((c)) 1994 by Pavel A. Sudoplatov and Anatoli P. Sudoplatov, Jerrold Schecter, and Leona Schecter. From SPECIAL TASKS: THE MEMOIRS OF AN UNWANTED WITNESS to be published by Little, Brown and Company, (Inc.)

In the summer of 1950, an apparently unremarkable young couple went on trial for conspiracy to commit espionage. Even before their execution three years later, they had become, to their sympathizers in the U.S. and abroad, the innocent victims of a government conspiracy fueled by the obsessive fear of communism.

When I first learned of the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1950 from a TASS report, I was not concerned about it. This might strike some as odd, but we had hundreds of agents in the U.S., not including illegals, sources and informers. As the director of Department S, I was familiar with our personnel, though not with any but the most important sources; the Rosenbergs were not important or significant sources of information. I considered the whole affair to be routine business.

The Rosenbergs were recruited by Gaik Ovakimian, our resident in New York in 1938. They were absolutely separate from my major networks gathering atomic secrets. In the summer of 1945, shortly before the first nuclear-test explosion, a report had been prepared by David Greenglass, code name Caliber, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg. Greenglass was an army sergeant working in a Los Alamos, New Mexico, machine shop. The courier scheduled to pick up his report could not make the trip, and Anatoli Yatskov, eager to supply the report to Moscow and authorized by the Center, ordered Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs' courier, to substitute. Gold met Fuchs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then went to Albuquerque to pick up the report from Greenglass. The Center had broken the first commandment: never allow an agent or courier from one cell to have contact with, or know the members of, another group. When Gold was arrested in 1950, he identified Greenglass, who incriminated the Rosenbergs.

The irony is that the Rosenbergs are portrayed by the American counterintelligence service as the key figures in delivering atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, but actually they played a very minor role. They were a naive couple, overeager to cooperate, who worked for us because of their ideological motivations. Their contribution to atomic espionage was minor.

It was clear from the very beginning that the case had acquired a political character far out of proportion to their actual role as spies. More important than their spying activities was that the Rosenbergs served as a symbol in support of communism and the Soviet Union. Their bravery to the end served our cause because they became the center of a worldwide [anti-U.S.] communist-propaganda campaign.