US:This week the sons of Julius Rosenberg acknowledged he stole non-atomic secrets, writes Denis Staunton
FOR MORE than half a century, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has been a symbol for many on the left of the worst excesses of America's 1950s anti-communist hysteria: the judicial murder of two innocent people on trumped-up spying charges.
The couple, who denied to the very end that they passed military secrets to the Soviet Union, left behind two sons, aged six and 10.
This week, those sons acknowledged for the first time that their father had been a Soviet spy after all and that he had stolen non-atomic military and industrial secrets. The about-face came after Morton Sobell, Julius Rosenberg's co-defendant, admitted that they had been guilty of the spying charges.
"I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," the Rosenbergs' son Michael Meeropol told the New York Times.
"We believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent. But I remember saying to myself in late 1975, maybe a little later, that whatever happens, it doesn't change me. We really meant it, that the truth is more important than our political position."
Conservatives' delight at the admission of Julius Rosenberg's guilt was tempered by newly released trial documents showing that Ethel Rosenberg's conviction was based on perjured testimony.
Meanwhile in a 1983 interview published for the first time this week, Richard Nixon, who was vice-president at the time of the Rosenberg trial, admitted that Ethel should not have been executed.
In July 1950, when Julius Rosenberg was arrested, the US was already in a heightened state of panic about communism and the Soviet Union. The two countries had been allies in the second World War only a few years earlier, but by then, the FBI under J Edgar Hoover was hunting for communists and their sympathisers at every level in American society.
Washington was shocked at the speed with which Moscow had been able to develop atomic weapons and became convinced that the Soviets had access to US military secrets. The Rosenbergs had been members of the Young Communist League and Julius started passing secrets to the Russians during the war, recruiting his brother-in-law David Greenglass, an army machinist at Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was made.
Prosecutors sought to put pressure on Rosenberg to testify against other spies by arresting his wife and charging her with spying too, basing their case on evidence by Greenglass and his wife that Ethel had typed up the reports sent to the Russians.
Grand jury testimony released this week by the National Archives shows, however, that even if Ethel knew about her husband's activities, she took no part in them.
"What was she guilty of? Of being Julius's wife," Sobell said.
The newly released documents include the grand jury testimony of Ruth Greenglass, in which she describes writing in her own longhand the information her husband obtained at the Los Alamos nuclear installation, for passing on to Julius Rosenberg and the Soviet Union.
FBI records show that 10 days before the trial of the Rosenbergs began, Ruth and David Greenglass for the first time mentioned that Ethel Rosenberg had typed those notes.
The prosecutor used the Greenglass testimony as the culmination of his closing speech to the jury, saying that Ethel Rosenberg sat at that typewriter and "struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets".
The Rosenbergs' conviction and death sentence caused outrage across the world, drawing protests from Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Jean- Paul Sartre, and raising allegations of anti-Semitism.
After the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing prison on June 19th, 1953, their sons, Michael and Robert, were adopted and only emerged to reveal their identity 20 years later.
On the day of their execution, the Rosenbergs wrote to their sons: "Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience." The brothers still maintain that, despite Julius Rosenberg's spying, their parents should not have been put to death.
Robert Meeropol said this week that he did not feel betrayed by their final protestation of innocence.
"I can understand that they didn't do the thing they were being killed for. The grand jury testimony taught me more about my parents' social circle. It's a description of a whole bunch of 20-somethings, people who came out of the Depression, not only survived but went to the top of their class and they thought they could change the world.
"They were going to do what they could to make their mark, until it all came crashing down," he told the New York Times.
"What Julius was asked to do was send his best friends to jail and he could not do that. My parents would have to have made a bigger betrayal to avoid betraying me, and frankly I don't consider myself that important."