Results tagged “rosenbergs”

In the opening of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the narrative voice of Esther Greenwood notes that "It was the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs." The NY Times recently looked back to that summer, in light of Morton Sobell confessing last week he and Julius Rosenberg were in the spy game. Julius and Ethel's sons, Robert and Michael, say they have no reason to doubt "Morty." The Times adds "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."

Morton Sobell, who in the '50s was convicted along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges, has finally admitted he was a Soviet spy. However the NY Times reports that the now 91-year-old, who spent 19 years behind bars and now lives in the Bronx, said "the sketches and other information on the bomb that were passed along to Julius Rosenberg were of little value to the Soviets," in fact, he called it "junk." When the paper asked him if he was a spy, he declared, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it as that in those terms.” He also noted that "Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband’s espionage, but did not actively participate."