Sons Admit Obvious: Julius Rosenberg Was Spy

Well, they admit what was evident decades ago, but who had convinced themselves that their father acted with the Soviet Union's best intentions in mind. Michael Meeropol, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's son, had been spending decades trying to convince anyone who would listen that his father wasn't passing secrets to the Soviets. Well, he's admitting that his father was a spy, but not that they were passing nuclear secrets.

He was wrong.

It began in July 1950 when F.B.I. agents arrested Julius Rosenberg in the family’s Lower East Side apartment, thrusting the boys onto a global stage as bit players in their parents’ appeals, in the government’s efforts to extract their parents’ cooperation and in Soviet propaganda campaigns to cast the Rosenbergs as martyrs.

Their journey became public again nearly a generation later when the brothers proclaimed that their parents were framed to feed cold war hysteria and compensate for America’s counterespionage lapses. Amid the Watergate-era revelations of criminal conspiracies and cover-ups, they began a legal battle to release all the government records in the case. While they were vested in a single outcome, they insisted all along that they would follow the facts, wherever they led.

“We believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent,” Michael Meeropol said on Sunday. “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.”

This is how they still see things: whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death penalty.

But after digesting Mr. Sobell’s confession, in an interview last week with The New York Times, that he and Julius stole nonatomic military and industrial secrets, the Meeropols have now concluded that continuing to claim that their father was innocent of an espionage conspiracy was no longer defensible.

Rosenberg was a spy, and one of Rosenberg's comrades, Morton Sobell, admitted as much, though he claimed that what Rosenberg was passing was military secrets and nonnuclear weapons information, and not nuclear weapons secrets. Sorry, but that's splitting hairs and the Venona documents plus released caches of information from the former Soviet KGB show just how important the Rosenbergs were in helping the Soviet Union acquire information for their own nuclear program. Sobell is engaging in a bit of revisionist history of his own, and perhaps he's trying to clear his conscience, but the facts show just how involved the Rosenbergs were in passing national secrets, including atomic secrets, to the Soviets.

Specifically, the Venona program broke the Soviet codes, and revealed several major spy rings operating inside the US, including Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, William Perl, the Rosenbergs, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Harry D. White.

Ethel Rosenberg wasn't some innocent caught up in Red menace hysteria either. She was busy trying to recruit other members to the spy ring, including her sister in law and brother, Ruth and David Greenglass. Greenglass worked at Los Alamos as a machinist in 1944, working on the Manhattan Project, and was passing on information to Rosenberg for distribution back to the Soviet Union.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that one of the Rosenberg sons, Robert Meeropol, now runs a legal organization that tries to help children whose parents suffered because of their progressive politics. And both sons still don't think that their parents passed our nation's nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

Nice.