Nearly 75 years after our mother, Ethel Rosenberg, was arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage and 50 years since we filed our first legal action under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to gain access to U.S. government records about our parents’ case, we have found the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle we have been working on for half a century.
The National Security Agency (NSA) recently declassified and released a 1950 NSA memo, which makes clear that the top U.S. expert on Soviet espionage concluded 11 days after her arrest in August 1950 that our mother was not engaged in espionage. This information was transmitted by the FBI’s liaison with the NSA to his boss, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Despite their knowledge, the U.S. government indicted, tried, and later executed our mother in June 1953, along with our father, Julius Rosenberg, at Sing Sing prison north of New York City, leaving us at ages 6 (Robert) and 10 (Michael) as orphans.
Now is the time for President Joe Biden to correct the historical record before he leaves office, by declaring our mother’s conviction and execution wrongful and apologizing to us and to our family for our grievous loss.
To the Biden administration’s credit, the NSA fulfilled its commitment to greater transparency by providing us with this bombshell document: a memo dated Aug. 22, 1950, in which the NSA’s chief cryptologist, Meredith Gardner, stated his conclusion that our mother, “knew about her husband’s work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.” The cross reference to the espionage activities of our father in the same memo, leaves no doubt, in our reading and that of others, that Meredith Gardner concluded that our mother was not a spy. This represents a significant change in Gardner’s assessment; in a memo dated two years earlier, Gardner speculated whether the words “did not work” in Soviet communications about our mother referred to ordinary employment or espionage activities. By August 1950, he was sure. Our mother was no spy.
The release of Gardner’s memo provided the capstone of our search for the truth about our parents. We grew up believing they were totally innocent, framed because they were Jews and communists. Through our precedent-setting FOIA legal action of 1974, we received documents that indicated our father was, in fact, engaged in military-industrial espionage. In the VENONA transcriptions (Soviet spy cables intercepted by the NSA in the 1940’s), Julius states his “ignorance“ of the atomic bomb project, contrary to the original allegations that the espionage was related to atomic secrets (VENONA Soviet Espionage and the American Response 939-1975, NSA, page 393. #78, New York 1773 to Moscow, 12/16/1944).
But the documents also raised questions about whether our mother was involved at all. This included a July 17, 1950, FBI memo – the date was the day our father was arrested and shortly before our mother’s arrest. The memo stated that there was not enough evidence to indict her but suggested that she could be used as leverage against her husband. (We had a copy of that FBI memo – identified as A.M. Belmont to D.M. Ladd, July 17, 1950, JR HQ 188 — when we wrote the second edition of our book “We Are Your Sons” in 1986, but no longer possess a copy.)
The 1995 release of the VENONA transcriptions (Soviet spy cables intercepted by the NSA in the 1940’s) also contained exculpatory evidence related to our mother. All KGB agents in the cables were given code names, but Ethel Rosenberg was never given one, indicating that she was not a spy. Ironically, during some of the tensest years of the Cold War, the NSA and KGB agreed about our mother’s status.
The most shocking aspect of this new release is that individuals at the highest level of our government’s prosecutorial apparatus concluded our mother was not a spy, yet they stood by and allowed her execution anyway. The NSA is still withholding several dozen documents that likely relate to communications between the NSA and FBI about our mother. Last month, nine U.S. Senators joined us in requesting these documents, though we are not at liberty to share that letter. We know that Meredith Gardner shared his memo with the NSA’s FBI liaison, Robert Lamphere, and that Lamphere passed it to J. Edgar Hoover, who in April 1951 recommended against the death penalty for Ethel. It is not clear how much other government officials knew about Gardner’s conclusion, but FBI files from June 1953 refer to Ethel not as guilty but as “cognizant and recalcitrant.” As historian Lori Clune recently wrote of top U.S. officials at that time, “They knew it when FBI agents arrested Ethel on Aug. 11, 1950. They knew it when the jury convicted her nine months later. They knew it when the judge sentenced her to death on April 5, 1951. And they knew it when prison officials executed her on Friday, June 19, 1953.”
The release of this new exculpatory information has prompted us to call upon President Biden to act before leaving office on Jan. 20. We base this demand not only on Gardner’s conclusive determination but also on the following facts.
- It is hard to imagine that a jury, even at the height of the McCarthy period, would not have found reasonable doubt in our mother’s case if they had known that the only evidence presented against her at trial was oral testimony from David and Ruth Greenglass. We now know they committed perjury because their sworn statements about our mother to the grand jury contradicted their sworn trial testimony. Crucially, David Greenglass publicly acknowledged his perjury before he died in 2014 in interviews with CBS and a reporter for the New York Times.
- The members of the trial jury were never made aware of the Greenglasses’ perjury, they never knew that the KGB did not give her a code name and never treated her as an asset, and they never knew that the NSA had determined she did not spy.
- Despite this, Judge Irving R. Kaufman, in pronouncing her death sentence, concluded, “However, let no mistake be made about the role which his wife, Ethel Rosenberg, played in this conspiracy. … She was a full-fledged partner in this crime.” Thus, our mother was sentenced and executed as a master atomic spy, even though she was not a spy at all.
Despite these incontrovertible findings based on memos from top U.S. government officials, some historians insist, as one commentary declared in a headline, “Despite Fresh Evidence, Ethel Rosenberg is Still Guilty.” Almost all of their assertions are rehashed and previously refuted by the evidence we have collected through the years. Rather than accepting the gravity of the new evidence that Ethel Rosenberg was not engaged in espionage or refute newly revealed facts, they assert that Gardner’s newly declassified memo is merely “an imprecise paraphrase of what the Soviet intelligence cable actually says.” Unhappy with Gardner’s considered opinion, they ignore that Gardner’s 1950 memo represents the culmination of two years of research by a highly respected cryptologist known for being meticulous.
In fact, other historians of the Rosenberg case such as Clune were persuaded by the power of this memo. In the article noted above, she writes that the newly declassified memo “clarifies the truth.” She notes that “generations of Americans have learned that the Rosenbergs – both of them – betrayed their country.” She later continues: “I now believe that a presidential exoneration is appropriate and necessary because it will correct the view that Ethel was an active spy. It will address the serious flaws in her trial and conviction. And it will set right the historical record.”
Getting to the bottom of what happened to our mother is deeply personal for us, of course. Most importantly, acknowledging past miscarriages of justice is essential to our nation, as U.S. Representative Jim McGovern suggested in his October letter to President Biden urging him to issue a presidential apology in this case. This is especially true at a time when the politicization of the federal judiciary threatens to destroy the rule of law. That is why we urgently call on the NSA to release the remaining files and ask President Biden to declare that Ethel Rosenberg’s conviction and execution were wrongful and to act now to correct the historical record.