A few years later, Julius’s Soviet handler, Aleksander Feklisov, affirmed that Ethel knew about Julius’s work but was not a spy herself. But if the transcripts confirmed Julius’s guilt, they showed that Ethel’s role was limited to knowledge of the espionage ring and recommending her sister-in-law Ruth for the role of typist-thus undermining the narrative advanced by the state in Ethel’s conviction. This theory came crashing down in 1995 when newly released Soviet files, known as the Venona transcripts, demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Julius was not only a spy, but the head of a ring of mainly Jewish comrades, including David. In the decades after their execution, one could be certain that each June, an article would appear in the pages of this magazine that picked apart the government’s case by pointing to apparent absurdities in the charges leveled against the Rosenbergs’ ring: What kind of spies showed up at each other’s doors using their real names? Could something as silly as a jaggedly cut Jell-O box really have been a sign by which Soviet spies recognized each other? Could a drawing by Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, who had no postsecondary education, actually have enabled the Soviets to manufacture their own bomb? The left’s consensus-clinched by book-length treatments of the case like Walter and Miriam Schneir’s 1966 study Invitation to an Inquest-was that the Rosenbergs were framed, killed not for espionage but because they were Jews and, despite their unwavering denial, committed Communists. 320 pages.įor more than 40 years, it was axiomatic on the left that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-the Jewish couple famously executed on June 19th, 1953, as spies who turned the designs for the atom bomb over to the Soviets-were innocent victims, scapegoats of the McCarthy era. Discussed in this essay: Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, by Anne Sebba.
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