Morton Sobell gives up the Rosenbergs:
Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits Spying for Soviets
By SAM ROBERTS
Ever since he was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges in 1951, Morton Sobell has maintained his innocence.
Until now. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, who served nearly 19 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, 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 vital classified military information and what the American government claimed was the secret to the atomic bomb.
In the interview, Mr. Sobell, who is 91 and lives in 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. Was he, in fact, a spy?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he replied. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
“What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun,” he added. “This was defensive. 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. Sobell drew a distinction between defensive radar and artillery devices and the atomic bomb. But he said that the sketches and other information on the bomb that were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, an Army machinist at Los Alamos, N.M., where the bomb was being built, were of little value to the Soviets, who had already gleaned much of it from other sources.
“What he gave them was junk,” Mr. Sobell said of Julius Rosenberg. The two men became friends while attending City College of New York in the 1930s.
Mr. Sobell added, though: “His intentions might have been to be a spy. The fact that he didn’t know it was junk makes that debatable.”
Mr. Sobell, who refused to testify at his trial, was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment but was released in 1969. The Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing.
Mr. Sobell made his revelations on Thursday as the National Archives, in response to a lawsuit from the National Security Archive, historians and journalists, released the bulk of the grand jury testimony in the espionage conspiracy case against him and the Rosenbergs.
Mr. Sobell is ailing, but says his long-term memory is sound. He has repeatedly professed his innocence and has said earlier of the Rosenbergs, “I would not take the position that they were absolutely innocent.”
In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell affirmed what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband’s espionage, but did not actively participate.
“She knew what he was doing,” Mr. Sobell said. “The only thing she may have done is talked to her brother, but Julius knew her brother as well as she did.”
Mr. Greenglass, in an interview for a book by this reporter, “The Brother,” 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. That allegation emerged months after Mr. Greenglass and his wife testified before the grand jury and only weeks before the trial was to begin.
Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they hoped a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would get her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables.
That strategy failed, William Rogers, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, admitted: “She called our bluff.”
Mr. Sobell has been interviewed a number of times recently by Walter Schneir who, with his wife, Miriam, wrote a damning indictment of the Rosenberg prosecution years ago, but, on the basis of decoded Soviet cables and other information, have since reconsidered their verdict that Julius was innocent and was completely framed by the government.
“Do I believe Morty? Yes,” Mr. Schneir, who is writing a memoir, said on Thursday. “The details that he’s given us so far we’ve been able to check the peripheral parts and they check out.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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