Julius Rosenberg was guilty of treason after all:
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.
In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Sobell, who lives in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, was asked whether, as an electrical engineer, he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II when they were considered allies of the United States and were bearing the brunt of Nazi brutality. Was he, in fact, a spy?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he replied. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
Yeah, well that’s exactly what you were.
September 12th, 2008 at 9:41 am
I had occasion to meet Alger Hiss in college, and he was still denying his treason. What a pathetic old man.
Turns out, I had a friend (my grandfather’s lawyer) who was a law school classmate of Hiss’, and while a Conservative, still believed him to be innocent.
I was always glad that my friend didn’t live to see the release of the Venona papers.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Got to attend a lecture last year by Jim Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence. He was intimately involved with the investigation of several spies, including Aldrich Ames, Felix Bloch, and Edward Lee Howard. Pretty interesting stuff; it was also instructive to see how passion he apparently felt regarding their betrayal.