Give us the real scoop. Did the Venona Project establish beyond a doubt that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as spies in 1953 but proclaimed their innocence, were Soviet agents? –Jim D., Medford, Massachusetts
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The trial of the Rosenbergs, the only U.S. civilians ever executed for espionage, was one of the most notorious episodes of the cold war. Among other things Julius was accused of persuading his brother-in-law David Greenglass, a technician at the Los Alamos nuclear lab, to divulge design details for the implosion device needed to trigger the bomb, which were then passed to the Soviets. After a three-week trial, the Rosenbergs were convicted in March 1951 and sentenced to death. The verdict predictably outraged the left–both defendants had been Communists in the 30s–but even Pope Pius XII made a pitch for clemency. The critics fell into two camps: some believed the defendants were innocent; others felt that, regardless of guilt, the sentence was too harsh. The authorities were unmoved. Their appeals exhausted, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted in June 1953.
Still, that doesn’t mean he and his wife deserved the death penalty. True, the Espionage Act of 1917, under which the Rosenbergs were convicted, permitted execution for spying “in time of war.” But you’d think it might count for something that during World War II, when the couple passed along their ill-gotten secrets, the Soviet Union was an ally. For just that reason the UK was obliged to spare the life of physicist Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized British citizen, who confessed to giving information from the Manhattan Project and the British nuclear program to the Soviets and was sentenced to 14 years. The U.S. legal system drew no such fine distinctions. Sentencing judge Irving Kaufman blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War and said what they’d done was “worse than murder.” Come now. We know today that the Soviets obtained A-bomb secrets from multiple sources–Venona files indicate they had some 350 informants in the U.S. government. Even at the time it was widely assumed that Fuchs had provided the core technical know-how, with the Rosenbergs merely confirming the details. (Actually, some now think the Greenglass info may have given the Russians their first insight into a key feature of imploder design.) But in the hysterical atmosphere of the early cold war–the Russians had detonated their first atom bomb less than a year before the Rosenbergs were arrested–nobody with a say in the matter, up to and including the Supreme Court, was in the mood to cut the bad guys any slack. Even if you consider Julius an evil genius, Ethel was at most an accomplice. Prosecutors apparently hoped that leaning hard on Ethel would persuade Julius to talk, but it seems clear the U.S. was set on making an example of them. To paraphrase philosopher Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago: Your example, their lives.
