1940s A-bomb spy who betrayed his sister dies at 92

David Greenglass, the Army machinist-turned-Soviet-spy who was vilified for betraying his country and his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, in the Cold War-era atomic espionage case that ended with the electrocutions of Rosenberg and husband, Julius, has died. He was 92.

His attorney, Daniel Arshack, confirmed Tuesday that Greenglass died on July 1 “somewhere in New York state,” but declined to give other details.

Greenglass, who spent 10 years in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., as a co-conspirator in the case, knew that history would remember him as the “spy that turned his family in.” He provided the most incriminating testimony in an otherwise weak government case against his sister – information that, he admitted decades later, had been a lie.

Since his release from prison in 1960, he lived under an assumed name in the New York City area. He avoided the spotlight until 2001, when he admitted in the book “The Brother” by Sam Roberts that he had lied about Ethel Rosenberg’s involvement in her husband’s spying in order to save his own wife.

The Rosenbergs’ convictions in 1951 bolstered Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to expose Communists in government and other fields. They were the only people executed in the United States for Cold War espionage and went to their deaths as martyrs, and their innocence became a tenet of American radicalism over the ensuing decades.

Their supporters clung to their views of the couple as victims of the Red Scare until 1995, when the U.S. government released Soviet intelligence cables that had been intercepted and deciphered in the 1940s. The declassified documents, known as the Venona transcripts, provided incontrovertible evidence of Julius’ involvement in a Soviet spy ring, but how valuable his information was – and whether either he or his wife deserved to die – are questions that historians and others continue to debate.

Greenglass remained one of the most controversial figures in the case. When a group of historians petitioned the government for the release of grand jury testimony from the Rosenberg case, Greenglass was one of several witnesses who refused to allow their testimony to be made public or who could not be located to give their consent. Greenglass’ attorney told the court that his client and his family wished to avoid the “unwanted spotlight which has dogged their lives ever since” he emerged as a crucial witness in what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had called the “trial of the century.”

After the Rosenbergs’ arrest, the Greenglass name became synonymous with treachery of the most intimate kind. It was burned into cultural memory through such contemptible characters as that of Selig Mindish, the protagonist of E.L. Doctorow’s fictionalized version of the Rosenberg case in the novel “The Book of Daniel.” It was invoked by Woody Allen in his film “Crimes and Misdemeanors”: “I love him like a brother – David Greenglass,” the Allen character says of a loathsome relative.

Greenglass’ admission of perjury was the bombshell in Roberts’ book, which drew on 50 hours of unrestricted interviews with the confessed spy. Greenglass, who had given only two limited interviews in the years since he left prison, agreed to talk to Roberts in exchange for a portion of the book’s profits – he told Roberts he needed the money – and gave up veto rights over what was published.

“He was a man who impressed me (as) having very little morality, a man governed by situational ethics, a man who was narcissistic and who certainly did things without any sense of consequences whatsoever,” Roberts, a New York Times editor who pursued his interview with Greenglass for 13 years, told National Public Radio in 2001.

Greenglass, who worked as a machinist and inventor after his release from prison, is survived by two children, Steven and Barbara; and grandchildren. His wife, Ruth, whose testimony in the Rosenbergs’ trial also was crucial to the prosecution, died in 2008.

Greenglass was a 28-year-old former Army sergeant in 1950 when he confessed to providing sketches and other technical information about the atom bomb to Julius Rosenberg and another Soviet agent named Harold Gold, the man who would later turn in Greenglass. Greenglass delivered the material during World War II, when he was assigned to the top-secret weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M.

He had grown up in a caldron of radicalism, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where his immigrant father, Barnet, repaired machines and his mother, Tessie, managed the tenement where they lived.

He was the youngest of four children, who included two brothers, Sam and Bernard, and his sister Ethel. David, with his round face and wavy hair, was his mother’s favorite, and Ethel, older by seven years, also doted on him.

Although he displayed an early aptitude for machines and gadgetry, he was not known as a hard worker, often preferring the movies to helping out at his father’s repair shop. He had a reputation as a loudmouth and windbag.

He was 14 when his sister began to date Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineering major at City College of New York who was embroiled in leftist politics. Julius encouraged David’s interest in science and persuaded him to join the Young Communist League. On the witness stand years later, he would describe Julius as his hero.

Three years after Ethel wed Julius in 1939, Greenglass married his childhood sweetheart, Ruth Printz. He had flunked out of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and was working as a machinist when he was drafted into the Army in 1943. While Greenglass was in basic training at the Army Ordnance Base in Aberdeen, Md., Julius shared with him his ambition to help the Russians as a spy.

Greenglass served at Army posts in California and Tennessee before being assigned to Los Alamos in mid-1944 with a full security clearance. No one asked if he had ever been a Communist, and he deliberately omitted from the security questionnaire his membership in the Young Communist League.

Back in New York, Ruth, too, had joined the league and attended political rallies with Ethel and Julius. By late 1944, Julius, who had learned through his contacts that David’s assignment involved the atom bomb, had enlisted her as an intermediary. Her job was to ask David if he would engage in espionage.

On a weekend in December 1944, she met her husband in Albuquerque and put the question to him. Greenglass quickly agreed, believing that stealing atomic secrets would help a U.S. ally, the Soviet Union, and create a balance of nuclear power.

Soon he had a Soviet code name, Kalibr. His wife was known as Oso. Julius Rosenberg was Antenna and, later, Liberal.

Tellingly, perhaps, Ethel was identified by Soviet operatives only as “Antenna’s wife” or “Liberal’s wife.” She was never given a code name.

Spying, Greenglass was later to tell Roberts, was not particularly hard work. He did not have to furtively search cabinets and desks for classified documents. He picked up information about trigger mechanisms and the bomb’s plutonium core through eavesdropping and casual conversations.

He made a nuisance of himself needling scientists with questions, insisting that a lowly machinist was as important to the project as they were. They apparently were not alarmed by his queries, considering him “too stupid and too outspoken to be a spy,” Roberts wrote.

Security at Los Alamos apparently was so lax that Greenglass slipped a cartridge for an exploding-wire detonator into his pocket and walked out the door with it. Another time he stole a chunk of uranium and kept it as a souvenir until FBI agents came looking for it and he hastily threw it away.

In June 1945 Greenglass met Gold, the Soviet courier, in New Mexico to hand over his first batch of secrets: sketches of a high-explosive lens mold and a list of co-workers who might be ripe for spy work. Gold paid him $500. “I felt there should have been more,” Greenglass told Roberts, “but somebody gives me money, I take it.”

A few weeks later, on July 16, 1945, the first test of the atomic bomb (an enormous blast that Greenglass slept through) took place in the New Mexico desert. On Aug. 6, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

The following month, Greenglass went to New York on home leave. At the Rosenbergs’ apartment he turned over a drawing of the bomb and a sheaf of handwritten notes.

The importance of Greenglass’ stolen information would later be contested. Experts ranging from Gen. Leslie Groves, who ran Los Alamos, and Igor Kurchatov, the chief Russian atomic scientist, would characterize his notes and sketches as relatively inconsequential, providing at most corroboration of details already known to the Soviets.

But Ethel Rosenberg’s fate would turn on those notes, which were never recovered by investigators.

After his discharge from the Army, Greenglass entered a series of failed business ventures with Julius that would cause a rift between the two families.

While he was struggling to earn a living, American counterintelligence was making a breakthrough decoding Soviet intelligence cables. Diligent sleuthing led them to Greenglass’ door on June 16, 1950.

Within hours of his arrest he confessed his disloyalty – and fingered both his wife and Julius as co-conspirators. He promised the government his full cooperation in exchange for immunity for Ruth Greenglass. The government agreed, and Ruth was never indicted.

Although Greenglass had said nothing to implicate his sister, the government eventually arrested the mother of two boys to pressure Julius, who had been taken into custody shortly after Greenglass’ arrest.

Knowing they had a flimsy case against Ethel, government investigators interviewed Ruth Greenglass again just 10 days before the Rosenbergs’ trial was to begin.

This time she told them that Ethel had typed up the notes David had given Julius at the Rosenbergs’ apartment five years earlier. Government investigators re-interviewed David, who corroborated Ruth’s account – the only evidence prosecutors had of Ethel’s direct participation in the spy operation.

At the close of the trial, it was used to maximum effect by federal prosecutor Irving Saypol. Painting Ethel Rosenberg as a full-fledged partner in the conspiracy, Saypol told the jury that in typing up Greenglass’ description of the atom bomb she had “struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country.”

Half a century later, Greenglass confessed to Roberts that he had no memory of Ethel typing up his notes. He said his wife was the one who had incriminated his sister and he had to back up his wife. “I frankly think my wife did the typing,” he told Roberts, “but I don’t remember.”

When the grand jury transcripts were released in 2008, historians who read the files said they showed “irreconcilable” differences between Ruth Greenglass’ grand jury testimony and the remarks she made under oath at the Rosenbergs’ trial. She told the grand jury that she had handwritten, not typed, the information about the bomb that her husband had stolen. The Soviet Venona cables also indicated that the notes passed to them by Julius Rosenberg had been written by hand.

Ruth Greenglass never spoke publicly about the incident outside of the trial.

To what degree, if any, Ethel Rosenberg was involved in her husband’s spying may never be known. But Morton Sobell, who had been convicted along with the Rosenbergs, told the New York Times in 2008 that she was aware of her husband’s activity but did not directly participate in it.

Greenglass insisted that he had tried to save his sister.

“I told them the story and left her out of it, right?” he told Roberts. “But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know. You make a life with somebody. In my generation, that’s the way I would go. My wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother or my father, OK? And she was the mother of my children.”

The Rosenbergs were on death row for two years before Greenglass wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to plead for leniency. “I would be less than human if I did not state that if these two die, I shall live the rest of my life with a very dark shadow on my conscience,” he wrote.

Yet he blamed his sister and Julius for their fates, insisting they could have saved themselves if they had confessed. That they failed to do so – and made orphans of their two young sons – was, Greenglass said, “stupidity.”

“What Greenglass did is unforgivable,” Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ younger son, told a Canadian interviewer in 2003. “On a personal level, he is dead to me.”

Robert and his brother Michael were adopted by another couple, Abel and Anne Meeropol, after their parents’ execution at Sing Sing, and had no contact with Greenglass in the ensuing decades.

If given a chance to speak to his nephews, Greenglass told Roberts he would say only that he was sorry their mother and father were dead.