A more accurate headline would be "Sons of convicted spy find a sentence in a document they interpret as saying she's innocent if you ignore all the other evidence."
It's important to note this document was not disclosed to her defense. Law enforcement suppressing evidence that might exonerate, even in part or lead to a lesser charge, is a well worn trope, and should outrage us all.
Not to mention the objections many of us have about capital punishment, which is a topic for another day.
“Well she was still guilty of something”
“Well she would have spied if she could”
Feeling relieved HN comments sections aren’t responsible for handling death row appeals
Even the Soviet article 58-1c, which introduced criminal penalty specifically for the family members in case they did not report the treason to authorities, only applied a) if the traitor was in the military service; b) only in cases when the treason consisted of fleeing the country. Otherwise, 58-12 would apply which did not have the capital punishment as an option.
What's interesting is that she was damned, at least in large part, by testimony from her own brother, who claimed that she typed up memos on nuclear weapons for the Soviets. But then, in a plot twist, he recanted in 2001, saying:
> “I don’t remember that at all,” Mr. Greenglass said. “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.”
> “My wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother or my father, O.K.? And she was the mother of my children.”
Jonathan Pollard stole an eyewatering amount of secrets for Israel, including the most-critical US nuclear blueprints and designs. The intelligence community wanted him to die in jail, but the Israeli Lobby, 70 Knesset members, President Shimon Peres, countless Jewish groups and figures kept applying pressure until he was paroled after 30 years served. Was such a storm in the intelligence community (because of the sensitivity of stuff stolen) that CIA chief tenet threatened to resign if he was pardoned.
This seems like pretty weak evidence compared to what’s shown in other sources like Venona. Regardless - if someone does not do the spy work themselves, but is aware of, married to, and likely supports in some way a spy.. have they committed any crimes?
That memo shows no such thing. The persistence of this story is crazy. The article even links to the ample evidence of her participation. Just because she was physically unable to meet assets or whatever "work" means, doesn't mean she isn't guilty of espionage. Now, maybe you can argue the chair wasn't an appropriate punishment for her, but she is definitely guilty of conspiracy at a minimum.
This is the sad story of children unable to come to terms with the fact that their parents were Soviet spies.
How many times was the atomic bomb developed? I think it might have been only once. Oppenheimer invented it, the Rosenburgs leaked it to the USSR, and if I understand correctly the communists leaked it to other communist countries. There were a few bad choices that led to MAD and I really regret that as a society we made those choices.
The Soviets developed their first nuclear devices largely on their own; though findings from espionage certainly accelerated the effort, it wasn't like the entire conceptual design was simply "leaked" to them. As to the Rosenbergs -
the article you just read makes it clear that while she apparently knew of her husband's doing, “she did not engage in the work herself” (per the leaked memo). But of course she had to be sent to the chair anyway.
And whatever help Julius did provide was apparently of minimal value:
The notes allegedly typed by Ethel apparently contained little that was directly used in the Soviet atomic bomb project.[63] According to Julius's contact Feklisov, the Rosenbergs did not provide the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb: "He [Julius] didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."
General Leslie Groves, who developed the American nuclear program as part of the Manhattan Project, said during a United States Atomic Energy Commission hearing on Robert Oppenheimer that he thought that "the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs was of minor value" and that he "always felt the effects were greatly exaggerated, that the Russians did not get too much information out of it". Groves requested that this "should be kept very quiet" as he still believed the Rosenbergs deserved to die. This part of his testimony was redacted from the publicly released 1954 transcript of the Commission's hearing on Oppenheimer and remained classified until 2014.
The possibility of constructing a bomb was known probably since the '20s. The USSR most certainly could have done it themselves, alone.
What the leak most probably did was reduce the number of nuclear tests done by the USSR and probably nuclear accidents too (USSR were really prone to accidents). Which is good for the entire planet.
