Ethel Rosenberg and the Bridge Table Testimony That Sent Her to Sing Sing

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On June 19, 1953, Sing Sing moved the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg up to 8 p.m. so it would finish before the Sabbath, and Ethel survived the first three shocks and needed two more. The episode traces how two children of Jewish immigrant families on the Lower East Side met through the Young Communist League in 1936 and married in 1939. Julius, a City College engineering graduate working as an Army Signal Corps inspector at Fort Monmouth, was recruited by the NKVD on Labor Day 1942 through Semyon Semyonov and passed thousands of reports, including a complete proximity fuze. His real value was recruiting college friends such as Morton Sobell and William Perl, who supplied P-80 Shooting Star jet drawings, and later Ethel's brother David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos.

After the Soviet atomic test of August 1949, Klaus Fuchs led investigators to Harry Gold, Gold to Greenglass, and Greenglass to Julius, arrested in July 1950. J. Edgar Hoover wrote that charging Ethel would be a lever to make Julius talk, and she was arrested at the courthouse after invoking the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury. Ten days before the March 1951 trial, David and Ruth Greenglass changed their accounts to say Ethel typed the atomic notes on a bridge table, supplying the overt act prosecutors needed, and charges against Ruth were dropped. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced both to death. The Venona decrypts released in 1995 and later archives confirmed Julius's espionage, while KGB files and a 2024 NSA memo describe Ethel as aware but not active.

• Judge Kaufman blamed the couple for Korean War casualties numbering over 50,000.
• Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Pope Pius XII sought clemency, and Jean-Paul Sartre called the execution a legal lynching.
• Venona identified Julius under the code names Antenna and later Liberal, but the cables could not be used at trial without revealing the broken codes.
• In a 2001 televised interview David Greenglass said he believed his wife Ruth did the typing and that he chose to protect her and his children.
• General Leslie Groves privately rated the Greenglass material as of minor value to the Soviet bomb effort.