In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  The Christmas present must have weighed fifteen pounds, so Sasha had taken a cab back to the consulate. He waited until he was upstairs, behind the locked steel rezidentura door, before undoing the tightly tied string. The contents, he’d recall, left him “totally flabbergasted.” The Center had designated information about the Americans’ proximity fuse a high priority. This was the device that initiated an explosion when a surface-to-air missile approached its target; a direct hit was no longer required to destroy a plane. Liberal had delivered not a schematic but the actual device, brand-new and in working order. He had managed, Liberal later explained, to smuggle it out of the electronics factory where he worked in the back of a security van whose driver believed he was giving him a lift home with his groceries. After the fuse had made its way by diplomatic pouch to the Center, the Council of Ministers had been so impressed that they’d issued an emergency decree establishing a factory to mass-produce Russia’s own version of the device. With this unprecedented accomplishment in his file, Liberal was granted wide-ranging operational leeway, and the Center’s suspicions about the serendipity of Kalibre’s arrival into the ring were assuaged.

  There had been, however, one problem. Liberal couldn’t effectively run Kalibre as he did the other operatives in his ring. On his furlough to New York in January 1945, Kalibre had delivered hand-drawn sketches of a high-explosive lens, a complex and specialized device that was an integral component of an implosion bomb. Neither Liberal nor his handler knew enough physics to begin to understand the explosive device’s significance, or even to ask Kalibre the pertinent questions. “It’s very important that David be able to talk to one of your specialists,” Rosenberg told Sasha. “Is that possible?”

  On the evening of January 10, Sasha introduced his agent to Yatskov, only he called the Russian John, appending another cover name to the lengthy list of aliases the two friends had used over the years. John, he said, was an expert on scientific matters, which was a bit of a stretch, but he certainly was more knowledgeable than Sasha. From now on, John would run Kalibre.

  Rosenberg telephoned his brother-in-law and told him there was someone he wanted him to meet. The snap to his voice signaled that it was not a family matter but a summons to their secret life; only by now, of course, both men realized that the disparate strands of their relationship were fatally intertwined.

  Greenglass borrowed his father-in-law’s Oldsmobile and, as instructed, drove to an address on First Avenue near Forty-Second Street. Rosenberg came out of a bar, checked the surroundings, and then went back in and emerged with John. The three men got into the Oldsmobile, and as Greenglass drove through the nighttime New York traffic, the Russian sitting next to him asked questions about the plutonium-core implosion bomb, the secret weapon that would destroy the city of Nagasaki.

  But now, five years later, Sasha understood that those heroics were as distant to the events of today as was the glorious upheaval that had dethroned the tsars. The time had come for his spies to run.

  The Center knew this, too. They understood what was in store if Gold led the FBI to Kalibre. Sasha’s hopes soared when in a cable to the New York rezidentura the Center warned: “The competitors in the end will force them [Greenglass and his wife] to testify, with all the consequences proceeding from this for King [Rosenberg’s new code name], his group, and all our work in the country.”

  But despite this somber prediction, to Sasha’s bewilderment, the spymasters took surprisingly little concrete action. It couldn’t be simple indifference, he thought despondently. Perhaps, he finally concluded, they had come to believe the FBI would never connect the links in the chain.

  35

  BOB, IF HE HAD BEEN privy to the Russians’ disparaging thoughts, might very well have confirmed them. He, too, had begun to lose confidence in the Bureau’s ability to identify Kalibre. Now that Gold had been apparently squeezed dry, only one investigative tool remained—the Los Alamos furlough records. Meredith had already provided the dates when the spy had traveled to Albuquerque and New York. If he returned to the files, backtracked once again, Bob wanted to believe that this go-round he’d find the incriminating match.

  But when Bob sent a request to the Bureau’s St. Louis field office asking them to dig deeper into the Army records at the nearby National Personnel Records Center, the responses he received left him ready to scream. First they notified him that the records had been “messed up.” When he shot back that they’d better unmess them, the agents came up with another excuse: apparently the records “had been routinely destroyed.” And in the aftermath of this disastrous run of institutional incompetence, when some ambitious fieldman in the Boston office sent him a flash teletype with the totally improbable deduction that Fuchs must also be Kalibre, Bob had to do all he could to avoid sending off a response that read “No repeat no you nitwit.”

  At the end of the day, feeling no wiser than the clueless Boston agent, he channeled his festering anger into a strongly worded memo that went out to all the field offices across the nation. He warned them “to get into high gear on the case—instantly.”

  He didn’t say what the consequences for failure would be. Let them sweat, he thought. Just as he was sweating each day that Kalibre, a Russian atomic spy, remained on the loose.

  IN NEW YORK, MEANWHILE, ANY plans the Greenglasses might have made for escape had gone up, literally, in flames. As Ruth, six months pregnant, leaned over the bed to wake her husband, the hem of her flannel nightgown fell against the open gas heater that had been warming their small apartment. Fire engulfed her. Her frantic husband managed to extinguish with his bare hands the shooting flames, but not before Ruth had been severely burned from head to toe.

  Rushed to the nearby Gouverneur Hospital, she lay for days in critical condition, delirious with fever. She spent a painful, difficult month in the hospital, yet the fetus, miraculously, survived.

  Ruth gave birth in May to a healthy daughter, their second child. On the day she returned with the baby from the hospital, Rosenberg came by the apartment. But it was not a visit from a brother-in-law welcoming a new addition to the family. He came as their control, to issue a warning.

  Rather than flowers, he brought a copy of that day’s New York Herald Tribune. A front-page headline announced: “U.S. Arrests Go-Between for Soviets in Fuchs Case.” And there was a photograph of Harry Gold.

  The new parents recognized the courier who had made the pickup at their apartment in Albuquerque.

  They stared dumbfounded at the photograph as Rosenberg raged, panic driving his anger. Don’t you see you must run? he challenged. Take the children, take whatever you need, but go! His agitated mood finally settling, he revealed an escape plan the Soviets had concocted.

  The Greenglasses were to travel to Mexico; passports wouldn’t be necessary, just routine tourist visas. After they arrived in Mexico City, they must write a letter to the Soviet embassy there. A line of word code was to be included, a mention of the United Nations. Then his brother-in-law was to wait in a plaza where there was a statue of Christopher Columbus. He was to arrive at five p.m., his thumb in a Mexico City guidebook, and wait for the courier to arrive. “Have you ever seen such a statue before?” the courier would ask. Greenglass must reply, “No. I have lived in Oklahoma all my life.” The identities confirmed, the Soviet cutout would hand over American passports for the entire Greenglass family. He would also provide expense money, and instructions for their travel to Stockholm. Once in Sweden, they would be met and given the itinerary that would take them to Prague. As soon as they arrived, they were to announce their presence to the Soviet ambassador. Moscow was only a short flight away.

  David Greenglass listened to this fantastic scheme with feigned interest, first accepting $1,000 and days later another $4,000 from Rosenberg to finance their escape. But he had no intention of leaving the country. In his ambivalent way he could spy against America, but he could not bear the thought of abandoning it. “If I go, I’ll never read ‘Li’l Abner�
� again,” he would remember despairing.

  A new child, his wife’s condition still uncertain—concerns about his family, their future, hung heavily on Greenglass. He knew he needed to protect them. Plans were explored, decisions made, and then just as quickly abandoned. Yet all the time spent trying to come up with a solution proved dangerous. He began to suspect that what he really wanted to escape from was his life, from the corner he’d boxed himself into. With each terrible day, the anxieties mounted. The grievous realization that there would be no way out tightened around him.

  AT HOLMESBURG PRISON, AS ROSENBERG feared, the inquisitors kept chipping away at Harry Gold. And so it was that one of the agents, doggedly looking for a new angle of attack, threw out a suggestion to the prisoner. Try to imagine, he proposed as though it were a game, the walk to your contact’s house in Albuquerque.

  Gold willingly played along, talking out loud to his attentive audience as he made the mental journey. There he was going up the street, past the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, continuing on for maybe five blocks, no, eight—yes, eight, he corrected. Then he turned left. And here the street was shaded; he remembered a much welcomed canopy of trees offering protection from the broiling New Mexico sun.

  Encouraged, the Philadelphia agents went to work. They swiftly contacted the Albuquerque office and requested maps as well as photographs of the streets he’d described. They hoped they could use these visual aids to pry open further Gold’s memory.

  In New Mexico, the agents got busy. It didn’t take the local officers long to retrace Gold’s journey. It led them down a shady street to a recently renovated apartment building. Yet even as the photographs were being sent to Philadelphia, they began combing their own files. They quickly hit pay dirt. The building’s address had appeared on the list of sixty-two names of Los Alamos personnel whose furloughs coincided with the dates previously forwarded by Supervisor Lamphere; for unknown reasons, no one had paid much attention to it at the time. In fact, the soldier who had lived at this address five years ago had also been a suspect in the theft of uranium-238 souvenirs.

  Just before six p.m. at headquarters, a clerk handed Bob a copy of a telex that had also been sent to Philadelphia by the Albuquerque field office. He ran his eyes across it, assuming it would be one of the dozens of inconsequential bureaucratic updates on the unsub Kalibre investigation he received in the course of each long day.

  “Investigation in area suggested by tel. reflects house located two naught nine North High. Situated geographically to somewhat resemble premises described by Gold as site of contact with unsub.”

  An address! They got an address, Bob realized. His interest rapidly rising, he read on.

  “Landlord advises that this two-story house in nineteen forty-five consisted of several apartments, one of which occupied by landlord and wife and another occupied by individual David Greenglass.”

  Have we finally found Kalibre? Bob wondered with a sudden, yet still cautious, excitement.

  FOR GREENGLASS, THE DAYS HAD taken on their own sort of escalating hysteria. He spotted a van parked outside his apartment building, and he immediately suspected its real purpose. The advertisement painted on its side read: Acme Construction Company, 1400 First Avenue, Manhattan. But when he checked the telephone directory, there was no such listing. And now he was certain that it wasn’t his imagination fueling his fears. It had become something very real.

  He should run, he lectured himself once again. Take the family and head to Mexico as Julius had instructed. This time he made up his mind to do it. Yet no sooner had he firmed up that decision than another replaced it. He would go to the Catskills, rent a bungalow, lie low with the family, and this would all pass over like a bad dream. But on the six-hour bus trip to Ellenville, New York, he grew convinced the bus was being followed by a dark sedan with two men in the front seat in fedoras. He arrived, only to turn around and return home at once. The logic made perfect sense to him at the skittish time.

  Adding to his troubles, Ruth’s burns had become infected. Now he asked himself: Was this the final reason he’d needed for running? What sort of medical attention would she get in jail? Or was it a further rationale for staying in place? How could the family flee New York when his wife was ill? He couldn’t make up his mind, his constant internal arguments flying about in all directions. And so he did nothing.

  Then, on the afternoon of June 15 there was a pounding on the apartment door. It was the sound of the insistent tattoo that had echoed through his nightmares all these years.

  THE TWO AGENTS FROM THE New York office, Leo Frutkin and John Lewis, didn’t have a search warrant. Nor did they have an arrest warrant. But these formalities proved unnecessary. They confronted a man at the end of his tether and that was all that would matter.

  The agents began by saying that they were following up on the souvenir uranium thefts. But Greenglass just ignored that pretense, and so they quickly dropped it and got down to business. Without much discussion, Greenglass signed a consent form authorizing the agents to search the four-room apartment. It also gave them the authority to take any papers or photographs they wanted. Greenglass wanted to believe he could win them over with his cooperation. It was as if he refused to acknowledge, even to himself, the enormity of his crimes.

  It didn’t take the agents long to discover one of the items the Bureau had been struggling to get their hands on for weeks—several photos of the Greenglasses taken in Albuquerque in 1945. With the snapshots grasped in his hand, Frutkin dashed downstairs and, like a runner in a relay, handed them off to Agent William Norton, who had been stationed by the building’s entrance. Norton took them, and started off on the next lap—a sprint by speeding car to Harry Gold in Philadelphia.

  Inside the apartment, the agents kept hurling questions at Greenglass. He did his best to deflect them, claiming he just couldn’t remember. After three hours of this fruitless back-and-forth, they politely asked if he’d like to continue the conversation downtown. It’d be easier without the children around. He could have refused, but they seemed nice enough. He could talk his way out of this thing, he told himself.

  They led him to a conference room on the twenty-ninth floor of the U.S. District Courthouse on Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, the building where the Bureau’s field office was located. The questions continued, but he remained vague. It was five years ago, Greenglass complained with lighthearted exasperation. The agents realized they were getting nowhere. And the prospect of knowing he was guilty but having to release him left the agents increasingly on edge.

  How about we break for dinner? Frutkin suggested, more to give his own jangled nerves a break than anything else.

  AS GREENGLASS FINISHED OFF ONE, then another hamburger, in Philadelphia Gold studied the photographs that had been taken from the apartment on Rivington Street. One held his attention. It showed the smiling young couple on the steps of 209 North High Street, Albuquerque. The camera shop had stamped a date on the back of the print—November 8, 1945.

  The agents stood silently, their anticipation growing, as Gold picked up a pen and started writing on the back of the photo in a cramped longhand.

  “This is the man I contacted in Albuquerque, N.M., in June 1945 on instructions from my Soviet Espionage Superior, ‘JOHN.’ The man in the picture gave me information relative to his work at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which information I later gave to JOHN.”

  Now all the pent-up emotions in the room spilled out. Applause erupted. One agent flung his arm around his buddy’s shoulders in a spontaneous outburst of joy. And agent Norman Cornelius grabbed the phone to call New York.

  IN THE COURTHOUSE CONFERENCE ROOM, the agents returned from the dinner break with a new authority. All their previous friendliness had vanished. They stood erect and their voices were firm. And they began with the one question Greenglass had been hoping they would never ask.

  Tell us about the visit to your apartment in Albuquerque from a Soviet courier in June 1945, one of the agents deman
ded.

  Greenglass didn’t answer. He tried to think of a way out of this, a response that would suggest he was still cooperating.

  Then the interrogator played his next card. He announced that Harry Gold had minutes ago positively identified him. David Greenglass was Kalibre.

  The truth now lay exposed between them. All Greenglass had to do was reach out and grasp it. But he was frozen. The silence stretched on and on until it felt like it had to break.

  And in this long moment of dread Greenglass came to see that nothing he could do or say would change things. His only choice was to accept his fate. Besides, after seven hours with the agents, Greenglass had run out of stories, as well as the will to invent new ones. He no longer had any desire to resist. He just wanted it to be over.

  It was 9:25 p.m. when, as a stenographer hurried in to take notes, he started to confess.

  36

  IT WAS THE TIME IN Bob’s life when he would lie awake in bed, taking inventory of his failures. The discomforting list stretched from his inability to find Kalibre, to his powerlessness to dismantle Liberal’s network, to, invariably, his final late-night destination, his shaky marriage. And so he would tell people he was not quite asleep, drifting along with his unhappy thoughts in the darkness, when the ringing phone on his bedside table jolted him wide-awake as if it were a scream.

  It was just after two a.m., and headquarters was on the line. Dick Whelan, the head of the New York office, had called Washington minutes ago to read the confession Greenglass had signed that morning. Now an agent shared it with Supervisor Lamphere.