The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

The updated, expanded edition of our book, Invitation to an Inquest, reviewed by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton [NYR, July 21], contains new chapters based on some 200,000 pages of FBI and other government documents relating to the Rosenberg-Sobell case. These documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by means of an eight-year-long legal battle waged—against the determined opposition of the FBI—by attorney Marshall Perlin on behalf of the Rosenbergs’ sons. The bureau still is withholding tens of thousands of files and a substantial proportion of those released are heavily censored. Clearly, in working with such rich yet problematic source material, questions of accuracy and authenticity are bound to arise and some honest differences of interpretation between researchers would hardly be surprising. What separates us from Radosh and Milton, unfortunately, are not such honest differences. Their attack on us—both in their review and book—frustrates rational discourse because their arguments rely on distortions, omissions, and, all too often, outright falsifications.

It is not true, as Radosh and Milton claim, that we have failed to undertake “a full-scale review” of the FOIA files concerning Elizabeth Bentley, the prison informer Jerome Tartakow, or the alleged spy ring. What is true is that some material on those subjects that they have included in their own book, material crucial to their conclusion that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were guilty, does not appear in our new chapters. The reason, to put it bluntly, is that this material also does not appear in any of the FOIA files: It has been invented by Radosh and Milton. Detecting these derelictions is not easy because many of their statements are not supported by any source citation, some citations are erroneous, and their identification of FBI files is so inadequate (providing neither file nor serial numbers) that it can take hours or even days to locate a single item—even when one is as familiar with the archive as we are.

A further problem in evaluating their accuracy arises from their use of interviews (Radosh has indicated that he will not make transcripts available to other historians). Our decision to conduct no interviews for the new chapters in Invitation to an Inquest, because of our reluctance to rely on unsupported recollections of events that happened over thirty years ago, is faulted by Radosh and Milton in their review. They quote derisively from the statement in our book that we chose “to listen instead to the voices that speak from the files in words unaltered by the passage of time.” Their book, on the other hand, is replete with interviews, some of which—we have discovered—were altered considerably, even without the passage of time. For example, on pages 56-57 of their book are three seemingly decisive interviews with ex-Communist Party functionaries Max Gordon, Junius Scales, and John Gates. The latter two are quoted to the effect that they knew of the Rosenbergs’ involvement in espionage long before their arrest. According to Radosh and Milton, these interviews “provide circumstantial corroboration of the Green-glasses’ version of events.” But when we contacted Gordon, Scales, and Gates, each in turn unequivocally denied the statements attributed to him.

An added impediment to follow-up scrutiny of the Radosh-Milton sources is their frequent resort to quoting unidentified persons. In their book, they present material from a “well-known left-wing lawyer,” a “well-known and influential left-wing journalist, whose confidentiality we are respecting,” an “anonymous source who is close to [Roy] Cohn,” a “lawyer who has requested anonymity,” a “venerable and well-established Communist party lawyer,” and “a source close to the Rosenberg defense effort over the years.” They cite the latter source twice: to substantiate a close friendship between prison informer Tartakow and Communist Party General Secretary Eugene Dennis (which they say explains why Rosenberg confessed his crimes to Tartakow), and to back their astonishing claim that Dennis gave Tartakow “a letter of reference” to Rosenberg defense attorney Emanuel Bloch (pp. 293 and 314). In this instance we know that the unidentified source is an individual who was previously named by Radosh in the New Republic but who firmly repudiated in a letter to that publication the information attributed to her.¹ In any event, this individual could not possibly have had any direct knowledge of the relationship or incident for which she is cited as an anonymous source, since she was less than ten years old at the time.

Exemplifying Radosh and Milton’s brand of historiography is their treatment of Elizabeth Bentley, a major prosecution witness at the Rosenberg-Sobell trial in 1951. The files show that in 1945 she gave a statement to the FBI about a group of New York City engineers, one of whom she knew as “Julius.” (“However, I do not believe this was his true name.”) In her FBI statement, Bentley said that in 1943 “Julius and the others in the group” moved to Norfolk, Virginia, “where they secured employment of some kind” and, apparently, obtained naval data for the Russians.² Julius Rosenberg could not have been the “Julius” described in Bentley’s story. He never lived or worked in Norfolk, nor was he ever employed on any naval projects. Nor did any of the other men the FBI named in the files as suspected members of a Rosenberg spy ring ever work in Norfolk.

Radosh and Milton refuse to face these simple facts. In a chapter titled “Elizabeth Bentley: The Norfolk Connection,” they admit that “Julius Rosenberg had never worked in Norfolk.” But they insist that Bentley’s story about people who moved to Norfolk in 1943 did apply to Rosenberg and offer the following “evidence”: A Rosenberg classmate, William Perl, resided during this period in Hampton, Virginia, while employed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; in 1945, a Rosenberg acquaintance, Alfred Sarant, wrote a letter to the Navy Bureau of Ships; at some undesignated time and place, an unidentified CCNY classmate of Rosenberg’s, “never involved in espionage,” did work for the Navy on sonar; and Morton Sobell once visited a ship at Norfolk without proper authorization (pp. 230-231). Radosh and Milton do not dignify this mélange with a single source citation.

Their pièce de résistance, of course, is the last item—the only one that claims the actual presence of someone in Norfolk. They write: “…the Bureau knew that on one occasion…Sobell had gone to Norfolk and boarded a ship that housed fire-control devices and other material of a classified nature and received a briefing for which he technically did not have clearance.” Even if Morton Sobell had once boarded a Navy ship at Norfolk it would hardly establish that in 1943 Julius Rosenberg had a “Norfolk connection.” But Sobell never did. The item is false. No document describing a visit by Sobell to Norfolk exists in the FOIA files.³

In their review, Radosh and Milton find our utilization of FOIA files on Tartakow and the spy ring “highly selective,” presumably as compared with their book. But on these subjects also their book contains invented data and omits relevant information. Regarding the prison informer to whom Rosenberg was supposedly confessing the innermost secrets of his spy ring, Radosh and Milton write: “One of the things the Bureau wanted most from Jerry Tartakow was a lead that might help them to build an espionage case against William Perl.” Eventually, “Tartakow came through by telling his interviewers of a specific incident.” He claimed that on a July 4th weekend Perl “removed some secret files” from a Columbia University physics laboratory and took them to Rosenberg’s apartment to photograph. The bureau found, “to their amazement,” that Tartakow’s story “fit the facts.” Agents discovered that at Columbia’s Pupin Lab during the appropriate period “Perl had checked out and signed for a huge amount of classified material” and “had also checked out substantial numbers of reports in May and June of that same year (1948)” (pp. 297-300).

This is not proof of espionage, but it is as close as Radosh and Milton get anywhere in their book. However, their statement that the FBI discovered that Perl “checked out and signed for” classified material is false. No FOIA document that we have seen makes any such claim, and the source cited in the Radosh-Milton book (p. 537) could not be located despite an extensive search. In any event, a Justice Department report on the subject notes that “there was no system for checking out material,” and observes: “Investigation at Columbia University failed to disclose evidence that Perl removed any classified material at Columbia University.”⁴

The only verifiable parts of the Columbia story were Perl’s presence at the school and the existence of classified material there. Radosh and Milton believe that Tartakow could only have learned these facts from Julius Rosenberg. However, a more likely source was the FBI, which already had the requisite information. (A year before Tartakow told his story, FBI agent John P. Buscher had made a detailed review of all material forwarded to Columbia’s Pupin Lab during the period Perl worked there.)⁵ Radosh and Milton object that “it makes no sense” to suggest that the FBI fed data to Tartakow (p. 534). But one value of Tartakow’s statements to the FBI became manifest in 1953 when Hoover, to forestall the possibility of presidential clemency, dispatched a top-secret memorandum to the Attorney General citing the informer’s charges against Perl and others as extra-judicial proof of the Rosenbergs’ guilt.⁶

Radosh and Milton’s contention that Perl and others were part of a larger spy ring was first voiced by the FBI over thirty years ago. The problem today remains the same as it was then: suspicion without evidence. In addition to the defendants, the FBI regarded more than a dozen men and women as spy ring suspects. Nearly all stayed in the United States, where they underwent years of investigation, job loss, and other hardships—but never were charged with espionage. Two became expatriates whose whereabouts were unknown. Joel Barr, an engineer fired for his left-wing politics, had been living in Western Europe since early 1948. Alfred Sarant, also a leftist, was an engineer working as an Ithaca, New York, painting contractor. In 1950, after Rosenberg’s arrest, the FBI searched Sarant’s home for a week (with his permission) and he was interrogated continually, surveilled, and accused of espionage, which he denied. Three weeks later he and his lover, Carol Dayton, eluded the bureau and went to Mexico. Each abandoned a spouse and young children. A few years ago the former Carol Dayton contacted family members in the United States for the first time and she has since corresponded and met with some of them. According to family members, she and Sarant lived in Mexico for six months during which time she decided not to return. They married, moved to Prague and later the Soviet Union, and had four children. Sarant had a successful career as an engineer-scientist and died of a heart attack in 1979. Less is known about the wanderings of Barr, who has also been out of touch with relatives, but he is reportedly living and working in the Soviet Union. How they chose to live their lives is a story with many human mysteries but, as far as we have any basis for knowing, it is not a spy story. If the FBI has any evidence to the contrary, it should be released. But this seems unlikely. In March 1951 Assistant Attorney General James McInerney inquired of US Attorney Saypol “what action should be taken by the FBI in the event Alfred Sarant re-enters the United States” and Saypol responded: “…there is insufficient evidence at the present time to warrant filing a complaint against Sarant in this district on any possible federal charge.”⁷ That statement is not mentioned in the Radosh-Milton book.