by Bill Wallace
In his confession, he mentioned a courier who was known to him only as ‘Raymond’. Raymond, it transpired, was an American laboratory chemist named Harry Gold who had worked at the Manhattan Project. Gold, in turn, named his Soviet contact as ‘John’, in reality an NKVD agent, Anatoli Yakovlev who asked Gold to not only pass on to him Fuchs’ documents, but also to collect other documents from an American soldier who worked at Los Alamos. He could not recall the soldier’s name but remembered he had a wife whose name was Ruth, and he roughly identified where he lived. Shortly after, the soldier, David Greenglass, was arrested and under interrogation implicated his own wife Ruth as well as his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.
Julius Rosenberg was born into a poor Jewish family in the Bronx, New York, in 1918. He joined the Young Communist League while still young and rose through its ranks. Graduating from college with a degree in electrical engineering in 1939, he enlisted in the US Army Signal Corps, working on radar equipment.
His wife Ethel was born Ethel Greenglass three years before her husband, also to poor Jewish parents in the Bronx. She worked as a secretary at a shipping company where she became active in labour disputes. This led to her joining the Young Communist League where she met her future husband when he was eighteen. The couple had two sons, Robert and Michael.
During the next five years, while Julius was in the Signal Corps, the Rosenbergs lived better than at any time in their lives, modestly but comfortably. In 1945, however, Julius’s Communist Party membership from 1939 was discovered and he was thrown out of the army. The family fell on hard times.
In 1942, Julius had been recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union by the Soviet spymaster, Semyon Semenov. When Semenov was ordered back to the USSR, Rosenberg reported to Alexandre Feklisov.
Julius was arrested on 17 July 1950 and on 11 August, Ethel was also arrested. They were each held on $100,000 bail but they did not have the money to gain temporary freedom. They were held, therefore, in the New York House of Detention.
No matter what can be said about the Rosenbergs, no one could doubt their love for each other. In the van as they were being transported to the courthouse, they held hands and kissed through the wire that separated them. Once when they were allowed to meet, their guards, embarrassed by the passion of their greeting, had to separate them. Later, when they were separated on Sing Sing’s death row by a wall and were allowed to see each other only once a week, Ethel would sing to Julius through the wall.
Their trial opened on 6 March 1951 and included a third defendant, Morton Sobell, an engineer working for General Electric, also accused of con-spiring to pass secrets to the Soviet Union.
It is worth noting the extraordinary events occurring in the background around this time, events that created a kind of anti-communist hysteria in the United States. In January 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in the famous Hiss/Chambers spy trial; in February, Senator Joseph P. McCarthy gave a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed that there were two hundred and fifty subversives working in the State Department; in March, British spy Klaus Fuchs was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years for passing secrets to the Russians; in June, the Korean War began.
Irving R. Kaufman was the judge at the trial and the prosecutor was United States Attorney, Irving H. Saypol who had secured the conviction of Alger Hiss. Both these men had been desperate to secure their roles at this high-profile trial. Assisting Saypol was Roy Cohn who would later become famous as Senator McCarthy’s right-hand man.
The case against Sobell was based largely on testimony provided by a man called Max Elichter that he had delivered a can of microfilm to Julius Rosenberg. Sobell and Elichter had attended college with Rosenberg. However, it was the Greenglasses and Harry Gold – already sentenced to thirty years – who were the basis of the case against the Rosenbergs. In a piece of testimony straight out of a spy novel, Gold described how half of a Jello box had been given to him to present to David Greenglass when they met in Albuquerque. Greenglass had the other half and when they put them together each could be sure he was talking to the right man. Gold also had a phrase to be used as code – the highly incriminating, ‘I come from Julius’.
David and Ruth Greenglass testified that Julius had encouraged David to become a member of the Communist Party and had asked Ruth to urge David to steal atomic secrets while working at Los Alamos. In 1950, when everything began to unravel with Harry Gold’s confession, Julius told David and Ruth to go to Mexico with their children. He even gave the Greenglasses $4,000 to pay for the trip. David Greenglass, who would later be sentenced to fifteen years in prison, had cut a deal with the prosecution whereby he would testify against the Rosenbergs in exchange for immunity for his wife, Ruth.
David Greenglass’s testimony also directly impli-cated Ethel. They claimed that she typed out David’s notes about Los Alamos that contained names of scientists engaged on the Manhattan Project, and details and sketches of the bomb’s design. A sketch of a device designed to focus energy for the detonation of the bomb was of particular use. This testimony would prove fatal to Ethel, even though in reality, the information in question was of a much lower grade than that already provided to the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs. However, the Rosenbergs’ attorney made a curious error of judgement during the testimony, requesting that, in order to preserve ‘the secret of the atom bomb’ it should be given in secret, with no members of the public present. Thus, the jury was convinced that the material being handed over to the Soviets must be vitally important. It was such an extraordinary decision by the attorney that the judge asked him if he was sure that was what he wanted.
The defence case consisted purely of testimony from Julius and Ethel. It did not go well from the beginning, any sympathy the jury might have had for them quickly waning, especially when Julius refused to answer the question of whether he had ever belonged to a group that had discussed the Soviet system. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate him. On the stand, Ethel seemed cold and arrogant but like Julius, she denied each allegation put to her. Like him, she pleaded the Fifth on certain questions, but it was not only out of principle that they refused to answer – they simply did not want to implicate others.
The jury was sent out on 28 March 1951 and at 11 a.m the next day they returned with a verdict of guilty for each of the three defendants. On 5 April, Judge Kaufman announced that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would die in the electric chair during the week of 21 May 1951 and that Morton Sobell would spend thirty years in prison.
Turning to the Rosenbergs, Kaufman seemed to place the blame for the entire Korean War firmly on their shoulders. ‘I consider your crime worse than murder,’ he said ‘…I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.’
There was horror in many quarters at the death sentence and it was not just communists around the world who protested. Committees to secure justice for the Rosenbergs were established in Britain, France and Italy. Support was forthcoming from prominent scientists such as Albert Einstein and the chemist Harold Urey.
Eventually, after appeals and a false dawn when Supreme Court Judge, William Douglas called a stay, the execution was scheduled for 11 p.m. on 19 June. In a desperate attempt to win more time, the Rosenbergs’ attorney pointed out that it was a Friday and that the Sabbath would already have begun when they were executed. To his horror, the problem was
solved by bringing the time forward to 8 p.m.
Julius went to the chair quietly but Ethel had to be electrocuted a second time before she was dead, smoke reportedly rising from her head during the process.
Ultimately, it is clear that Julius Rosenberg was engaged in spying for the Soviet Union. Former Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev writes about Rosenberg’s spying for Russia in his memoirs and his Soviet contact, Alexandre Feklisov has admitted recruiting him and working with him. But, the arguments over the case rage on. Some argue they were innocent and some insist on their guilt. Others state quite simply that their death sentence was too harsh a penalty for their crime, especially in the light of the comparatively lenient fourteen-year sentence given to Klaus Fuchs in Britain when the secrets he passed were so much more vital to the development of the Soviet atomic bomb.
Derek Bentley
On 30 July 1998, the British Appeal Court finally ruled that the 1952 conviction of Derek Bentley for murder was unsafe. Tragically, the decision came too late for his sister Iris who had campaigned on her brother’s behalf for forty-five years. She had died in 1997. Even more tragically, it was forty-five years too late for Derek Bentley himself. He was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 28 January 1953.
His problems had begun in 1938 when, aged five, he had fallen from a lorry, banging his head on the pavement. Following that incident, he suffered from epilepsy. He had then received a serious head injury when a V-1 flying bomb had blown up the house the Bentley family was living in. Slow to learn, he failed the eleven-plus examination and attended a secondary modern school but not long before he was due to leave school at fifteen, he was arrested for theft and sent to Kingswood Approved School. At this time, his IQ was estimated to be around seventy-seven and he was unable to read or write.
Released from Kingswood, he found work with a furniture removal company, in March 1951. When he injured his back, however, he had to leave the job, working next for Croydon Corporation and then as a dustman. He moved on to street-sweeping but was even sacked from that. When it came time for him to do National Service in February 1952, he was deemed unfit due to the injuries he had received during the war.
On the night of 2 October 1952, in the company of sixteen-year-old Christopher Craig, nineteen-year-old Bentley was climbing the gate of the Croydon warehouse that belonged to confectionery manufacturers and wholesalers, Parker & Barlow. As the two boys shimmied up a drainpipe onto the roof of the warehouse, Bentley was carrying with him a knife and a knuckle-duster he had been given by Craig. Craig, meanwhile, could feel the dead weight of a Colt .455 Eley revolver in his pocket.
Their progress had not gone unnoticed, however. A little girl, looking out of the window of her room across from the warehouse, spotted the boys and ran downstairs to tell her parents what she had seen. Her father put on a coat and walked to the nearest telephone box to phone the police.
By the time the first patrol car arrived, the boys were on the roof, hiding behind a lift-housing, but they had been spotted by Detective Constable Frederick Fairfax who climbed the drainpipe and made a lunge for Bentley. The boy managed to slip out of his grasp but as he did so, police officers, looking up anxiously from below, heard him shout the fatal words: ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ Craig pulled the trigger, firing a bullet that wounded the policeman in the shoulder. Fairfax still managed to arrest Bentley, however. Bentley made no attempt to escape and remained with the stricken officer for some thirty minutes, completely unrestrained.
Reinforcements soon arrived and began to climb onto the roof but Craig continued to fire at anything that moved. PC Sydney Miles emerged onto the roof through a door at the top of some stairs. As he did so, he was hit in the head by a bullet from Craig’s gun. He died instantly. A terrified Craig continued to fire his weapon until he ran out of ammunition. He leapt from the roof, a height of about thirty feet, and landed on a greenhouse roof below, fracturing his spine and breaking a wrist.
The two boys were charged with the murder of Constable Miles but the case contained a number of tricky questions. The most important was whether Derek Bentley should have been charged at all. His learning difficulties presented one issue, but there was also the fact that he had neither fired a gun nor had one in his possession that night. However, four policeman had been murdered in London the previous year and the press seethed with stories of young men joining gangs and terrorizing the populace of the capital.
Medical reports found Bentley to be of low intelligence, but concluded that he had been of sound mind on the night of the murder and was fit to stand trial. Although it existed in Scottish law, English law did not yet recognise the concept of diminished responsibility due to ‘retarded development’. Insanity was the only defence and Bentley, it was claimed, was not insane.
Both boys pleaded not guilty when their trial opened at the Old Bailey on 9 December 1952, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, presiding. Interestingly, however, the case against Christopher Craig was not as cut and dried as it had first appeared. The bullet exhibited in court had no traces of blood on it and there was increasing debate whether a bullet from the .455 revolver had actually been the one that had killed the policeman. There were many other doubts and inconsistencies. The prosecution failed to establish how many shots Craig had actually fired and a ballistics expert cast doubt on whether he could have hit the policeman, given that he had sawn off the gun’s barrel, making it wildly inaccurate and, in addition, was using the wrong calibre bullets.
The case against Bentley was more complex and several issues preoccupied the jury. The words ‘Let him have it, Chris,’ caused problems. Some suggested they had never even been uttered and been invented later to bolster the prosecution case. The prosecution, on the other hand, took them to mean that the two boys had ‘common purpose’ and in that case, they were both guilty of murder.
Of course, if he did say those words, Bentley may just have been telling Craig to hand over the gun.
There is, of course, also the fact that Bentley, although possibly not under arrest, was being detained by PC Fairfax at the moment the fatal shot was fired. Understandably, Fairfax was somewhat preoccupied at the time with his wound and avoiding Craig’s gunfire, but if he had read Bentley his rights and thrown a charge at him, Bentley would, undoubtedly, have had a strong case against being accused of the murder that was about to be perpetrated.
For Lord Goddard, it seemed enough that the two had gone together to rob the warehouse and the fact that Bentley had a knuckle-duster and a knife did not help his case in his Lordship’s eyes.
The jury took a mere seventy-five minutes to find both boys guilty of murder. Craig, at sixteen, legally a minor was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure while Derek Bentley, being nineteen, was sentenced to death. The jury had added a recommendation of mercy for Bentley when they had delivered their verdict but the Lord Chief Justice did not pass this on to the Home Office. In mitigation, Lord Goddard probably thought there was no possibility that Bentley’s sentence would actually be carried out and, consequently, thought the recommendation unnecessary.
Sadly, however, Bentley’s appeal was rejected on 13 January 1953, leaving the Home Secretary of the time, Sir David Maxwell-Fife as Bentley’s last resort for clemency. However, after reading psychiatric reports, he recommended that the execution should go ahead. A petition asking for mercy was signed by two hundred MPs. Bizarrely, however, Parliament was constitutionally prevented from debating whether he should be hanged until after he actually had been hanged.
There are numerous theories as to why the execution of Derek Bentley was allowed to proceed. Some said the Home Office let it happen to increase the case for the abolition of the death penalty, that Derek Bentley was sacrificed for that cause. Of course, the fact that the dead man was a police officer added to the difficulty of giving Bentley a reprieve.
Some have suggested that armed police officers were at the scene before the fatal shot was fired, although the official version says that the
y did not arrive until after the death of PC Miles. Was he killed by a police bullet and then the matter covered up and the boys blamed? It was a case that would not go away and that continued to make the British people and the British justice system uneasy during the years following Bentley’s execution.
Christopher Craig was released from prison after serving ten years, but for Derek Bentley it took forty-six years to obtain a release of some kind, even though it was too late. His remains were removed from the grounds of Wandsworth Prison and re-buried in a family grave.
Eric Edgar Cooke – The ‘Night Caller’
When asked why he did it, he replied that he liked to hurt people. That much was obvious from the one-man crime spree during which he terrorised the Western Australian city of Perth between 1959 and 1963. During that time, he committed at least twenty-two violent crimes and murdered at least eight people.
It should have been no surprise he turned out bad. Born in Perth in 1931, with a cleft palate, he was the victim of numerous beatings as a child from his alcoholic father, often for no reason. At the age of sixteen, for example, he ended up in hospital after he tried to intervene when his father was beating his mother. He explained it away by telling doctors that he had been beaten up by a gang of boys. He was bullied at school because of his appearance but several operations failed to improve matters and he was left with a facial deformity and an inability to speak clearly.
Rejected by everyone around him, he became a loner and started to spend his nights committing acts of pointless vandalism and petty crime. At one point, he was sent to jail for burning down a church just because they had rejected him for a place in the choir.
Aged twenty-one, he joined the Australian Army but three months later, when his juvenile record was discovered, he was discharged. He did learn something about how to fire a gun, however. It was a lesson that the inhabitants of the city of Perth would live to regret.
