Worse Than Murder

Judge Irving Kaufman looked down at the man & woman before him. "Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed," he told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in a hoarse, faint voice. "I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb . . . has already caused the Communist aggression in Korea . . . and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason."

Judge Kaufman, one of the youngest (40) federal judges, had had only ten hours' sleep in a week, had spent long hours in prayer at his synagogue. Tearful Mrs. Tessie Greenglass, mother of convicted spies Ethel Rosenberg and David Greenglass, had visited him to plead for her children. "I have deliberated for hours, days and nights," said Judge Kaufman. "I have searched my conscience to find some reason for mercy. I am convinced, however, that I would violate the solemn and sacred trust that the people of this land have placed in my hands were I to show leniency . . . The sentence of the court upon Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is that, for their crime, they are sentenced to death."

Sallow Julius Rosenberg and his wife were led away. Later, in their adjoining cells, the Rosenbergs sang to each other: her choice was Puccini's One Fine Day, his The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

After a brief recess, Judge Kaufman went back to the bench to sentence sullen Morton Sobell, because of his "lesser degree of implication," to 30 years. Next day, Judge Kaufman sentenced David Greenglass, the ex-Army sergeant who had fed atomic secrets to the Rosenbergs and whose testimony had convicted his sister and brother-in-law, to a milder 15 years because of his help to the Government.

There would be appeals. But though higher courts may reverse the convictions, none may reduce the sentences. If the sentences are carried out, the Rosenbergs will be the first spies ever executed by order of a U.S. civil court.

The Trail. With the conviction of the Rosenbergs, the U.S. could take an appalled backward look at the furtive efficiency of Soviet spies. In a long report entitled "Soviet Atomic Espionage," the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy this week reviewed the many men and means that the Soviet had used to crack the nation's most closely guarded secret.

The story led back to one night in 1945 when Igor Gouzenko, a Russian clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, abruptly defected and fled to Canadian police with an armload of files. Those files convicted British Dr. Allan Nunn May of handing over a sample of U-235 and U-233 to a Russian in Montreal. May also admitted that he had written out a report for the Russians on what he knew of atomic energy. He knew a great deal. He was in & out of the secret lab at the University of Chicago, where-- under the stadium--the first controlled chain reaction was achieved, had been a senior member of the Anglo-Canadian research team at Montreal's McGill University. His sentence: ten years in prison.

Scribbled in a notebook among the Canadian spy papers was the name Fuchs, but for a long time nobody thought to connect the name significantly with German-born Klaus Fuchs, an anti-Hitler refugee who was high in Anglo-American atom councils. Four years passed before Klaus Fuchs was arrested in England (and sentenced to 14 years). His confession led to the arrest of Courier Harry Gold in Philadelphia. The trail from Harry Gold led to the Rosenbergs, Greenglass and Soviet Spy Master Anatoli Yakovlev, who was ostensibly a Soviet vice consul in New York.

Worst Ever. Fuchs, said the joint committee, was by far the most damaging spy. "Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations." As a top member of the visiting British atomic-energy mission, he knew all the secrets of the Los Alamos weapons center. At Columbia University, he worked on the gaseous-diffusion method for separating U-235 --the process now used exclusively at Oak Ridge. He knew all the ideas for improving bombs, and the thinking on the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs fed his material to stubby Harry Gold, who took it to Yakovlev at furtive meetings in restaurants and bars, at the end of elevated lines, at a Childs restaurant.

David Greenglass, the only American among the top spies, was far less important to the Russians. He furnished Russia with mechanical details of the bomb, most importantly the high-explosive lenses used in the Nagasaki-type bomb, and a diagram of the bomb itself. But, the committee noted, he had nothing like Fuchs's fund of scientific principles and information.

The Gap. The Russians still had one major gap in their knowledge: they did not know how to make plutonium. That gap, the committee suggested, was filled by Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian-born British physicist who quietly took his wife and three children on a trip to Finland last fall, then vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Pontecorvo was an expert on nuclear reactors, the devices which are needed to make plutonium.

'At Canada's Chalk River atomic center, Pontecorvo helped design the heavy-water pile, still the "reactor of most advanced design and performance." He knew the secrets of the plutonium-producing piles at Hanford. After the war, he was a senior officer at Harwell, the British atomic research center. Pontecorvo, whose brother and sister were lifelong Communists, might have been betraying reactor data from 1943 on, the committee guessed. He was rated by some colleagues as an even abler scientist than Fuchs. After Fuchs, said the committee, "Pontecorvo may be plausibly rated as the second deadliest betrayer . . . Certain it is that Russia today possesses nuclear reactors."

Minor Nets. These men were the prime sources of information. There were minor spies and subsidiary nets in the Soviet apparatus.* On the Pacific coast, Communist Steve Nelson, now under indictment for contempt of Congress, organized a cell in the radiation laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. Another ring operated around Chicago with Scientist Clarence Hiskey (also under indictment for contempt) as a chief contact. In New York, Yakovlev directed the activities of Courier Harry Gold, in his pickups from Fuchs and from Alfred Dean Slack (now serving 15 years for espionage), who gave Gold a sample of a new explosive called RDX. The Rosenbergs apparently fed Yakovlev the data collected from Morton Sobell, who worked in radar and electronics, while Rosenberg himself stole the proximity fuse by the simple expedient of putting one in his briefcase at the Emerson Radio Corp.

It was a sickening and, to Americans, almost incredible history of men so fanatical that they would betray their own countries and colleagues to serve a treacherous Utopia. The committee added that the FBI had reported no successful atomic spying since mid-1946. Considering the damage already done, the nation could only hope the FBI was right.

*The committee also investigated Radio Commentator Fulton Lewis Jr.'s charges that Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace connived at sending atomic information and materials to Russia, through Great Falls, Mont, during the war, reported that it "could find no indications" that any unauthorized material was shipped.

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