Meet the Man Who Lied to Send the Rosenbergs to Their Deaths

http://www.alternet.org/books/meet-man-who-lied-send-rosenbergs-their-deaths

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs," Sylvia Plath began "The Bell Jar." My sixth birthday was sandwiched between their execution at Sing Sing on Friday night, June 19, 1953, and their funeral that Sunday morning. The somber procession passed by our block in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and while I was too young to be told details, I was old enough even then to feel the palpable betrayal and shame.

That was the closest I would come to the Rosenberg case for the next 30 years. In 1983, reviews described Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton's "The Rosenberg File" as newsworthy and Arthur Gelb, The Times managing editor, who had covered the execution in 1953, made what to some of his colleagues was a startling suggestion: why don't we do a news story? I made the mistake of not looking preoccupied when Arthur headed toward me, arms flailing.

I first contacted Peter Kihss, who had covered the case. He challenged me to find David Greenglass: the army machinist who had been assigned to Los Alamos, stolen secrets to the atomic bomb, delivered them to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, to convey to the Soviets and whose testimony sent Julius and Ethel -- David's sister -- to the electric chair. I called Roy Cohn, too, one of the former prosecutors, audaciously seeking the one compelling piece of evidence that would finally solve the case. "The smoking gun," he said, "is the testimony of David Greenglass."

Since he was released from prison in 1960 after serving nearly 10 years and fading into pseudonymity, Greenglass had surfaced only once, in the 1970s, when Radosh and Sol Stern interviewed him and his wife, Ruth. By now, was he senile, like Selig Mindish, the Greenglass character in "The Book of Daniel," E.L. Doctorow's fictional account of the case? Was he even alive?