Spy House Bed and Breakfast in Albuquerque
I’m no stranger to lodgings with a past. In my travels, I’ve shared quarters with everyone from the ghost of a Cajun girl to the shadowy form of an Irish stone builder, and once got to stay in a room formerly occupied by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (neither he nor Gatsby made an appearance).
But a bed-and-breakfast in Albuquerque provided my first chance to sleep in the room of a convicted spy. The appropriately named Spy House, an Arts and Crafts-style bungalow, played a key role in one of the most controversial chapters of the Cold War period: the espionage of Harry Gold, his conspirator, David Greenglass, and his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
On a June day in 1945, Gold visited an apartment Greenglass shared with his wife, Ruth. He was to deliver certain documents, but first had to verify Greenglass’ identity. Gold handed Greenglass a piece of cardboard cut from a Jell-O box, which Greenglass matched to his own fragment. The spy had met the courier.
In return for $500, Greenglass, who worked at the nuclear labs in Los Alamos, gave Gold drawings
The Greenglass Room at Spy House
that detailed the implosion effect needed to trigger an atomic reaction. Gold’s mission was to deliver the drawings to the Russians.
However, the Russians didn’t have time to use the drawings. Less than a month later, the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and followed three days later with a similar device over Nagasaki.
A few years later, U.S. and U.K. intelligence agents found Gold, who led them to Greenglass and the Rosenbergs. In 1951, Gold and Greenglass were convicted of espionage, and served prison terms of 15 years and 10 years, respectively. Greenglass’ sister and brother-in-law, against whom he testified, got the electric chair.
Today, the renovated property hardly seems spy-like. The current owners, Kara and Steve Grant, who purchased the house in 2004, tore out walls, have retained the handsome original woodwork and leaded glass windows, while freshening and updating the four-room inn –– and the adjoining Heritage House B&B–– to make them suitable for guests. Three of the rooms in the Spy House take their names from the notorious figures at the center of the case: Gold, Rosenberg and Greenglass.
All of the rooms appealed to me, but the choice of where to stay was obvious: I wanted to sleep with the ghost of a Soviet agent. The room, now painted a cherry yellow, is smaller than many of the others. An ordinary-looking table that with flat-screen television offers one of the few clues that there more than meets the eye at this B&B. Once, a little over 60 years ago, the table held drawings reportedly sketched by Greenglass that showed how to destroy the world.
When I touched the table, a shiver ran up my arm. In the Spy House, the political becomes very personal.
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