So what was the angle? To agree with them maybe about the entrapment, the frame-up? I could tell them I’d been the victim of smear jobs, too, I knew what they were up against. But if we were going to make it work, they had to trust me, they had to tell me everything. Of course, if they really were who the FBI said they were, then we were back to square one again. Or if they were really as innocent as they claimed to be: same problem — I had to have something to take down to Times Square tonight. But I was convinced the truth lay somewhere in the middle: the Rosenbergs were guilty of something, all right, but not as charged. And if the Rosenbergs could deliver their half, I could probably deliver mine. The FBI had let the word out in a thousand ways that they had the goods on the Rosenbergs locked away in their files, but their repeated declarations on this subject were themselves cause for suspicion — like the Rosenbergs dropping their Daily Worker subscription, it could be read two ways. Those guys over there still hadn’t grown out of their gangbusting days and the Junior G-Men Clubs, they’d built up a fantastic image for themselves in that Golden Age, and now it scared them that somebody might catch them in a fuck-up. I’d met a lot of them, depended on them in fact for my inside dope over the years, but I had to say that most of them are pretty far removed from reality. Putting on disguises and snooping about after other people makes them think everybody else is doing the same thing only better, even their fellow agents, they get very paranoid, and that filing system of theirs with all those tedious and intertangled dossiers has got them more cloistered than a bunch of goddamn medieval monks. And in spite of all their files and snoopers and crime labs and privileged access, they still crack most of their cases because some guy rats on another, in effect using the FBI as his own trigger, or because some agent plays a lucky hunch. Maybe just because a guy looks like a crook. Or a Commie. This is true. They still believe they can identify criminal tendencies by the bones in the face — they run a regular goddamn seminar down there over John Dillinger’s death mask! And Julius Rosenberg had a very unlucky face. He looked like the stoolies, the finks, the unsympathetic first-reel victims of all those old gangster movies — once they saw him, they probably didn’t think twice. After which, the dossier grew and grew. Like Pinocchio’s nose.
Certainly, through all this, one thing became clear. At the heart of this worldwide conflict and crisis lay a simple choice: Who was telling the truth, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or two admitted Reds? At the trial, in the press, in the appeal courts, there was no contest: for what chance did the Rosenbergs have? Kaufman knew this in advance: every juror at the Easter Trial had had to swear under oath that he’d give the same weight to testimony of either an FBI agent or a member of the Communist Party. Of course this was just bullshit, you couldn’t find twelve decent Americans who’d believe a Commie as easily as a G-man, it was simply Kaufman’s way of protecting himself from a mistrial and assuring the prosecutor of a jury willing to fudge a little, but it showed Kaufman knew what the case would ultimately rest on.
Saypol, free from such scruples, could throw the whole weight of the FBI legend against these ghetto outcasts: “There came a day, however, that a vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation broke through the darkness of this insidious business…” He heaped praises on the FBI. So did Kaufman. So did the President, the press and radio, the Attorney General, the nation’s civic clubs and leading politicians…and me, too, for that matter. So did the FBI itself in its own frequent and popular press releases. Not even the Rosenbergs’ own lawyer could stop himself! What did Kaufman and Saypol really believe? Probably that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. Why? Because the FBI said so. Hoover himself had flatly announced the Rosenbergs’ guilt in the nation’s press, who was going to say it wasn’t so? Maybe Edgar believed it all himself, locked away in his inner sanctum, reading all those eager-beaver reports from ambitious agents, fluttering through all those inventories and interviews, surveillance reports and signed confessions. Sometimes the entire FBI file on the case read like a strange remote dialogue between Gold and Hoover — a speaker, reaching for the truth, a hearer, avidly sanctifying the revelations: a sinner and his distant God. At the time of the trial, the newspapers were full of front-page stories announcing that “meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is following other leads on wartime espionage.” Saypol hinted that there was a lot of FBI material he wasn’t free to use because of these continuing investigations (presumably protecting, for example, some new Herbert Philbrick down in the ranks I, but if he could, the stuff would nail the Rosenbergs to the wall, and who in the courtroom or all America doubted this? There probably wasn’t one American in a thousand who had even paused to think about it. No, if Irving Saypol held up a handful of FBI reports and told them to imagine Julius Rosenberg “reaching out like the tentacles of an octopus,” then an octopus is what everyone willingly saw, surprised only that it had a moustache and wore double-breasted suits.
But maybe they were all wrong. Maybe the case constructed against the Rosenbergs had been a complete fabrication, beginning to end, maybe Greenglass was the Herbert Philbrick of this investigation and he’d simply fucked it up, had had to agree to the invented meeting with Gold in order to validate many years of otherwise fruitless effort, save the Old Man’s job. Or worse: maybe even the FBI didn’t know what had happened. Maybe the whole trial had been just an elaborate smoke screen thrown up by the Phantom to conceal the real ring. Perhaps Gold, wilier than anyone had thought, had surrendered to throw the FBI off the track, and the Rosenbergs, innocent of the spying but in on the cover-up, had constructed their tenacious defense to waste Uncle Sam’s energies and draw the FBI into a blind alley. Maybe they were even supposed to have pleaded guilty but chickened out at the last moment — certainly this would explain why until a few months ago they’d been completely disowned by the Communist press and abandoned by their old left-wing friends. So was that it, a calculated deflection? A bit crackpot maybe — or as TIME would say, psychoceramic — but even those clowns over at the FBI had noticed Rosenberg’s “quixotic behavior,” once they’d shown themselves and let him know they were on his taiclass="underline" they’d reported that he’d continued to traffic with the very characters who later got arrested with him, had made ludicrously elaborate preparations for other people to escape while lingering on himself, had made all manner of furtive and suspicious moves while at the same time bragging openly to complete strangers about his undercover exploits. The FBI planted informers in jail with him after he was arrested and following his conviction, and even there he kept right on blabbing away. In effect, in order to satisfy themselves he was indeed the man they wanted, they’d had to conclude he was a nut. Maybe he was. That story he allegedly told the passport photographer about Ethel inheriting an estate in France was pretty far out after all, nearly as good as Harry Gold’s invented family. Providing Rosenberg had ever actually said such a thing: there were a lot of lively imaginations in the FBI, too. But to me all that “quixotic behavior” looked more like a snow job by a couple of con artists, two experienced actors diverting the overeager G-men’s (and later the whole nation’s) attention away from the real thing.