Free A Brief History of the Spy by Paul Simpson Page A

passed top secret information about the atom bomb in June 1945, on the Castillo Street bridge over the river in the small town of Santa Fe near the Las Alamos base. ‘Raymond’ had made contact with Fuchs through the scientist’ssister and the descriptions given by her and Fuchs tallied with someone the FBI had already interrogated as a result of Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony: Harry Gold. Faced with evidence found at his own apartment that placed him in Santa Fe (which he had denied visiting), Gold confessed.
    However, parts of Gold’s story didn’t add up, in particular why he had stopped in Albuquerque on one of his trips to Santa Fe. Eventually he admitted that he had visited a soldier who gave him technical drawings from Los Alamos – and this turned out to be Fuchs’ colleague, David Greenglass. In turn, Greenglass broke under interrogation, and confessed that his wife Ruth and brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg were spies. This tallied with further Venona transcripts, which identified Rosenberg as a key agent known as ‘Antenna’ or ‘Liberal’, David Greenglass as ‘Kalibr’, and his wife as ‘Osa’. Another agent, radar engineer Morton Sobell, was also taken into custody in Mexico when he tried to flee.
    Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were arrested and charged with espionage, but unlike the other members of their spy ring, they refused to admit their guilt. Accordingly they, along with Sobell, were brought to trial, where the FBI had to rely on the testimony of David Greenglass, which included details of the way the side piece of a box of Jell-O was used as a means of identification between agents Harry Gold and Elizabeth Bentley. Sobell was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. They were executed at Sing Sing Prison in June 1953, after multiple legal appeals and pleas for clemency.
    President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded Harry S. Truman in January 1953, summed up the general public’s revulsion at the Rosenbergs’ activities:
    These two individuals have been tried and convicted of a most serious crime against the people of the United States. They have been found guilty of conspiring with intent and reason tobelieve that it would be to the advantage of a foreign power, to deliver to the agents of that foreign power certain highly secret atomic information relating to the national defence of the United States. The nature of the crime for which they have been found guilty and sentenced far exceeds that of the taking of the life of another citizen; it involves the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation and could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens. By their act these two individuals have, in fact, betrayed the cause of freedom for which free men are fighting and dying at this very hour.
    The Rosenbergs’ trial concluded in April 1951; a month later, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the USSR. Questions were asked about the strength of the British security vetting that had been taking place: Fuchs had gained clearance from MI5; Maclean and Burgess had similarly passed muster. There was much talk of a ‘Third Man’ in the British set-up who had warned Burgess and Maclean, and many in MI5 were convinced it was Kim Philby. The mistrust didn’t prevent the two countries working together, though.
    Two of the most important joint operations took place in continental Europe – the Vienna-based Operation Silver, and its Berlin equivalent, Operation Gold. The Russians were increasingly using landlines for phone calls and teletype traffic. This presented a problem for intelligence-gathering, as it was no longer a case of monitoring radio frequencies.
    Like Berlin, Vienna was partitioned into different sectors in the immediate post-war period, and Operation Silver was the brainchild of the MI6 head of station in 1949, Peter Lunn, who realized that they were in a position to tap into the Soviet landlines. A