John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr Say Rosenberg May Have Enlisted Two Spies
Julius Rosenberg, who recruited his brother-in-law David Greenglass to steal atomic secrets, also enlisted a second spy to penetrate the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the atomic bomb during World War II, according to a new book by authorities on Soviet espionage.
The authors conclude that the spy nicknamed in decoded Soviet cables as Fogel or Persian was not the scientists Robert Oppenheimer or Philip Morrison, as some investigators have speculated, but Rosenberg’s recruit, Russell W. McNutt, a relatively obscure engineer who helped build the uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that was part of the Manhattan Project.
Mr. McNutt, a graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a former assistant Manhattan borough engineer, died a year ago at 93. Though he had been identified as a Communist sympathizer, earlier American counterintelligence did not identify him as a member of the Rosenberg spy ring.
The book, “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the K.G.B. in America,” is by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, a former Soviet espionage agent....
The book, to be published this spring by Yale University Press, is based on the detailed notes of Mr. Vassiliev, who had some access to Soviet espionage files. Those files, copied by Mr. Vassiliev into notebooks, represent a fraction of the K.G.B. and military intelligence records that still remain secret.
The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, but questions linger about the extent of Ethel Rosenberg’s guilt, whether the death penalty was warranted and the value of the secrets the ring passed along. The couple was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, which meant the government needed to prove only that they intended and tried to steal secrets for a foreign power.
In 2008, the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, acknowledged that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military, but not atomic, espionage.
“The news that Julius Rosenberg recruited not one atomic spy but two was a total surprise,” Mr. Haynes said.
Julius Rosenberg’s code name was Liberal. That his wife apparently was not given a covert identity, Mr. Haynes said, was not surprising, because she was “not active in her own right, but just as an aide to Julius,” he said....
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The authors conclude that the spy nicknamed in decoded Soviet cables as Fogel or Persian was not the scientists Robert Oppenheimer or Philip Morrison, as some investigators have speculated, but Rosenberg’s recruit, Russell W. McNutt, a relatively obscure engineer who helped build the uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that was part of the Manhattan Project.
Mr. McNutt, a graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a former assistant Manhattan borough engineer, died a year ago at 93. Though he had been identified as a Communist sympathizer, earlier American counterintelligence did not identify him as a member of the Rosenberg spy ring.
The book, “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the K.G.B. in America,” is by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, a former Soviet espionage agent....
The book, to be published this spring by Yale University Press, is based on the detailed notes of Mr. Vassiliev, who had some access to Soviet espionage files. Those files, copied by Mr. Vassiliev into notebooks, represent a fraction of the K.G.B. and military intelligence records that still remain secret.
The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, but questions linger about the extent of Ethel Rosenberg’s guilt, whether the death penalty was warranted and the value of the secrets the ring passed along. The couple was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, which meant the government needed to prove only that they intended and tried to steal secrets for a foreign power.
In 2008, the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, acknowledged that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military, but not atomic, espionage.
“The news that Julius Rosenberg recruited not one atomic spy but two was a total surprise,” Mr. Haynes said.
Julius Rosenberg’s code name was Liberal. That his wife apparently was not given a covert identity, Mr. Haynes said, was not surprising, because she was “not active in her own right, but just as an aide to Julius,” he said....