Flynn Files -- Rosenberg Sons: Dad Guilty

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Rosenberg Sons: Dad Guilty

"Rosenbergs sons acknowledge their father was a spy," reads an Associated Press headline. Who cares? "Rosenbergs guilty," was a headline in the 1950s. In 2008, it's old news.

It's nice to see two sixtysomething hard leftists lose their ideological and parental delusions. But no serious person since Julius Rosenberg's 1953 execution has believed him innocent of passing along secrets, including orchestrating an atomic spy ring, that aided Stalin's USSR. A jury determined him guilty in 1951. In 1983, Ron Radosh and Joyce Milton's "Rosenberg File" adjudged a guilty verdict on Julius Rosenberg's from the perspective of two liberal academics. From the grave, Nikita Khruschev acknowledged Rosenberg's guilt in his posthumously published memoirs in 1990. The release of the Venona intercepts in 1995 made public Rosenberg's code names ("Antenna," "Liberal") and espionage work on behalf of the Soviet Union. The documents Allen Weinstein pulled from the Soviet archives for "The Haunted Wood" depict an overzealous spy recklessly dscarding discretion in pursuit of secret information for the Soviet Union. "The main thing he can't reconcile himself to his relative inactivity," his handlers reported to Moscow. "At every meeting, he asks us to allow him to bring materials out of the plant and thus benefit us." And last week, Rosenberg's co-defendant, a 91-years-young Morton Sobell, who was captured in Mexico fleeing his FBI pursuers and subsequently sentenced to thirty years (he served about half of that), conceded that he and Rosenberg were indeed Communist spies.

"I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol told the New York Times. Yeah, if you can't trust a Communist spy engaged in a lifetime of deception, who can you trust? Amazingly, mountains of evidence, including documents from the Soviet archives and intercepted Soviet spy cables, testimony from their uncle against their parents, and the admission of Stalin's successor all never swayed the Meeropol (Rosenberg) brothers in their steadfast defense of their father. But a few abracadabra words from Mort Sobell does the trick. How many decades will we have to wait before the pair admits that their mother was a Communist steeped in her husband's shady business?

To make a 57-year-long story 45 seconds short, since the original case against Julius Rosenberg resulted in a guilty verdict, an enormous body of knowledge has been added to that original, overwhelming case. The initial correct judgment that this man was indeed a spy has been corroborated, vindicated, and enhanced. Like the Japanese soldier still fighting World War II in the Asian jungles in 1974, the pair left orphaned by their Communist parents were esentially the last men standing in their side's cause. Like World War II, this case closed a long time ago--even if a few crusaders still fought it on the periphery.

posted at 12:15 AM

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