The Brother

I grew up believing that the US Government framed and then executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 to whip up anti-Communist hysteria. I was wrong. First of all, Julius was guilty; secondly, it was not the government that framed Ethel, but her own brother, David Greenglass. He did it to save his own skin, for he had passed documents to his brother-in-law (although they proved worthless to the Russians). Also, he wanted to save his wife, who had typed a few things for Julius. Sixty years later he came clean to Sam Roberts. This book is a revelation, an… show more.

Roberts, a journalist with the New York Times, provided a very needed update of the Rosenberg story in 2001. Roberts benefitted from the 1995 disclosures of the Venona project, an American spy operation that decoded World War II Soviet intelligence. Julius Rosenberg, the transcripts revealed, had indeed spied for the Soviet Union, although his wife Ethel was not implicated. Even more remarkably, Roberts, in a feat of journalistic derring-do, had managed to track down David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg whose testimony about Julius’s and Ethel’s supposed involvement in passing secrets to the Soviets had led to their… show more.