Julius Rosenberg 

Julius Rosenberg

This is the kind of thing that drives bloggers to their computers, questioning the mainstream media.

A new film about the Rosenbergs, "Heir to an Execution: a Granddaughter's Story," by their granddaughter Ivy Meeropol.

Everyone...tiptoes...so...carefully. Were they guilty, yes or no? It's not really a big mystery, and there aren't really two equally smart or equally stupid sides to the story. It isn't just a shouting match involving people with different emotional stakes. Of course one wants to respect the feelings of the family, but still.

The NYT says Ethel's brother, (Julius's brother-in-law) David Greenglass "said that he had obtained crude sketches of a cross-section of the bomb and a crucial device known as a high-explosive lens mold and passed them to Julius." Julius then allegedly passed the information to the Soviets. There is far more evidence today that Julius actually spied for the Soviet Union, and handed over information on the bomb in particular, than there was in the early 50s.

"Despite various disclosures during the years about Julius Rosenberg, defenders have argued that the information he passed was inconsequential and was already known by the Soviets."

The Toronto Star today says the evidence used at the trial was "thin." It also says evidence that emerged much later from the VENONA project strongly indicated that Julius was guilty of different (though not unrelated) acts of espionage for the Soviet Union.

On the VENONA files, the NYT refers vaguely to CIA files that were released about a decade ago, and says:

Since then, "my brother and I have had to live with the possibility that unlike the lies told about them before, this could be true,'' Michael Meeropol, now 61 and a professor of economics at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., said in an interview before the film was shown. "And we've asked ourselves, what does it mean if it is true? We can live with that and we can live with the ambiguity of never being sure."