David Greenglass

David Greenglass (March 2, 1922 – July 1, 2014) was an American machinist and atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Greenglass was born in 1922 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City.

His parents, Barnet Greenglass and Theresa "Tessie" Feit, were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, respectively.

Julius Rosenberg, who had married Greenglass' sister, Ethel, in 1939, had become an agent for the Soviet Union (USSR), working under Alexander Feklisov.

He attended Haaren High School, and graduated in 1940.

He attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute but did not graduate.

Greenglass married Ruth Printz in 1942, when she was 18 years old.

The two joined the Young Communist League shortly before Greenglass entered the U.S. Army in April 1943.

They had a son and a daughter.

He worked as a machinist at Fort Ord, California, and then at the Mississippi Ordnance Plant in Jackson, Mississippi.

He was briefly stationed at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico from August 1944 until February 1946.

He provided testimony that helped convict his sister and brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for their spying activity.

Greenglass served nine and a half years in prison.

In July 1944, Greenglass was assigned to the secret Manhattan Project, the wartime project to develop the first atomic weapons.

He was first stationed at the Clinton Engineer Works uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but was there for less than two weeks.

In August 1944 he was sent to the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

In order to pass his security clearance, he disguised or omitted details of his communist associations, and had friends write glowing references.

In September 1944, Feklisov suggested to Rosenberg that he should consider recruiting his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, and his wife.

On September 21, 1944, Feklisov reported to Moscow: "They are young, intelligent, capable, and politically developed people, strongly believing in the cause of communism and wishing to do their best to help our country as much as possible. They are undoubtedly devoted to us."

David wrote to his wife, Ruth: "My darling, I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project [espionage] that Julius and his friends [the Soviets] have in mind."

After Julius Rosenberg recommended his sister-in-law Ruth Greenglass to his NKVD superiors for the use of her apartment as a safe house for photography, the NKVD realized that David Was working on the Manhattan Project.

He was then recruited into Soviet espionage by Ruth at Rosenberg's behest in November 1944.

Greenglass began to pass nuclear secrets to the USSR via the courier Harry Gold, and more directly with a Soviet official in New York City.

According to the Venona project intercepts decrypted by the National Security Agency between 1944 and some time in the 1970s, Greenglass and his wife Ruth were given code names.

David Was codenamed "KALIBR" (Cyrillic: Калибр, "calibre") and Ruth "OSA" (Cyrillic: оса, "wasp").

Greenglass turned down requests from the Los Alamos Laboratory (and Rosenberg) to work on the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll because he wanted to be with Ruth.

He was honorably discharged from the Army on February 29, 1946.

Greenglass returned to Manhattan, where, with his brother Bernie, and Julius Rosenberg, he ran a small machine shop known as G & R Engineering.

On February 14, 1950, Ruth, who was pregnant with their second child, came too close to the gas heater in their Lower East Side apartment, and her nightgown caught on fire.

Greenglass extinguished the blaze, but she suffered severe burns.

She was taken to Gouverneur Hospital for skin grafts.

He suffered second degree burns to his right hand.

He was already aware that the UK and US intelligence agencies had discovered that a Los Alamos theoretical physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had spied for the USSR during the war.

Through Fuchs' confession, they found that one of his American contacts had been a man named Harry Gold from Brooklyn, New York.

Gold had passed Fuchs' information on to a Soviet agent, performing the role of courier, and Anatoli Yakovlev would then pass the information on to his controllers in the USSR.

Through Gold, the FBI's trail led to Greenglass and the Rosenbergs, who had allegedly also used Gold as a courier.

When Fuchs was first captured, Julius allegedly gave the Greenglasses $5,000 to finance an escape to Mexico.

Instead, they went to the Catskills and used the money to seek legal advice.

David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage in June 1950 and quickly implicated Julius Rosenberg.

He explicitly denied his sister Ethel's involvement when he testified before a grand jury in August 1950.