knocked at the Greenglass apartment.
David Greenglass opened the door. “We had just completed eating breakfast,” the young soldier would testify, “and there was a man standing in the hallway who asked if I were Mr. Greenglass, and I said ‘Yes.’ He stepped through the door and he said, Julius sent me,’ and I said, ‘Oh.’ And I walked to my wife's purse, took out the wallet and took out the matched part of the Jello box… ” Gold offered the part Yatzkov/Yakovlev had given him; the two parts matched. David introduced Ruth.
“The whole setup smelled wrong to me,” Gold would recall. Not only was he “jeopardizing an already accomplished mission with Fuchs” by meeting with David Greenglass, but “the man was a G.I. Yakovlev had made no mention of this. As Greenglass opened the door I saw that he had on a pajama top and Army trousers; and on the wall to the right there was hanging a (non-com's) coat with stripes.” Gold never explained why Greenglass's military status troubled him; he may have worried that military personnel were watched more closely than civilians.
David testified that he offered Gold something to eat. Ruth, to the contrary, asked later by the FBI if she offered Gold a cup of coffee, snapped, “I didn't like the situation well enough to be friendly.” David liked the situation, but he was unprepared. “He just wanted to know if I had any information, and I said, ‘I have some but I will have to write it up. If you come back in the afternoon I will give it to you.’” The garrulous New Yorker tried to start a conversation. “I started to tell him [a] story about one of the people I [was going to] put into the report” — a buddy at Los Alamos who he imagined might be “good material for recruiting into espionage work.” Appalled, Gold “cut him very short indeed. I told him that such procedure was extremely hazardous, foolhardy, that under no circumstances should he ever try to proposition anyone on his own into trying to get information for the Soviet Union.” Years later, Gold still shuddered to remember his dismay at the young soldier's brashness: “Greenglass was not only young, but at once impressed me as being frighteningly naive, particularly in his eager volunteering of the idea of approaching other people at Los Alamos as potential sources of data. I was horrified at his total inexperience in espionage, especially considering what we were after.” David was chagrined. “He agreed with me,” Gold says. “He did not seem angry or taken aback by the rebuke. He said, yes, I was right, that just previously] a man whom he knew at [Los Alamos] had been broken to the ranks and had been sent elsewhere… ”
For the rest of Gold's brief twenty-minute visit, the conspirators confined themselves to small talk, some of it significant. “Mrs. Greenglass told me that she had seen and spoken with a Julius in New York, just prior to her coming to Albuquerque in April 1945… Greenglass told me… that he expected to be furloughed and would take the opportunity to go home to New York. He told me I could get in touch with him about Christmas time by calling Julius.” Evidently both the Greenglasses assumed Gold knew David's brother-in-law. Associating themselves with Julius Rosenberg further cross-linked and compromised the two separate lines of Yatzkov's operation. He had only himself to blame for breaking with protocol and sending Gold to Albuquerque in the first place.
After Gold left the Greenglasses, he stopped at the railroad station to ask about reservations eastward. He thought later that he may also have stopped for breakfast. (Though Greenglass remembered Gold responding to his invitation to eat by saying he had already eaten, the chemist was probably offering an excuse to cover his discomfort with a situation that “smelled wrong.”) Then Gold went on to the Hilton to take a room for the day, standard operating procedure to stay out of sight that Gold appreciated. “With all that material from Fuchs on me, wandering an entire day around a relatively small town such as Albuquerque was a risk to be avoided,” he explains; he was tired and “under a strain from the whole mission.” There was as well an airlines office nearby, Gold was “most anxious to get away from New Mexico and I had to have some sort of address at which I could be called should space be available.” He camped out in the hotel lobby, “waiting for people to check out… There was crowding around the registration desk…, confusion and jostling.” At 12:36 he registered and went to his room.
In the meantime, in his small apartment back at High Street, David Greenglass prepared to write down what he knew:
I got out some eight-by-ten ruled white line paper, and I drew some sketches of a [high-explosive] lens… and how they are set up in an experiment, and I gave… a description of this experiment… I gave sketches relating to the experiment[al] setup: one showing… the face of the flat-type lens… I showed the way [a high-explosive lens] would look with this high explosive in it with the detonators on, and I showed the steel tube in the middle which would be exploded by this lens… I showed… a schematic view of the lens… set up in an experiment.
To clarify his sketches, which depicted configurations and experiments concerning cylindrical — two- dimensional — implosion, David keyed them to a detailed description that he wrote out by hand. These, a discussion of “the growth of the project” and “a pretty substantial list of names of both possible recruits and of scientists who worked there,” went into a large letter-size envelope. He was not well-informed. He thought that Hans Bethe, a staunch patriot, was a possible espionage recruit, and he thought that Harold Urey, the Columbia chemist who had guided gaseous-diffusion research and development, was head of the Manhattan Project.
Harry Gold returned to High Street midafternoon. David gave him the envelope and briefed him verbally as well. “David and this man discussed how the atom bomb was detonated,” Ruth Greenglass remembered, “and… this man told David that he was a chemical engineer. I also recall that David and [Gold] discussed lenses and high-speed cameras.”
Gold said later that Greenglass asked to be paid. Both the Greenglasses remember Gold to the contrary offering them money unasked that they accepted with shame. Given Gold's lonely solicitude for family life — his own family, the family he invented as a cover, Kristel Heineman and her children — it seems likely that he offered the money directly in return for Greenglass's information. “Gold told me that I was living in a rather poor place,” Greenglass described the exchange, “and said I could probably use some money. I answered that I could use some money. Gold then gave me an envelope containing $500 in currency.” Gold remembered that Greenglass looked disappointed. The young soldier put the envelope into the pocket of his army blouse. “[Gold] said, ‘Okay?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it will be enough.’… He said something to the effect that he would be back. I said okay… I remember saying that my wife had just had a miscarriage and cost me a lot of money for doctor bills and medicines, etc. He was very sympathetic about that and about the place we lived in… I said something about, ‘I guess I need it.’”
Now that he was holding espionage documents, Gold wanted to leave immediately, following his standard protocol. David discouraged him. “I said, ‘Wait, and we will go down with you,’ and he waited a little while.” There was small talk as the Greenglasses got ready. Gold remembered them telling him “that they had regularly had food packages containing delicatessen items sent to them from New York… I particularly recall the mention of… salami and pumpernickel bread… ”
“We went down,” David Greenglass testified, “and we went around by a back road and we dropped him in front of the USO. We went into the USO and he went on his way. As soon as he had gone down the street my wife and myself looked around and we came out again and back to the apartment and counted the money.”
“The taking of the money made David and me feel worse,” Ruth Greenglass confessed. “I was under the impression at first that Julius said it was for scientific purposes we were sharing the information, but when my husband got the $500,1 realized it was just C.O.D.; he gave the information and he got paid.” Five years later, David was still rationalizing the transaction. “I furnished [Gold] with information concerning the Los Alamos project,” he insisted, “although I did not do it for the promise of money… I felt it was gross negligence on the part of the United States not to give Russia the information about the atom bomb because she was an ally.”
Gold headed for the railroad station “to see if Pullman space had been verified… [or] maybe it was getting near train time.” A long Roman Catholic religious parade blocked his way. “So I leaned on a low stone wall watching it, till I finally could get across [the street].”
En route to Chicago, somewhere in Kansas, Gold surveyed his treasures, with what solitary rapture he never divulged. “On the train… I examined the material which Greenglass had given me. I just examined it very quickly… I put it into an envelope, into a manila envelope, one of the kind with a brass clasp, and in another manila envelope I put the papers which Dr. Fuchs had given me. I labeled the two envelopes. On the one from Fuchs I wrote ‘Doctor.’ On the one from Greenglass I wrote ‘Other.'…” For thirty-six hours, at least, Harry Gold was another roaming torpedo, the only person on earth in private possession of the plans for the world's first atomic bomb.
Monday, June 4, 1945, Ruth Greenglass opened a savings account in her own and her husband's name at the Albuquerque National Trust and Savings Bank with an initial deposit of four hundred dollars in cash.
In Chicago that Monday morning, Gold caught a flight to Washington, as near as he could get to New York, “to save time… since the wait for a train would involve a stay in Chicago until late evening.” From Washington in the
