www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/nyregion/12spy.html?hp
SAM ROBERTS Published: September 11, 2008 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.
Enlarge This Image Bettmann/Corbis A US Marshal escorted Morton Sobell, left, to Federal Court in New York in March of 1951. 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.
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.
Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius's espionage, but did not actively participate. "She knew what he was doing," he said, "but what was she guilty of?
National Archives, in response to a lawsuit from the nonprofit National Security Archive, historians and journalists, released most of the grand jury testimony in the espionage conspiracy case against him and the Rosenbergs. Coupled with some of that grand jury testimony, Mr Sobell's admission bolsters what has become a widely held view among scholars: that Mr Rosenberg was, indeed, guilty of spying, but that his wife was at most a bit player in the conspiracy and may have been framed by complicit prosecutors. The revelations on Thursday "teach us what people will do to get a conviction," said Bruce Craig, a historian and the former director of the National Coalition for History, a nonprofit educational organization. "They took somebody who they basically felt was guilty and by hook or crook they were going to get a jury to find him guilty." The Rosenbergs' younger son, Robert Meeropol, described Mr Sobell's confession Thursday as "powerful," but said he wanted to hear it firsthand. "I've always said that was a possibility," Mr Meeropol said, referring to the question of his father's guilt. "This is certainly evidence that would corroborate that possibility as a reality." In the interview, Mr Sobell drew a distinction between atomic espionage and the details of radar and artillery devices that he said he stole for the Russians. "What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun," he said. You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there's a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country." Mr Greenglass was an Army machinist at Los Alamos, NM, where the weapon was being built.
The charge was conspiracy, though, which meant that the government had to prove only that the Rosenbergs were intent on delivering military secrets to a foreign power. "His intentions might have been to be a spy," Mr Sobell added. After David Greenglass was arrested, Mr Sobell fled to Mexico and lived under false names until he was captured -- kidnapped, he maintained -- and returned to the United States in August 1950. He said he was innocent, but his lawyer advised him not to testify at his trial. He was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment and was released in 1969.
In an interview for a 2001 book by this reporter, "The Brother," Mr Greenglass acknowledged that he had lied when he testified that his sister had typed his notes about the bomb -- the single most incriminating evidence against her. His allegation emerged months after Mr Greenglass and his wife testified before the grand jury and only weeks before the 1951 trial.
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