Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case - Hardcover

Schneir, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1935554166 ISBN 13: 9781935554165

Verlag: Melville House, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

 
A new narrative of the famed case that finally solves its remaining mysteries, by the author of the bestselling Invitation to an Inquest

Walter and Miriam Schneir’s 1965 bestseller Invitation to an Inquest was among the first critical accounts of the controversial case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, famously executed in 1953 for passing atom bomb secrets to Soviet Russia. In Invitation the Schneirs presented exhaustive and damning evidence that key witnesses in the trial had changed their stories after coaching from prosecutors, and that the FBI had forged evidence.  The conclusion was unavoidable: The Rosenbergs were innocent.
 
But were they?
 
Thirty years after the publication of Inquest, Walter Schneir was back on the case after bits and pieces of new evidence started coming to light, much of it connecting Julius Rosenberg to Soviet espionage. Over more than a decade, Schneir continued his search for the truth, meeting with former intelligence officials in Moscow and Prague, and cross checking details recorded in thousands of government documents.
 
The result is an entirely new narrative of the Rosenberg case. The reality, Schneir demonstrates, is that Rosenbergs ended up hopelessly trapped: prosecuted for atomic espionage they didn’t commit—but unable to admit earlier espionage activities during World War II.
 
As it happened, Julius Rosenberg was only marginally involved in the atomic spy ring he was depicted as leading—while Ethel, critically, was not at all involved. The two lied when the contended they knew nothing about espionage. Ethel knew about it and Julius had practiced it, but the government’s contention that they had stolen the “secret” of the atom bomb was critically and fatally flawed.

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Walter Schneir was a freelance writer on law, politics, and science. He is the co-author, with his wife Miriam Schneir, of Invitation to an Inquest, long considered the definitive book on the Rosenberg case. He is also the editor of Telling It Like It Was: The Chicago Riots and editor of the collection Westmoreland v. CBS. His work appeared in many publications, including The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, Ramparts, The Progressive, and the Times op-ed page. He died in April 2009.
 
Miriam Schneir is editor of Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present and Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. In addition to Invitation to an Inquest, she is also the co-author of “Remember the Ladies”: Women in America, 1750–1815.

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                                                   Opening the KGB Archives
 
To suddenly and unexpectedly unearth new information about the Rosenberg affair was an exciting event, and it set my mind racing. I tried to rethink some of the material about David and Ruth Greenglass that I had gone over so many times before. When Miriam and I first studied the Rosenberg trial record, it was immediately evident to us that the principal prosecution witnesses were the Greenglasses. On that there was general agreement. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had ruled: “Doubtless, if [the Greenglass] testimony were disregarded, the conviction could not stand.” But it was also frustratingly evident to us then, as it was to me now, that the major accusations relating to atomic espionage that the Greenglasses had leveled against the Rosenbergs were essentially irrefutable. There was simply no evidence to prove or disprove their account. The Greenglasses told a story. The Rosenbergs denied the story. It was a classic he-said/she-said situation.
Naturally I couldn’t resist a glimmer of hope that this old and seemingly insurmountable impasse might now at long last be resolved with the help of the fresh clues I had stumbled on—especially the enigmatic date December 27, 1945, relating to David Greenglass’s report on the atomic bomb. I knew that the only major untapped source of material on the case was the Holy of Holies of the Cold War espionage universe: the KGB intelligence archives. That Allen Weinstein was then preparing a book based on those hitherto-sealed archives was a fantastic stroke of luck for me, and I impatiently awaited its publication.
I had to wait for more than a year.

                                                                 •  •  •
 
Allen Weinstein is a historian who taught at Smith College and elsewhere. He is also a writer. His best-known book is Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case which, when it appeared in 1978, was widely acclaimed and catapulted him to national attention. It also precipitated a still-extant dispute between himself and then Nation editor Victor Navasky, whose request that he be permitted to check some of the book’s documentation was denied by Weinstein. After about two decades in academia, Weinstein made a major career change, moving into a far different and wider arena: international relations. In 1985, he founded and became president of the Center for Democracy, a small but surprisingly influential Washington-based organization that operated throughout the world with the stated goal of promoting and strengthening the democratic process. In this capacity he had contact with many top governmental leaders, both in Washington and abroad; the Center maintained an office in Moscow, and Weinstein is said to have been an advisor to Boris Yeltsin while the latter was president of Russia.
One of the interests of the Center was the role of intelligence organizations in a democratic state, and Weinstein has made no secret of the fact that he had intimate connections with the American intelligence community. For example, he has recounted that in 1993, several high-level Russian intelligence officials “visited the United States as my guests. Their meetings included a private talk with then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey at my home … and conversations with leading CIA and FBI counterintelligence officials at the request of those officials.” In 1996, when a conference on the Venona decrypts was held at the National War College, it was jointly sponsored by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Weinstein’s Center for Democracy.5 Allen Weinstein’s new book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, co-authored with a Russian, Alexander Vassiliev, finally appeared in early 1999.6 Reviews were somewhat mixed. Thus the Sunday New York Times praised the book unreservedly, while the daily Times complained that “readers less familiar with the record will find much of the material fragmentary, convoluted, badly shaped, dryly written and, all in all, an exercise to make the eyes glaze over.” Another reviewer, in the online magazine Salon, used words like “dull” and “boring” and said the book’s organization “is haphazard and difficult to track. Names, dates, facts and figures are sprayed at the reader like a sneeze.” Even an otherwise laudatory review in the Journal of Cold War Studies criticized the book’s “minimal background” and “absence of context.”
The moment I obtained a copy, I eagerly skipped straight to the pages on the atom spies, particularly the Greenglasses and Rosenbergs. Surprise after surprise unfolded. Far from dull and soporific, I found what I was reading mind-blowing, enthralling, incredibly exhilarating, and then, ultimately, infuriating and sad.
I reread the pages over and over, amazed that none of the reviewers had comprehended their import. Then gradually I understood why. Nowhere in the book had Weinstein (who appears to have been the primary author) alerted the reader to the fact that he and Vassiliev had made important discoveries about the Rosenberg case. Moreover, the book prints material from the KGB files on the Rosenbergs and Greenglasses but doesn’t include relevant excerpts from the Rosenberg trial record, to enable the reader to compare the two versions. Such a comparison would have revealed that the authors had come up with new evidence that contradicts key prosecution testimony in the government’s atom spy trial.
I have no idea why Weinstein hid his light under a bushel. But while I was perplexed at this unique shortcoming, it would be fair to say that I was also delighted, because it meant that I would have a crack at explicating Weinstein’s and Vassiliev’s remarkable but still unexamined findings.
But first I had the responsibility of any researcher working with material from an unfamiliar source: to learn as much as I could about its provenance and authenticity. The KGB documents utilized in the book are identified by their file, volume, and page numbers in the Russian intelligence archives. Ordinarily, this would be sufficient information to enable me to determine whether a quotation or fact in the book was copied or interpreted correctly simply by checking it against the original source. But I was dealing here with data from archives that are barred to the public. For all intents and purposes, the extensive source notes in the book refer the reader to an invisible archive. Performing due diligence on an invisible archive is definitely tricky.
From explanations provided by Allen Weinstein in The Haunted Wood and in various media interviews, I pieced together a partial picture of how and under what unusual conditions the KGB files were opened. The project had its beginnings a few years after the demise of the Soviet Union, a time that Weinstein describes as a “honeymoon period in Russian-American relations.” More to the point, perhaps, it was also, for the Russians, a period of severe economic dislocation when the once-stable ruble plummeted in value, impoverishing those on fixed incomes, such as pensioners. The need for money was apparently the spur that led the Russians to divulge the contents of some of their closely guarded intelligence files. And, in fact, it was a group of retired KGB spooks, now fallen on hard times, who were in the forefront of the negotiations on the archives...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Melville House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1935554166
• ISBN 13: 9781935554165
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar