffusion plant and a series of electromagnetic isotope-separation units to enrich uranium for atomic bombs. Yet Julius Rosenberg had heard of the installation and thought he knew its purpose. ‘Julie was in the house,” Ruth wrote David on July 31, “and he told me what you must be working on. Sweets, I can't discuss with you (and certainly no one else either) but when I see you I'll tell you what I think it is and you needn't commit yourself.”
But Greenglass spent less than two weeks at Oak Ridge. The isotope-separation facilities did not need machinists. Los Alamos did. By August 4, Greenglass was on his way to Santa Fe. In Kansas City he paused to mail Ruth a cautionary letter:
Dear, I have been very reticent in my writing about what I am doing or going to do because it is a classified top secrecy project and as such I can't say anything — Darling, in this type of work at my place of residence there is censorship of mail going out and [censorship of] all off-the-post calls. So dear, you know why I didn't want you to say anything on the telephone. That is why I write C now instead of comrade.
The Greenglasses had signed their letters “Your sweetheart, wife and comrade” and “Your husband, lover and comrade,” and David had proselytized his buddies. Now that he was traveling to secret work he understood that he needed to keep his political commitments to himself.
David Greenglass arrived at Los Alamos on August 5, 1944, nine days before Klaus Fuchs. “I don't think I… ever [saw] him,” Greenglass would testify. But the two men shared a common activity: both had been transferred to the Hill (as its occupants called Los Alamos) to help develop implosion. Greenglass joined the Second Provisional
