Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
A Family Affair
By Sam Tanenhaus
The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair
by Sam Roberts
Random House, 543 pp., $35.00
The Man Behind the Rosenbergs
by Alexander Feklisov and Sergei Kostin
Enigma Books, 428 pp., $35.00
The Brother is the first full-scale account of the 'atom spies' Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to appear since archival materials released in the 1990s documented their part in a Soviet espionage ring that flourished in the United States during World War II. Sam Roberts, a veteran reporter at The New York Times, draws on the most important new evidence: the VENONA decryptions—intercepted wartime cables sent between Moscow and its KGB stations in the US—and published extracts of relevant Soviet dossiers.[1] He has also added a new layer of detail gleaned from extensive interviews, some fifty hours' worth, with the case's most enigmatic figure, David Greenglass, the younger brother of Ethel Rosenberg who confessed to having spied at Los Alamos and then testified against his sister and brother-in-law in exchange for a reduced sentence in 1951.
Review, 4780 words
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