David Greenglass, Spy Who Helped Seal the Rosenbergs’ Doom

David Greenglass in 1956 at a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Credit Henry Griffin/Associated Press

It was the most notorious spy case of the Cold War — the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union — and it rested largely on the testimony of Ms. Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, whose name to many became synonymous with betrayal.

For his role in the conspiracy, Mr. Greenglass, an Army sergeant who had stolen nuclear intelligence from Los Alamos, N.M., went to prison for almost a decade, then changed his name and lived quietly until a journalist tracked him down. He admitted then, nearly a half-century later, that he had lied on the witness stand to save his wife from prosecution, giving testimony that he was never sure about but that nevertheless helped send his sister and her husband to the electric chair in 1953.

Mr. Greenglass died on July 1, a family member confirmed. He was 92. His family did not announce his death; The New York Times learned of it in a call to the nursing home where he had been living under his assumed name. Mr. Greenglass’s wife, Ruth, who had played a minor role in the conspiracy and also gave damning testimony against the Rosenbergs, died in 2008.

In today’s world, where spying has more to do with greed than ideology, the story of David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs is an enduring time capsule from an age of uncertainties — of world war against fascism, Cold War with the Soviets, and shifting alliances that led some Americans to embrace utopian communism and others to denounce such ideas, and their exponents, as un-American.

Mr. Greenglass, who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a household that believed Marxism would save humanity, was an ardent, preachy Communist when drafted by the Army in World War II, but no one in the barracks took him very seriously, much less believed him capable of spying.

He was not well educated, but his skills as a machinist — and pure luck — led to his assignment in 1944 to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where America’s first atomic bombs were being developed. After being picked to replace a soldier who had gone AWOL, he lied on his security clearance report and was assigned to a team making precision molds for high-explosive lenses used to detonate the nuclear core.

When Mr. Rosenberg, already a Soviet spy, learned of his brother-in-law’s work, he recruited him. Security was often lax at Los Alamos, with safes and file cabinets left unlocked and classified documents lying on desks. Mr. Greenglass had no need for Hollywood spy tricks. He kept his eyes and ears open, and in mid-1945 sent Mr. Rosenberg a crude sketch and 12 pages of technical details on the bomb.

Spy who seduced America

I read this book last year. Coincidence.

Judith Socolov, who as a diminutive Barnard graduate named Judith Coplon was convicted of espionage more than 60 years ago after embracing a utopian vision of communism and falling in love with a Soviet agent, died Saturday in Manhattan.

Wartime Spy

Matt Cardy/Getty Images - Mourners paid their respects on Tuesday at the funeral for Eileen Nearne in Torquay, England. She was a decorated World War II veteran


LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.

But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.

On Tuesday, the anonymity that Ms. Nearne had cherished in life was denied her in death. A funeral service in Torquay featured a military bugler and piper and an array of uniformed mourners. A red cushion atop her coffin bore her wartime medals. Eulogies celebrated her as one of 39 British women who were parachuted into France as secret agents by the Special Operations Executive, a wartime agency known informally as “Churchill’s secret army,” which recruited more than 14,000 agents to conduct espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines.

Funeral costs were paid by the British Legion, the country’s main veterans’ organization, and by anonymous donors who came forward after the circumstances of Ms. Nearne’s death made front-page news in Britain.

The funeral organizers said that in accordance with her wishes, her ashes would be scattered at sea.

Ms. Nearne, known as Didi, volunteered for work that was as dangerous as any that wartime Britain had to offer: operating a secret radio link from Paris that was used to organize weapons drops to the French resistance and to shuttle messages back and forth between controllers in London and the resistance.

After several narrow escapes, she was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Berlin, a camp that was primarily intended for women, tens of thousands of whom died there.

Ms. Nearne survived, though other women working for the Special Operations Executive were executed in the Nazi camps.

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen. Yet they failed to force her to yield the secrets they sought: her real identity, the names of others working with her in the resistance and the assignments given to her by London. At the time, she was 23.

The account she gave her captors was that she was an innocent and somewhat gullible Frenchwoman named Jacqueline Duterte, and that she had been recruited by a local businessman to transmit radio coded messages that she did not understand.

She recalled one interrogator’s attempts to break her will: “He said, ‘Liar! Spy!’ and hit me on the face. He said, ‘We have ways of making people who don’t want to talk, talk. Come with us.’ ”

From Ravensbruck, Ms. Nearne was shuttled eastward through an archipelago of Nazi death camps, her head shaved. After first refusing to work in the camps, she changed her mind, seeing the work assignments as the only means of survival.

In December 1944 she was moved to the Markleberg camp, near Leipzig, where she worked on a road-repair gang for 12 hours a day. But while being transferred yet again, she and two Frenchwomen escaped and eventually linked up with American troops.

Even then, her travails were not over. American intelligence officers initially identified her as a Nazi collaborator and held her at a detention center with captured SS personnel until her account, that she was a British secret agent, was verified by her superiors in London.

Asked by her postwar debriefers how she kept up hope, she replied: “The will to live. Willpower. That’s the most important. You should not let yourself go. It seemed that the end would never come, but I always believed in destiny, and I had a hope.”

“If you are a person who is drowning, you put all your efforts into trying to swim.”

Ms. Nearne was born on March 15, 1921, into an Anglo-Spanish family that later moved to France, where she grew up speaking French.

The family fled to Spain ahead of the German occupation of France, arriving in Britain in 1942. Ms. Nearne, her older sister, Jacqueline, and their brother, Francis, were recruited by the Special Operations Executive. In March 1944, Didi Nearne followed her sister in parachuting into France, remaining there, under the code name Agent Rose, after her sister was airlifted back to Britain.

The Gestapo had infiltrated many of the Allied spying networks, and Ms. Nearne lived on a knife’s edge. On a train journey to a new safe house south of Paris, her cover came close to being blown when a German soldier offered to carry her suitcase, which contained her secret radio. After telling him that it contained a gramophone, she hurriedly got off the train and walked with the case the rest of the way.

Describing how she lived undercover, she said after the war: “I wasn’t nervous. In my mind, I was never going to be arrested. But of course I was careful. There were Gestapo in plain clothes everywhere. I always looked at my reflection in the shop windows to see if I was being followed.”

In July 1944, the Gestapo arrived at her Paris hide-out moments after she had completed a coded transmission. She burned the messages and hid the radio, but the Germans found the radio and the pad she had used for coding the transmissions.

Parts of her story were later told in books written about wartime secret operations, including the 1966 history “SOE in France, 1940-1944,” by Michael Foot, part of a government history series by authors given special access to secret government records.

But wartime friends said after her death, on Sept. 2, that she had found it difficult to adjust to peacetime life, and a medical report in the government archives said she was suffering from psychological symptoms brought on by her wartime service. She never married, and she lived alone after her sister died in 1982.

Friends said that she withdrew into herself and shunned all opportunities to earn celebrity from her wartime experiences. In 1993, she returned to Ravensbruck for a visit, but otherwise she cherished her anonymity. As she told an interviewer several years before she died: “It was a life in the shadows, but I was suited for it. I could be hard and secret. I could be lonely. I could be independent. But I wasn’t bored. I liked the work. After the war, I missed it.”

September 21, 2010: Eileen Nearne, Wartime Spy, Dies at 89. By JOHN F. BURNS

U.K. spy held sway in Africa

others:
http://news.scotsman.com/obituaries/Obituary-Daphne-Park-Baroness-Park.6186737.jp
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7078662.ece
photo from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7076407.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7521495/Baroness-Park-of-Monmouth-the-Queen-of-Spies-dies-aged-88.html

Daphne Park, aged 23, in 1944 in her FANY uniform

PARK--Daphne Sybil Margaret Desiree, Baroness Park of Monmouth CMG OBE died on Wednesday, 24 March, 2010, aged 88. Revered, respected and loved by friends, family and colleagues in the UK and around the world. Funeral on Tuesday, 6 April at 2:30pm, Somerville College Chapel, Oxford. Memorial Service to be announced later.
Published in New York Times on March 30, 201


Daphne Park 1921-2010


From THE TIMES OF LONDON

Daphne Park was once called the greatest woman intelligence officer in the world. It was just the sort of remark to make her angry, not because she disliked being acknowledged as a spy but because of the female tag.

"Why woman intelligence officer?" Ms. Park would ask. Within Britain's Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, where she worked for 30 years, Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park became a legend. Ms. Park, who died March 24 at age 88, retired in 1979 after a career in which she avoided summary execution on several occasions by quick thinking. She then forged new careers as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford and as a member of the House of Lords.

As an SIS officer, she enjoyed extraordinary influence, especially in Africa. Ms. Park was raised in Africa and won a scholarship to Oxford. In 1959, SIS posted her to the Belgian Congo, the year before it became independent. She once escaped death after being seized by soldiers who claimed that a tape in her handbag was a smuggled recording of Patrice Lumumba, one of the Congo's new leaders, who was then in jail, calling on his people to rise up.

British-born Israeli spy

David Kimche, who died on March 8 aged 82, was a British-born Israeli spy and diplomat who slipped between the covert and overt domains of foreign affairs, building both the fearsome reputation of his country's intelligence service and its valuable official ties to other nations.

Kimche (centre) with US chief delegate Morris Draper (R) and Lebanese negociator Antoine Fattal (L), after the three completed their marathon negociations that produced the agreement between Israel and Lebanon to begin the withdrawal of foreign troops fro Photo: AFP

As deputy head until 1980 of the Israeli external security service, the Mossad, Kimche was deeply involved in Operation Wrath of God – the plot to assassinate the terrorists who had killed 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Kimche ensured that, rather than eliminating the terrorists with a straightforward sniper's bullet, Mossad used more sophisticated methods (booby-trapped mattresses or telephones) that both burnished the agency's own reputation and struck fear into potential future targets.


"We wanted to make them afraid of being a terrorist," he said. "We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. This was a message that they can be got at anywhere, at any time and therefore they have to look out for themselves 24 hours a day."


Long before the recent furore over the use of foreign passports by Mossad for its assassination operations abroad, Kimche was at the heart of a similar scandal. As Mossad was being ticked off by Whitehall for using fake British documents for Wrath of God "hits", Kimche was applying to have his own, genuine, British passport renewed.

"This is really extraordinary," one Foreign Office official noted. "At the same time as the minister is about to protest to the Israeli ambassador over the misuse of British passports for Israeli intelligence operations, we are apparently contemplating issuing a British passport to a man who may well have been in charge of the operation complained of."

Chutzpah.

But Kimche was by no means a stereotypical Israeli blood-and-guts man of war. He was an urbane and cultivated official diplomat, who, as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1980 to 1987, drew on his extraordinary contacts to bring his nation out of the cold at a time when many foreign partners, fearful of an Arab oil-embargo, were minded to shun the Jewish state. No one will now be able to say for sure exactly where Kimche exerted most influence. But it is certain that he had long experience dealing with the Soviet Union and African nations.

Inevitably he focused on building ties with the Arab world: "You have to be very sensitive. You have to understand Arab society," he once said. "Above all, you have to be sensitive to their feelings and their attitudes. I've had a lot of dealings with the Arab world. I find it interesting."

This boundless interest in people and places was one of Kimche's great assets both in the overt and covert domains. His friends said he was a well-rounded man, not purely focused on operational intrigue. "The fact is that I know the world fairly well," Kimche conceded. "The fact is that I know how to make contacts with people. This enables me to do things that many others don't know how to do."

David Kimche, usually known as Dave, was born in London in 1928 to an aristocratic Jewish family with Swiss roots. His parents and brother, Jon, were active Zionists, and Dave left Britain Palestine in 1946, fighting in the war two years later that accompanied Israel's creation. He then joined the Jerusalem Post before joining Mossad in 1953. His postings to Africa and Asia, often under journalistic cover and using the name David Sharon, were designed to create an Israeli sphere of influence on the periphery of the Arab world.

A frequent tactic was to approach Christian ethnic groups and offer support in civil wars or uprisings against Muslim rivals. In this role Kimche became known as the "Man with the Suitcase", appearing in various African states shortly before dramatic coups and disappearing again quickly afterwards. There was rarely room for scruple in this "Great Game" strategy, and among the Israeli proteges on the continent was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. No state was too remote to prove useful, however, and Israel sought and secured allies from Central America to South East Asia.

By the late 1970s, Kimche's covert work was proving crucial in the delicate peace negotiations with Egypt. Using contacts in north Africa, he is thought to have convinced Morocco's King Hassan to broker talks between Jerusalem and Cairo. But Kimche, by then deputy-director of Mossad, fell out with his boss, Yitzhak Hofi, and, in 1980, he resigned to join the Foreign Ministry. It was there that he almost came unstuck. The caution inherent to covert work seemed to give way to adventurism as he championed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 where, true to form, he backed Christian militias – which then went on to carry out massacres at Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Chatila. It was in Lebanon too, that Kimche almost became snared by a web of intrigue that stretched from Nicaragua to Tehran.

Following the suggestion that Iran could use its influence with Hizbollah to win the release of American hostages held by the Lebanese militant group, Israel agreed to sweeten Tehran by supplying the regime there with weapons, in defiance of an arms embargo. The CIA funnelled profits from the deals to anti-communist rebels, or Contras, that it was backing in Nicaragua.

Fall out from the so-called Iran-Contra affair proved deeply damaging, and afterwards there was a suspicion that the idea had originated with Kimche. But he retained his contacts in Iran. In 1991, after he had officially retired to pursue "business interests", an American television team reporting in Tehran found that, "whenever we went to interview Islamic revolutionary government officials, David Kimche seemed to be just leaving their offices". But an undercover relationship with a sworn enemy inevitably produced worrying and comical moments.

"I was in Hamburg for discussions with a certain ayatollah," he once recalled. "The talks went on into the night, ending at 2am. Then the Iranians beckoned us to go with them.'We have something to show you,' they said, and drove us into the depths of Hamburg's dockland. We stopped outside a warehouse and were led up an unlit staircase. I felt quite nervous when we suddenly emerged into a huge chamber. The light went on – and spread before us was an extraordinary spectacle: a huge collection of magnificent carpets once owned by the Shah of Persia. They had been shipped out for sale to finance the Mullahs' revolution." Sadly for Kimche, his salary could not stretch to meet the price of the treasures on display.

In his later years, Kimche, ever the pragmatist, focused on achieving a peace settlement with the Palestinians. He had previously sought to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) of Yasser Arafat ("Arafat was our mortal enemy" he said). But having weakened the PLO, he later accepted that "like it or not, Mr. Arafat is the only Palestinian leader with the power to curb violence and work out an enduring ceasefire, let alone a peace accord." Even after Arafat's death, and despite endless failures that hardened mistrust among people on both sides, Kimche kept at behind-the-scenes peace efforts. In his last years, and as informed as anyone of Israel's capacity to strike at its enemies if need be, he was in a position, perhaps, to be more trusting than most.

"I do not share what I regard as the Diaspora mentality of seeing danger under every rock we pick up," he says. "I do not believe that a Palestinian state poses a danger in any way or form. Whether the territories become a part of Jordan or a Palestinian state, neither will pose a threat to Israel."


David Kimche, the author of several books on foreign affairs, married twice. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and four children

Vera Atkins, Spymaster

 The confessions she obtained from the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. She always shuddered at Höss's reaction to her suggestion that 1.5 million people had been killed in Auschwitz. "Oh no," he said, as if offended. "It was 2,345,000."

One agent, George Millar, recalled in his autobiography, "Road to Resistance,"( Little, Brown, 1980), how she had reacted to his falling in love -- again. "Oh, the bloody English!" she said. "We never have bother of this sort with the French. They just copulate, and that is that."

Vera Atkins, 92, Spymaster for British, Dies - June 27, 2000

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vera Atkins, who recruited, trained and watched over the legendary British secret agents who parachuted into France to sabotage the Nazis in World War II, died on Saturday in Hastings, Sussex. She was 92.

Vera AtkinsAlthough Ian Fleming never identified her, Ms. Atkins was widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond series. She was principal assistant to Col. Maurice Buckmaster, director of the Special Operations Executive, who is said to have been the model for "M."

But Ms. Atkins's steel-trap intelligence and fierce loyalty to agents who had been warned their chances of surviving were barely one in two were a far cry from Miss Moneypenny's lovestruck mooning over the elusive Bond. Ms. Atkins's heart was with her 400 secret agents. She stood on the runway to watch each take off to parachute into France.

After the war, when the tally of lost agents turned out to be a little worse than 1 in 4, Ms. Atkins pushed to be assigned to investigate each of the 118 cases. She traced 117, all dead, and brought their surviving killers to war crimes trials. The 118th had been, unknown to her, a compulsive gambler who vanished not far from Monte Carlo while carrying three million francs of secret service money.

"I could not just abandon their memory," she said. "I decided we must find out what happened to each one, and where."

She spent nearly a year questioning officers from concentration camps and poring over records. "I was probably the only person who could do this," she said. "You had to know every detail of the agents, names, code names, every hair on their heads, to spot their tracks."

The confessions she obtained from the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, were used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. She always shuddered at Höss's reaction to her suggestion that 1.5 million people had been killed in Auschwitz.

"Oh no," he said, as if offended. "It was 2,345,000."

Ms. Atkins was born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Bucharest, Romania, and went to London with her parents in 1933, where she adopted her mother's last name. She studied modern languages at the Sorbonne and went to finishing school at Lausanne. Her perfect French and her just as perfect manners would come in handy later.

At the outbreak of the war, she joined the Special Operations Executive, which Winston Churchill set up "to set Europe ablaze" through sabotage and subversion. The unit started slowly. But after victory in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "It was the equivalent of 15 divisions."

Hitler said, "When I get to London I am not sure who I shall hang first -- Churchill or that man Buckmaster."

Hitler, perhaps, did not know about Buckmaster's assistant, Ms. Atkins.

The spymasters headed the unit's F section, for France. They began by interviewing candidates in a hotel room with a desk, two chairs and a lightbulb. After the initial questioning, they had a general conversation in French to see whether the applicant could pass as a native. Each successful candidate was told that he had a 50-50 chance of survival and given a few days to think about it.

The recruits were a remarkable cross-section -- bankers and playwrights, chefs and taxicab drivers. Gen. Charles de Gaulle had insisted that the unit not recruit French citizens, while demanding that he control the agents. Most of those selected were half-French British citizens.

The initial training was at a 16th-century country house where they had no contact with the outside world. Next came a commando course in the Scottish Highlands, where they learned about guns and explosives. Then there was a survival course in Hampshire, followed by parachute training near Manchester.

They were given practice in being interrogated and keeping up their cover stories by going over and over their false identities and backgrounds.

It was Ms. Atkins who briefed the agents in minute detail on how to live in occupied France with its curfew and regulations. They were given continental clothing and French mementos, ticket stubs, letters and keepsakes to put in their pockets.

At last, they were dropped in France, to be met by reception committees. Each evening, they received their orders in coded personal messages broadcast after the news on the BBC French Service.

Ms. Atkins had no rank, but the blunt force of her personality, described by The Times of London as a "sledgehammer," pervaded the operation. She worked 18-hour days. A British television documentary in 1997 reported that she sent off each agent with the brisk shout of a French expletive.

One agent, George Millar, recalled in his autobiography, "Road to Resistance,"( Little, Brown, 1980), how she had reacted to his falling in love -- again. "Oh, the bloody English!" she said. "We never have bother of this sort with the French. They just copulate, and that is that."

Usually she remained in the shadows. But the accounts of some heroes whom she controlled eventually came to the fore. Four agents were captured separately, given fatal injections and burned in ovens. Violette Szabo, who was tortured and shot, became famous. So did Odette Sansom, who refused to talk even when the Gestapo pulled out her toenails one by one. She was the first woman awarded the George Cross and was the subject of a 1951 movie that took its title from her first name.

Ms. Atkins, who did not marry and has no known survivors, worked to keep the memory of the Resistance alive. She was appointed a Commandant of the Legion of Honor in 1987.

She traveled a great deal, but settled in a cottage left her by an aunt at Winchelsea, from which, on a clear day, you can see France.