WEBVTT
00:00:00.620 --> 00:00:03.180
Every case on this show gets the same treatment
00:00:03.180 --> 00:00:06.080
before we ever sit down to record. Full timeline.
00:00:06.379 --> 00:00:08.960
Every piece of physical evidence. Every post
00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:11.660
-case development run down to the source. If
00:00:11.660 --> 00:00:14.480
you want to check our work, and you should, the
00:00:14.480 --> 00:00:16.559
full source list for this episode is sitting
00:00:16.559 --> 00:00:19.859
right there in the episode notes. I'm Eli Marchetti.
00:00:19.980 --> 00:00:23.539
And Simone Valdez. This is Precision and Instinct.
00:00:24.940 --> 00:00:28.820
Sundown, June 19th, 1953. Ossining, New York.
00:00:29.320 --> 00:00:32.320
A prison called Sing Sing. A husband and wife
00:00:32.320 --> 00:00:35.240
are walked separately into a room with one chair.
00:00:35.659 --> 00:00:39.899
Wood. Leather straps. A metal cap. He goes first.
00:00:40.179 --> 00:00:44.780
Three jolts. 2 ,000 volts each. Then her. And
00:00:44.780 --> 00:00:46.740
here's the part that still turns my stomach.
00:00:46.979 --> 00:00:51.259
It takes five. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The
00:00:51.259 --> 00:00:54.899
only American civilians ever executed for espionage
00:00:54.899 --> 00:00:57.390
in peacetime. Convicted of handing the Soviet
00:00:57.390 --> 00:01:00.450
Union the design for the atomic bomb. Except,
00:01:00.670 --> 00:01:03.530
that's not quite what the evidence says. Not
00:01:03.530 --> 00:01:06.650
against both of them, anyway. I'm Eli Marchetti.
00:01:06.829 --> 00:01:10.609
I'm Simone Valdez. This is Precision and Instinct.
00:01:11.870 --> 00:01:14.629
Let's build the people before we build the case.
00:01:15.209 --> 00:01:19.390
Julius Rosenberg, born 1918, Lower East Side,
00:01:19.609 --> 00:01:22.010
electrical engineering degree from City College.
00:01:22.450 --> 00:01:26.819
Ethel. Born Ethel Greenglass, 1915. Wanted to
00:01:26.819 --> 00:01:29.379
sing on Broadway. Ended up a secretary and a
00:01:29.379 --> 00:01:32.120
labor organizer instead. They meet at a young
00:01:32.120 --> 00:01:35.400
Communist League event. Married in 39. Two boys,
00:01:35.620 --> 00:01:38.579
Michael and Robert. On paper, it's a Bronx apartment,
00:01:38.959 --> 00:01:41.599
a union card, and a couple who genuinely believed
00:01:41.599 --> 00:01:44.379
the Soviet Union was the future. That belief
00:01:44.379 --> 00:01:47.019
is not in dispute. What's in dispute is what
00:01:47.019 --> 00:01:49.719
they did about it. Here's my instinct read before
00:01:49.719 --> 00:01:52.609
we even open the file. Everything about how this
00:01:52.609 --> 00:01:55.510
case gets prosecuted later, the two Jewish immigrant
00:01:55.510 --> 00:01:58.189
kids from the Lower East Side, the crime of the
00:01:58.189 --> 00:02:01.329
century language, that's not incidental. That's
00:02:01.329 --> 00:02:04.189
the atmosphere the whole thing breathes in. Fair,
00:02:04.349 --> 00:02:07.409
but let's be precise about that atmosphere. Because
00:02:07.409 --> 00:02:10.849
it's easy to hear communist in 1940s New York
00:02:10.849 --> 00:02:15.530
and picture something fringe. It wasn't. Nationally,
00:02:15.569 --> 00:02:18.909
the Communist Party USA topped out around 75
00:02:18.909 --> 00:02:22.330
to 100 ,000 members out of a country of over
00:02:22.330 --> 00:02:26.129
130 million, a rounding error. But numbers lie
00:02:26.129 --> 00:02:28.949
if you zoom out too far. Zoom into the actual
00:02:28.949 --> 00:02:31.969
rooms Julius and Ethel lived in. Lower East Side,
00:02:32.210 --> 00:02:35.030
working class, Jewish, labor movement New York.
00:02:35.189 --> 00:02:37.830
And that party card isn't exotic. It's practically
00:02:37.830 --> 00:02:40.080
neighborhood furniture. This is the depression.
00:02:40.439 --> 00:02:43.840
25 % unemployment. Bread lines around the block.
00:02:44.340 --> 00:02:46.800
Capitalism looks, to a lot of people, like it
00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:50.259
just visibly failed. Soviet propaganda is selling
00:02:50.259 --> 00:02:52.919
full employment and a planned economy. And for
00:02:52.919 --> 00:02:55.139
a generation that watched the system they grew
00:02:55.139 --> 00:02:58.180
up in collapse, that's not naive. It reads like
00:02:58.180 --> 00:03:00.650
the rational bet. And it's not just economics.
00:03:00.969 --> 00:03:03.729
By the mid to late 30s, the party's rebranding
00:03:03.729 --> 00:03:06.349
itself as the loudest anti -fascist voice in
00:03:06.349 --> 00:03:08.449
the country, ahead of the mainstream parties,
00:03:08.689 --> 00:03:11.229
ahead of most of Washington. For Jewish families
00:03:11.229 --> 00:03:13.810
who'd fled pogroms in Europe, watching Hitler
00:03:13.810 --> 00:03:16.110
rise while their own government dragged its feet.
00:03:16.379 --> 00:03:18.580
That pulls people in who never opened a page
00:03:18.580 --> 00:03:21.000
of Marx. They're there for the anti -fascism.
00:03:21.199 --> 00:03:23.759
So this is the world Julius and Ethel meet in,
00:03:23.819 --> 00:03:26.639
a young communist league event, a few years before
00:03:26.639 --> 00:03:29.719
they marry, not radicals in a vacuum, two kids
00:03:29.719 --> 00:03:32.759
from a very specific, very real corner of American
00:03:32.759 --> 00:03:35.120
life, where this was simply what a politically
00:03:35.120 --> 00:03:37.819
engaged young Jewish New Yorker looked like.
00:03:38.080 --> 00:03:40.300
That sympathy doesn't hold forever, for what
00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:42.860
it's worth. Stalin signs a non -aggression pact
00:03:42.860 --> 00:03:46.560
with Hitler in 1939 and membership craters. People
00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:49.259
quit in disgust overnight. It creeps back up
00:03:49.259 --> 00:03:51.939
once the USSR becomes a wartime ally against
00:03:51.939 --> 00:03:54.740
the Nazis. Then it's gone for good once the Cold
00:03:54.740 --> 00:03:57.300
War sets in and Khrushchev's own revelations
00:03:57.300 --> 00:03:59.819
about Stalin's purges come out. Which matters
00:03:59.819 --> 00:04:01.979
for where we're headed, because the country that
00:04:01.979 --> 00:04:05.759
executes the Rosenbergs in 1953 is not the country
00:04:05.759 --> 00:04:08.020
they joined the party in. By the time Julius
00:04:08.020 --> 00:04:10.780
and Ethel are on trial, that entire political
00:04:10.780 --> 00:04:14.240
current, mainstream and almost unremarkable in
00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:18.339
1936, has been redefined as treasonous by default.
00:04:18.579 --> 00:04:21.300
Same beliefs, completely different verdict on
00:04:21.300 --> 00:04:24.420
holding them. That's the atmosphere. Now, precision
00:04:24.420 --> 00:04:26.939
wants the paper trail. And the paper trail starts
00:04:26.939 --> 00:04:31.319
with a man named Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs is a German
00:04:31.319 --> 00:04:33.800
-born physicist working on the actual Manhattan
00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:37.019
Project at Los Alamos. British intelligence catches
00:04:37.019 --> 00:04:40.420
him in early 1950. He's been passing atomic secrets
00:04:40.420 --> 00:04:43.459
to Moscow for years. Under interrogation, he
00:04:43.459 --> 00:04:46.699
gives up his American courier. A chemist named
00:04:46.699 --> 00:04:49.829
Harry Gold. Gold gives up the next link, a Los
00:04:49.829 --> 00:04:52.230
Alamos Army machinist who'd been passing him
00:04:52.230 --> 00:04:55.170
sketches of the bomb's lens mold implosion mechanism.
00:04:55.670 --> 00:04:59.410
David Greenglass, Ethel's little brother. Greenglass
00:04:59.410 --> 00:05:03.029
is arrested in June 1950, and within weeks, he's
00:05:03.029 --> 00:05:05.089
naming the man who recruited him in the first
00:05:05.089 --> 00:05:08.529
place, his brother -in -law. Julius. The FBI
00:05:08.529 --> 00:05:13.310
arrests Julius on July 17, 1950. Ethel, despite
00:05:13.310 --> 00:05:15.870
there being no comparable chain leading to her,
00:05:15.970 --> 00:05:18.930
is arrested three weeks later on August 11th.
00:05:18.949 --> 00:05:22.129
And that gap matters. That's not evidence catching
00:05:22.129 --> 00:05:27.350
up to her. That's a decision. Let's talk physical
00:05:27.350 --> 00:05:30.089
evidence, because there's genuinely a piece of
00:05:30.089 --> 00:05:32.709
pop culture famous evidence here, and it's smaller
00:05:32.709 --> 00:05:37.040
than people remember. The Jell -O Box. Gold needed
00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:40.379
a way to identify himself to Greenglass as Julius's
00:05:40.379 --> 00:05:43.259
courier, so Julius cuts the side panel off a
00:05:43.259 --> 00:05:46.240
box of jello into a jagged shape, gives half
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:49.220
to Greenglass, keeps the matching half. When
00:05:49.220 --> 00:05:51.920
Gold shows up in Albuquerque and the two torn
00:05:51.920 --> 00:05:54.680
edges fit together like a puzzle piece, Greenglass
00:05:54.680 --> 00:05:58.199
knows he's legitimate. It's almost absurdly simple.
00:05:58.649 --> 00:06:01.470
A grocery store box as a spy credential. But
00:06:01.470 --> 00:06:03.990
it's also exactly the kind of tradecraft detail
00:06:03.990 --> 00:06:06.550
that's hard to fabricate. Both green glasses
00:06:06.550 --> 00:06:09.430
testified to it independently, and it lines up
00:06:09.430 --> 00:06:12.410
with Gold's own account. Sure, but notice what
00:06:12.410 --> 00:06:15.149
that evidence actually proves. It proves Julius
00:06:15.149 --> 00:06:18.170
ran a courier drop. It says nothing about Ethel.
00:06:18.269 --> 00:06:20.910
The box was in his hand by his sister -in -law
00:06:20.910 --> 00:06:24.589
Ruth's own testimony. Which brings us to the
00:06:24.589 --> 00:06:27.860
testimony that actually convicted her. At trial,
00:06:28.060 --> 00:06:30.819
David Greenglass takes the stand and says that
00:06:30.819 --> 00:06:34.480
in September 1945, he watched his sister Ethel
00:06:34.480 --> 00:06:37.420
sit at a portable typewriter in the Rosenberg's
00:06:37.420 --> 00:06:40.040
apartment and type up his handwritten notes on
00:06:40.040 --> 00:06:42.759
the atomic bomb, notes meant for the Soviets.
00:06:43.519 --> 00:06:46.680
That's it. That's the single piece of testimony
00:06:46.680 --> 00:06:49.699
that turns Julius's wife, who may have known
00:06:49.699 --> 00:06:52.959
things, into co -conspirator facing the chair.
00:06:53.680 --> 00:06:56.579
The prosecutor, in his summation, all but says
00:06:56.579 --> 00:06:59.420
it outright. The typewriter is what makes her
00:06:59.420 --> 00:07:02.379
an active participant instead of a bystander.
00:07:02.839 --> 00:07:05.519
Now here's where my gut starts screaming, and
00:07:05.519 --> 00:07:08.459
I want you to sit with the timeline. David and
00:07:08.459 --> 00:07:10.860
his wife Ruth had been the government's key witnesses
00:07:10.860 --> 00:07:14.079
since the day of their arrest. But according
00:07:14.079 --> 00:07:17.139
to FBI records, neither of them mentioned Ethel
00:07:17.139 --> 00:07:21.019
typing anything, not once, until 10 days before
00:07:21.019 --> 00:07:25.779
trial. 10 days. Ten days before trial, David
00:07:25.779 --> 00:07:28.399
Greenglass suddenly remembers his sister at a
00:07:28.399 --> 00:07:32.339
typewriter, five years after the fact. And Ruth
00:07:32.339 --> 00:07:35.180
Greenglass, who actually faced no charges at
00:07:35.180 --> 00:07:38.560
all, corroborates it on the stand. I'll give
00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:40.839
you that the timing is suspicious on its face,
00:07:40.980 --> 00:07:43.720
but suspicious timing isn't the same as false
00:07:43.720 --> 00:07:46.459
testimony. People do recover memories closer
00:07:46.459 --> 00:07:48.899
to a trial when they're finally asked the right
00:07:48.899 --> 00:07:51.500
question. Except we don't have to guess anymore,
00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:55.680
Eli. In 2001, David Greenglass told New York
00:07:55.680 --> 00:07:58.759
Times reporter Sam Roberts, on the record, that
00:07:58.759 --> 00:08:02.019
he lied. He said he never actually saw Ethel
00:08:02.019 --> 00:08:05.240
typing anything. He only knew about it secondhand,
00:08:05.240 --> 00:08:08.860
from Ruth. He said he testified against his own
00:08:08.860 --> 00:08:11.759
sister to keep Ruth out of prison, so she could
00:08:11.759 --> 00:08:14.680
stay home and raise their kids. Without that
00:08:14.680 --> 00:08:17.000
testimony, I believe she would not have been
00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:19.879
convicted, let alone executed. That's Roberts'
00:08:20.060 --> 00:08:22.360
own assessment, and it's hard to argue with.
00:08:22.500 --> 00:08:25.360
The typewriter was the smoking gun, and the man
00:08:25.360 --> 00:08:28.800
holding it now says the gun was empty. He buried
00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:32.019
his sister and lived another 60 years under an
00:08:32.019 --> 00:08:35.320
assumed name in Queens, trying not to be found.
00:08:38.500 --> 00:08:41.100
Precision has to be honest about the other side
00:08:41.100 --> 00:08:44.059
of this, because it cuts hard against easy sympathy.
00:08:44.649 --> 00:08:48.789
In 1995, the NSA finally declassified the Venona
00:08:48.789 --> 00:08:52.409
Project, decrypted World War II -era Soviet cable
00:08:52.409 --> 00:08:56.110
traffic sitting classified for 50 years. And
00:08:56.110 --> 00:08:59.809
Julius is all over it. Under the codename Liberal,
00:09:00.149 --> 00:09:03.110
one cable has Soviet intelligence worrying about
00:09:03.110 --> 00:09:05.690
overworking him. That's how productive a source
00:09:05.690 --> 00:09:08.909
he was. Combined with co -defendant Morton Sobel's
00:09:08.909 --> 00:09:12.110
own 2008 confession that he and Julius had been
00:09:12.110 --> 00:09:14.710
passing military secrets for years, there is
00:09:14.710 --> 00:09:17.629
no serious historical argument left that Julius
00:09:17.629 --> 00:09:20.710
Rosenberg was innocent. I'm not going to pretend
00:09:20.710 --> 00:09:24.090
otherwise. Even his own sons, who spent decades
00:09:24.090 --> 00:09:26.769
insisting on their father's innocence, came out
00:09:26.769 --> 00:09:29.590
after Sobel's confession and said, in their words,
00:09:29.769 --> 00:09:32.710
they had no reason to doubt it. That's Michael
00:09:32.710 --> 00:09:35.889
and Robert. Two boys, 10 and 6 years old when
00:09:35.889 --> 00:09:38.309
their parents were arrested. We're going to come
00:09:38.309 --> 00:09:40.970
back to them, but finish the cable story first,
00:09:41.190 --> 00:09:43.289
because this is where precision and instinct
00:09:43.289 --> 00:09:46.389
actually agree, and it's rare. Ethel appears
00:09:46.389 --> 00:09:49.830
in exactly one Venona message, not as an agent,
00:09:49.990 --> 00:09:53.049
as a wife. The cable describes her as politically
00:09:53.049 --> 00:09:56.370
sympathetic, in poor health, aware of her husband's
00:09:56.370 --> 00:09:59.149
work. It does not assign her a codename. She
00:09:59.149 --> 00:10:01.960
never transmitted anything. By the government's
00:10:01.960 --> 00:10:04.919
own intercepted communications, she was not treated
00:10:04.919 --> 00:10:08.940
as an operative. A declassified 2025 memo, one
00:10:08.940 --> 00:10:12.259
attributed to the NSA's own lead Venona decryptor,
00:10:12.279 --> 00:10:14.659
put it about as plainly as a government document
00:10:14.659 --> 00:10:20.559
ever puts anything. Ethel was not a spy. So why
00:10:20.559 --> 00:10:23.500
prosecute her at all if the case was this thin?
00:10:23.840 --> 00:10:26.639
Here's my read, and it's not really speculation
00:10:26.639 --> 00:10:29.220
at this point. It's what the prosecutors said
00:10:29.220 --> 00:10:33.379
themselves at the time. Ethel was leverage. The
00:10:33.379 --> 00:10:35.519
government's real target was breaking Julius,
00:10:35.960 --> 00:10:39.000
getting him to name the rest of the ring. The
00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:41.100
threat of executing his wife was the pressure
00:10:41.100 --> 00:10:43.820
they thought would make him talk. He never did.
00:10:44.139 --> 00:10:47.480
He never did. And instead of backing off, they
00:10:47.480 --> 00:10:49.519
carried the leverage all the way through to the
00:10:49.519 --> 00:10:52.820
chair. Because backing off at that point would
00:10:52.820 --> 00:10:54.740
have meant admitting the leverage was empty.
00:10:55.440 --> 00:10:57.779
And here's what turns the leverage theory from
00:10:57.779 --> 00:11:01.240
instinct into paper trail. It wasn't just outside
00:11:01.240 --> 00:11:03.740
critics who thought executing her went too far.
00:11:03.980 --> 00:11:07.480
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the man running
00:11:07.480 --> 00:11:10.320
the entire investigation, recommended against
00:11:10.320 --> 00:11:14.000
it. A memo drafted for him argued no purpose
00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:16.399
would be served by a death sentence for Ethel.
00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:19.860
Hoover wanted 30 years for her, with Julius'
00:11:20.120 --> 00:11:22.799
sentence tied to whether he cooperated. And when
00:11:22.799 --> 00:11:25.220
Judge Kaufman formally consulted the prosecution
00:11:25.220 --> 00:11:28.100
team after the guilty verdict, asking whether
00:11:28.100 --> 00:11:30.299
both Rosenbergs should get the same sentence,
00:11:30.659 --> 00:11:33.980
that team, as a body, was reluctant to back her
00:11:33.980 --> 00:11:37.379
execution too. So the two institutions that actually
00:11:37.379 --> 00:11:40.639
built this case, the FBI that investigated it,
00:11:40.679 --> 00:11:43.480
and the prosecutors who tried it, both leaned
00:11:43.480 --> 00:11:46.559
toward sparing her life. Kaufman had that on
00:11:46.559 --> 00:11:49.000
the record, and he sentenced her to death anyway.
00:11:49.480 --> 00:11:51.860
Which makes what happened next even harder to
00:11:51.860 --> 00:11:54.639
defend. Because the official team being reluctant
00:11:54.639 --> 00:11:57.120
didn't mean nobody was pushing the other way.
00:11:57.360 --> 00:12:00.379
I want to name the judge because precision doesn't
00:12:00.379 --> 00:12:02.559
get to skip the parts of the system that failed
00:12:02.559 --> 00:12:05.769
here. Irving Kaufman presided. Decades later,
00:12:05.990 --> 00:12:09.230
FBI memos, released after a Freedom of Information
00:12:09.230 --> 00:12:12.870
request filed by the Rosenbergs' own sons, showed
00:12:12.870 --> 00:12:15.649
Kaufman had been in private, one -sided contact
00:12:15.649 --> 00:12:18.529
with one member of that prosecution team before
00:12:18.529 --> 00:12:21.990
sentencing, a 23 -year -old assistant named Roy
00:12:21.990 --> 00:12:25.590
Cohn, who broke ranks with his own office's reluctance
00:12:25.590 --> 00:12:28.490
and personally lobbied the judge for death, for
00:12:28.490 --> 00:12:32.360
Ethel specifically. That's a serious breach of
00:12:32.360 --> 00:12:35.139
judicial ethics, confirmed by the paper record,
00:12:35.320 --> 00:12:38.860
not rumor. One ambitious young man, going around
00:12:38.860 --> 00:12:41.840
the very team he worked for, is what closed the
00:12:41.840 --> 00:12:44.059
gap between the government leaned toward mercy
00:12:44.059 --> 00:12:47.259
and the government killed her. That's this whole
00:12:47.259 --> 00:12:50.779
case in a single fact. And this trial makes his
00:12:50.779 --> 00:12:53.879
career. He goes on to be Joseph McCarthy's chief
00:12:53.879 --> 00:12:57.259
counsel. Later in life, he mentors a young real
00:12:57.259 --> 00:12:59.659
estate developer in New York on how to fight
00:12:59.659 --> 00:13:02.480
in public and never apologize. We're not going
00:13:02.480 --> 00:13:05.220
to say the name. You already know it. We don't
00:13:05.220 --> 00:13:07.720
have to connect that dot for you. It's just a
00:13:07.720 --> 00:13:09.679
fact sitting there in the historical record,
00:13:09.940 --> 00:13:14.000
waiting for whoever wants to pick it up. Let's
00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:16.399
stay with Cohn for a minute, because Precision
00:13:16.399 --> 00:13:19.419
thinks his backstory actually explains the climate
00:13:19.419 --> 00:13:22.379
this whole case happened in, not just one man's
00:13:22.379 --> 00:13:25.620
opportunism. My instinct's been itching to get
00:13:25.620 --> 00:13:28.379
here since we said his name the first time. Roy
00:13:28.379 --> 00:13:31.779
Cohn is one of the strangest, most self -contradictory
00:13:31.779 --> 00:13:33.980
figures to walk through 20th century American
00:13:33.980 --> 00:13:38.759
power. Born 1927, Bronx, into money and legal
00:13:38.759 --> 00:13:42.360
pedigree, his father was a judge. Family lore
00:13:42.360 --> 00:13:44.879
has it his own parents' marriage was practically
00:13:44.879 --> 00:13:47.460
a business transaction. His mother's wealthy
00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:50.519
family bankrolled his father's judgeship in exchange
00:13:50.519 --> 00:13:54.029
for the wedding. Cohn is raised from birth in
00:13:54.029 --> 00:13:56.669
a household where ambition and transaction are
00:13:56.669 --> 00:14:00.509
the same language. He's a prodigy on paper, Columbia
00:14:00.509 --> 00:14:03.370
Law School at 20. But everyone who worked with
00:14:03.370 --> 00:14:05.950
him says the same thing. It was never really
00:14:05.950 --> 00:14:09.190
about the law. It was about winning and being
00:14:09.190 --> 00:14:12.289
feared while doing it. The Rosenberg trial is
00:14:12.289 --> 00:14:15.730
his first major national stage at 23 years old.
00:14:15.850 --> 00:14:18.389
And by his own later boasting, he didn't just
00:14:18.389 --> 00:14:21.220
prosecute. He claimed he privately engineered
00:14:21.220 --> 00:14:24.100
which judge got the case and then lobbied that
00:14:24.100 --> 00:14:27.240
judge toward a death sentence. That's not tough
00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:30.799
young lawyer having a big case. That's a 23 -year
00:14:30.799 --> 00:14:33.259
-old deciding two people should die and then
00:14:33.259 --> 00:14:36.320
working the machinery until they did. From there,
00:14:36.320 --> 00:14:38.539
he goes straight to Joseph McCarthy's committee
00:14:38.539 --> 00:14:42.080
as chief counsel, 18 months at the absolute center
00:14:42.080 --> 00:14:45.039
of the anti -communist hearings. Same playbook,
00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:48.720
destroy first, ask questions never. Here's where
00:14:48.720 --> 00:14:51.100
the self -loathing thread comes in. And it's
00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:54.299
not speculation. It's documented. While Cohn
00:14:54.299 --> 00:14:56.679
is helping drive the hunt for communists in government,
00:14:57.000 --> 00:14:59.580
that same McCarthy -era machinery is running
00:14:59.580 --> 00:15:02.799
a parallel purge. Historians call it the Lavender
00:15:02.799 --> 00:15:05.539
Scare, hunting gay men and women out of federal
00:15:05.539 --> 00:15:09.000
jobs as supposed security risks. Cohn himself
00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:12.519
was gay. closeted his entire public life, seen
00:15:12.519 --> 00:15:15.799
for years at Studio 54 with young male companions,
00:15:16.059 --> 00:15:18.840
and denying it to every reporter who asked right
00:15:18.840 --> 00:15:22.120
up to his death. A man helping fuel a persecution
00:15:22.120 --> 00:15:25.240
machine built, in part, to destroy people like
00:15:25.240 --> 00:15:28.559
himself. That's not a footnote. That's the psychological
00:15:28.559 --> 00:15:32.059
engine of the whole era. Paranoia doesn't just
00:15:32.059 --> 00:15:34.700
point outward. It eats the people running it,
00:15:34.700 --> 00:15:38.139
too. He spends the following decades representing
00:15:38.139 --> 00:15:42.100
mob bosses, shipping magnates, Studio 54's owners,
00:15:42.340 --> 00:15:45.620
always ambitious, always operating right at the
00:15:45.620 --> 00:15:48.399
edge of the law, indicted three separate times
00:15:48.399 --> 00:15:51.679
for bribery, perjury, mail fraud, obstruction,
00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:56.659
extortion, never convicted, not once. Until finally,
00:15:56.840 --> 00:16:00.860
in 1986, six weeks before his death, a disciplinary
00:16:00.860 --> 00:16:03.700
panel disbars him for stealing money from a client.
00:16:04.159 --> 00:16:06.879
and a string of other conduct they called particularly
00:16:06.879 --> 00:16:10.620
reprehensible. His response, reportedly, was
00:16:10.620 --> 00:16:13.940
to call the judges a bunch of yo -yos. He was
00:16:13.940 --> 00:16:16.399
dying of AIDS at the time. He told the press
00:16:16.399 --> 00:16:19.519
it was liver cancer all the way to the end. And
00:16:19.519 --> 00:16:21.940
the people he'd spent decades collecting as friends
00:16:21.940 --> 00:16:24.679
and protégés, including the man he'd mentored
00:16:24.679 --> 00:16:26.820
in real estate and public combat starting in
00:16:26.820 --> 00:16:30.039
the 1970s, mostly disappeared once he couldn't
00:16:30.039 --> 00:16:32.580
do anything for them anymore. There's one more
00:16:32.580 --> 00:16:35.279
detail here Precision thinks earns its place.
00:16:35.620 --> 00:16:38.899
Decades later, a documentary examines Cohn's
00:16:38.899 --> 00:16:43.039
entire life. The Rosenberg trial, McCarthy, the
00:16:43.039 --> 00:16:46.159
mob clients, the closeted double life, all of
00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:50.159
it. It's directed by Ivy Mirapole. Julius and
00:16:50.159 --> 00:16:52.799
Ethel's own granddaughter, making a film about
00:16:52.799 --> 00:16:55.019
the man who helped put her grandparents in the
00:16:55.019 --> 00:16:58.240
chair. A boy who prosecuted a case partly built
00:16:58.240 --> 00:17:01.580
on outsider suspicion. Two Jewish radicals, a
00:17:01.580 --> 00:17:04.220
wife used as leverage, grows up to spend his
00:17:04.220 --> 00:17:06.839
whole career hiding an outsider identity of his
00:17:06.839 --> 00:17:09.400
own while helping a system punish people for
00:17:09.400 --> 00:17:12.339
exactly that kind of difference. We're not drawing
00:17:12.339 --> 00:17:14.539
a moral here. We're just telling you who was
00:17:14.539 --> 00:17:18.720
standing in the room. Appeals run for two years.
00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:22.279
The case becomes an international story. Protests
00:17:22.279 --> 00:17:25.900
in over 40 countries. Pope Pius XII appeals for
00:17:25.900 --> 00:17:40.819
mercy. Albert Einstein appeals for mercy. Eisenhower
00:17:40.819 --> 00:17:44.339
denies clemency twice. His stated reasoning is
00:17:44.339 --> 00:17:46.940
that their actions immeasurably increased the
00:17:46.940 --> 00:17:50.180
chances of atomic war. On the evening of June
00:17:50.180 --> 00:17:55.039
19, 1953, timed notably to happen before sundown
00:17:55.039 --> 00:17:57.920
brought in the Jewish Sabbath, Julius is executed
00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:01.160
first. Witnesses describe him going with what
00:18:01.160 --> 00:18:05.440
one reporter called a grotesque smile. Then Ethel.
00:18:05.619 --> 00:18:08.900
And here's the detail I can't get past. Gut or
00:18:08.900 --> 00:18:11.279
evidence, doesn't matter which lens you use.
00:18:11.640 --> 00:18:14.740
The executioner sends three shocks through Julius,
00:18:14.920 --> 00:18:18.180
and he's gone. Ethel takes four, and she's still
00:18:18.180 --> 00:18:21.960
alive. They send a fifth. Smoke was reported
00:18:21.960 --> 00:18:25.180
rising from her head. The woman the government's
00:18:25.180 --> 00:18:27.859
own intercepted cables never gave a codename
00:18:27.859 --> 00:18:31.180
to needed five jolts of 2 ,000 volts to die.
00:18:33.119 --> 00:18:37.279
Michael was 10. Robert was 6. That afternoon,
00:18:37.359 --> 00:18:39.640
they'd been in the death house for a final visit
00:18:39.640 --> 00:18:42.960
with their parents. What happened to them next
00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:45.640
doesn't get told nearly enough, and it should.
00:18:45.880 --> 00:18:48.700
No relative would take them in publicly. The
00:18:48.700 --> 00:18:52.109
family was too radioactive in every sense. They
00:18:52.109 --> 00:18:54.309
were shunted between a shelter, family friends,
00:18:54.670 --> 00:18:57.029
even pushed out of a New Jersey public school
00:18:57.029 --> 00:19:00.049
because of who they were. Their parents' defense
00:19:00.049 --> 00:19:02.950
attorney, Emanuel Block, eventually found them
00:19:02.950 --> 00:19:05.849
a home with a Bronx school teacher named Abel
00:19:05.849 --> 00:19:08.950
Mirapole and his wife, Anne. But before that
00:19:08.950 --> 00:19:11.490
home was found, it was Block himself who stepped
00:19:11.490 --> 00:19:14.690
in. He delivered the eulogy at Julius and Ethel's
00:19:14.690 --> 00:19:17.210
funeral and served as the boys' legal guardian
00:19:17.210 --> 00:19:20.029
in the raw weeks after the execution. while a
00:19:20.029 --> 00:19:23.190
permanent home was still being worked out. He'd
00:19:23.190 --> 00:19:25.950
fought this case for three years, five trips
00:19:25.950 --> 00:19:28.809
to the Supreme Court, two personal pleas to the
00:19:28.809 --> 00:19:31.309
White House for clemency. He gave it everything
00:19:31.309 --> 00:19:34.710
he had left. Seven months after the execution,
00:19:35.230 --> 00:19:37.569
Emanuel Block was found dead in his apartment,
00:19:37.789 --> 00:19:41.710
a heart attack. He was 52. The boys had already
00:19:41.710 --> 00:19:44.750
lost their parents. Within a year, they lost
00:19:44.750 --> 00:19:47.069
the one adult who'd fought hardest to keep that
00:19:47.069 --> 00:19:49.450
from happening. and who'd held them, briefly,
00:19:49.589 --> 00:19:53.430
in the gap between. You may not know Abel Mirapole's
00:19:53.430 --> 00:19:56.569
name. You know his work. Under the pen name Lewis
00:19:56.569 --> 00:20:00.309
Allen, he wrote the song Strange Fruit, the anti
00:20:00.309 --> 00:20:02.650
-lynching song Billie Holiday made immortal.
00:20:03.289 --> 00:20:07.150
A man who wrote 97 words about a government -tolerated
00:20:07.150 --> 00:20:09.769
killing spent the rest of his life raising the
00:20:09.769 --> 00:20:12.289
sons of two people he believed his own government
00:20:12.289 --> 00:20:15.789
had killed unjustly. Michael and Robert took
00:20:15.789 --> 00:20:18.779
the Mirapole name. Robert Mirapole grew up to
00:20:18.779 --> 00:20:21.279
found the Rosenberg Fund for Children, supporting
00:20:21.279 --> 00:20:23.960
kids of targeted activists and political prisoners.
00:20:24.339 --> 00:20:26.940
And both brothers spent the rest of their lives
00:20:26.940 --> 00:20:34.839
trying to get their mother's name clear. The
00:20:34.839 --> 00:20:38.880
Mirapole brothers appealed to Presidents Obama
00:20:38.880 --> 00:20:42.000
and then Biden for a posthumous exoneration of
00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:45.410
Ethel. As of this recording, neither acted. The
00:20:45.410 --> 00:20:49.230
campaign hasn't stopped. Morton Sobel, the third
00:20:49.230 --> 00:20:51.829
defendant convicted alongside them, served over
00:20:51.829 --> 00:20:54.950
18 years, including time at Alcatraz, before
00:20:54.950 --> 00:20:58.869
finally admitting his own guilt in 2008. David
00:20:58.869 --> 00:21:02.910
Greenglass died in 2014 at 92, having spent decades
00:21:02.910 --> 00:21:06.630
living under an assumed name in Queens. And in
00:21:06.630 --> 00:21:09.029
a detail almost too on the nose for fiction.
00:21:09.500 --> 00:21:12.059
Judge Kaufman later became known for a career
00:21:12.059 --> 00:21:14.559
of otherwise liberal, civil liberties protective
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:17.539
rulings. This case followed him for the rest
00:21:17.539 --> 00:21:23.059
of his life. So, precision or instinct? Here's
00:21:23.059 --> 00:21:26.200
where I land. The evidence the government actually
00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:29.019
had on Ethel Rosenberg, at the moment they chose
00:21:29.019 --> 00:21:32.019
to prosecute her, was not evidence of a spy.
00:21:32.680 --> 00:21:36.259
It was a lever. And they used it until it killed
00:21:36.259 --> 00:21:40.700
her. I won't argue, Julius. The cables, Sobel,
00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:44.779
his own sons, that door's closed. But Ethel is
00:21:44.779 --> 00:21:47.240
a different file, and precision has to admit
00:21:47.240 --> 00:21:50.619
when the file is thin. A single Venona mention
00:21:50.619 --> 00:21:53.980
with no codename, a typewriter story that surfaced
00:21:53.980 --> 00:21:56.720
ten days before trial and was recanted decades
00:21:56.720 --> 00:21:59.859
later by the one man who told it. That's not
00:21:59.859 --> 00:22:02.839
proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That's a woman
00:22:02.839 --> 00:22:06.240
used as bait. Two boys stood at the White House
00:22:06.240 --> 00:22:10.099
gates in 1953. asking a president to spare their
00:22:10.099 --> 00:22:13.579
parents. One of them stood there again in 2016,
00:22:14.099 --> 00:22:16.839
an old man now, asking a different president
00:22:16.839 --> 00:22:20.299
to admit the government got it wrong. Nobody
00:22:20.299 --> 00:22:28.720
has yet. If you like tonight's case, the best
00:22:28.720 --> 00:22:30.720
thing you can do is follow the show. It costs
00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:32.960
nothing and it means we get to keep doing this.
00:22:33.140 --> 00:22:35.339
And leave a rating while you're there. It's the
00:22:35.339 --> 00:22:38.089
fastest way to help someone else find us. I'm
00:22:38.089 --> 00:22:40.890
Eli Marchetti. And Simone Valdez. Until next
00:22:40.890 --> 00:22:41.269
time.
00:00:00.620 --> 00:00:03.180
Every case on this show gets the same treatment
00:00:03.180 --> 00:00:06.080
before we ever sit down to record. Full timeline.
00:00:06.379 --> 00:00:08.960
Every piece of physical evidence. Every post
00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:11.660
-case development run down to the source. If
00:00:11.660 --> 00:00:14.480
you want to check our work, and you should, the
00:00:14.480 --> 00:00:16.559
full source list for this episode is sitting
00:00:16.559 --> 00:00:19.859
right there in the episode notes. I'm Eli Marchetti.
00:00:19.980 --> 00:00:23.539
And Simone Valdez. This is Precision and Instinct.
00:00:24.940 --> 00:00:28.820
Sundown, June 19th, 1953. Ossining, New York.
00:00:29.320 --> 00:00:32.320
A prison called Sing Sing. A husband and wife
00:00:32.320 --> 00:00:35.240
are walked separately into a room with one chair.
00:00:35.659 --> 00:00:39.899
Wood. Leather straps. A metal cap. He goes first.
00:00:40.179 --> 00:00:44.780
Three jolts. 2 ,000 volts each. Then her. And
00:00:44.780 --> 00:00:46.740
here's the part that still turns my stomach.
00:00:46.979 --> 00:00:51.259
It takes five. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The
00:00:51.259 --> 00:00:54.899
only American civilians ever executed for espionage
00:00:54.899 --> 00:00:57.390
in peacetime. Convicted of handing the Soviet
00:00:57.390 --> 00:01:00.450
Union the design for the atomic bomb. Except,
00:01:00.670 --> 00:01:03.530
that's not quite what the evidence says. Not
00:01:03.530 --> 00:01:06.650
against both of them, anyway. I'm Eli Marchetti.
00:01:06.829 --> 00:01:10.609
I'm Simone Valdez. This is Precision and Instinct.
00:01:11.870 --> 00:01:14.629
Let's build the people before we build the case.
00:01:15.209 --> 00:01:19.390
Julius Rosenberg, born 1918, Lower East Side,
00:01:19.609 --> 00:01:22.010
electrical engineering degree from City College.
00:01:22.450 --> 00:01:26.819
Ethel. Born Ethel Greenglass, 1915. Wanted to
00:01:26.819 --> 00:01:29.379
sing on Broadway. Ended up a secretary and a
00:01:29.379 --> 00:01:32.120
labor organizer instead. They meet at a young
00:01:32.120 --> 00:01:35.400
Communist League event. Married in 39. Two boys,
00:01:35.620 --> 00:01:38.579
Michael and Robert. On paper, it's a Bronx apartment,
00:01:38.959 --> 00:01:41.599
a union card, and a couple who genuinely believed
00:01:41.599 --> 00:01:44.379
the Soviet Union was the future. That belief
00:01:44.379 --> 00:01:47.019
is not in dispute. What's in dispute is what
00:01:47.019 --> 00:01:49.719
they did about it. Here's my instinct read before
00:01:49.719 --> 00:01:52.609
we even open the file. Everything about how this
00:01:52.609 --> 00:01:55.510
case gets prosecuted later, the two Jewish immigrant
00:01:55.510 --> 00:01:58.189
kids from the Lower East Side, the crime of the
00:01:58.189 --> 00:02:01.329
century language, that's not incidental. That's
00:02:01.329 --> 00:02:04.189
the atmosphere the whole thing breathes in. Fair,
00:02:04.349 --> 00:02:07.409
but let's be precise about that atmosphere. Because
00:02:07.409 --> 00:02:10.849
it's easy to hear communist in 1940s New York
00:02:10.849 --> 00:02:15.530
and picture something fringe. It wasn't. Nationally,
00:02:15.569 --> 00:02:18.909
the Communist Party USA topped out around 75
00:02:18.909 --> 00:02:22.330
to 100 ,000 members out of a country of over
00:02:22.330 --> 00:02:26.129
130 million, a rounding error. But numbers lie
00:02:26.129 --> 00:02:28.949
if you zoom out too far. Zoom into the actual
00:02:28.949 --> 00:02:31.969
rooms Julius and Ethel lived in. Lower East Side,
00:02:32.210 --> 00:02:35.030
working class, Jewish, labor movement New York.
00:02:35.189 --> 00:02:37.830
And that party card isn't exotic. It's practically
00:02:37.830 --> 00:02:40.080
neighborhood furniture. This is the depression.
00:02:40.439 --> 00:02:43.840
25 % unemployment. Bread lines around the block.
00:02:44.340 --> 00:02:46.800
Capitalism looks, to a lot of people, like it
00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:50.259
just visibly failed. Soviet propaganda is selling
00:02:50.259 --> 00:02:52.919
full employment and a planned economy. And for
00:02:52.919 --> 00:02:55.139
a generation that watched the system they grew
00:02:55.139 --> 00:02:58.180
up in collapse, that's not naive. It reads like
00:02:58.180 --> 00:03:00.650
the rational bet. And it's not just economics.
00:03:00.969 --> 00:03:03.729
By the mid to late 30s, the party's rebranding
00:03:03.729 --> 00:03:06.349
itself as the loudest anti -fascist voice in
00:03:06.349 --> 00:03:08.449
the country, ahead of the mainstream parties,
00:03:08.689 --> 00:03:11.229
ahead of most of Washington. For Jewish families
00:03:11.229 --> 00:03:13.810
who'd fled pogroms in Europe, watching Hitler
00:03:13.810 --> 00:03:16.110
rise while their own government dragged its feet.
00:03:16.379 --> 00:03:18.580
That pulls people in who never opened a page
00:03:18.580 --> 00:03:21.000
of Marx. They're there for the anti -fascism.
00:03:21.199 --> 00:03:23.759
So this is the world Julius and Ethel meet in,
00:03:23.819 --> 00:03:26.639
a young communist league event, a few years before
00:03:26.639 --> 00:03:29.719
they marry, not radicals in a vacuum, two kids
00:03:29.719 --> 00:03:32.759
from a very specific, very real corner of American
00:03:32.759 --> 00:03:35.120
life, where this was simply what a politically
00:03:35.120 --> 00:03:37.819
engaged young Jewish New Yorker looked like.
00:03:38.080 --> 00:03:40.300
That sympathy doesn't hold forever, for what
00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:42.860
it's worth. Stalin signs a non -aggression pact
00:03:42.860 --> 00:03:46.560
with Hitler in 1939 and membership craters. People
00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:49.259
quit in disgust overnight. It creeps back up
00:03:49.259 --> 00:03:51.939
once the USSR becomes a wartime ally against
00:03:51.939 --> 00:03:54.740
the Nazis. Then it's gone for good once the Cold
00:03:54.740 --> 00:03:57.300
War sets in and Khrushchev's own revelations
00:03:57.300 --> 00:03:59.819
about Stalin's purges come out. Which matters
00:03:59.819 --> 00:04:01.979
for where we're headed, because the country that
00:04:01.979 --> 00:04:05.759
executes the Rosenbergs in 1953 is not the country
00:04:05.759 --> 00:04:08.020
they joined the party in. By the time Julius
00:04:08.020 --> 00:04:10.780
and Ethel are on trial, that entire political
00:04:10.780 --> 00:04:14.240
current, mainstream and almost unremarkable in
00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:18.339
1936, has been redefined as treasonous by default.
00:04:18.579 --> 00:04:21.300
Same beliefs, completely different verdict on
00:04:21.300 --> 00:04:24.420
holding them. That's the atmosphere. Now, precision
00:04:24.420 --> 00:04:26.939
wants the paper trail. And the paper trail starts
00:04:26.939 --> 00:04:31.319
with a man named Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs is a German
00:04:31.319 --> 00:04:33.800
-born physicist working on the actual Manhattan
00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:37.019
Project at Los Alamos. British intelligence catches
00:04:37.019 --> 00:04:40.420
him in early 1950. He's been passing atomic secrets
00:04:40.420 --> 00:04:43.459
to Moscow for years. Under interrogation, he
00:04:43.459 --> 00:04:46.699
gives up his American courier. A chemist named
00:04:46.699 --> 00:04:49.829
Harry Gold. Gold gives up the next link, a Los
00:04:49.829 --> 00:04:52.230
Alamos Army machinist who'd been passing him
00:04:52.230 --> 00:04:55.170
sketches of the bomb's lens mold implosion mechanism.
00:04:55.670 --> 00:04:59.410
David Greenglass, Ethel's little brother. Greenglass
00:04:59.410 --> 00:05:03.029
is arrested in June 1950, and within weeks, he's
00:05:03.029 --> 00:05:05.089
naming the man who recruited him in the first
00:05:05.089 --> 00:05:08.529
place, his brother -in -law. Julius. The FBI
00:05:08.529 --> 00:05:13.310
arrests Julius on July 17, 1950. Ethel, despite
00:05:13.310 --> 00:05:15.870
there being no comparable chain leading to her,
00:05:15.970 --> 00:05:18.930
is arrested three weeks later on August 11th.
00:05:18.949 --> 00:05:22.129
And that gap matters. That's not evidence catching
00:05:22.129 --> 00:05:27.350
up to her. That's a decision. Let's talk physical
00:05:27.350 --> 00:05:30.089
evidence, because there's genuinely a piece of
00:05:30.089 --> 00:05:32.709
pop culture famous evidence here, and it's smaller
00:05:32.709 --> 00:05:37.040
than people remember. The Jell -O Box. Gold needed
00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:40.379
a way to identify himself to Greenglass as Julius's
00:05:40.379 --> 00:05:43.259
courier, so Julius cuts the side panel off a
00:05:43.259 --> 00:05:46.240
box of jello into a jagged shape, gives half
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:49.220
to Greenglass, keeps the matching half. When
00:05:49.220 --> 00:05:51.920
Gold shows up in Albuquerque and the two torn
00:05:51.920 --> 00:05:54.680
edges fit together like a puzzle piece, Greenglass
00:05:54.680 --> 00:05:58.199
knows he's legitimate. It's almost absurdly simple.
00:05:58.649 --> 00:06:01.470
A grocery store box as a spy credential. But
00:06:01.470 --> 00:06:03.990
it's also exactly the kind of tradecraft detail
00:06:03.990 --> 00:06:06.550
that's hard to fabricate. Both green glasses
00:06:06.550 --> 00:06:09.430
testified to it independently, and it lines up
00:06:09.430 --> 00:06:12.410
with Gold's own account. Sure, but notice what
00:06:12.410 --> 00:06:15.149
that evidence actually proves. It proves Julius
00:06:15.149 --> 00:06:18.170
ran a courier drop. It says nothing about Ethel.
00:06:18.269 --> 00:06:20.910
The box was in his hand by his sister -in -law
00:06:20.910 --> 00:06:24.589
Ruth's own testimony. Which brings us to the
00:06:24.589 --> 00:06:27.860
testimony that actually convicted her. At trial,
00:06:28.060 --> 00:06:30.819
David Greenglass takes the stand and says that
00:06:30.819 --> 00:06:34.480
in September 1945, he watched his sister Ethel
00:06:34.480 --> 00:06:37.420
sit at a portable typewriter in the Rosenberg's
00:06:37.420 --> 00:06:40.040
apartment and type up his handwritten notes on
00:06:40.040 --> 00:06:42.759
the atomic bomb, notes meant for the Soviets.
00:06:43.519 --> 00:06:46.680
That's it. That's the single piece of testimony
00:06:46.680 --> 00:06:49.699
that turns Julius's wife, who may have known
00:06:49.699 --> 00:06:52.959
things, into co -conspirator facing the chair.
00:06:53.680 --> 00:06:56.579
The prosecutor, in his summation, all but says
00:06:56.579 --> 00:06:59.420
it outright. The typewriter is what makes her
00:06:59.420 --> 00:07:02.379
an active participant instead of a bystander.
00:07:02.839 --> 00:07:05.519
Now here's where my gut starts screaming, and
00:07:05.519 --> 00:07:08.459
I want you to sit with the timeline. David and
00:07:08.459 --> 00:07:10.860
his wife Ruth had been the government's key witnesses
00:07:10.860 --> 00:07:14.079
since the day of their arrest. But according
00:07:14.079 --> 00:07:17.139
to FBI records, neither of them mentioned Ethel
00:07:17.139 --> 00:07:21.019
typing anything, not once, until 10 days before
00:07:21.019 --> 00:07:25.779
trial. 10 days. Ten days before trial, David
00:07:25.779 --> 00:07:28.399
Greenglass suddenly remembers his sister at a
00:07:28.399 --> 00:07:32.339
typewriter, five years after the fact. And Ruth
00:07:32.339 --> 00:07:35.180
Greenglass, who actually faced no charges at
00:07:35.180 --> 00:07:38.560
all, corroborates it on the stand. I'll give
00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:40.839
you that the timing is suspicious on its face,
00:07:40.980 --> 00:07:43.720
but suspicious timing isn't the same as false
00:07:43.720 --> 00:07:46.459
testimony. People do recover memories closer
00:07:46.459 --> 00:07:48.899
to a trial when they're finally asked the right
00:07:48.899 --> 00:07:51.500
question. Except we don't have to guess anymore,
00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:55.680
Eli. In 2001, David Greenglass told New York
00:07:55.680 --> 00:07:58.759
Times reporter Sam Roberts, on the record, that
00:07:58.759 --> 00:08:02.019
he lied. He said he never actually saw Ethel
00:08:02.019 --> 00:08:05.240
typing anything. He only knew about it secondhand,
00:08:05.240 --> 00:08:08.860
from Ruth. He said he testified against his own
00:08:08.860 --> 00:08:11.759
sister to keep Ruth out of prison, so she could
00:08:11.759 --> 00:08:14.680
stay home and raise their kids. Without that
00:08:14.680 --> 00:08:17.000
testimony, I believe she would not have been
00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:19.879
convicted, let alone executed. That's Roberts'
00:08:20.060 --> 00:08:22.360
own assessment, and it's hard to argue with.
00:08:22.500 --> 00:08:25.360
The typewriter was the smoking gun, and the man
00:08:25.360 --> 00:08:28.800
holding it now says the gun was empty. He buried
00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:32.019
his sister and lived another 60 years under an
00:08:32.019 --> 00:08:35.320
assumed name in Queens, trying not to be found.
00:08:38.500 --> 00:08:41.100
Precision has to be honest about the other side
00:08:41.100 --> 00:08:44.059
of this, because it cuts hard against easy sympathy.
00:08:44.649 --> 00:08:48.789
In 1995, the NSA finally declassified the Venona
00:08:48.789 --> 00:08:52.409
Project, decrypted World War II -era Soviet cable
00:08:52.409 --> 00:08:56.110
traffic sitting classified for 50 years. And
00:08:56.110 --> 00:08:59.809
Julius is all over it. Under the codename Liberal,
00:09:00.149 --> 00:09:03.110
one cable has Soviet intelligence worrying about
00:09:03.110 --> 00:09:05.690
overworking him. That's how productive a source
00:09:05.690 --> 00:09:08.909
he was. Combined with co -defendant Morton Sobel's
00:09:08.909 --> 00:09:12.110
own 2008 confession that he and Julius had been
00:09:12.110 --> 00:09:14.710
passing military secrets for years, there is
00:09:14.710 --> 00:09:17.629
no serious historical argument left that Julius
00:09:17.629 --> 00:09:20.710
Rosenberg was innocent. I'm not going to pretend
00:09:20.710 --> 00:09:24.090
otherwise. Even his own sons, who spent decades
00:09:24.090 --> 00:09:26.769
insisting on their father's innocence, came out
00:09:26.769 --> 00:09:29.590
after Sobel's confession and said, in their words,
00:09:29.769 --> 00:09:32.710
they had no reason to doubt it. That's Michael
00:09:32.710 --> 00:09:35.889
and Robert. Two boys, 10 and 6 years old when
00:09:35.889 --> 00:09:38.309
their parents were arrested. We're going to come
00:09:38.309 --> 00:09:40.970
back to them, but finish the cable story first,
00:09:41.190 --> 00:09:43.289
because this is where precision and instinct
00:09:43.289 --> 00:09:46.389
actually agree, and it's rare. Ethel appears
00:09:46.389 --> 00:09:49.830
in exactly one Venona message, not as an agent,
00:09:49.990 --> 00:09:53.049
as a wife. The cable describes her as politically
00:09:53.049 --> 00:09:56.370
sympathetic, in poor health, aware of her husband's
00:09:56.370 --> 00:09:59.149
work. It does not assign her a codename. She
00:09:59.149 --> 00:10:01.960
never transmitted anything. By the government's
00:10:01.960 --> 00:10:04.919
own intercepted communications, she was not treated
00:10:04.919 --> 00:10:08.940
as an operative. A declassified 2025 memo, one
00:10:08.940 --> 00:10:12.259
attributed to the NSA's own lead Venona decryptor,
00:10:12.279 --> 00:10:14.659
put it about as plainly as a government document
00:10:14.659 --> 00:10:20.559
ever puts anything. Ethel was not a spy. So why
00:10:20.559 --> 00:10:23.500
prosecute her at all if the case was this thin?
00:10:23.840 --> 00:10:26.639
Here's my read, and it's not really speculation
00:10:26.639 --> 00:10:29.220
at this point. It's what the prosecutors said
00:10:29.220 --> 00:10:33.379
themselves at the time. Ethel was leverage. The
00:10:33.379 --> 00:10:35.519
government's real target was breaking Julius,
00:10:35.960 --> 00:10:39.000
getting him to name the rest of the ring. The
00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:41.100
threat of executing his wife was the pressure
00:10:41.100 --> 00:10:43.820
they thought would make him talk. He never did.
00:10:44.139 --> 00:10:47.480
He never did. And instead of backing off, they
00:10:47.480 --> 00:10:49.519
carried the leverage all the way through to the
00:10:49.519 --> 00:10:52.820
chair. Because backing off at that point would
00:10:52.820 --> 00:10:54.740
have meant admitting the leverage was empty.
00:10:55.440 --> 00:10:57.779
And here's what turns the leverage theory from
00:10:57.779 --> 00:11:01.240
instinct into paper trail. It wasn't just outside
00:11:01.240 --> 00:11:03.740
critics who thought executing her went too far.
00:11:03.980 --> 00:11:07.480
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the man running
00:11:07.480 --> 00:11:10.320
the entire investigation, recommended against
00:11:10.320 --> 00:11:14.000
it. A memo drafted for him argued no purpose
00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:16.399
would be served by a death sentence for Ethel.
00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:19.860
Hoover wanted 30 years for her, with Julius'
00:11:20.120 --> 00:11:22.799
sentence tied to whether he cooperated. And when
00:11:22.799 --> 00:11:25.220
Judge Kaufman formally consulted the prosecution
00:11:25.220 --> 00:11:28.100
team after the guilty verdict, asking whether
00:11:28.100 --> 00:11:30.299
both Rosenbergs should get the same sentence,
00:11:30.659 --> 00:11:33.980
that team, as a body, was reluctant to back her
00:11:33.980 --> 00:11:37.379
execution too. So the two institutions that actually
00:11:37.379 --> 00:11:40.639
built this case, the FBI that investigated it,
00:11:40.679 --> 00:11:43.480
and the prosecutors who tried it, both leaned
00:11:43.480 --> 00:11:46.559
toward sparing her life. Kaufman had that on
00:11:46.559 --> 00:11:49.000
the record, and he sentenced her to death anyway.
00:11:49.480 --> 00:11:51.860
Which makes what happened next even harder to
00:11:51.860 --> 00:11:54.639
defend. Because the official team being reluctant
00:11:54.639 --> 00:11:57.120
didn't mean nobody was pushing the other way.
00:11:57.360 --> 00:12:00.379
I want to name the judge because precision doesn't
00:12:00.379 --> 00:12:02.559
get to skip the parts of the system that failed
00:12:02.559 --> 00:12:05.769
here. Irving Kaufman presided. Decades later,
00:12:05.990 --> 00:12:09.230
FBI memos, released after a Freedom of Information
00:12:09.230 --> 00:12:12.870
request filed by the Rosenbergs' own sons, showed
00:12:12.870 --> 00:12:15.649
Kaufman had been in private, one -sided contact
00:12:15.649 --> 00:12:18.529
with one member of that prosecution team before
00:12:18.529 --> 00:12:21.990
sentencing, a 23 -year -old assistant named Roy
00:12:21.990 --> 00:12:25.590
Cohn, who broke ranks with his own office's reluctance
00:12:25.590 --> 00:12:28.490
and personally lobbied the judge for death, for
00:12:28.490 --> 00:12:32.360
Ethel specifically. That's a serious breach of
00:12:32.360 --> 00:12:35.139
judicial ethics, confirmed by the paper record,
00:12:35.320 --> 00:12:38.860
not rumor. One ambitious young man, going around
00:12:38.860 --> 00:12:41.840
the very team he worked for, is what closed the
00:12:41.840 --> 00:12:44.059
gap between the government leaned toward mercy
00:12:44.059 --> 00:12:47.259
and the government killed her. That's this whole
00:12:47.259 --> 00:12:50.779
case in a single fact. And this trial makes his
00:12:50.779 --> 00:12:53.879
career. He goes on to be Joseph McCarthy's chief
00:12:53.879 --> 00:12:57.259
counsel. Later in life, he mentors a young real
00:12:57.259 --> 00:12:59.659
estate developer in New York on how to fight
00:12:59.659 --> 00:13:02.480
in public and never apologize. We're not going
00:13:02.480 --> 00:13:05.220
to say the name. You already know it. We don't
00:13:05.220 --> 00:13:07.720
have to connect that dot for you. It's just a
00:13:07.720 --> 00:13:09.679
fact sitting there in the historical record,
00:13:09.940 --> 00:13:14.000
waiting for whoever wants to pick it up. Let's
00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:16.399
stay with Cohn for a minute, because Precision
00:13:16.399 --> 00:13:19.419
thinks his backstory actually explains the climate
00:13:19.419 --> 00:13:22.379
this whole case happened in, not just one man's
00:13:22.379 --> 00:13:25.620
opportunism. My instinct's been itching to get
00:13:25.620 --> 00:13:28.379
here since we said his name the first time. Roy
00:13:28.379 --> 00:13:31.779
Cohn is one of the strangest, most self -contradictory
00:13:31.779 --> 00:13:33.980
figures to walk through 20th century American
00:13:33.980 --> 00:13:38.759
power. Born 1927, Bronx, into money and legal
00:13:38.759 --> 00:13:42.360
pedigree, his father was a judge. Family lore
00:13:42.360 --> 00:13:44.879
has it his own parents' marriage was practically
00:13:44.879 --> 00:13:47.460
a business transaction. His mother's wealthy
00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:50.519
family bankrolled his father's judgeship in exchange
00:13:50.519 --> 00:13:54.029
for the wedding. Cohn is raised from birth in
00:13:54.029 --> 00:13:56.669
a household where ambition and transaction are
00:13:56.669 --> 00:14:00.509
the same language. He's a prodigy on paper, Columbia
00:14:00.509 --> 00:14:03.370
Law School at 20. But everyone who worked with
00:14:03.370 --> 00:14:05.950
him says the same thing. It was never really
00:14:05.950 --> 00:14:09.190
about the law. It was about winning and being
00:14:09.190 --> 00:14:12.289
feared while doing it. The Rosenberg trial is
00:14:12.289 --> 00:14:15.730
his first major national stage at 23 years old.
00:14:15.850 --> 00:14:18.389
And by his own later boasting, he didn't just
00:14:18.389 --> 00:14:21.220
prosecute. He claimed he privately engineered
00:14:21.220 --> 00:14:24.100
which judge got the case and then lobbied that
00:14:24.100 --> 00:14:27.240
judge toward a death sentence. That's not tough
00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:30.799
young lawyer having a big case. That's a 23 -year
00:14:30.799 --> 00:14:33.259
-old deciding two people should die and then
00:14:33.259 --> 00:14:36.320
working the machinery until they did. From there,
00:14:36.320 --> 00:14:38.539
he goes straight to Joseph McCarthy's committee
00:14:38.539 --> 00:14:42.080
as chief counsel, 18 months at the absolute center
00:14:42.080 --> 00:14:45.039
of the anti -communist hearings. Same playbook,
00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:48.720
destroy first, ask questions never. Here's where
00:14:48.720 --> 00:14:51.100
the self -loathing thread comes in. And it's
00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:54.299
not speculation. It's documented. While Cohn
00:14:54.299 --> 00:14:56.679
is helping drive the hunt for communists in government,
00:14:57.000 --> 00:14:59.580
that same McCarthy -era machinery is running
00:14:59.580 --> 00:15:02.799
a parallel purge. Historians call it the Lavender
00:15:02.799 --> 00:15:05.539
Scare, hunting gay men and women out of federal
00:15:05.539 --> 00:15:09.000
jobs as supposed security risks. Cohn himself
00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:12.519
was gay. closeted his entire public life, seen
00:15:12.519 --> 00:15:15.799
for years at Studio 54 with young male companions,
00:15:16.059 --> 00:15:18.840
and denying it to every reporter who asked right
00:15:18.840 --> 00:15:22.120
up to his death. A man helping fuel a persecution
00:15:22.120 --> 00:15:25.240
machine built, in part, to destroy people like
00:15:25.240 --> 00:15:28.559
himself. That's not a footnote. That's the psychological
00:15:28.559 --> 00:15:32.059
engine of the whole era. Paranoia doesn't just
00:15:32.059 --> 00:15:34.700
point outward. It eats the people running it,
00:15:34.700 --> 00:15:38.139
too. He spends the following decades representing
00:15:38.139 --> 00:15:42.100
mob bosses, shipping magnates, Studio 54's owners,
00:15:42.340 --> 00:15:45.620
always ambitious, always operating right at the
00:15:45.620 --> 00:15:48.399
edge of the law, indicted three separate times
00:15:48.399 --> 00:15:51.679
for bribery, perjury, mail fraud, obstruction,
00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:56.659
extortion, never convicted, not once. Until finally,
00:15:56.840 --> 00:16:00.860
in 1986, six weeks before his death, a disciplinary
00:16:00.860 --> 00:16:03.700
panel disbars him for stealing money from a client.
00:16:04.159 --> 00:16:06.879
and a string of other conduct they called particularly
00:16:06.879 --> 00:16:10.620
reprehensible. His response, reportedly, was
00:16:10.620 --> 00:16:13.940
to call the judges a bunch of yo -yos. He was
00:16:13.940 --> 00:16:16.399
dying of AIDS at the time. He told the press
00:16:16.399 --> 00:16:19.519
it was liver cancer all the way to the end. And
00:16:19.519 --> 00:16:21.940
the people he'd spent decades collecting as friends
00:16:21.940 --> 00:16:24.679
and protégés, including the man he'd mentored
00:16:24.679 --> 00:16:26.820
in real estate and public combat starting in
00:16:26.820 --> 00:16:30.039
the 1970s, mostly disappeared once he couldn't
00:16:30.039 --> 00:16:32.580
do anything for them anymore. There's one more
00:16:32.580 --> 00:16:35.279
detail here Precision thinks earns its place.
00:16:35.620 --> 00:16:38.899
Decades later, a documentary examines Cohn's
00:16:38.899 --> 00:16:43.039
entire life. The Rosenberg trial, McCarthy, the
00:16:43.039 --> 00:16:46.159
mob clients, the closeted double life, all of
00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:50.159
it. It's directed by Ivy Mirapole. Julius and
00:16:50.159 --> 00:16:52.799
Ethel's own granddaughter, making a film about
00:16:52.799 --> 00:16:55.019
the man who helped put her grandparents in the
00:16:55.019 --> 00:16:58.240
chair. A boy who prosecuted a case partly built
00:16:58.240 --> 00:17:01.580
on outsider suspicion. Two Jewish radicals, a
00:17:01.580 --> 00:17:04.220
wife used as leverage, grows up to spend his
00:17:04.220 --> 00:17:06.839
whole career hiding an outsider identity of his
00:17:06.839 --> 00:17:09.400
own while helping a system punish people for
00:17:09.400 --> 00:17:12.339
exactly that kind of difference. We're not drawing
00:17:12.339 --> 00:17:14.539
a moral here. We're just telling you who was
00:17:14.539 --> 00:17:18.720
standing in the room. Appeals run for two years.
00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:22.279
The case becomes an international story. Protests
00:17:22.279 --> 00:17:25.900
in over 40 countries. Pope Pius XII appeals for
00:17:25.900 --> 00:17:40.819
mercy. Albert Einstein appeals for mercy. Eisenhower
00:17:40.819 --> 00:17:44.339
denies clemency twice. His stated reasoning is
00:17:44.339 --> 00:17:46.940
that their actions immeasurably increased the
00:17:46.940 --> 00:17:50.180
chances of atomic war. On the evening of June
00:17:50.180 --> 00:17:55.039
19, 1953, timed notably to happen before sundown
00:17:55.039 --> 00:17:57.920
brought in the Jewish Sabbath, Julius is executed
00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:01.160
first. Witnesses describe him going with what
00:18:01.160 --> 00:18:05.440
one reporter called a grotesque smile. Then Ethel.
00:18:05.619 --> 00:18:08.900
And here's the detail I can't get past. Gut or
00:18:08.900 --> 00:18:11.279
evidence, doesn't matter which lens you use.
00:18:11.640 --> 00:18:14.740
The executioner sends three shocks through Julius,
00:18:14.920 --> 00:18:18.180
and he's gone. Ethel takes four, and she's still
00:18:18.180 --> 00:18:21.960
alive. They send a fifth. Smoke was reported
00:18:21.960 --> 00:18:25.180
rising from her head. The woman the government's
00:18:25.180 --> 00:18:27.859
own intercepted cables never gave a codename
00:18:27.859 --> 00:18:31.180
to needed five jolts of 2 ,000 volts to die.
00:18:33.119 --> 00:18:37.279
Michael was 10. Robert was 6. That afternoon,
00:18:37.359 --> 00:18:39.640
they'd been in the death house for a final visit
00:18:39.640 --> 00:18:42.960
with their parents. What happened to them next
00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:45.640
doesn't get told nearly enough, and it should.
00:18:45.880 --> 00:18:48.700
No relative would take them in publicly. The
00:18:48.700 --> 00:18:52.109
family was too radioactive in every sense. They
00:18:52.109 --> 00:18:54.309
were shunted between a shelter, family friends,
00:18:54.670 --> 00:18:57.029
even pushed out of a New Jersey public school
00:18:57.029 --> 00:19:00.049
because of who they were. Their parents' defense
00:19:00.049 --> 00:19:02.950
attorney, Emanuel Block, eventually found them
00:19:02.950 --> 00:19:05.849
a home with a Bronx school teacher named Abel
00:19:05.849 --> 00:19:08.950
Mirapole and his wife, Anne. But before that
00:19:08.950 --> 00:19:11.490
home was found, it was Block himself who stepped
00:19:11.490 --> 00:19:14.690
in. He delivered the eulogy at Julius and Ethel's
00:19:14.690 --> 00:19:17.210
funeral and served as the boys' legal guardian
00:19:17.210 --> 00:19:20.029
in the raw weeks after the execution. while a
00:19:20.029 --> 00:19:23.190
permanent home was still being worked out. He'd
00:19:23.190 --> 00:19:25.950
fought this case for three years, five trips
00:19:25.950 --> 00:19:28.809
to the Supreme Court, two personal pleas to the
00:19:28.809 --> 00:19:31.309
White House for clemency. He gave it everything
00:19:31.309 --> 00:19:34.710
he had left. Seven months after the execution,
00:19:35.230 --> 00:19:37.569
Emanuel Block was found dead in his apartment,
00:19:37.789 --> 00:19:41.710
a heart attack. He was 52. The boys had already
00:19:41.710 --> 00:19:44.750
lost their parents. Within a year, they lost
00:19:44.750 --> 00:19:47.069
the one adult who'd fought hardest to keep that
00:19:47.069 --> 00:19:49.450
from happening. and who'd held them, briefly,
00:19:49.589 --> 00:19:53.430
in the gap between. You may not know Abel Mirapole's
00:19:53.430 --> 00:19:56.569
name. You know his work. Under the pen name Lewis
00:19:56.569 --> 00:20:00.309
Allen, he wrote the song Strange Fruit, the anti
00:20:00.309 --> 00:20:02.650
-lynching song Billie Holiday made immortal.
00:20:03.289 --> 00:20:07.150
A man who wrote 97 words about a government -tolerated
00:20:07.150 --> 00:20:09.769
killing spent the rest of his life raising the
00:20:09.769 --> 00:20:12.289
sons of two people he believed his own government
00:20:12.289 --> 00:20:15.789
had killed unjustly. Michael and Robert took
00:20:15.789 --> 00:20:18.779
the Mirapole name. Robert Mirapole grew up to
00:20:18.779 --> 00:20:21.279
found the Rosenberg Fund for Children, supporting
00:20:21.279 --> 00:20:23.960
kids of targeted activists and political prisoners.
00:20:24.339 --> 00:20:26.940
And both brothers spent the rest of their lives
00:20:26.940 --> 00:20:34.839
trying to get their mother's name clear. The
00:20:34.839 --> 00:20:38.880
Mirapole brothers appealed to Presidents Obama
00:20:38.880 --> 00:20:42.000
and then Biden for a posthumous exoneration of
00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:45.410
Ethel. As of this recording, neither acted. The
00:20:45.410 --> 00:20:49.230
campaign hasn't stopped. Morton Sobel, the third
00:20:49.230 --> 00:20:51.829
defendant convicted alongside them, served over
00:20:51.829 --> 00:20:54.950
18 years, including time at Alcatraz, before
00:20:54.950 --> 00:20:58.869
finally admitting his own guilt in 2008. David
00:20:58.869 --> 00:21:02.910
Greenglass died in 2014 at 92, having spent decades
00:21:02.910 --> 00:21:06.630
living under an assumed name in Queens. And in
00:21:06.630 --> 00:21:09.029
a detail almost too on the nose for fiction.
00:21:09.500 --> 00:21:12.059
Judge Kaufman later became known for a career
00:21:12.059 --> 00:21:14.559
of otherwise liberal, civil liberties protective
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:17.539
rulings. This case followed him for the rest
00:21:17.539 --> 00:21:23.059
of his life. So, precision or instinct? Here's
00:21:23.059 --> 00:21:26.200
where I land. The evidence the government actually
00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:29.019
had on Ethel Rosenberg, at the moment they chose
00:21:29.019 --> 00:21:32.019
to prosecute her, was not evidence of a spy.
00:21:32.680 --> 00:21:36.259
It was a lever. And they used it until it killed
00:21:36.259 --> 00:21:40.700
her. I won't argue, Julius. The cables, Sobel,
00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:44.779
his own sons, that door's closed. But Ethel is
00:21:44.779 --> 00:21:47.240
a different file, and precision has to admit
00:21:47.240 --> 00:21:50.619
when the file is thin. A single Venona mention
00:21:50.619 --> 00:21:53.980
with no codename, a typewriter story that surfaced
00:21:53.980 --> 00:21:56.720
ten days before trial and was recanted decades
00:21:56.720 --> 00:21:59.859
later by the one man who told it. That's not
00:21:59.859 --> 00:22:02.839
proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That's a woman
00:22:02.839 --> 00:22:06.240
used as bait. Two boys stood at the White House
00:22:06.240 --> 00:22:10.099
gates in 1953. asking a president to spare their
00:22:10.099 --> 00:22:13.579
parents. One of them stood there again in 2016,
00:22:14.099 --> 00:22:16.839
an old man now, asking a different president
00:22:16.839 --> 00:22:20.299
to admit the government got it wrong. Nobody
00:22:20.299 --> 00:22:28.720
has yet. If you like tonight's case, the best
00:22:28.720 --> 00:22:30.720
thing you can do is follow the show. It costs
00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:32.960
nothing and it means we get to keep doing this.
00:22:33.140 --> 00:22:35.339
And leave a rating while you're there. It's the
00:22:35.339 --> 00:22:38.089
fastest way to help someone else find us. I'm
00:22:38.089 --> 00:22:40.890
Eli Marchetti. And Simone Valdez. Until next
00:22:40.890 --> 00:22:41.269
time.
