Rosenbergs revisited

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.

As this NY Times article notes, this is no news to historians. Even though many who learned the "facts" of the case years ago still believe in the Rosenbergs' innocence, declassified documents from both the US and the USSR leave no doubt that however aggressive the prosecution, the spy ring was real. Nonetheless, the Times article retains more than a hint of a desire to minimize their guilt, perhaps less out of direct sympathy than out of a reluctance to let go of the witch-hunt meme:

Echoing a consensus among scientists, Mr. Sobell also maintained that the sketches and other atomic bomb details that the government said were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they had already gleaned from other moles. Mr. Greenglass was an Army machinist at Los Alamos, N.M., where the weapon was being built.

"What he gave them was junk," Mr. Sobell said of Julius Rosenberg, his classmate at City College of New York in the 1930s.

Duplicate intelligence is manifestly not "junk". As we have been reminded too often recently, single-source information is often unreliable or incomplete -- that is, when it isn't a complete fabrication, or deliberately misleading. Corroboration is golden: though in hindsight it is easy to say that the Soviets had all the pieces of the puzzle in hand, on the spot you have to have both the pieces and the confidence that they all belong. As it happens, I recall that Soviet documents did indicate that the Rosenbergs' Kremlin spymasters did not think so highly of the information provided -- but it certainly wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the spies.

The grand jury testimony released on Thursday by the National Archives appeared to poke even more holes in the case against Ethel Rosenberg, who was 34 and the mother of two young sons when she appeared before the grand jury and was arrested on the courthouse steps after her testimony.

The crux of the matter, however, is that she too was a committed Communist and well aware of the overall conspiracy -- as the Times reluctantly admits. From what I have read about the investigation and trial, all the conspirators, indicted and not, lied continually and often inconsistently, so a fine parsing of details tends to obscure the big picture -- which is that those found guilty were indeed guilty, as were a large number of those who managed to escape prosecution, by either flight or absence of sufficient evidence (some of which only came to light decades later, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union).

UPDATE: The Washington Post gives the story a short summary today, and misspells "Venona" as "Vanona".

Posted by David on September 12, 2008 8:59 AM