Declassified memo from US codebreaker sheds light on Ethel Rosenberg’s Cold War spy case
WASHINGTON — A top U.S. government codebreaker who deciphered secret Soviet communications during the Cold War concluded that Ethel Rosenberg knew of her husband’s activities but “did not do any work herself,” according to a recently declassified memo that her sons say proves their mother was not a spy and should lead to her acquittal in the sensational 1950s nuclear espionage case.
The previously unpublished assessment, written days after Rosenberg’s arrest and shown to The Associated Press, adds to questions about the criminal case against Rosenberg, who was put to death along with her husband Julius in 1953 after being convicted of conspiring to steal atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union.
The couple maintained their innocence to the end, and their sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, have worked for decades to establish that their mother was wrongly implicated in espionage. The brothers see the memo as a smoking gun and are urging President Joe Biden to issue a formal proclamation declaring that she was wrongly convicted and executed.
Historians have long considered Julius Rosenberg a Soviet spy. But questions about Ethel Rosenberg’s role have simmered for years, dividing those who side with the Meeropols and say she played no role in espionage from some historians who argue there is evidence she aided her husband’s activities.
The handwritten memo by Meredith Gardner, a linguist and codebreaker for what would later become known as the National Security Agency, quotes from decoded Soviet communications and concludes that Ethel Rosenberg was aware of Julius’s espionage work, “but because of her illness she did not go to work herself.”
Ethel Rosenberg and her husband went to trial months after writing the memo, despite Gardner’s review. The Meeropols believe that review was available to FBI and Justice Department officials who investigated and prosecuted the case.
“This puts it on both sides of the Atlantic — in other words, both the KGB and the NSA ultimately agreed that Ethel was not a spy,” Robert Meeropol said in an interview. “And so we have a situation where a mother of two young children was executed as a master nuclear engineer, when she was not a spy at all.”
The Meeropols recently obtained the August 22, 1950, memo from the NSA through a Freedom of Information Act request and passed it on to the AP.
“This piece of documentation, comparing my father’s work to work she did not do, seems to me to be the crux of the matter,” said Michael Meeropol.
The document was written more than a week after Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest (her husband had been arrested a month earlier). It was probably intended to summarize what was known about a Soviet espionage network operating in the United States at the height of the Cold War and connected with the development of the atomic bomb.
It refers to Julius Rosenberg, who worked as a civil engineer, under his Soviet code names – first “Antenna” and later “Liberal” – and characterizes him as a recruiting agent for Soviet intelligence.
In a separate section titled “Mrs. Julius Rosenberg,” Gardner describes a decoded message stating that Ethel Rosenberg was a “party member” and “devoted wife” who knew about her husband’s work but did not participate in it.
Harvey Klehr, a now-retired historian at Emory University, said this week that despite the memo, he believes Ethel Rosenberg conspired to commit espionage, even though she did not spy on herself or have access to classified information.
“Ethel may not have been a spy — that is, she may not have passed on classified information — but she was an active participant in her husband’s spy network, not just someone who happened to agree with her husband on politics,” Klehr wrote in a 2021 article for Mosaic Magazine.
Another historian, Mark Kramer of Harvard University, said this week that the interpretation of the Russian communications is questionable and that other documents at least contain “incriminating evidence” of Ethel Rosenberg’s involvement in espionage and her participation in tasks, even “if she did not participate directly in the way that Julius Rosenberg did.”
The Meeropols strongly deny this, claiming that the evidence clearly shows that the Soviets never considered their mother an asset and that she played no role in recruiting spies or in spying on her husband.
The memo is the latest piece of information that Ethel Rosenberg’s supporters say casts doubt on her criminal conviction and public opinion of her. Previously decrypted Soviet cables showed that, unlike her husband, she had not been given a code name, and a separate memo from Gardner said that Ethel Rosenberg “didn’t work.”
In a 2001 television interview, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, admitted that he had lied on the stand about his sister to secure clemency for himself and to keep his wife out of prison so she could care for their two children. As a fellow communist sympathizer, he was charged as an accomplice and served 10 years in prison.
In 2015, secret grand jury testimony from Greenglass was released that contradicted incriminating statements he had made against the Rosenbergs during their trial, which had helped secure their conviction.
Greenglass claimed at trial that he had given the Rosenbergs research data he had obtained while working as a machinist at the Manhattan Project headquarters in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic weapons were produced. He also said he remembered seeing his sister in the Rosenbergs’ apartment using a portable typewriter to type handwritten notes to give to the Soviets.
But in his grand jury testimony, which a judge made public after Greenglass’s death in 2014 at the request of historians and archivists, he never mentioned his sister’s involvement.
Greenglass told the grand jury that Julius Rosenberg was adamant that he continue his military service so that Greenglass could “continue to give him information.” But when Greenglass was asked if his sister was equally insistent, he replied, “I have said before, and I will say it again, frankly, this is a fact: I have never spoken to my sister about this.”
The Meeropols believe the recently released memo almost certainly would have reached high levels of the FBI, since Gardner, its author, worked closely with an FBI agent known to have passed on information uncovered by the NSA analyst. They say the information may have influenced then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s recommendation that Ethel Rosenberg not face the death penalty, though she ultimately did.
Robert Meeropol, 77, said the release of the memo is a culmination of decades of work to clear his mother’s name. As young boys, the brothers visited the White House in 1953 in a failed attempt to persuade President Dwight Eisenhower to prevent their parents’ executions. They were later adopted.
In 2016, they cited recently released grand jury testimony in an attempt to convince President Barack Obama to acquit their mother.
“I’m so relieved that I can do this now that I’m still alive, because for a long time I thought I wouldn’t survive,” he said.
Michael Meeropol said he remembered his brother saying in 1973 that within a few years “they would blow the place up.”
“Well, 1973 to 2024 is a little more than a few years, but it just happened as far as I’m concerned. The publication of this memo, thank God, blows the lid off as far as our mother is concerned,” said Michael Meeropol.