SPY CASES - UNITED STATES

Atomic Bomb Spies

Generally

R - Z

Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), created a flurry of charge and countercharge surrounding the naming of Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Niels Bohr as "voluntary sources" for Soviet intelligence. The large body of review literature on Sudoplatov's book is presented under its own heading (Sudoplatov). Should greater access be gained to the files of the KGB and its predecessor organizations the story of the Atomic Bomb spies of the 1940s could either be rewritten or essentially confirmed.

H. B. Laes, "Theory of Fielding," 14 Jan. 2001, at http://www.tof.blogspot.com/ has a monograph-length article in which he argues that J. Robert Oppenheimer's "career, actions and words are very consistent" with Vladimir Chikov's "story of an American atomic physicist recruited by Soviet agent Morris Cohen before Cohen went in the US Army in July, 1942."

Reuben, William A. The Atom Spy Hoax. New York: Action Books, 1955.

Wilcox: "Leftist polemic alleging charges of Soviet espionage against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is a hoax."

Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. New York: Random House, 2001.

Haynes, I&NS 17.3, calls this book "a well-written melodrama with the ethics of the grade school playground. Espionage against the United States in the service of Stalin is a mere piffle compared [to] the monstrous crime of snitching on your sister.... The Brother is written for a popular audience, scholarly apparatus is minimal, and the sources of much information are unclear or not given."

For Ehrman, Studies 46.4 (2002), this "book is a notable addition to the literature on the case.... More than anyone else, [Roberts] has told us about the human beings in the story, and shown that they were not admirable people."

Roberts, Sam. "Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying." New York Times, 12 Sep. 2008. [http://www.nytimes.com]

On 11 September 2008, Morton Sobell in an interview with the New York Times "admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy. And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.... Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius's espionage, but did not actively participate.

Schweber, Silvan S. In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

According to Schecter, I&NS 16.2, the focus here is on the moral consequences of creating the atomic bomb, not on "the greatest moral question" of whether to provide classified information to the Soviet Union. The author "never raises the possibility ... that Oppenheimer had been a long-time Communist Party member who went into the Communist underground when he started work on the atomic bomb." Nor does he "deal with the campaign against Oppenheimer orchestrated by the US Air Force that led to the removal of his security clearance in 1953."

Trahair, Richard C.S. "A Psychohistorical Approach to Espionage: Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988)." Mentalities 9, no. 2 (1994): 28-49. [Calder]

Trilling, Diana. "The Oppenheimer Case: A Reading of the Testimony." Partisan Review 21 (1954): 604-635.

The author views the Atomic Energy Commission investigation of J. Robert Oppenheimer in a negative light. For a flavor of the passions of the times, this article should be read in conjunction with Hans Meyerhoff, "Through the Liberal Looking Glass -- Darkly." Partisan Review 22 (1995): 238-245, and Diana Trilling, "A Rejoinder to H. Meyerhoff," Partisan Review 21 (1954): 248-251.

Usdin, Steven T.

1. Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

According to Peake, Studies 50.1 (Mar. 2006), this is the story of Julius Rosenberg’s recruitment of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, "their wartime espionage"; their escape from the net that closed around the spy ring after Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had spied for the Soviets; "their lives in the Soviet Union, where they helped create a scientific laboratory complex called Zelenograd; and what happened to them after the Cold War." The book "is well written and well documented."

Beard, I&NS 21.2 (Apr. 2006), says that the author "has carefully documented his story in the secondary literature." The book "succeeds as both a biography of two personally and politically complex men and as Cold War history."

2. "Famous Espionage Cases: Tracking Julius Rosenberg’s Lesser Known Associates." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 3 (2005).

The author focuses on two of Julius Rosenberg's associates, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, to argue that the responses of the FBI and the U.S. Army "to communist penetration during World War II were characterized by a ... lack of imagination. The ... Bureau and the army treated communists as potential subversives, not as spies acting on behalf of the Soviet Union." The ability of Barr and Sarant to spy "unmolested can only be attributed to stunningly incompetent and uncoordinated American counterintelligence."

West, Nigel. [Rupert Allason] Mortal Crimes: The Greatest Theft in History -- Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project. New York: Enigma, 2004.

An AFIO WIN 18-04 (31 May 2004) reviewer finds that the author "painstakingly reconstructs the warren of espionage networks set up" by Soviet intelligence in the United States in the 1930s.

Roberts, I&NS 20.2 (Jun. 2005), finds that the author's "main achievement is to synthesize the all too abundant material about atomic espionage and weave it into a readable and lively account." However, the reviewer is unhappy about "the scattered and sporadic" footnoting in the book, and decides that the charges West makes against Ernest Lawence "are not supported by the available evidence."

To Bath, NIPQ 21.3 (Sep. 2005), West's "story is detailed, and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the names and numbers of all the players. It is not a casual read, but those who are willing to undertake it will find it a worthwhile contribution to the study of espionage and the development of the atom bomb."

Williams, Robert Chadwell. Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Petersen says this "is a valuable scholarly treatment of Fuchs and the Fuchs case."

Cosslett, I&NS 3.4: "If one merit of a biography is the extent to which it deals with why, as well as how its subject did the deed, then these two books [Norman Moss and Robert Chadwell Williams] both rank highly."

For Powers, NYRB (9 Jun. 1994) and Intelligence Wars (2004), 63/fn. 5, this is the "best account of the Fuchs case."

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